Back Stage West visited actors Faith Ford and Crystal Bernard on the set of the Falcon Theatre's production of Beth Henley's Pulitzer Prize-winning Crimes of the Heart, which opens this week and is directed by veteran film/TV director Garry Marshall. While both Ford and Bernard are also television veterans, neither has performed in a play as a professional actor until now.
Faith Ford is best known for her portrayal of Corky Sherwood on Murphy Brown, a role she played for nine seasons, followed by the CBS series Maggie Winters in which she played the title role. Prior to Murphy Brown, Ford was a regular on the popular series thirtysomething. Her other credits include the television movies Night Visitors, A Weekend in the Country, Her Desperate Choice, and Poisoned by Love: The Kern County Murders. She also appeared in the film North and in the daytime drama Another World for two seasons.
Texas native Crystal Bernard is well known for her starring role as Helen Chappel on the long-running NBC sitcom Wings, which wound up its ninth and final season this past spring. Her earlier credits include the series Happy Days and It's a Living and the film Young Doctors in Love. She has also starred in numerous TV movies, including To Love, Honor, and Betray, Dying to Be Perfect: The Ellen Hart Pena Story, As Good as Dead, and Miracle Child. Outside of acting, Bernard is also an accomplished singer and recently released her album, Don't Touch Me There.
Crystal Bernard: When I moved to Los Angeles at the age of 17, I blew everybody away. Every appointment I went to people were going, Oh my God. She's so good. I was phenomenal. I had no inhibitions and I just did it. Garry Marshall cast me in Young Doctors in Love and Happy Days. But as soon as I got on a set and saw that everybody had a craft-that acting was a craft-in two days I went from thinking I was so good and not worrying about a thing to having no ability at all and worrying about everything.
I got my ass in acting class so fast. I went to Milton Katselas at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. I was doing Happy Days at the time. Right after that I got another show called It's a Living for four years. During that time, I put up a scene every week at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. So I feel like I've done theatre, but I haven't. I've been working on TV shows this whole time.
Faith Ford: I moved to New York when I was 17, right after I graduated high school in Louisiana. I went there for a summer to get into modeling. All these agencies brought me to New York that summer and when I got there they decided that they didn't want to represent me. Here I was, all set up with a place to live for which I was committed to three months-I had to do something with myself.
Modeling was not going to be it for me, and my mother, thinking ahead, enrolled me in acting classes, because I had acted in high school. We had something called the National Friendship League that I used to compete in. I did a lot of monologues from classic plays, but I didn't know what I was really doing, either.
So I got into this acting class and my teacher was a casting director and she said, "You really should think seriously about doing this for a living." I thought, Oh, no way, but she said, "Just come in for an audition." I auditioned for a soap opera and I got my first job that way. And then it seemed interesting to me all of a sudden that I would make that much money in one week's time. At first that was the appeal. And then it was kind of fun and it didn't really seem like work.
When I was 21, I had my first theatre audition. I was supposed to meet with Mike Nichols. I had gone past the casting director and I was going to be understudying Cynthia Nixon on Broadway. However, I had to shoot a Burger King commercial the same day and they wouldn't let me go to make my callback. I got really pissed off and said, "That's it. I'm leaving New York." That's what made me move out to Los Angeles and, hence, get more into television-primetime television.
My goal has always been to do a play. However, agents around me always said, "No, no, no. When you get finished with this, maybe you'll do a play." It was really like pulling teeth to get anybody to go with me on this. People said, "It's going to be a lot of work," and I'd say, "Sitcoms are a lot of work." The script changes all week long until the night of, and it even changes when you're on the set shooting it, and you have to still give some sort of truth and reality to it and do comedy.
Not that doing this play isn't hard, but it just was something I needed to do for myself and my life right now-to feel that I could play one character for a while and explore the nuances of that character.
Back Stage West: What about you, Crystal? What made you want to join this production?
Crystal: Garry picked the play and then called us. I immediately said, "I'm dropping everything," because I wanted to do this very badly. I wanted to work with Garry again. I adore him. I owe him my life and my career. And it's exciting. To do a live performance every night for 99 people and it's just seen by those people-isn't that neat?
Faith: It's intimate. Whatever happens that night, only those people in the audience are going to see it. No matter how well we know it, it will be a new experience for them.
BSW: It sounds like both of you are really doing this play as a gift to yourselves. What do you hope to get out of this experience?
Faith: The only people we're doing this for is ourselves, Garry, and the people involved in our little group. And that's it. There's no network breathing down our necks. There's no studio saying, "You have to do it this way." There's nobody saying, "We don't have this name. We don't have that name." So we can just do it for the art and for the purity of that, which very rarely happens.
BSW: When you found out that Murphy Brown and Wings were coming to an end after many years on the air, where either of you afraid of what lay ahead?
Faith: I was ready to move forward. It's like leaving home. It's like getting out of college. If those were my formative years as an actor, what a great place to spend them. But now is a time for me to really branch out on my own and do more than what I've done and stretch myself. And this play is what it's about. I've always believed that if something seems a little bit scary, do it, because you're going to grow from that experience. So you never really fail; you just learn.
Crystal: I was scared and excited when Wings ended. A lot of us, including myself, let our work define us. If I'm doing well then I feel like I'm a successful human. So there was the fear that I wouldn't work again, and there was also the excitement that I was going to do new things and meet new people. So it goes from the feeling of, I need a job where people will like me and I'll be accepted in life, to, I love just being me and finding out what's in store.
BSW: Is there any advice you can offer young actors?
Faith: Crystal said it. Training is where it's at. It's invaluable. If you're not willing to put in the time and do the work and train and take classes, then acting may not be the thing you want to do.
Crystal: The common question that I get asked is, How do you get into acting? You don't get into acting; it gets into you. Everything else will follow. There are some people who want to be stars and they're very pretty and they want to pose. They would make good models, but they're wrong for acting. There has to be a passion and an art to your acting.
I'm actually very shy. I may seem like an extrovert, but I'm extremely shy. I'd rather be by myself. I'm very private with my pain and with everything. Acting is the most present I am in my life. Every given moment when I'm acting, it's real. Whereas in our lives, we pretend. We're polite, when we really want to say, "That's awful!" When I'm acting, I'm more present. I love it so much I would do it for free. The main thing is that you have to act.
Faith: If it's in your blood to do it, you can't run away from it. You'd be denying a piece of who you are. I'm also a very shy person. I was painfully shy growing up. My sister was Miss Louisiana National Teenager. She was not shy. She always had the right things to say. She could slice through a room of men with just a few words. I was not that. I was very at home being in her shadow.
My sister actually was the one to say, "You should act." She's the one who got me into it. She sensed that there was a part of me that wanted to come out. And there was. There's a piece of me that I would never show in real life, but that I can show in front of an audience. It's the weirdest thing. But it's very freeing for me and I think that a lot of actors probably feel the same thing. BSW