Bald and Beautiful



Going all the way: Danson sans hair. photo: Maria Kotsikoros

Actress Randy Danson sheds her locks for Wit.

by Toby Zinman

Note: Randy Danson is a New York actress (she was briefly married to Ted Danson when they were both starting out and kept the name) who has made a career of powerful classical roles: Phaedra, Clytemnestra, the Duchess of Malfi, Lady Macbeth, as well as contemporary work like Tony Kushner’s Slavs and Craig Lucas’ Blue Window. She was awarded an Obie for Sustained Excellence.

Remember when bald was for old guys, over-the-hill types like your Uncle Max? And then bald got to be for young guys, but nasty skinhead types. Then bald got to be fashionable and kindly (the Dali Lama crowd) and then bald got to be fashionable and macho (shaved heads are everywhere on TV). But women, even if they no longer believe that hair is their "crowning glory," tend to try to hang onto it, fussing with it in various time-consuming and expensive ways, unless they’re Myra Bazell or Sinead O’Connor and they’re going for streamlined and fierce.

So it was with considerable curiosity that I asked Randy Danson, who is currently bald, and neither fierce nor young nor streamlined, how it felt to have shaved her head for the central role of Dr. Vivian Bearing in the upcoming production of Wit at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. The role requires this radical preparation because Dr. Bearing is dying of ovarian cancer and has lost her hair to chemotherapy. Randy Danson used to have long, light brown hair; she also had some surprising and interesting and eloquent responses to my question.

Randy Danson: It was much simpler and happier than I expected it to be — I had a while to think about it before I did it, and I confess there was part of me that was really jazzed about it. Actually the day we shaved my head I was fully expecting to be a little shocked, weepy maybe — I’ve cried over a bad haircut, haven’t you? — but I just didn’t. It was kind of exciting and liberating. The man who did it has been cutting my hair since I was 20-something — when I walked into the salon he said, "Oh my God, Randy, I have hard nipples." People said, "Couldn’t you just wear a bald cap?" But I think you have a certain responsibility to the people you represent on stage — I’m not going to stand up there with a piece of rubber on my head and say, "I feel your pain."

Toby Zinman: Are you wearing a wig outside?

RD: I have one but I haven’t worn it. For a while it was too cold to go without a hat — it’s amazing how much colder it is without hair, somebody passing by creates a cold breeze. But the first time I felt, "OK, this is old, I don’t want to play anymore," was when I went to the flower show and I was indoors with hundreds of strangers for hours and at the end of that time I felt, "OK, this is boring." I got hundreds of averted glances; it was weird to be remarked [about], over and over without any contact.

TZ: Do you think people assumed you were a cancer victim?

RD: I don’t know if they even thought through it that far. It’s just odd to see a bald woman; they want to look, but know it’s not polite to look — they’re embarrassed.

TZ: Do you think it’s because bald only ‘works’ if you’re young?

RD: I think the reverse, that this is the middle of my life; how great to start over. Just lose it. Cut it off and start again. Because in the middle of a woman’s life everything does change, so it seems so appropriate. I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the guts or even the interest to do this on my own. Once we finish the show I’m moving — I’ve lived in the same apartment in New York for 20 years now — so it’s just feels like everything is new.

TZ: Let me ask you about the other extreme physical demand the role makes: nudity. [At the end of the play, Dr. Vivian Bearing stands spotlit and naked.]

RD: I haven’t done it in this production yet, but I have had the granddaddy — maybe that should be the grandmother — of naked experiences. About eight years ago, in San Francisco, I played the Duchess of Malfi in a production directed by Robert Woodruff, a very cutting-edge sort of guy. The big execution scene was to be a total humiliation for the Duchess, so I was stripped, tied up with black rubber ropes, had blood poured over me, and all this happened at the edge of the stage in full white light, and with the house lights up. And after that I was put on a metal desk and left there in full view for the last half-hour of the play. At the time I was 42 — and not a work-out-every-day 42 either — so, there you go. You can’t get more naked than that. But, you know, it’s like jumping into cold water: It’s much worse in the anticipation.



	Crowning glory: Danson before she went under the razor.

TZ: Vanity doesn’t enter into it at all in that scene anyway: It’s a soul unclothed. But it must be hard to play a character who has so little "back-story" — with so little in her life but what we see, who discovers that "being smart" isn’t enough.

RD: She [Vivian] lives from the neck up; I don’t believe I’ve ever played a role that was so completely a-sensual. She never ever talks about how anything feels, smells, tastes; when she’s asked medical questions about what the onset of her disease felt like, this extremely articulate woman finds her language just falls apart. If you pay no attention to something for 50 years of your life, it’s going to insist on your noticing it.

TZ: This suggests a causal relation: If you neglect your body you’ll be attacked by it. Do you think that’s so?

RD: I do. I don’t think it’s punitive, it’s not about blame, it’s just true. The yin and yang circle has to be completed, so if you live only at one extreme, you eventually need to go so far to get to the other side. That’s why moderation is the key to peace.

TZ: Given your work in classical roles, and given your voice, which has such presence, how does this role connect with those — the Duchess, Phaedra, Clytemnestra, etc.

RD: The connection is obviously in that this is a language-heavy piece; the classical training and experience is really necessary, since there’s just so much stuff to wade through. Since she’s a professor of literature, a lot of the old-fashioned stuff is necessary: Can you parse a sentence, do you understand a parenthetical phrase, what happens when you elide a syllable — that kind of understanding of the mechanics of language.

TZ: I think great plays that are about difficult subjects have to teach the audience what it needs to know about that subject as it goes along, so that we’ll "get" it. Stoppard’s Arcadia does that with chaos mathematics, just as Wit does that with Donne’s poetry. It must be interesting to do that to an audience — then they leave with even more than the experience of the play.

RD: I think one of the great pleasures of this play is that you get to understand — in a survey sort of way, obviously — something that most people haven’t had any connection with. As an actor the fun of that happens all the time — you get to learn little bits about so many different things. It’s like forever being at the buffet table of life.

Philadelphia Theatre Company’s production of Wit runs March 17-April 16 at Plays & Players Theatre, 1714 Delancey St., $24-$38, 215-569-7900.