Julia Stiles Gets an "Absent," Not a Present, for Her 30th

The talented and well-educated actress, Julia Stiles, turns 30 on March 28, 2011. I'm sure Entertainment Tonight will make note of the fact, and there is an outside chance David Letterman may also. He will sometimes throw a celebrity birthday into his monologue. For example, a number of years ago, he did a live show on December 24^th.

"You folks like celebrity birthdays?" he asked the audience. When they responded positively, he added, "Here's one coming up: Jesus Christ." That said, he generally sticks with the still-living Hollywood crowd.

Talk show hosts aside, Ms. Stiles may have received this or that gift from friends and family on this occasion, but she also received a very un-celebratory bit of news: the Broadway show she was set to appear in got postponed until next season. She was to have played the role of Jeannie in the acclaimed Neil LaBute play, Fat Pig. No, she did not have to gain a bunch of weight to play the title character, à la Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. Julia Stiles gets to play the title character's romantic rival, shaped as she normally is.

The show has been well-received and has already won a number of awards outside of Broadway, but, for all that, the production team for this particular staging could not come up with the bucks they needed to get the show staged. Even a community theatre production of a popular show is expensive, and its Broadway counterpart is astronomically so. That is why the tickets are so pricey.

The show's producers hope they will be able to hold onto their main players (Besides Stiles, it is supposed to star Dane Cook, Josh Hamilton and Heather Jane Rolff in what is presumably the title role.) until the start of the next season.

I hope that Julia Stiles will make herself available for the role she has been cast to play, if and when the show finally opens. In her performing history, she has done well in lead roles, to be sure, but she is an excellent character actor.

In the plot of Fat Pig, her character, Jeannie, originally had a none-too-committed relationship with the leading man, Tom. She only becomes seriously invested in the relationship when it looks like she may lose Tom's interest to some fat broad. Yes, it appears that the character Jeannie is petty and vindictive to a considerable extent, but that is the sort of role a serious actor would love to play.

There is nothing we know to the effect that Julia Stiles is like that in real life, but, then, that is the true joy of acting: stepping into a character that is so far away from yours. In my own experience, I have found that often to be the case. I remember one lady, named Inez, who was one of the nicest people you would want to meet in the amateur theater community, but, when it came time to play the evil vindictive harridan on stage, nobody could do it nearly as well as she.

In fact, in my own case, though I consider myself reasonably articulate, I am always looking to play the idiot, if there is one to play.

So, happy birthday, Julia. It is too bad one of your presents was having the rug yanked out from under you, but, if you stay with the project and do the kind of work you are so clearly capable of doing, maybe you'll get the belated 31^st birthday present of a Tony nomination.

Sources

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/broadways-fat-pig-finds-its-title-character/

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gossip/2011/03/dane-cook-julia-stiles-fat-pig.html

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=julia+stiles&date=2011-3-28&sa=X

Wikipedia