Helen Hunt’s decorated acting career hit a peak in the 1990s, with her Emmy Award–winning performance in the hit ‘90s sitcom “Mad About You” and her Oscar win for best actress opposite Jack Nicholson in the romcom “As Good as It Gets.”
But Hunt — whose father, Gordon Hunt, was a distinguished Hollywood director and acting coach — has always had a passion for the stage, building a theater resume that includes Broadway productions of “Twelfth Night” and “Life x 3.”
“Theater has always meant the world to me,” said Hunt, calling over Zoom the first week of rehearsals for “Betrayal,” a classic love-triangle story told in reverse chronological order. The play, written in the 1970s by Harold Pinter, opens Feb. 18 at the Goodman Theatre.
“I was raised going to the theater. The theater has helped me make sense of the world,” she said. “It gave me joy. It’s kept me company. So there’s never been a day when the theater hasn’t been important to me.”
Hunt landed the part in “Betrayal” courtesy of Susan Booth, the Goodman’s newish artistic director, who had heard from friends that the actor was looking for a play and interested in coming to Chicago. Booth arranged a meeting with Hunt and came in with a short list of plays that could work.
“We were 15 minutes in and [‘Betrayal’] came on the table,” recalled Booth. “You can tell when somebody has an immediate, resonant response. And there it was. We started talking, and we never talked about any other play.”
But Booth is putting her own twist on the production: In Pinter’s script, the female character at the heart of the love triangle, a complicated woman named Emma, is having an affair with her husband’s married best friend. Emma is described as 38-years-old, and the two male characters are 40. Yet Booth intentionally cast her production with older actors.
For Hunt, who is in her 60s, the role places her alongside a recent list of seasoned female actors, including Demi Moore (“The Substance”) and Nicole Kidman (“Babygirl”) taking on complex mature characters. She believes her experience allows her to bring more to the role.
“Most people become more interesting as they get older, either because of the damage they’ve sustained or the wisdom they’ve gained,” Hunt said. “Or because of the wisdom they’ve lost. So, by definition, any part about a woman at that age is going to be more complex and interesting, certainly to me.”
Booth, who has her own history with the Pinter play, said the cast, which also includes Robert Sean Leonard (“House” on FOX) and Ian Barford (Tony-nominated for his role in “Linda Vista”), has “life mileage.” Putting them in front of the audience as characters in such a monumental moment in their lives feels more critical with older actors.
Society tells us there is always more time, explained Booth, to make amends when you break trust with a spouse. But placing an older cast in the center of this drama takes away the natural belief that there is time to heal the wounds.
Reflecting on the rehearsal process, Booth refers to the chemistry of the cast as “delicious.” They are all pure theater performers at heart, even Hunt and Leonard, whom audiences will likely recognize more from movies and TV.
“There is nothing to hide behind in ‘Betrayal,’” said Booth, sitting in an empty rehearsal room at the Goodman during a lunch break. “With Pinter, you can’t get fancy-pants as a director. If you don’t have actors who have a deep, deep, deep understanding — not just of every word that is spoken, but in fact and even more so because it’s Pinter, of every silence that transpires — then you can’t get away with anything.”
Booth first fell in love with “Betrayal” when she was a graduate student at Northwestern University in Evanston. She played the role of Emma, the role Hunt is playing now, in a production that paired her with fellow student Harry Lennix (“The Blacklist,” “The Matrix Reloaded”), who would go on to have a distinguished career of his own. She said she still has all her notes from that show and that Emma, who is equal parts conflicted and conflicting, is arguably the most dense female character Pinter ever wrote.
“I am fascinated by gender identity,” said Booth, the first woman to lead the historic Goodman Theatre, which was founded in 1922. Her directorial debut was “The Penelopiad,” Margaret Atwood’s feminist take on “The Odyssey,” boldly recast through the eyes of Odysseus’ wife, Penelope.
“Gender dynamics [interest me], particularly when a woman is being acted upon and is also acting of her own volition, and those two impulses collide in big, blistering fashion,” inform much of Booth’s directorial instincts. “I don’t believe Emma ever wanted a flawed marriage or that she ever wanted to discover a passion for not only another man, but for her husband’s best friend. But she found herself where she found herself.”
Hunt said the love triangle at the center of play allows her to dive into the challenging dialogue. Pinter uses long pauses and intentional moments of silence in the script, a writing style that coined the phrase “Pinter pause.”
“I’m able to wrestle with language,” said Hunt. “It’s a modern classic, but that doesn’t mean that the language isn’t formidable. Even the lack of language is formidable.”
It helps, Booth said, that each of her actors has a musical background. That has helped them conquer the challenge of those wordless moments.
“Our actors are all musicians,” Booth said. “Every single scene is scored with pauses and periodically with silences. Those moments are musical in that they demand interruption of text. And not only does the audience not know what’s going to happen next, the characters in question do not know what’s going to happen next. ‘What do I do with this bomb that just went off between me and my husband?’ You have to deal with the aftershocks. And that’s music. It’s human, messy, wonderful music.”