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[[image of Lili Taylor]]
Taylor Made For Broadway
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Starla Smith
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IRINA: (Sobbing.) Where? Where's it all gone? Where is it? Oh, my God, my God! My mind is a total muddle...I can't even remember the Italian for window or ceiling...I forget everything, every day I forget something else. My life is just slipping away and I'll never, never get it back...and we're never going to Moscow, it's as clear as it can be, we're never going to leave here...
-Three Sisters, Act III

Those heart-wrenching words, by Anton Chekhov (translated by Lanford Wilson), as pure and telling a moment as theatre can know, are spoken these nights from a Broadway stage by a young woman who not long ago on screen gave a shockingly good, psychotic-tinged butchbeatnik performance as Valerie Solanis, founding and only member of S.C.U.M., the Society to Cut Up Men, near-successful killer of Andy Warhol.

Irina Segeevna Prozorov, the youngest and most idealistic of the three Prozorov sisters, would seem to be about as far away from Valerie Solanis as anyone might possibly get.

After a spate of highly acclaimed film roles, Lili Taylor is making her Broadway debut in Chekhov's Three Sisters

Lili Taylor, the Solanis of the film I Shot Andy Warhol, the Irina of the Three Sisters that Scott Elliott has directed at the Roundabout, nodded agreement, or partial agreement. Then, drawing a breath: "But what Scott says is also true. Irina's really a rebel, not an ingenue. Maybe she's not as pretty, coy and safe as she's been played in the past.

"So for me it's the stage of incubation, taking all the information in," said the diffident rising star of more than a dozen movies, nursing her courage, as it may have been, with a tea bad and some hot water in a Greenwich Village espresso house. This was a few days before the start of rehearsals on the Chekhov play. her deep purple fingernails were rather more evocative of Sally Bowles than Irina Prozorov, but one noticed, as not in films, the long clean jawline, the quite lovely flower face, the mass of piled-high dark hair, the flickering smile that comes and goes like heat lightning.

The "incubation" had had her reading and rereading the play, reading about Chekhov, reading about that era in Russia, thinking about Irina.

Okay, what about Irina?

"Well, let me say--I'm almost 30 now, and she's 20--so it's kind of nice to go back, to relive that innocence, that hope. Because it's kind of like it's going to get less frequent"--the opportunity to play 20-year-olds, she meant. "And also I love that yearning, that innocence."

All of this implied, without being spelled out, the yearning and hope and, if you like, the innocence of Chicago schoolgirl Lili Taylor who made her professional stage debut at 17 and got kicked out of the Goodman of De Paul acting conservatory for...

by Jerry Tallmer

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Intermission lasts 15 minutes.

Make the most of it.

Dewar's ®

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