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g h o s t s
by henrik ibsen
Photography by Tom Hurst
Actress: Ibsen is like 'going over the falls'
By Elizabeth Maupin | Sentinel Theater Critic
Posted June 6, 2002
Kim Crow wants to talk about Niagara Falls.
She's an actress sitting in the middle of a theater set on the second floor of an old Victorian building in downtown Orlando. But in her mind, and yours, you're both on the Canadian side of the falls - the pretty side, Crow says with a grin.
On the Canadian side, she says, in the park above the falls, the river is peaceful. But there's a strong sense of the current pulling you downstream. You have a hard time resisting. You almost want to jump.
It's the same thing, she says, with Ibsen - that sense of "relentless inevitability," she calls it, as if you've got to throw caution aside and take the plunge.
"You don't know you're going over the falls," she says, "until you're there."
Speaking with Kim Crow is a little like going over the falls: Before you know it, you're swept up in talk of earth elements and Arthur Miller, potluck dinners and purification and watercolor portraits of cats.
Crow is about to play Ibsen, and intensity like hers might be just the thing.
When Mad Cow Theatre's production of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts opens tonight for a 3*-week run, Crow will be Helene Alving, a widow with everything going for her. An orphanage in her small rural town is about to be dedicated to her late husband. And her beloved son Osvald, who has spent many years abroad, has left Paris to come home.
But tragedy is about to strike. Mrs. Alving's pastor condemns her beliefs. Her son's health is questionable. Her maid is eager to take off for more cosmopolitan surroundings. And the ghosts of the choices she has made have moved in to stay.
Alan Bruun directs Ibsen's most controversial drama, which also will feature Rick Stanley, Stephen Middleton, Chris Gibson and Natalie Weiss.
Crow comes to perform Ghosts from Sarasota, where she lives with her husband, cat watercolor artist Drew Strouble, and five controlling felines. But Mad Cow Theatre, which she says takes "very bold chances with very great writing," seems to Crow like her kind of place. And Mrs. Alving - intelligent, passionate and courageous - seems like her kind of woman.
"I know this woman," Crow says. "I wanted to tell her story, and I knew I could."
She corrects herself. "I know I can."
Crow's father was a rocket engineer and her mother what Crow calls a "psychic" teacher of exceptional children, so she grew up thinking anything was possible. As her family moved around, she discovered theater in the eighth grade, at a Bucks County, Pa., school with a strong theater program. She loved the people. She loved the intensity.And she loved telling stories.
By Elizabeth Maupin | Sentinel Theater Critic
Posted June 6, 2002
Kim Crow wants to talk about Niagara Falls.
She's an actress sitting in the middle of a theater set on the second floor of an old Victorian building in downtown Orlando. But in her mind, and yours, you're both on the Canadian side of the falls - the pretty side, Crow says with a grin.
On the Canadian side, she says, in the park above the falls, the river is peaceful. But there's a strong sense of the current pulling you downstream. You have a hard time resisting. You almost want to jump.
It's the same thing, she says, with Ibsen - that sense of "relentless inevitability," she calls it, as if you've got to throw caution aside and take the plunge.
"You don't know you're going over the falls," she says, "until you're there."
Speaking with Kim Crow is a little like going over the falls: Before you know it, you're swept up in talk of earth elements and Arthur Miller, potluck dinners and purification and watercolor portraits of cats.
Crow is about to play Ibsen, and intensity like hers might be just the thing.
When Mad Cow Theatre's production of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts opens tonight for a 3*-week run, Crow will be Helene Alving, a widow with everything going for her. An orphanage in her small rural town is about to be dedicated to her late husband. And her beloved son Osvald, who has spent many years abroad, has left Paris to come home.
But tragedy is about to strike. Mrs. Alving's pastor condemns her beliefs. Her son's health is questionable. Her maid is eager to take off for more cosmopolitan surroundings. And the ghosts of the choices she has made have moved in to stay.
Alan Bruun directs Ibsen's most controversial drama, which also will feature Rick Stanley, Stephen Middleton, Chris Gibson and Natalie Weiss.
Crow comes to perform Ghosts from Sarasota, where she lives with her husband, cat watercolor artist Drew Strouble, and five controlling felines. But Mad Cow Theatre, which she says takes "very bold chances with very great writing," seems to Crow like her kind of place. And Mrs. Alving - intelligent, passionate and courageous - seems like her kind of woman.
"I know this woman," Crow says. "I wanted to tell her story, and I knew I could."
She corrects herself. "I know I can."
Crow's father was a rocket engineer and her mother what Crow calls a "psychic" teacher of exceptional children, so she grew up thinking anything was possible. As her family moved around, she discovered theater in the eighth grade, at a Bucks County, Pa., school with a strong theater program. She loved the people. She loved the intensity.And she loved telling stories.
"I had just turned 30, I had gotten my ears pierced, and I needed a tan," she says. So off she went.
Florida has been good to Crow. She met and married Strouble, her husband of 17 years. And she built a career as an actor, director and voice-over artist, doing the voices for hundreds of commercials, working frequently for theaters in Sarasota and Fort Myers and most recently playing the lead, Dr. Vivian Bearing, in back-to-back productions of Wit in Fort Myers and Jacksonville.
She feels blessed, she says. She has found work, she has gotten to tell stories, and she has been able to play "the most fascinating women ever written."
To Crow, Mrs. Alving seems to belong in that group - way ahead, in fact, of Ibsen's more famous tragic heroines, Nora in A Doll's House and the title character in Hedda Gabler.After all, Crow points out, Nora flees an oppressive household. Hedda shoots herself. But Mrs. Alving keeps on keeping on.
"She tries to keep all the balls in the air, she really does," Crow says. "It takes its toll on her."
Mrs. Alving has put responsibility and duty ahead of her heart, and she has done the so-called right things for the wrong reasons. If you do the right things for the wrong reasons, Crow says, there's a price to pay.
In some ways, Ghosts is a creation of its time, the 1880s, with that era's fear of public opinion, its horror of scandal and its strict rules about what women should be. But Ibsen didn't share those views, and Crow thinks the play will ring true to today's audiences.Some things haven't changed.
"1881 to 2002, and we're still human beings," she says. "I don't really know how much we've learned.
So Crow is digging into Ibsen. She's looking at Norse mythology, and she's examining his reliance on the element of fire, and she's thinking about the fact that Hel, the first three letters in her character's name, was the Norse goddess of death.
And she's talking about Ibsen and his tragic heroines as if she and they are one of a kind.
"We like the edge," she says. "Probably because we've been living on it our entire lives."
Heroines of one sort or another have been with her all her life: Crow talks about her Irish grandmother and her opera-singer, rattlesnake-shooting aunt, who encouraged younger people to be all they could.
Crow wants to do the same. Check out her web page, she tells you - it has all the info on her career, and it also has pages and pages of musings about acting and life.
She did it for "the little girls coming up," says Crow, before tearing into Mrs. Alving for the rest of the night.
She wants to say to them, Look, you have choices. You can do it all. Life is good.
Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426.
