Jessica Hecht (#260) - March, 2010

Jessica Hecht, now on Broadway as Eddie Carbone's long-suffering but cleared-eyed wife Beatrice in the Broadway revival of "A View From The Bridge", talks about her role in the play's tragic love triangle and why her preparation for this performance was so different than her usual practice. She also discusses how she began studying at Connecticut College, only to have the famed actor Morris Carnovsky send her off to New York to study at New York University; her earliest roles, including an appearance in "Hamlet" at Hartford Stage, near her hometown of Bloomfield CT, as a silent lady-in-waiting to Pamela Payton-Wright as Gertrude; her Broadway debut in "The Last Night of Ballyhoo" where, after being raised in an observant Jewish home, she appeared as part of a Southern family disconnected from their Jewish roots; how she handled portraying a character alternating between dawning love and heart-rending tragedy in the non-linear "Stop Kiss"; working on "After The Fall" at the Roundabout with Arthur Miller and her interaction with the legendary playwright; playing in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" with Denzel Washington -- and how that yielded the greatest entrance ovation she's ever experienced; the joy and pain of opening in "Brighton Beach Memoirs" but never being able to perform for an audience in the prematurely closed "Broadway Bound"; and why she's drawn back to the Williamstown Theatre Festival year after year. Original air date - March 17, 2010.