Lisa LoCicero (Olivia, GH) is set to star in a limited run revival of the Tony-winning comedy God of Carnage at Los Angeles’s Odyssey Theater from May 13-29. The opportunity came out of the blue, she reports. “The director [Peter Allas] called me; he was someone I had worked with some years ago and he was putting this play together and I guess he just thought that I would bring to the table what he saw in the character, which I was really honored to hear.” While she hadn’t been actively pursuing stage work (“It’s not something I think about on a daily basis”), LoCicero notes, “It had started to percolate with me a little bit. I saw some pictures of myself from when I was in acting school, doing a play called Trelawny of the ‘Wells,’ which is a four-act [Arthur Wing] Pinero play that I was the lead in. I thought, ‘My God, I was so young and dumb, it didn’t even occur to me to be afraid!’ I thought to myself, ‘I wonder if I could do that now! Could I do now, as a middle-aged woman, what I did as a teenager?’ So, it is something I had been thinking about, and as luck would have it, the phone rang. And so I guess we’ll find out!”
LoCicero is a fan of the play, which she saw “with the all-star cast everyone associates with it” from its original Broadway run: Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Hayden, “so part of me thinks, ‘This is just ludicrous,’ because they were all so good in these roles and such titans of theater. But it’s that thing you’ve heard actors say so many times that it’s sort of an eye-roll now: ‘If it’s scary, you have to do it!’ What’s the worst thing that could happen? I could be terrible! And if that happens, it’s happened to a lot more talented people than me.”
GH was happy to work with her on scheduling to enable her to moonlight. “I start rehearsal on my birthday, April 18, while we’re on a hiatus and I naturally had the next week off. It’s a short run, and they’ve always been really wonderful with me and the other actors when it comes to working things out. They want us to stretch ourselves and be the best artists we can be and they understand that I’ve been playing this character [Olivia] for almost 14 years now; sometimes you need a detour! And I’m very grateful to them for helping me work this all out.”
She is eager to dig into the rehearsal process. “So far, we’ve had one read-through on Zoom. It’s a very physical show, and talking with Peter, the director, we both have similar ideas [about the show]. It’s very funny, but it’s also very keenly observed and very emotional, as well, with a lot of physical comedy and visual comedy. It’s a wonderful play and it’s very fast-paced, both for the actors and the audience, hopefully! I’m really looking forward to jumping in. I’m going into the whole thing extremely humble and I’m sure that I will be even more humbled as the process goes on [laughs]. Hopefully not brought to my knees, but certainly humbled.”
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