When Donald Margulies' Collected Stories opens this weekend at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, local audiences will have a chance to see an actress who in a very short time has established herself as one of this area's best. Katherine Michelle Tanner appeared in Proof at American Stage just a few months ago, and gave the sort of performance that instantly makes a reputation. As the brilliant but troubled daughter of a great mathematician, she was unpredictable, resentful, sardonic, depressed, funny, compassionate, bad-tempered and fragile. Tanner's performance was the sort that you don't dare look away from, lest you miss some sudden but crucial flash of emotion.
When Tanner turned up weeks later in Larry Parr's Sundew at Sarasota's Florida Studio Theatre, she gave another top-notch performance, this time as a young woman contemplating the seizure and sale of her mother's beloved property. Where Proof's heroine was notable for her mutability, Sundew's Alice was a sympathetic, loving young woman whose plot against her mother was apparently the first mischief she'd ever contemplated, and who radiated so much goodness that you could almost excuse her experiment in larceny.
With performances like these, it should have come as no surprise when Tanner won Best Actress in the Weekly Planet's Best of the Bay issue. She's an extraordinary performer, and a needed addition to the local scene.
That's if she decides to stay. I talked with Tanner — who's in her late 20s but looks younger — in Ybor City recently, and one of my first questions was "Do you intend to remain in the area?" I had lots of other questions, too; and as we chatted outside a small deli/restaurant on Eighth Avenue — only a few blocks from where she was rehearsing Collected Stories for Stageworks — I discovered a woman who's passionate about acting, not the least bit vain and eager to discover where fate will eventually lead her. There was nothing of Proof's depressive heroine in Tanner, though I found elements of Sundew's Alice in the actress' good humor and fundamental optimism. I also found something that, for lack of a better term, might be called "innocence:" the sort of openness to experience that more jaded souls gave up eons ago. It was refreshing to talk with a woman this brightly straightforward; most of the people I interview are much more cautious.
But on the question of where her acting will take her: "I'll kind of go wherever the work is," she says. Tanner has auditioned for a group of theaters in Atlanta, and is also prepared to move to Chicago. She thinks she'll ultimately audition for the Asolo company at home in Sarasota, but suspects that her type is already too well represented there.
She wants to act in films, but thinks that the dialogue in American cinema is too often substandard. "I really want to continue to find quality work," Tanner says. "And when I mean quality, for myself I really have to able to feel proud of it. And I think that its a challenge to break into films of quality right now, I really do."
The actress is willing to work in serious films (not third-rate "movies") and believes that she can "get a few things on a reel, so that when I go [to New York or L.A.], there's something to see." Speaking of New York, Tanner says that she's aware of all the actors in that city who fail to advance in the face of massive competition: "When I hear of my friends up in New York, and they can't get anything, I do feel bad for them. Because, is it worth waiting a table for 11 years to get one audition? … And for me, there's too much in me to say, or to experience, or to feel, in order to do that."
If Tanner had a guaranteed role in the Big Apple, she'd go, but would think hard about what her next step would be.
Tanner comes from a family of artists. Her father is a painter and former potter; her mother was an actress before she had children; one of her aunts was a professional actress; and her sister is presently a performer in Chicago. Unlike parents who try to dissuade their children from the perilous, unstructured life of acting, Tanner's folks support her career choice: "They're very excited that I'm so artistically happy," she says, "and they love to come see their daughters …They love to come see who their daughters are going to be that night." They apparently instilled a wide-ranging love of the arts in this daughter. In addition to acting, Tanner plays the violin and piano, takes ballet and singing lessons and is writing a children's book, which she hopes her father will illustrate.
Tanner is originally from Hastings, Minn. (the town, she points out, where the movie Grumpy Old Men was made), and attended schools in Minnesota before coming south to study at Sarasota's FSU/Asolo Conservatory in 2001 (she graduated in spring, 2004). She says the conservatory experience was "a whirlwind" that she misses; it helped her "to see where the gaps were" in her technique "and then to work my way through them."
The conservatory teachers focused on the notion that acting was "reacting truthfully under imaginary circumstances," an approach that she still finds eminently workable. Now her method is to "find the truth of that character and the truth of that play."
Tanner's favorite playwrights are Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Among more contemporary writers, she likes Martin McDonagh because Irish people "say it like it is. They put it out there."
She'd love to play Nina in The Seagull, Nora in A Doll's House, or Imogen in Cymbeline. "I really like finding things that kind of scare me a little bit," she says," not scare me, but don't come ready-made, and then how can I maneuver into that. I really like that."
Other roles that scare her — and that she therefore wants to tackle — are Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and any of the sisters in Chekhov's Three Sisters. But it's the parts that attract her, not some idea of fame: "Fame can come from being a criminal," she says. "Fame is such a weird … thing."
What matters is putting a respectable effort into a worthy part. Anything less is too little.
Her name is Katherine Michelle Tanner and she has a demanding role in Collected Stories as an ambitious, not entirely scrupulous young author.
For now, she's one of our best.
Let's hope we can hold onto her.
This article appears in Oct 26 – Nov 1, 2005.