Women at the center of their own story.

In the theater women can act their age.

The stage has other lures as well. For one, it is the ultimate proving ground for actors. Allison Janney, 49, best known as C. J. Cregg, the brainy, wisecracking White House staffer in “The West Wing” on television, has been nominated for a Tony for “9 to 5: The Musical.” Theater “demands a lot more of me,” she said. “It requires a different skill set: singing, accents, physical comedy.”

Harriet Walter explained that “to carry the audience with you all through an evening, it’s recognized that you need a certain developed technique and experience.” Consider a romantic moment in “real life,” she said, bending her fingers into quotation marks; “you would be whispering and mumbling to each other.”

Onstage “you have to preserve that intimacy while knowing that the person at the back of the orchestra can see you and hear you, and identify with you more importantly, and imagine they are in the room with you,” she said. “That isn’t something you can just get up and do.” The stage requires a kind of “mental agility,” she said, an “awareness of the whole arc of the evening, and you’re in charge.”

That control is irresistible for an artist, Susan Sarandon said. Over a pot of mint tea she recalled a recent film (she won’t say which) in which the essential qualities of the character that had prompted her to accept the role were edited out, something she did not discover until the film was finished. “The first time I saw it was with an audience,” she said.

Theater is kinder to mature women in other ways. “Theater is a much more forgiving medium,” said Ms. Sarandon, who has been nominated for Oscars five times and won once. Onstage there are no camera close-ups, and an actress can lose or gain 20 years depending on the lighting. “When you’re doing film, you’re not necessarily their priority,” she said, referring to directors of photography.

~ by mentalimaging on May 25, 2009.