Last season Amy Van Nostrand appeared on the Huntington stage in a captivating cameo as the mysterious, fragile Francey, moribund first girlfriend of gangster Baby-face Martin, in artistic director Nicholas Martin’s inaugural production, Dead End. She returns to Boston in different guise next week, portraying that assertive daughter of Britannia, Hesione Hushabye, one of the leading roles in George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House.

Shaw began the work in 1916 but did not allow its production until the conclusion of World War I. Long considered his anti-war play, Heartbreak House ends with bombs falling near the country home of the upper-class Shotover family; these are accompanied by intimations that the clan’s lives will be superfluous in the society to emerge from the ruins. Shaw acknowledged his debt to Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard by subtitling the work, " Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes. " Says Van Nostrand, " The characters in Heartbreak House are both symbols and real. There are stories about Shaw going to parties with Virginia Woolf and others of the Bloomsbury people. They would stand in their garden and look through the fields to see the zeppelins crashing and burning. There are all sorts of rumblings throughout the play, questions like ‘What is it costing us to live this life? How long can it go on like this? What will be sacrificed because of it?’ It connects to present day, how we all stood watching the television set on September 11 and realizing that life in this country will never be the same again. "

Van Nostrand follows a distinguished line of actresses who have taken on Hesione — Vanessa Redgrave, Edith Evans, Jessica Tandy, and Irene Worth among others. " Hesione is described as a bohemian, " the actress says. " I get a hugely warm and generous feeling from her. She’s not pretentious, doesn’t stand on ceremony. She’s extremely loving but knows how to call a spade a spade. She loves to flirt, to entertain, and to hatch plots. Hesione is very much the heartbeat at the center of the play because of her fearlessness. "

Matching her conception of Hesione, the actress is hugely warm and exudes no pretension, sitting curled up on a scruffy sofa in the green room at the Huntington to talk with a visitor. Born and raised in Providence, she graduated from Brown University and then trained for the stage at Trinity Repertory Company, where she has played many roles. Indeed, she met her husband, actor Tim Daly, on stage at Trinity when they were cast opposite each other in Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. They married in 1982 and have two children: a son who is a high-school senior and a 12-year-old daughter.

Van Nostrand is commuting to the Huntington from Providence, where she lives with her family. They moved back east after many years in Los Angeles after the television series Wings, on which Daly was a regular, ended. Van Nostrand had a career in television as well, guesting on Frasier, Family Album, and One Life To Live, among other shows, and appeared in a number of films. About the return east, she says, " We realized that we’d only have the children under our roof until they went off to college. Los Angeles is a one-industry town. We wanted our kids to have a wider experience. We looked for a manageable-sized city, close to New York, with a rich community and good schools. Providence has all that. "

The Huntington’s production of Heartbreak House is directed by Darko Tresnjak, who staged last season’s Amphitryon. It marks Van Nostrand’s first professional outing in a Shaw play, though she studied his works at Brown and owns her grandmother’s full set of the plays. " My mother’s mother was a poet, Louisa Fletcher Connelly, who was celebrated in her day. Her first husband was the author Booth Tarkington. My copies of the Shaw plays have her notes written in the margins. I’ve always loved this play. When I was in my early 20s, I thought, ‘I’ve got to play Ellie Dunn,’ the ingenue, but then what I really wanted was to play Hesione. I had the chutzpah and the intelligence for it, but you need to get to a point where you’ve lived enough life to know what it feels like to go through heartbreak and reach the other side. You need to have the knowledge to pass it on to someone younger. "

Heartbreak House will be presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre, January 4 through February 3. Tickets are $12 to $58; call (617) 266-0800.

Issue Date: December 27, 2001 - January 3, 2001

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