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Gideon Lester: Last season you played Li’l Bit in the American Repertory Theater’s production of How I Learned to Drive opposite your husband Arliss Howard. At the time, you said you had no plans to act again. You and Arliss are about to enter rehearsals for Ivanov. How did we entice you back?

Debra Winger: Bob Brustein sent us the play and we read it in bed. I was making jokes: “Anna’s starting to cough . . . oh wait, she’s ill . . . she disappears for Act Two, then at the beginning of Act Four she’s dead.” I said to Arliss, “Honey, if I have something else going on this is perfect. Otherwise I’ll be shopping for groceries while you’re on stage.” We didn’t think we could make it work with our schedules–three children and all that that implies. We turned out the light and Arliss said, “I will play that role, Ivanov, at some point.” The light went back on and I said, “This is the point. We’re not at the age anymore where you can say that. We’re not in our twenties anymore. This is the time to do it, and this is the place.”

GL: Why is the American Repertory Theater the place?

DW: We had a great time here doing How I Learned to Drive. It was a real awakening for me, because I hadn’t had much experience in professional theater, only a little repertory work when I was young.

GL: Li’l Bit in How I Learned to Drive must be a challenging role for a film actor, because she spends so much time addressing the audience directly.

DW: I think that helped me. I had to take the beast by the horns, particularly acting on a thrust stage. Everything about it was a baptism by fire. Arliss had the idea that I should begin the play in the audience, and that was great; there I was, sitting in the house while the lights were up and everyone was coming in. I was watching people who were soon going to be watching me.

GL: This time Arliss is addressing the audience and you’re a member of the company.

DW: Right. Marriage is a dance. This is a brilliant role for him, and I’m as excited for him as he was for me in the last play. Not that the role I’m taking on is nothing. It’s challenging in it’s own right, and resonant in my life. I have a lot of personal experience to bring to Anna.

GL: The part was also close to Chekhov’s life; he knew he had tuberculosis when he wrote the play.

DW: It’s been as thrilling researching the role as it used to be for me in movies till things started to get watered down. Potent writing always comes from life. I’m looking forward to rehearsal. I don’t yet have a sense of Anna’s struggle, because she never verbalizes it. If she did, it would no longer seem much of a struggle . . . just as with Ivanov; we have to read between the lines, no matter how much he talks.

GL: His internal struggle is not what he articulates?

DW: Exactly – and the same for Anna. First she tells Ivanov, “Don’t go. Stay with me.” Then she says, “Go. Don’t stay.” Something has happened that she doesn’t verbalize.

GL: How much contact have you had with Yuri Yeremin, the director of Ivanov?

DW: Yuri was in Russia when we needed to tell the theatre whether we would accept the roles, but we hadn’t met him and didn’t know what to base our decision on. I asked if, with his permission, I could read his notes on the production. They were sent to us, and when I read them I started howling with laughter and joy, because his ideas were so wild and original, within the context of a vast knowledge of Chekhovian theatre. At this point, I think he wanted a camel, two goats, and five pigs. I thought, that’s what I’ll do when I’m offstage, I’ll herd the animals. I was struck by his visual imagination. When I started acting in movies, there were no VCRs or multiplexes, and I was spoiled by that. I wanted people to go into a large theatre where the lights would darken and watch the movie on a big screen. When the lights went down at the first preview of How I Learned to Drive, I realized that I was back where I wanted to be. People have big reactions in the theatre because they’re imprisoned; they can’t go out for popcorn or stop the show like a VCR. Theatre is the definition of a captive audience.

GL: And no sooner had you accepted the part than Harvard called?

DW: Yes. A horrible moment for me. I keep thinking of James Agee’s phrase in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men about “cruel radiance.” Here I was, getting this phone call in which the offer was slowly being revealed… It took me ten minutes to figure out what they were saying.

GL: What was the position you were offered?

DW: It’s a teaching fellowship in Robert Coles’ course, “The Literature of Social Reflection.” Coles gives two lectures each week and provides a master syllabus from which the fellows are free to choose, and add to, a number of books. You have twenty students in your section and you’re on your own.

GL: Do you go to Coles’s lectures?

DW: I wouldn’t miss them for the world, and I’ve made them mandatory for my students. I suddenly realized, right before my first class, that I was able to save them from waking up in twenty years and saying, “What the hell did I do? Why didn’t I go? I had the chance to hear that guy!” He’s a phenomenon. He speaks for an hour without notes and brings in his entire life. I told them, “Just go, even if you don’t ‘get it.’ I don’t care. You’ll be there, and something will seep into your pores.”

GL: Is it a literature course?

DW: Yes and no. The idea is to bring yourself to the books. It’s a last chance for Harvard seniors who have been trained to analyze and deconstruct literature intellectually. We ask, “What did you feel when you read that passage, and why? How does it relate to your life? What happened to you that you had this reaction?”

GL: Much as an actor approaches a text?

DW: I feel perfectly suited for this – it’s what I do. The students are concentrators in neuroscience and anthropology, social studies, history – some of them are going to be doing fieldwork. For twenty-three years, I would try to figure out how somebody else felt about something, how they lived, how they dealt with the world, the search for understanding.

GL: How did you first come into contact with Coles?

DW: When I left movies four years ago, I was interested in making documentaries. I still am. I made a documentary in China with my son Noah; we had traveled to Bali together, and I had taken him to cremation ceremonies and seen how he responded. I’d also watched the extraordinary way how he dealt with my mother’s death, and I wanted to do a series on the spiritual life of children – to visit different cultures with my child, and see how kids get God. Of course that led me right to Coles’ work. I wrote him and he was very encouraging, but I’m not a producer, and the project hasn’t yet happened.

GL: Have you ever taught before?

DW: Not formally, though I’ve led workshops. It’s a natural impulse for me – not teaching so much as letting someone know what noone let me know when I was young – that it’s all inside you. Nobody can really teach you anything. Your soul is equipped – just open it up. The question is how to look in. The search is ongoing.

Gideon Lester is A.R.T.’s Resident Dramaturg.