Frances McDormand talks about “Early Shaker Spirituals.”
Frances McDormand has lived in New York for decades while keeping a home in a bucolic Bay Area town where she would go to unwind. Then last year she made a momentous decision: to tip the balance toward living around here.
Her desire has partially to do with getting older and becoming acutely aware of her mortality. “I intend to rest my bones in the soil of Northern California and just go out on a tide,” said the 57-year-old Academy Award-winning actress.
McDormand also moved here out of a belief that women in these parts are like-minded spirits. A self-described “champion of aging gracefully and without cosmetic intervention,” she has spoken out against a climate in Hollywood that drives actresses her age and younger to go under the knife.
So when she walks down to a local beach and sees “five women coming toward me who have never plucked, dyed or shaved a thing,” it feels like a homecoming. “It is a vision of real beauty and power, and it is just as powerful as the sea,” she said.
McDormand made her presence known with a recent appearance at City Arts & Lectures, where her honesty and humor shone through. She related her first meeting with Joel Coen, whom she later married. To prepare her for her audition for his debut movie, “Blood Simple,” he gave her “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” “It is one of the hottest books ever written, so for three nights we discussed it over chocolate,” she told the audience.
As half of the famed Coen brothers who wrote her Oscar-winning role in “Fargo,” her husband has been so successful that McDormand doesn’t need to accept a part solely for money. “I have the luxury of a husband supporting my decisions.” (He still spends much of his time in New York because he works closely with his brother, who lives there.)
When someone asked if she has ever had to kiss an actor with bad breath, she responded with a laugh. “That would be me. I always say, ‘I have bad breath and I fart and I don’t wear deodorant, so get used to it.’ ”
McDormand will be back in front of a local audience this week when she appears in “Early Shaker Spirituals: A Record Album Interpretation” at Z Space. It is a production of the famed experimental New York company Wooster Group, scheduled to appear in San Francisco for the first time in its 40-year history. She joined the company 16 years ago and found a home away from home.
‘Wheel me out’
“I will continue to be with them until I can’t move anymore, and then they will probably wheel me out,” said McDormand, who would like it to be known that her 35-year-acting career encompasses as much theater work as movies. “It just doesn’t get the same amount of publicity as film does.”
The Wooster group “harbored me when my son was young and in school, and I didn’t want to leave home but needed the work for my soul as an actor.”
When McDormand expressed an interest in doing something new with the group, it struck members that “we had the perfect ensemble to do ‘Shaker Spirituals,’ ” said Kate Valk, who directs the piece. The inspiration comes from a 1976 recording of Shaker women singing a cappella various hymns and marches specific to their faith. McDormand and three other actresses equipped with earpieces sing and in other ways interpret the voices heard on the record.
“We do the first 20 cuts on the album, and we sing every song in the order they are in on the album,” Valk said. As a fascinating aside, two of the tracks are spoken word. “You hear this woman talk almost like giving testimony about being a Shaker and how she came to be a Shaker.”
McDormand believes it makes for a “really satis- fying piece of theater for many reasons. First of all, it is an hour long, so it is kind of a perfect amount of theater. Then you can still have dinner and talk about it. And for us performers, it just kind of lifts you up and gets your lungs popping and the oxygen flowing,” she adds.
‘Olive Kitteridge’
This is a fertile time for McDormand as an actress. Besides interpreting a Shaker woman, she also plunged into the world of premium television for the first time, playing a dispirited small-town math teacher over a period of 25 years in the HBO miniseries “Olive Kitteridge.” The smart money is on her winning an Emmy to go with her Oscar and Tony (for “Good People”).
McDormand, who appears to have strong opinions about almost everything, doesn’t think much of award shows. “Really they are becom- ing extremely anachronistic. They are like strange variety shows from the early 1970s and not even that good. I mean, Carol Burnett was better television.”
To become more relevant, she believes the Academy Awards should open its acting categories to long-format TV films like “Olive Kitteridge,” pointing out the difficulty the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has had in recent years finding five women to fill the best actress category.
Rewarding experience
Nevertheless, if she’s nominated for an Emmy, she will show up “because ‘Olive Kitteridge’ is one of the most satisfying and rewarding experiences of my professional life, and anybody who wants to celebrate it, I will do it along with them.”
Her upcoming work combines the small screen with the big. She’s developing another HBO miniseries at the same time that she has optioned Michael Pollan’s 2006 nonfiction book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” for a feature film. She intends to add a fictional narrator to his critique of food chain productivity. She has also announced she will appear in the film as a dying mother.
“What I am always looking for — in movies or TV — is good storytelling and grown-up films which have a real power and fulfill a necessary part of our culture,” she said.