Thirty-three-year-old actress Beth Cole didn’t have to spend much time playing toothy ingenues on stage. Instead, the Vermont and Detroit native skipped straight to the gritty roles. This month, she can be found on stage playing opposite Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Jack Goes Boating” — a LAByrinth Theater Company production currently at The Public Theater in New York.
CASTING CALL: Cole landed the role of Connie after recounting a somewhat tawdry tale to playwright Bob Glaudini and LAByrinth member John Ortiz over drinks. Partway through the story, Glaudini turned to Ortiz and queried, “Who do we have cast as Connie?” “It wasn’t the smartest thing I ever did,” admits Cole ruefully.
But hey, she got the part.
PLOT TWIST: “Jack Goes Boating” is a quirky love story in which the quiet, awkward Jack (Seymour Hoffman) courts the sweet but questionably stable Connie (Cole). Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega act as Jack’s equally damaged romantic advisers. One particularly explosive scene has all four characters consuming copious amounts of hashish, cocaine and alcohol, a potent catalyst for their emotional blowups. “We did the first reading of the piece two years ago,” explains Cole. “But it wasn’t until almost the third or fourth week of rehearsal that we were all like, ‘Oh this is deep.'”
CHARACTER STUDY: “Connie is definitely like an only child who lost her parents and is a recent transplant to the city, so doesn’t really have anyone. This is the first group of people who have accepted her and taken her in and I think she’s continually filled with wonder and awe at the fact that people like her,” explains Cole of the backstory she created for Connie. “At first I had a lot of trouble with it, because personally, I have trouble being vulnerable….I really had to concentrate on the aspects of myself that I am uncomfortable with.”
PROVENANCE: Raised by a single mother in Detroit and Vermont, Cole began acting in theater at 18, then moved to New York two years later to get some proper training. She started interning with LAByrinth in 2001, and has worked for the company ever since, though “Jack Goes Boating” marks her performance debut in one of its productions.
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STAGE FRIGHT: A few years ago, Cole was in a small production opposite three other actors and one evening they found themselves performing in front of a one-person audience. “It’s pretty bad when you’ve got more people on stage than you do in the audience,” laughs Cole. “That’s always a bummer.”