Cynthia Goes On (and On)

Eighteen-year-old conquers Broadway (twice)

DESPITE living in a dorm and taking four arts and science courses, Barnard freshman Cynthia Nixon did not have a typical first semester. Right until finals, six nights a week she'd rush to the Barrymore Theatre at 7:30 and transform her classic Upper East Side Wasp looks into those of Donna, Hurlyburly's washed-out L.A. tramp. At 8:50 she'd change clothes and makeup, walk two blocks to the Plymouth Theatre, and play Debbie, the precocious ponytailed Brit in Act Two of The Real Thing. At 10:20 she'd take that curtain call with Jeremy Irons, change, and return to Hurlyburly for Act Three. At 11:20 she'd bow alongside William Hurt et al., hop on an uptown bus, and take out her geology homework.

This schizophrenic existence might frazzle the most seasoned of actors, but Cynthia Nixon, untrained and eighteen, "seems to thrive on that sort of schedule," according to Irons. Hurt coos about her "astonishing" control: "She can do more in one day than most people can do in a week, and never sweat. She was carrying two shows, and Barnard, and a life, an interesting life, and coming through it like.. .like a soft breeze."

Sitting across from me at lunch, the soft breeze—who's paying her own tuition—sorts her way through seafood stirfry. She thought up the Broadway mini-commute herself, she says. A year ago, after leaving The Real Thing to do Hurlyburly workshops in Chicago, she realized Donna's and Debbie's onstage time never overlapped. "There's really loads of time," Cynthia says. "I thought, What a neat idea!" When Hurlyburly hit Broadway and her Real Thing replacement left, Cynthia volunteered to Mike Nichols, who had directed both. She went on five nights later.

"It scared me a lot at first," she says, her green agate eyes wide and alert. "I'd always planned on doing it in the summer. It meant I lost two hours a night that I could've been doing schoolwork. But you just got on this total schedule where you knew what you were doing every minute, and it was fine. I slept more than most people I know in college."

Nichols had seen her in 1982 as the lead in John Guare's Lydie Breeze, directed by Louis Malle, which she'd gotten as a result of her performance in Ellis Rabb's 1981 The Philadelphia Story— her first stage role. She'd started at eleven, intending to do children's theater, but was immediately cast in an Afterschool Special and the film Little Darlings. She's since done Showtime's Fifth of July and the movies Amadeus, I Am the Cheese, and O.C. andStiggs. She prefers theater work: it's closer to home and less likely to bring stardom and its requisite headaches. And "films are scarier. In a play, you have someone dragging you through all that muck, all that work that needs to be done."

She's picked out the vegetables from her seafood and is still munching on bread, so I offer my string beans. "Oh yeah," she accepts, "you want some of my stuff? Shrimp? You don't like shrimp?" She leans forward. "Shrimp-shrimpshrimp?"

The only child of a now divorced couple, Cynthia grew up around theater. Her mother, Anne, went to Yale Drama and took Cynthia to innumerable plays, and when Anne wrote for To Tell the Truth, Cynthia often performed, once as an impostor, often as a live model. On one show she sat in a bright-red jumper amidst a swarm of kids and toys, and host Garry Moore asked her, ' 'What are you playing with?" Six-year-old Cynthia replied, ' 'Anything I want to. ' '

"I feel so lucky," she says as the check arrives. "I'm in this great situation where I'm not looking for work. You know? I have a job: I go to school—that's my job. Anything on top of that isjustabonus."

We leave and head for an uptown subway, Cynthia toting her green canvas knapsack with its emergency supply of granola bars. I buy her a piece of pizza, which she clearly prefers to our fifty-dollar lunch. "You know what I love about this?" she asks. "A week ago, I wouldn't have had time for this. This is my first vacation in two years. ' '

David Handelman