Broadway debut all in the family

Rachel Griffiths and Thomas Sadoski perform in "Other Desert Cities" at the Booth Theater in New York. The family drama, which had its Off Broadway premiere in January, has moved to Broadway. Photo: Sara Krulwich/New York Times

Philippa Hawker, The Age, reports

RACHEL Griffiths apologises for ''talking American'', but she's just come off stage and it takes a while for her to shed her accent. She is on her phone, signing autographs outside the Broadway theatre where she has just made her debut in Other Desert Cities, which opened to glowing reviews. The New York Times called it ''a beautifully modulated Broadway debut''.

Griffiths plays a writer home for the holidays with a surprise for her patrician political family, particularly her parents, played by Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach. She has the manuscript of a memoir with her. For her siblings - and her mother and father, who bear some resemblance to Ronald and Nancy Reagan - its contents are potentially explosive.

The role is part of a continuum, Griffiths says wryly. ''I've made a career out of trying to understand the American family - how it can stay together and evolve out of its claustrophobic stereotypes.'' Coming from a different cultural background, she has been struck by, she says, an American preoccupation with appearance, with the way a family presents itself to the world.

Other Desert Cities is written by Jon Robin Baitz, who also created the TV series, Brothers and Sisters, in which Griffiths starred between 2006 and 2011. Before that, she was in Six Feet Under, the HBO drama about a dynasty of undertakers.

Spending 10 years on network television, Griffith says she relished the chance to do other work when she could, particularly films ''when the story is so important to the person making it''. She can be seen in an Australian movie, Burning Man, Jonathan Teplitzky's fractured exploration of a life in crisis. Griffiths plays a therapist who has a relationship with the central character, Tom (Matthew Goode), a volatile figure whose life seems out of control, for reasons not immediately apparent.

Her role is a small one, she says, but she could see that the movie had a cluster of female roles ''that needed to be the real McCoy, that needed gravitas. And I wanted to be part of the tapestry.'' She is a fan of Teplitzky's previous films (Better Than Sex and Gettin' Square) and regards him as ''one of our most underrated directors''. When she read the script, she says, she wasn't clear how the structure worked, ''but I didn't need to know that in order to do my job''. The important thing, she adds, ''was I knew that he would make sense of it''.

When she saw the finished film at its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, she says she was struck by the way Teplitzky had captured male experience. ''I got mad at him and told him he had made a much better movie than the one I signed on for. I knew it was going to be good, but not this good.''

Meanwhile, she's making the most of her Broadway experience. The play, she believes, has a good chance of winning a Pulitzer Prize. ''It's sharp and human and hopeful; I think there's a hunger for that.''

She talks about the role of the writer, of her interest in the author Joan Didion. There is a YouTube video, directed by Didion's nephew, actor Griffin Dunne, of the author reading from her work. Griffiths watches it every night. She says it makes her think about some of the issues at the centre of the play: what rights does a writer have? Whose story is she telling, and is it hers to tell? Whose truth, and what truth?

These are questions that ''resonate with audiences on every level'', she says. In Other Desert Cities, ''there's a moment when I take the manuscript and hold it up to the fire, and last night someone in the audience called out, 'burn it'; they couldn't help themselves''.

She thinks the play could do well in her homeland, ''although Australia, and the Australian media don't really understand the American right on a molecular level, and this play makes sense of it in a very interesting way''.

In fact, she says, ''I'd love to see how it would play. With Judy Davis, Jack Thompson … And me,'' she says, laughing.

Burning Man is now showing.

In the mourning light

Burning Man stars Matthew Goode and Rachel Griffiths

Jim Schembri, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports

Jonathan Teplitzky's bio drama Burning Man challenges our ideas of grief.

THE jagged emotions one is forced to work through after surviving a life-inverting trauma are at once complex, subtle, extreme and contradictory. They can also prove maddening, both for the soul at the centre of the storm and those unfortunates caught in its orbit.

Sydney writer-director Jonathan Teplitzky (Better Than Sex, Gettin' Square) learnt all about this 10 years ago when an event turned his life upside down. As grief, frustration, depression and denial raged through him, he found the easiest emotion to vent was anger - and one memorable scene in his extraordinary, powerful, bio-inspired adult drama Burning Man captures that with stinging clarity.

As a head chef, Tom (Matthew Goode) is frantically busy in the fire-breathing kitchen of a swish Bondi restaurant when one of the waiting staff returns with an uneaten duck dish. The customer has complained that it hasn't been cooked properly. Oh yes it has, Tom insists. ''That's how we do it here; if they don't like it they can go to Red Rooster.''

The customer nonetheless presses for the duck to be redone, so Tom acquiesces by plucking a fresh one off the hook and subjecting it to some special preparation.

He kicks the carcass across the kitchen floor, stabs it with a fork, swishes it around a basin full of dirty dishes, drops it in the toilet, hits flush, then duly chops the duck up and cooks away. Handing back the plate with the befouled fowl, Tom quips with a cheeky smile: ''The customer is always right.''

The only rationale for such appalling behaviour, Teplitzky says, is that Tom knows he can get away with it. Teplitzky refers to this as the ''get out of jail free'' syndrome, wherein a grief-stricken person begins taking shameless advantage of the allowances people make in deference to their post-traumatic stress. Teplitzky recalls this experience vividly.

''Once you get past the tragedy and the sadness, there's a strange exhilaration,'' he says.

''Suddenly you can behave like a 20-year-old again but with the life experience of a 40-year-old. There's a fantastic freedom that, in a sense, perverts the rest of your life. It's a deluded state but it allows you to free up your mind and just think, 'Life should be about life, not about fear.' That, ultimately, was the starting point of the film.''

Actually, the starting point for the film, Teplitzky says, was finding an actor willing to embrace the wide range of raw emotions he was determined to convey. After some long conversations in an English pub deconstructing the screenplay, Teplitzky hooked British actor Goode, best known for his outstanding support work in A Single Man (2009), Brideshead Revisited (2008) and Woody Allen's Match Point (2005).

''The thing I needed most was someone who was going to go there,'' Teplitzky says. ''So I said to him: 'Let's not go anywhere forward if you don't feel you can go 120 per cent there.'''

And he certainly does; Goode's central performance in Burning Man delivers a deeply affecting portrait of a man at war with himself and everybody around him. A deeper, richer understanding of life emerges once he realises that the world, as unfair as it is, does not revolve around him.

''I try not to take anything home with me but it was certainly very, very hard [not to] on this film,'' Goode says from London. ''The film was partly based on Jonathan's life but I'd never gone through anything like that before, so we went to some interesting places. That's one of the reasons this film has become the thing that I am definitely most proud of, not just for my performance but because of the entirety of the work. It was so sensitively handled.''

It wasn't an easy sell, however. Teplitzky's defiantly non-linear narrative starts with a blizzard of question marks about why Tom is behaving like, well, such an arsehole.

''It was always written as a very fractured narrative so you're confused as an audience member,'' Goode says. ''I [certainly] was when I first read the script. I was, like, 'I'm not sure how much I like this guy!' Then once we start to learn why his behaviour is so erratic and why he's such a mercurial father your heart goes straight out to him and we follow his story.

''It wasn't just because his behaviour was amusing [that I took on the role]; I liked the fact that an audience is going to go through that same process I did when I read it, which is an enormous arc from disliking someone to rooting for them.''

Burning Man certainly doesn't waste time grabbing attention; its opening shot is not only confronting, it deliberately confounds audience expectations about what kind of film they are about to witness.

''I wanted to make a film that was visceral and emotional but not sentimental,'' Teplitzky says. ''I tried to drain it of every ounce of sentimentality so that it became something people could identify with without going into that completely morbid thing of observing grief and being about the vulnerability of grief. What I wanted, in a funny sort of way, was a celebration of grief.''

Having seen and survived Beaches, Goode was glad the film adopted a full-frontal approach to a topic usually bathed in melodrama. ''There is humour, there are a lot of scenes where you go, 'This doesn't feel contrived,''' Goode says. ''The film doesn't feel like it's trying to manipulate an audience. The emotions were very real and the dialogue was very real, so we were very lucky.''

The experience of making Burning Man changed the career path of Melbourne actor Bojana Novakovic, who stars opposite Goode as his highly sexual, highly strung better half. ''It set a benchmark; I can't do anything less than this now,'' Novakovic says. ''I can't take on any jobs that offer me less than this in terms of personal development in my work … From this point I have to take on things that scare me.

''I've said no to a lot of things since this, and I've been unemployed as a result, but I feel I'm doing it for the right reasons.''

The chemistry the pair exude on screen was, Goode says, the result of some distinctly non-method acting.

''If I was a method actor - and I still don't quite understand, really, how that works - if you're suddenly drawing on your own experience and you're trying to work something out psychologically on screen, that can become very one-note and quite boring,'' he says.

''Where I was very lucky was having an energy with Bojana where we were able to go to the emotion between 'action' and 'cut', then we can breathe, relax, go have a cigarette and come back and do it again. If we had to 'live' it the whole day, that would have been the end of me.''

Burning Man opens on Thursday.

The US made mince out of me, says Aussie actress Rachel Griffiths

Matthew Goode and Rachel Griffiths in a scene from Burning Man. Picture: Angie Fielder Source: News Limited

Jonathon Moran, The Sunday Telegraph, reports

AFTER a decade as one of Australia's top earners in Hollywood, Rachel Griffiths says she's slowing things down.

The A-lister will relocate back to Sydney in January with her husband and three kids, ready to take a break after 10 years of consistent work on primetime TV in the US - a rarity in the acting business.

"I'm going to stop and enjoy the roses for a little bit," the 42-year-old actress tells Insider from New York.

"Most importantly I just don't want to do a big TV contract for a while. I've had 10 years of very well paid contracts but you are basically a serf, you have no freedom and there's a kind of cost to it."

Griffiths won critical acclaim on the hugely popular Six Feet Under, from 2001 for five years before she took on the role of Sarah Walker in Brothers & Sisters, alongside Sally Field, Rob Lowe and Calista Flockhart.

She's understood to have been paid more than $150,000 an episode over the six seasons, which wrapped earlier this year.

But having worked on US TV for so many years, Griffith relished the opportunity to take her time working on the new Australian film, Burning Man.

"Having done television at the rate and frequency and volume that I was, to do something that was such a precious story to somebody ... I knew that would remind me of what else this job can be because it did start to feel towards the end like I was mince meat going through the sausage machine of network television," she says.

Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky, Burning Man stars Matthew Goode as a young chef, whose life is out of control.

Griffith went nude in a number of scenes of the film shot in Sydney this year. "I do it very rarely but I really trusted Jonathan," she says.

Griffith, married to artist Andrew Taylor, is mother to Banjo, 7, Adelaide, 6, and Clementine, 2.

She moved to America off the back of 1994 Australian film Muriel's Wedding and hasn't looked back, until now.

She's looking forward to setting up home in Sydney as living overseas has been isolating.

"I don't really have any friends here to be honest. I have a tragic life," she says.

"I work my arse off and then I am with my kids, that's about my life. We don't have family here.

"Raising three kids on the other side of the world with no family, the only people you can rely on are on the payroll and even then you can't rely on them because they are on the payroll if you know what I mean," she says.

Burning Man opens Thursday