Katie Holmes and company talk “Dead Accounts”

By MARK BLANKENSHIP

Take Dead Accounts, the new dramedy by Theresa Rebeck that officially opens at the Music Box Theatre tomorrow night. The story of a Cincinnati family that’s trying to keep it together, it features a raft of marquee names. Norbert Leo Butz plays Jack, the son who suddenly arrives from New York with a possibly illegal fortune; Katie Holmes plays his frustrated sister Lorna, who has never managed to leave home; and Judy Greer (13 Going on 30, 27 Dresses) plays his estranged wife Jenny, who turns up in the Midwest for a variety of shady reasons.

But despite all these stars, Dead Accounts is still a one-set, five-character play. Many members of the cast and creative team are happy to work on something so contained.

He continues, “When you have three or four or five people, you can listen to them. In this case, the actors are smart and sympathetic, so I can set them free, and then watch the natural process happens and select the best moments later. You can’t do that with a room of twenty-eight people.”

This attentive approach has helped Greer discover the vulnerability in her estranged wife character. “When I first read the play, I didn’t pick up on that right away, but now in rehearsals and table reads, I’ve realized that this woman really loves [Jack], and I want her to love him,” she says. “I wish we did this kind of work on movies. They’d be better. How do you spend thirty million dollars and not sit down and talk about things?”

Holmes and Butz have used rehearsals to learn how to seem related. “We’re trying to find the specifics of this brother and sister,” says Holmes. “In the first scene, we’re eating ice cream, so what can we do to make it more than just eating? What can we do to make it clear that there’s a relationship?”

Butz adds, “You can’t do anything that isn’t in the play, but Theresa Rebeck is from a big, loud, messy, Catholic Midwestern family. As is Katie. As am I. We all speak the same vernacular.”

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Mark Blankenship is TDF’s online content editor
Photo by Joan Marcus