It’s not just because she’s sitting across a battered wooden table
in a dark bar full of surly, loud men—Amy Thone always looks like
a pirate. If you meet her on the sidewalk, in the middle of the day,
you can’t help but think: “pirate.”
Some of it’s how she dresses—leather shoes, jeans, slightly
billowing button-up cotton shirts, the kind of clothes you could raid a
ship in. Some of it’s her person—thin and muscular with dark,
curly hair and a strong, unflinching posture. Some of it’s how she
talks—direct and untactful and with many swear words.
Amy Thone on being a mother: “It’s contact improv with a
psychopath.”
Amy Thone on pretentious theater: “If you’re going to take a risk,
it has to be supported by discipline. Some people just pull out their
dicks and jump off a diving board, and that’s just boring, jackass
behavior.”
Amy Thone discussing a line from Two Gentlemen of Verona with one of her students: “Fuck that ‘farthingale’ shit. What the fuck
is going on with that? Cut, cut, cut!”
Her directness, her lack of artifice, is what makes her a great
actor. When Thone walks onto a stage, she sucks all the frivolity out
of the room, makes you lean forward to listen. Her presence is regal,
never clownish. She is the opposite of coy.
Watching Amy Thone act for the first time is startling, even a
little unpleasant. You realize all the puffed-up, empty acting you’ve
been putting up with—you didn’t know it could be so tight, dense,
and good. And, forever after, seeing Thone walk onstage is cause for
quiet celebration and relief. She saves inferior productions from
themselves, not least at Seattle Shakespeare Company, where she works
as a casting director. (The fact that she and her husband, Hans
Altweis, do much of their acting on that stage would seem suspicious if
they weren’t usually the best things about any production that happens
there.)
She doesn’t depend on an audience’s good-natured credulity and gives
no quarter—she quickly disarms you and turns your will into her
own. Thone specializes in the noble and the brooding, but she’s never
cold, whether she’s playing a stern abbess (Bridge of San Luis
Rey, Strawberry Theatre Workshop) or Emily Dickinson (The
Belle of Amherst, Seattle Public Theatre). Her worried and
pitifully poisoned King John (King John, upstart crow
productions) stole the play from Faulconbridge the Bastard, who should
own it. And though Kurt Beattie was a competent Lear in Seattle
Shakespeare Company’s 2004 production, I’m still waiting to see
Thone—cast in that production as Goneril, Lear’s eldest
daughter—tear her hair and howl about betrayal while a storm
rages around her.
To describe an actor as “believable” seems like faint
praise—the least we ask of actors is that they convince us that
they mean what they say. But it is also the actor’s only job,
a job so simple but so elusive that people spend thousands of dollars,
at Freehold and Cornish and the other places where Thone teaches, to
fail to learn how.
How does Thone do it? She orders another round and gives me a crash
course: There’s textual analysis (“I think of plays like
cars—every play has its own engine; you have to learn to pull it
apart”) and learning how to listen to whatever is happening onstage
(“even if your scene partner sucks, if you’re not present to the fact
that they suck, you’re not present”) and learning how to be (“every
actor gets at the best of himself by combining his truth with the
text’s truth”). But when the lesson is over, I’m still not an
actor.
Her secret is directness, a rigorous refusal of affectation. Earlier
in the evening, during one of her Freehold classes in the musty
Oddfellows Hall, she admonishes a young woman playing Juliet: “Don’t be
all airy-fairy. Just talk to the audience. Juliet is fucking
suffocating in that Capulet house!” Later, during the same
class, Thone is playing Gertrude opposite an imperious, actorly young
man’s Hamlet. He delivers a line too cavalierly. Thone slaps him. The
smack is loud; the class is silent. She says something like, “Remember,
you’re talking to your mother.” Then they continue. He is humbled, less
showy, better.
Amy Thone has been a tough, no-fooling-around person all of her
life. She was born in Nebraska, where her father, Charles Thone, was a
politician and the family ate a lot of beef. When her father was
elected senator, the family moved to Washington, D.C. When he was
elected governor of Nebraska, Thone refused to move back. For six
months, at 16 years old, she lived alone in her family’s D.C. house
because that’s what she wanted to do.
She marks her biography as a series of love affairs. She went to
college in Nebraska, followed a “gorgeous French biker” to Ashland,
Oregon (where she worked at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), followed
an actor and Shakespeare scholar around the country on his gigs (“he’d
argue for hours about punctuation—a semicolon in
Coriolanus became a bar fight”), worked a little as an actor
and standup comedian, went to grad school in Denver (“it was run by
alcoholic British actors; I was as happy as a pig in shit”), followed
some guy to Europe and, in 1992, followed another guy to Seattle. At
that time the city seemed crackling, a nascent theater town. And now?
“At this point we’re just staying because we have kids,” she says. Too
many paying theaters—the Empty Space, the Group, Alice B., the
Public—have closed. There’s too little work. Plus she’s a woman
of a certain age.
Thone says she stopped getting cast readily three or four years ago.
“My joke is that the directors look at me and I’m not their mother yet,
but they don’t want to fuck me anymore. I’m at that invisible age. But
it’s also because I had fucked around and had kids and sometimes showed
up to auditions ill prepared. So I say ‘politics, politics,’ but I was
also being lazy.”
Her husband, Altweis, is also an excellent actor who specializes in
Shakespeare. They met in 1996, during a production of Romeo and
Juliet at Seattle Children’s Theatre. “The good news is, I was
playing a guy, Tybalt, and Hans was playing Lady Capulet,” Thone said.
“Otherwise, it would be a nauseating story. As soon as I saw him, I
told my friend Ellen, ‘I’m going to have kids with that guy—he’s
gene-pool material.’ The art of courtship is quite lovely and totally
lost on me.” Thone and Altweis have two daughters, Charlotte (7) and
Stella (2), both born at home.
“I’m a hippie,” she smiles. It’s the first thing I’ve heard her say,
onstage or off, that’s not entirely convincing. 
