From China beach to Broadway Dana Delany takes on Brian Friel's `Translations"
Date: 03-16-1995 - Publication: Newsday - Author: Gene Seymour © 1995 Newsday

From China Beach to Broadway, Dana Delany takes on Brian Friel's `Translations"

"Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid."DANA DELANY can relate to courage's sweet irony.

Her idea of down time is jumping out of airplanes or roaming someplace remote and/or forbidding, like the Mekong Delta.

She's not afraid of much. She does get scared, but only on purpose.

"I like to be scared," she says. "I don't know where it comes from. I just have always had the feeling since I was a child that life was short and it was best to get in as much as you can."

Delany, who turned 39 Monday, opens Sunday night in "Translations," Brian Friel's 1980 play, which makes its Broadway debut at the Plymouth Theater. It's the first time she's appeared onstage in the seven years since she took on her breakthrough TV role of Coleen McMurphy, the compassionate, enigmatic Army nurse on the Vietnam War series, "China Beach."

Sound scary enough? You bet. But part of the point to hurling oneself into perilous straits is to come out the other end keener, stronger, better than before.

And however "Translations" fares with a high-powered cast that includes Brian Dennehy, Rufus Sewell and Michael Cumpsty, Delany says the experience has already paid dividends.

"I've had to use a whole new set of muscles doing this play," she says in her dressing room a couple hours before a preview performance. "It takes more energy to run around onstage [than in film] and keep your concentration, especially in a play like this."

"Translations" is set in an 1833 version of Friel's fictional town of Ballybeg, County Donegal, Ireland. British soldiers are mapping the area and struggling to communicate with the Gaelic-speaking denziens of this hardscrabble region.

Delany plays Maire, one of the pupils learning Latin, geography and philosophy at a "hedge school" run with affectionate rigor by a gruff schoolmaster (Dennehy).

Maire is making plans to come to America, but enters an ill-fated liaison with a good-natured British soldier (Cumpsty), who isn't sure he likes his superiors' notion of Anglicizing the country.

"These are not introspective people," Delany says of "Translations" characters. "They didn't have television, and they didn't have shrinks. So everything was expressed communally. And bluntly. They just said it in order to get it out. That's one thing the director [Howard Davies] has been urging us to do. `Don't think about the words too much. Just get them out.'

"It's been a challenge for me, because I'm not a show-off. I'm not demonstrative in my acting. I tend to act between the lines."

Indeed, beginning with her three-year run as McMurphy, Delany has established a reputation as someone who has, in television critic Tom Shales' words, "raised gazing to an art form . . . She has the kind of face . . . that retains expressiveness even when seemingly expressionless."

She's retained this aura in big-screen works like "Light Sleeper" (1991), in which she played ex-lover to Willem Dafoe's drug dealer.

"There's a look in her eyes as she sits in bed with Dafoe," wrote critic Greil Marcus, who liked little else about Paul Schrader's film. "A fluttering expectation of ecstasy unto oblivion that might have satisfied Louise Brooks."

One would think that Friel's allusive storytelling would be an easy fit for someone with Delany's between-the-lines instincts.

Not necessarily, she says. "Ambiguity in the script is one thing. Playing it [on stage] is another," she says. "One of the things I love about film is the ambiguity. You can let a million thoughts cross your face, and they'll all be right. Any one of them can have meaning. Onstage, that can't happen. You have to project or it doesn't work."

Hair like silk. Body like Monroe's. And a heart probably as big as America." Long after McMurphy's ride into Cancellation Gulch, Delany remains tagged as America's angel of mercy. (Her most recent television-movie role has been another nurse, family-planning pioneer Margaret Sanger, in the Lifetime cable network movie, "Choices of the Heart.") Given what' s been described elsewhere as Delany's "prenaturally wholesome" looks and "well-scrubbed sexuality," such a fate may be difficult, if not impossible to avoid.

Lord knows, she's tried. In "Exit to Eden," she played a leather-clad dominatrix running an exotic sex-and-games resort. The film sank like a stone upon its release last fall. Delany, however, has no regrets.

"I'm sorry it didn't turn out well, but I had a lot of fun, " she says. "I think I did very brave work in it, things a lot of actresses wouldn't have dared try. In a way, I'm glad I'm not a star who feels she has to maintain an image. I don't feel that responsiblity."

Still, none of Delany's large-screen work has successfully captured what may be her most compelling quality: an adventurous streak that led her, during a "China Beach" break, to take an intensive tour of Vietnam.

She hikes, sky-dives and has a case of wanderlust so acute that, given the chance, she'd hop aboard the first shuttle leaving for the Russian space station for a weightless weekend.

Still, her feet aren't so itchy that she'll migrate back East from her Santa Monica home.

"I know a lot of people are leaving L.A. because of the natural disatsers. But I have found a very pleasant niche out there. I think what I like about California is that it allows you to invent and reinvent yourself. Here in the East, people want to know what your background is, what your credentials are."

Her background, for the record, is as follows: Born in New York City to a family whose fortune was made in manufacturing toilet flush valves. Grew up in Stamford, Conn. Attended Andover and Wesleyan University. Spent several years in New York working in commercials and soaps like "Love of Life" and "As the World Turns." Two Emmys for "China Beach" just about cover the credentials. So far, anyway.

Background and credentials aside, what people really want to know about Delany is who's she been . . . you know, seeing. She's been linked, at various times, to Treat Williams, Don Henley, "China Beach" producer John Sacret Young, among others.

Most recently, she's reportedly been hanging with Henry Cznerny, her co-star in the Margaret Sanger movie.

Delany won't discuss specifics of her personal life. But she will engage, however tentatively, the general issue of love, arguably the most frightening daredevil risk of all.

Many of the characters she' s played, including "Translations'" Maire and "Eden's" dominatrix, take that risk and struggle to avoid being consumed by the chaos that results. She concedes that love is "definitely" scarier than jumping out of a plane.

"But there's a difference between taking that risk and settling. To me, it's a lot scarier to settle for less . . . I want to take that risk. It's just got to be the right situation."