Over almost 30 years, Ann Whitney has appeared in many Wagon Wheel Theatre productions. As Madame Arcati in “Blithe Spirit”, Whitney may be giving her last performance on the Warsaw stage. But she hasn’t decided 100 percent for sure yet. “You just never know, do you, what’s going to happen? I don’t know. It’s getting harder to learn the lines. It takes a lot of energy,” Whitney said. “I had someone say, just the other day, ‘you only work two hours a day.’ And I think, that’s true. We put a lot of time in beforehand. Hours and hours of rehearsals. And, actually, it’s two hours of non-stop concentration. And I kind of want to say, ‘How many hours of non-stop concentration do you do in your job?’” By the time you’re done, she said, it really takes a lot out of you. “You get to a point where you think, do I want to do this to myself anymore? It’s great fun, and it’s a privilege to be here and to be with these other actors, who are, to my way of thinking, extraordinary,” Whitney said. With her history at the Wagon Wheel, Whitney would be one to know extraordinary when she sees it. “I think my first show here was in 1983. And Tom Roland, who was the artistic director then, was a friend of mine and my husband’s for many, many years and we went to college together at Northwestern. He saw me do several things up in Chicago in community theater, and he asked me if I would like to come to the Wagon Wheel,” Whitney said. Of course, Whitney was excited about the opportunity. “My brother had worked here, Maclean Stevenson (‘M.A.S.H.’), many years before that, and I never thought I would be on that same stage in this lovely space,” she said. “So, of course, I said, ‘uh-huh’.” Roland told Whitney that he wanted to start the season with “On Golden Pond”, with Whitney playing Ethel and Roland playing Norman. Roland wanted to end the season with “Harvey,” with Whitney playing Veta Louise. “It was just a chance of a lifetime,” Whitney said. In the middle was “Good News”, which Roland had Whitney audition for, even though she admits she couldn’t carry a tune. Roland just wanted to see if she could. “Anyway, that was my first season. 1983. ‘On Golden Pond’, ‘Good News’ and ‘Harvey’ and that’s where it all began for me,” Whitney said. Since then, Whitney has appeared in many more. “I was here a couple of summers for that entire season, which was an interesting thing for both my family and me, because I am married, my husband and I live in Evanston, Illinois,” she continued. “Our teenage son was still at home at that time. So the two of them were bach-ing it for the whole summer.” As it turned out, some years later, their son, Michael, came to the Wagon Wheel as the prop guy. That was the year the theater did “Guys & Dolls”. “I remember it was very angst-ridden for him because he had to do blood bags when they had the big (shootout),” Whitney recalled. “I would stand with him outside that curtain to the main entrance and we’d be just like this (fingers crossed), hoping that the blood bags didn’t break too soon or did break when they were suppose to.” Their daughter, Sarah, also worked at the Wagon Wheel for awhile, while their other children and their families came to the theater as audience members. “The whole family has been involved over these years to some extent or another,” said Whitney. “At one point there were five owners of the theater and my husband was one of them. “I must say I haven’t been here for awhile now. And there’s so many people who are not with us anymore, that I miss so much. Roy Hine and Tom Roland. And Carol, Bruce’s sister. A whole lot of people that aren’t with us anymore but whose fingerprints are on this place,” she said. Whitney said that makes doing the play “Blithe Spirit” so interesting. It’s about a sort of whacky medium who tries to contact spirits from the other world. “The first time I walked in here to start this, all of these spirits just came into my mind and my heart. All these memories,” she said. Besides the Wagon Wheel, Whitney has also appeared in several movies. Her most well-known role may be as the drug store clerk in the first “Home Alone” movie. “The interesting thing to me, because I hadn’t done a lot of movies before that, is that it was about three quarters through the movie that you see this scene, but it was the first day of the shoot. And everybody was ecstatic because it was snowing. There was this huge blizzard going on. And they were so glad because they knew they wouldn’t have to make a lot of artificial snow,” she remembered. “So that was a lot of fun. And John Hughes was a great guy, and he’s gone now too.” In 2008, Whitney appeared in another movie. “I had a bigger part in a recent movie called ‘Sugar’. It’s about baseball players from the Dominican Republic. It’s a good one. I had an interesting audition for that. I auditioned four times for that,” Whitney stated. “The last audition was with this young couple who wrote it and directed it. They were passing through Chicago trying to make final decisions about people.” They sat together in a hotel room. Whitney recalled them being a very nice couple. They asked Whitney if she liked baseball. “And any Cubs fans would understand this. My eyes filled up with tears. I said, ‘Uh-huh. I’m a Cubs fan.’ And explained that I had been since I was 7 years old,” she said. “We talked a lot about baseball, my brother played baseball. Then they videoed a scene and I got the part!” Whitney traveled to Iowa for about a month. “It’s a sweet movie about these guys who come up from the Dominic Republic. There’s actually a baseball university there. Different Major League teams have a college there to teach guys how to play. It’s the one way a lot of them can get out of the Dominic Republic and make some money to send home to families,” she said. In “Sugar”, Whitney plays the lead’s landlady in Iowa. “We have some very nice scenes, at the baseball fields and in their home. It was great, it was fun,” Whitney said. As to why she chose to come back to the Wagon Wheel for “Blithe Spirit”, Whitney said Artistic Director Scott Michaels asked her. “So that was a big impetus,” she added. “I’ve always loved being here. It’s interesting, Noel Coward, wow, he is a very special kind of writer.” She said “Blithe Spirit” can be very complicated. It’s a British play that requires accurate accents. “The dialogue is very sophisticated with lots of adverbs and adjectives. He never said anything in five words that he could say in 50. But it’s all very smart and witty. And the connections made between the characters are bright and interesting and lead to the next thing. So it’s difficult, it’s not an easy play to do,” Whitney said. The play is being directed by WWT alum Ben Dicke and Andy Robinson, who Whitney said made some really good cuts to the show. “Still, there’s a lot to learn. I really was flattered that Scott asked me to come back. And I kind of wanted to see, don’t you always want to see if you can do this? I wonder if I can do a show in 10 days, though I’ve been working on this script for quite awhile,” Whitney said. She describes her character, Madame Arcati, as “eccentric” and “strange” but a very “positive person” and “hearty.” “Her mother before her was a medium and would hold seances and so even from the time Madame Arcati was a little girl, she has a speech in here, she talks about, ‘I had my first trance at 4 years old and my first ecto-plasma manifestation when I was 5-1/2.’ So she’s learned from her mother how to do this. However, one would wonder how successful she’s ever been,” Whitney continued.For more with Whitney, check out the two-part free videos on the Times-Union website at www.timesuniononline.com “Blithe Spirit” runs from Aug. 1-11 at the Wagon Wheel Theatre. Tickets are on sale now by calling the box office at 866-823-2618 or you can purchase tickets online at wagonwheeltheatre.org
