Alice Ripley fights the good fight in ‘Next to Normal’ role

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Actress Alice Ripley has been attached to the 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Next to Normal” since 2006, when it was workshopped at New York’s Second Stage Theatre and she first played the role of Diana Goodman, the bipolar suburban wife and mother who has been locked in grief ever since the death, 16 years earlier, of a young son.

Following that workshop, and a subsequent one the next year, she went on to star in the show’s 2008 Off-Broadway premiere, in a reworked regional theater edition presented by Arena Stage, and in the Broadway debut of the musical that opened in 2009 (and for which she received a 2010 Tony Award). And now she is reprising her role in the national touring production that hit the road in 2010 and will arrive April 26 at Chicago’s Bank of America Theatre for a two-week engagement.

By her own rough count, Ripley believes she has played the physically, emotionally and vocally taxing role of Diana (“I sing everything from a waltz to a thrasher song”) at least a thousand times by now. And she admits to feeling like a prizefighter, though as she quips, “Those guys get time out and we travel on our day off.”

“Performing Diana is like being in a boxing match,” Ripley said. “I often come offstage with cuts and bumps and bruises. And I have developed a real faith in hydrotherapy to help me recover each morning. I don’t exactly do the Joan Crawford face-in-a-bucket-of-ice thing. But after each performance — with so much sobbing and grieving, and having so much tension in my body — I take a hot shower and at the same time apply ice cubes to my face. That hot-and-cold treatment really seems to relax me.”

“Next to Normal,” with a book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, and rock-meets-classical music by Tom Kitt, is psychologically battering for all its characters as Diana’s problems become a challenge to everyone in her life. Suffering collateral damage are her husband, Dan; her teenage daughter, Natalie; Natalie’s devoted boyfriend, Henry, and even her doctors, who try everything from pharmaceuticals to shock therapy to help her. Even Diana’s phantom son, Gabriel, seems unable to rest easy.

“I enjoy playing characters who are complicated,” admitted Ripley, who was born in California and grew up mostly in Ohio. “A big Disney show just never came my way, though I would never have said no to playing Mary Poppins.”

Since arriving in New York in 1993 with a role in “The Who’s Tommy” that she first performed at California’s La Jolla Playhouse, the actress has played Betty Schaeffer, the young script editor in “Sunset Boulevard,” Violet Hilton (one half of a pair of conjoined twins) in “Side Show,” and leading roles in “Les Miserables,” “James Joyce’s The Dead” and a revival of “The Rocky Horror Show.”

“There is that question of whether you are attracted to certain kinds of projects, or they find you , and I guess it’s a bit of both,” the actress said. “Every creative life assumes a certain trajectory, though you can adjust it. But I’ve been a singer since college, and the pattern of being cast in musicals has continued. I yearn to do a straight dramatic role, and maybe that will be my next chapter.”

Meanwhile, playing Diana (a role created with her in mind) has been an all-consuming project.

“I always begin with the script, and then fill in as needed with facts and my imagination,” Ripley said. “For the role of Diana, I read several books about depression, including Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon and William Styron’s Darkness Visible. I also went online to learn more about the cocktails of pharmaceuticals given to people suffering from this sort of mental illness, even learning about the dosages and side effects and making a laminated bookmark that lists all the medications. Diana is in her mid-40s and has been taking this stuff since she was in her teens. Of course, after doing all that research, I just let everything go and use whatever has stuck in my imagination.”

Ripley sees “a certain poetry” in Diana’s suffering.

“And even when I have a day when I don’t know how I will be able to portray such a tortured character, I know I will get so much energy and buoyancy and positive energy from the audience,” Ripley said.

Besides hydroptherapy, Ripley turns to her guitar for release. Her latest recording, “Daily Practice: The Acoustic Sessions,” is a collection of classic rock covers.

On May 2, she will perform some of these songs, as well as her Broadway hits, in an intimate concert at Stage 777, 1225 W. Belmont.

For tickets, call (773) 327-5252 or visit stage773.com.