CHICAGO — Although a self-described nerd of the theater, and a woman who associates romance and falling in love with working in the theater, Jenna Fischer has not been on stage since Steve Martin’s “Meteor Shower” at the Old Globe Theatre some nine years ago.
“I stepped away from acting in general a little bit,” she says, over a coffee in a Chicago cafe. “This season of my life has been more about parenting and podcasting.”
It’s also been about recovering from breast cancer after being public with her diagnosis.
Podcasting-wise, the very genial Fischer has most recently been part of a popular podcast called “Office Ladies.” Her bona fides? Playing Pam Beesly on the American mockumentary “The Office,” spanning a whopping 201 episodes over nine seasons between 2005 and 2013. The content includes an epic “rewatch” analysis, wherein the “Office Ladies” watched all 201 episodes again, reached out to a bunch of fellow members of their creative teams and analyzed them down to the slightest details. Humorously and very popularly so.
“The podcast has a bunch of women listeners who all have banded together, and they are going to come and see our play,” she says.
“Our play” is actually “Ashland Avenue,” a brand-new work penned by Fischer’s husband Lee Kirk and set in an old-school appliance sales and repair store (once a chain, alas) on the titular Chicago street, precise address unspecified.
Kirk spent around five formative years in Chicago, living just off Ashland and studying at the Theatre School at DePaul University alongside Judy Greer and then working in Chicago’s storefront scene in the late 1990s, founding a company called Saint Ed at the Chopin Theatre in Wicker Park. Fischer says the play resulted from Kirk’s sense, on a relatively recent return from Los Angeles to visit his old haunts, that much of old Chicago had disappeared. Ergo, the nostalgic dramedy, wherein Francis Guinan plays the titular and venerable proprietor of Phil’s TV and Radio, and Fischer plays his daughter, Sam.
So she had an in when it came to casting, although that cut both ways, given her fame.
“I think Lee started hearing my voice in the character as he got deeper into the play,” Fischer says. “Sam runs this shop with her dad and she and he, a big personality, have been inseparable since Sam’s mother died when Sam was very little. But Sam has some dreams of her own. As she sees the TV shop might be coming to an end, she sees an opportunity for an exit. A chance to ask herself, who is she? Outside of her dad’s dreams and aspirations. Meanwhile, her dad does not want to let go of her or the shop. That’s the struggle.”
Fischer has not, however, sought any exit from her work on “The Office,” a series that remains very much alive, thanks to it finding a new audience via streaming. Some actors might choose to step away from such a thing, or even be frustrated by it or it being brought up in interviews, but Fischer clearly enjoys every last moment of her good fortune from a former era, even now.
“There are so many people,” Fischer says, “who meet the love of their lives at an ‘Office’ trivia contest at a bar. The show just brings people together. It’s the coolest thing.”
Presumably she still is recognized. “It always takes me by surprise, weirdly” she says. “I’ll just be in my head and someone will recognize me and I’m shy so I always then have this moment of adjustment as I haven’t really ever got used to it. But people are always so nice.”
One would imagine it has calmed down a little?
“Actually the opposite. ‘The Office’ on streaming has made it so. It’s funny. The kids of the people who watched it live on television now watch it; some of those kids don’t even know it was ever on NBC. They have no idea. So they get very confused because I am now 20 years older than the person they watch running around on their screen. So there is always that moment of adjustment.”
All that said, she says, there is more of her in the character she is playing in director Susan V. Booth’s production of “Ashland Avenue” than was the case with Pam. “Sam is far more like me,” Fischer says. “She’s a repressed artist, just like Pam, but she’s also a little feistier.”
Many people still think “The Office” was improvised, just as they do Second City, but it was always fully scripted.
“Oh yes,” Fischer says, “there were a lot of pauses and ellipses in the scripts. People were trying to express themselves but doing it poorly. They also had to write in the choreography of the camera because that was the nature of the mockumentary style and sometimes we knew the cameras were filming us and sometimes we didn’t. So our guard went down and the camera might be hidden in the kitchen and shooting through the blinds. And, of course, we often had to talk directly to the camera. That was very exciting to play. And there was, by the way, a very theater-company kind of element to all of that. We all were there living and breathing it. We all had to sit in the background of each other’s scenes to create the idea of a working office.”
She pauses. “It was magic. I’ve never quite been able to capture that again.”
Maybe on “Ashland Avenue” on Dearborn Street? “I know I want to do this play for a long as I possibly can,” Fischer says.
———
“Ashland Avenue” runs through Oct. 12 (extended) at Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.; 312-443-3800 and www.goodmantheatre.org.
———
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
