Bloom Proves That the Stage Needs Women

Don’t send a boy to do a woman’s job.

That was the message that actress Claire Bloom delivered Thursday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in a theater history lecture / performance piece called “Enter the Actress.”

Warming up the audience with one of Rosalind’s speeches from “As You Like It,” she went on to remind listeners that when Shakespeare wrote his plays in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the female parts were played by pre-pubescent boys in drag. It didn’t take much to convince her modern-day audience that it’s better to see the real thing, but, as she explained, it took a lot of persuading to finally get women onto England’s stages in about 1660.

Bloom, 67, has long supplemented her assignments in such movies as Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” with solo shows in which she essays Shakespeare’s heroines. Her new piece, which she performed on a night off from her Broadway appearances in “Electra” (via turnaround flights), still needs some shaping and overall livening-up. She spent most of the one-hour-and-45-minute presentation at a lectern, reading notes, moving aside only occasionally to perform monologues off-book. Though she won over the audience with her engaging manner and crisp British diction, she never quite shook the impression that she was a professor prepping her students for final exams.

Fortunately, she had lively tales to tell of the trailblazing actresses who propelled their profession from that of underpaid player (often forced into prostitution to make ends meet) to glittering celebrity. Bloom seemed to harbor particular affection for Sarah Siddons, a great tragic actress of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who, at her height, induced bouts of “Siddons fever”--mass fainting spells in packed summertime theaters. Attempting one of Siddons’ most famous roles, Bloom conveyed a touching mixture of deference and injured dignity as Katherine of Aragon, called to trial in Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII.”

In the last couple of years, Bloom has been caught up in tawdry scenes with her former husband, writer Philip Roth, which were driven by her tell-all autobiography “Leaving a Doll’s House” and his not-so-veiled riposte in his novel “I Married a Communist.” As Bloom quavered through Katherine’s speech, playing a woman whose man has done her wrong, she seemed to be drawing inspiration from her own experience. But it was nice to see her returning drama to the right place in her life.