The whole audience? “The women,” he clarified. “The men are usually pretty quiet.”
Barford, 53, was chatting about his role as the main character in “Linda Vista” by Tracy Letts, a Broadway play about a toxic man in midlife who may or may not achieve decontamination. He had picked a favorite lunch spot, a bistro in Chelsea, and crammed his gangling legs under a corner table, hunching his shoulders as he pushed some eggs around a plate, making himself as small as he could, which wasn’t very.
Graying at the temples, with pouches under his eyes that push his face toward woebegone, he looked handsome, shambolic, exhausted — a lion left out in the rain.
In “Linda Vista,” which Ben Brantley called an “inspired, ruthless take on the classic midlife-crisis comedy,” he plays Wheeler, a San Diego camera-shop employee who has torpedoed his marriage and moved to a down-market apartment complex to escape the wreckage. A walking conjugation, Wheeler sleeps, has slept, or is likely to sleep, with every woman in the play, as long as his bum hip holds out.
An aggressor, he likes to portray himself as a victim. (“And he was humiliated” is the punch line to all his anecdotes, he tells a co-worker.) The play’s second act pummels Wheeler with body blows, mostly self-inflicted, that shove him toward personal responsibility. Or not. The final scene has a teasing, troubling ambiguity.
The play, Barford’s fourth collaboration with Letts, doesn’t work if audiences loathe Wheeler from the get-go or if they cheer him on too long. Barford has to perform, with ruthlessness and charm, a high-wire act of empathy that allows Wheeler to sway from protagonist to antagonist and maybe back again. “I just try to not shy away from any of it,” he said. “I try to just let him be as nasty as he is and also let him be as wounded as he is.”
He walked a similar tightrope in his other recent Broadway outing, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Divorced dads of questionable sympathy seem to be his brand.
Barford began acting in the mid-’80s at Illinois State, the college that many founding members of the Steppenwolf Theater Company attended. A tennis player — his 6-foot-3 height was an advantage until it wasn’t — with little academic direction, he stumbled into a master class with the legendary acting teacher Uta Hagen. After his scene, she stubbed out her cigarette, kissed him on each cheek and announced, as Barford tells it, “Now this is what I’ve been talking about!”
After graduation, he joined Steppenwolf as an acting apprentice and except for a stint in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, he has stayed in and around there since, mostly in supporting roles. But when it came to “Linda Vista,” Letts recognized that the play would benefit from Barford’s unforced charisma and his Everyman quality. (Letts, also 6-foot-3, apparently likes his Everymen tall.)
“It felt really right to give Ian the ball and say this is yours,” Letts said by phone as he wheeled his baby son around Battery Park.
During rehearsals for the Chicago premiere and a subsequent production in Los Angeles, Wheeler was made to measure, incorporating Barford’s gruff, musical cadences, not to mention his bad hip. Letts didn’t like how spry he looked, Barford said. “He wanted to degrade me a little more.”
Letts agreed. “If I had any issue with Ian and the role, it’s that he’s so hale,” he said. But not so hale that an intimacy coordinator didn’t have to alter a raunchy sex scene to give that hip some protection.
Audiences will sometimes confuse Barford and his role, like the woman who waited at the stage door just to say, “I hated you.” But as Dexter Bullard, the play’s director, put it, “Ian is so nice. Wheeler is not.”
Wheeler can’t be bothered with civility. “I’m too old to pretend to be something I’m not, and a lot of the things I am are not attractive,” he says. But Barford can. The day after our lunch, Letts let me know I’d been mangling Barford’s first name. (It’s pronounced Yan, not Ee-an.) Barford never mentioned it.
Still, the actor had his Wheeler years, in Los Angeles, in his 30s, recovering from what he calls a “horrendous” early marriage and bedding everyone in driving distance before settling down again. His signature move was to look deep into the eyes of a woman, a gesture his wife, Steppenwolf’s artistic director, Anna D. Shapiro, described as “Clintonian.” It usually worked. At the cafe table, he provided a brief demonstration. And … yes.
None of his behavior was horrible, he said, “not like, horrible horrible,” but he noticed that the sex ultimately made him feel worse. So he went to therapy, he moved back to Chicago, he started dating Shapiro. He figured it out.
“He’s not Wheeler anymore,” Shapiro said, speaking by telephone from their home in Chicago.
Characters like Wheeler aren’t exactly rare. From Agamemnon and Oedipus on out, the stage is strewn with middle-aged men who are the smartest guys in the room except when it comes to self-knowledge — think of Hamlet, Othello, Faust, Peer Gynt, Arthur Miller’s heroes. Women are the collateral damage.
If “Linda Vista” has been recalibrated since Chicago — the women’s parts have thickened, Wheeler’s monologues have thinned — it still participates, enthusiastically, in this tradition. Is another Broadway play intently focused on male frustrations and anxieties a solution or part of the problem? Is this a story we need?
“I think we need all the stories,” Letts told me. “I don’t think there’s any story we don’t need.” Middle-aged men come to the show, he said, “and they are laid low by it. They come out at the end and they are weeping because it speaks to things that are going on in their lives — malaise, depression, deep sadness.” The play models how toxic masculinity hurts men, too, and how change is possible.
Barford doesn’t want to tell anyone — man, woman, child (well, not his 10-year-old twins, who are barred from seeing the show, as is his mother) — what to think about the play or how to feel about Wheeler.
But he hopes that people will see the character as human, as hurting, as capable of redemption. Barford changed; he thinks Wheeler can, too. Hate him, hiss him, throw a program, but don’t give up on him.
“The play doesn’t abandon the guy,” he said. And he won’t either. “That’s just doing my job,” he said. “That’s just what’s on the page.”
This article originally appeared in
.