Natasha Lyonne(*)...just finished rehearsing for the New Group production of Mike Leigh’s play “Two Thousand Years,” which will begin previews at the Acorn Theater on Jan. 15.
...The play will be Ms. Lyonne’s first legitimate stage credit, and its timing is serendipitous. “My life is very much in the present today,” she said. “And that’s what theater is all about.”
It is a surprise to Ms. Lyonne as much as anyone that she is working at all. Or living, for that matter. After establishing herself in the late 1990s as a talented and refreshingly unorthodox presence in independent films like “The Slums of Beverly Hills” and “But I’m a Cheerleader,” her press coverage shifted to the gossip pages and stayed there. In August 2001 she was arrested in Miami Beach on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol. Three years later, while occupying a Manhattan apartment rented to her by the actor Michael Rapaport, she was again arrested, this time for threatening her neighbor and the neighbor’s dog. Mr. Rapaport evicted her in early 2005, then wrote a damning account of the experience in Jane magazine, detailing Ms. Lyonne’s abusive conduct and unhealthy way of life.(**) She later missed several court dates, causing a warrant to be issued for her arrest.
Matters reached their nadir in the summer of 2005 when she checked into Beth Israel Hospital in New York and was put in the intensive care unit with a host of ailments, including hepatitis C. She remained in the hospital for five months.
“I remember being in pain a lot,” said Ms. Lyonne, who says she doesn’t recall much about her stay in the hospital. “I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, could hardly talk, could barely walk.”
She started her two-decade career when she was barely school age, the child of an Orthodox Jewish family who found herself on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” “I was kind of put into this business by my family, by my mother. To be fair, I think she thought it was the right thing, and I definitely responded to it. I was an outgoing child. But I don’t know if it was something I would have done by choice.”
Ms. Lyonne has lived on her own since she was 16 and isn’t in close touch with either of her parents, who divorced when she was young. “I’d love to say that there’s been this great 180 and happy ever after,” she said. “It’s not like I have some really crazy family stuff. I’m just somebody who has distanced myself without condemnation or resentment.”
Her darkest days came to an end in December 2006, when, accompanied by a counselor from the Caron Foundation, a drug and alcohol treatment center, she finally appeared in court to face the 2004 charges. A judge sentenced her to a conditional discharge, based on her staying out of trouble for six months. Since then she has completed roles in four films.
“I’ve always been both sides of the coin,” she said. “I’m very full of life, but at the same time very dismissive of it. Not really highs and lows, just a steady state of ‘Oh, hey, isn’t this great?’ and ‘Who gives a damn anyway?’”
These days, however, she trying to give more of a damn. “I took it about as far as I could,” she said with finality. “And I didn’t die, so I decided to live, basically. Obviously it’s complicated, but it’s also very simple. I wasn’t dead at 27, so I might as well be 30. You’re already in it. You may as well be in a rocking chair some day eating a lobster club.”
Source
(*)
born Natasha Braunstein in New York City, the daughter of Yvette Lyonne, a product licensing consultant, and Aaron Braunstein, a native of Brooklyn who worked as a boxing promoter, Lyonne grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household and lived in Israel with her family during her childhood. Her maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
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