Lily Rabe – fated for success.

By Roberta Hershenson

Lily Rabe at the opening-night party for Steel Magnolias.

Lily Rabe as Annelle and Christine Ebersole as M'Lynn in Steel Magnolias at the Lyceum Theatre.

Rabe in the Gloucester Stage Company production of Proof.

The cast of Steel Magnolias celebrating on opening night.

Lyceum Theatre NYC 800.432.7250

Lily Rabe did not grow up wanting to be an actress. The daughter of the actress Jill Clayburgh and the playwright David Rabe, she believed her parents' hardship stories about life in the theater and decided to become a ballerina, instead.

But fate took over, talent reared its head and 22-year-old Rabe is now making her debut on Broadway in Steel Magnolias, the Robert Harling play about six women in a Louisiana beauty shop in 1987. Sharing the stage with veteran actresses Delta Burke, Christine Ebersole, Marsha Mason and Frances Sternhagen, Rabe gives a poignantly comic performance as the fledgling hairdresser Annelle. The critics have noticed, suggesting that a big career lies ahead.

During an interview in a Manhattan café near her apartment, Rabe, who graduated in June 2004 from Northwestern University, talked about her path from a suburban New York childhood to a coveted role on the New York stage. She is a willowy 5 foot 8 inches tall, with long, straight blonde hair and a delicate face that still goes unrecognized in public. Dressed in jeans, chic green boots and a sweater, she pointed self-consciously to her watery eyes. “I'm not crying,” she said, explaining that she had just had her allergy shots because there was no time for them during rehearsals for the play.

Then she smiled, and it could have been Jill Clayburgh sitting there. She not only looks a lot like her mother, she also shares some of her comic instincts as an actress. Rabe acted with her mother during her college summer vacations, but she has firmly put such collaborations on hold.  Similarly, she thinks her father's female characters are awesome, but she will wait to audition for any of his plays. “I'm so close to my parents and admire them so much,” she said, sipping an ice tea. “But I think it's so important to stand on my own two feet.”

After attending elementary school in suburban New York and dancing in The Nutcracker with the NewYork City Ballet in Stamford, CT, every year, Rabe went to The Hotchkiss School, a boarding school in Lakeville, CT. It was there, after dropping out of ballet to enjoy a normal social life, that the acting bug struck. “I did a monologue in a kind of school talent show,” she said. “I loved it – I could feel instantly that this was what was missing from my life. That was the moment when my parents thought, ‘uh-oh.'” Having decided to become an actress, she entered the theater program at Northwestern, which offered rigorous professional training along with liberal arts courses. “I didn't want a conservatory,” she explained. “I wasn't ready to give up the other things I love so much, like literature and philosophy. And I didn't want to be just with other actors. It's so important as an actor and artist to expose yourself to a diverse group of people and to study other things.”

As a college student, she worked with her mother at the Gloucester Stage Company in Massachusetts, appearing in Speaking Well of the Dead by Israel Horovitz and The Crazy Girl by Frank Pugliese. She also appeared – “sans mother,” as she put it – in David Auburn's Proof. But her most important breakthrough – the play that boosted her confidence at a vital time – was Closer by Patrick Marber, which the school produced during her sophomore year. She played the pivotal role of Anna, portraying feelings about love and relationships that she said she was “just beginning to understand” in real life.

A mention of Julia Roberts as Anna in the film version of Closer made her wince. It was not her ego poking through – Rabe radiates a soft-spoken modesty – but rather her artistic sensibility. “It's a shame that plays get forgotten and movies are remembered,” she said quietly. “It's heartbreaking, in a way.” Rather than watch the 1989 movie of Magnolias, in which Daryl Hannah played Annelle, she prepared for her current role by hanging out in a Connecticut beauty parlor and learning to set hair from the play's wig designer. She must wash and set Christine Ebersole's hair during every performance, a routine she describes as grounding. “At first when I did it, I had these big, clunky hands,” she said wryly. “Now I'm totally agile.”

Rabe gets big laughs with lines like: “My personal tragedy will not interfere with my ability to do good hair.” She affects a Southern drawl, but her low-pitched voice carries an authority that has impressed both the play's director, Jason Moore, and the other cast members.

“She really knows what she's doing – she's a standout,” said Ebersole, a Tony Award-winning actress. Moore, who is clearly a fan, calls her a director's dream, an actress who can not only be funny but also talk about how she does it. “She's young, but the comic security she has is a really rare thing,” he said.

Is such talent inherited? Clayburgh, speaking by phone from the set of Running With Scissors in Los Angeles, said she was fascinated by the question. “Is it genetic, environmental?” she said. “I don't know the answer. Lily's very different from me – she's got a lot more of her father in her.  She is a powerhouse. She's got so much more presence and command than I did at her age.”

For now, Rabe is connecting every night with her stage “family,” enjoying the laughs, the unpredictable audience reactions (“audiences have their own chemistry”) and the strong personalities of her co-stars. Burke makes her laugh, Ebersole has great presence, Sternhagen calms her and Mason tells wonderful stories, she said. And Rebecca Gayheart, who is also making her Broadway debut, is “a great girl. Six women – it was a recipe for disaster,” Rabe said. “But it's been really amazing to be around them.”

She also loves the character of Annelle. “Annelle is like a blank slate,” she said. “She's flying by the seat of her pants, with no bigger sense of things. She doesn't know who she is or what she wants.”

Unlike Rabe, who knows just what she wants – “everything.”