Never a plain Jane — Fonda returns to stage

updated 12:58 p.m. ET March 14, 2009

NEW YORK - To meet Jane Fonda these days means first getting past her 8-pound fluffy gatekeeper.

Tulea, a white Bichon-like dog, is never very far from her 71-year-old mistress — part confidante, part wiggly joy, part security blanket.

How inseparable are they? Fonda, making her first foray on Broadway in 46 years, found out the hard way. She was recently bowing to a rapturous audience during a curtain call when she happened to look down.

“I saw, through my legs, this white thing and I thought, ‘That’s not what I think it is!’ And then I heard the click-click-click of her little nails on the stage,” she says.

The little dog had escaped from her backstage handler, wandered out to the delight of theatergoers, and turned into a complete ham.

“She knows what the applause means,” Fonda says with a smile. “She knows that means that it’s over and that we’re going to be reunited. She came looking for me.”

Tulea isn’t the only one unleashed these days. Fonda, in what she calls the “second scene of her third act,” has thrown herself into stage work with characteristic glee — no surprise for a woman who doesn’t do things halfway.

“I never thought the day would come that I would look forward to being on the stage every night,” she says. “It’s scary to some people and I would have thought it was scary, but it’s not.”

In a recent interview, she fights off a late winter cold with antibiotics and tea as she discusses her newfound love of the Internet, her father’s legacy and the Vietnam war veterans who continue to hate her.

Perfect time to lure Fonda
In writer-director Moises Kaufman’s play “33 Variations,” Fonda plays an ailing musicologist desperate to discover why her hero, Ludwig van Beethoven, spent so much time at the end of his life obsessing over a third-rate waltz. Though suffering from amoyotrophic lateral sclerosis — or Lou Gehrig’s disease — Fonda’s character relocates to Germany to find the answer in Beethoven’s archive, further straining her relationship with her daughter.

Joan Marcus / AP Samantha Mathis, left, Colin Hanks, center, and Jane Fonda are shown in a scene from "33 Variations," currently running at Broadway's Eugene O'Neill Theatre in New York.

“I needed an actor who had a strong emotional life and also a great mind. I found a woman who had both,” says Kaufman, whose other works include “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde” and “The Laramie Project.”

Kaufman picked the perfect time to lure Fonda back on stage. His script arrived just as she was writing a book about aging, exploring why so many great artists did their best work late in life.

“It moves me that I’m able to have this opportunity to do this particular play with this particular message,” she says. “The membranes between life and death and past and present are very thin in the play, which I think is the way life is.”

Fonda, who won an Academy Award for playing a prostitute in the 1971 movie “Klute” and another for the 1978 anti-war war drama “Coming Home,” was last seen on Broadway in a 1963 production of “Strange Interlude.”

This time, she had to tone her natural acting inclinations. Since her character is tightly wound, Fonda acknowledges her ego has been tested by having to pull back. “My tendency is to be emotional, maybe because I want to be liked or something,” she says. “Emotion is very easy for me. So I have to be careful to not overdo it.”

That’s not as easy as it sounds for a woman who commits as strongly as Fonda, whether it’s acting, activism, fitness or now as a high-tech convert.

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