Restoration, the play that opened last week at New York Theatre Workshop, gives us a memorable and endearing new odd couple in Claudia Shear and Jonathan Cake. She plays Giulia, the frumpy, sardonic American art restorer hired to clean Michelangelo’s David for its 500th anniversary. He’s Massimo (a.k.a. Max), the handsome, flirtatious security guard at L’Accademia in Florence who’s with her every day while she’s working. There’s a little bit of will-they-or-won’t-they tension, but the crux of their relationship is an almost begrudgingly flowering friendship, through which each learns to come to terms with their life’s disappointments.
Shear wrote the play, so her role was tailor-made for her. But Jonathan Cake, a British actor last seen on the New York stage in Broadway’s The Philanthropist with Matthew Broderick, only got the part of Max after Daniel Serafini-Sauli played it in La Jolla and Danny Mastrogiorgio dropped out of the New York production shortly before previews. He proves the perfect foil/confidant for Shear’s Giulia.
Cake, 42, won a Theatre World Award playing Jason to Fiona Shaw’s Medea during the 2002-03 Broadway season, and later was Iachimo in Cymbeline at Lincoln Center. In London, he had the title role in Coriolanus at the Globe and received the Barclays Theatre Award as Best Actor for a stage adaptation of Baby Doll. He costarred in the 2008 big-screen remake of Brideshead Revisited and has been featured on the U.S. television series Chuck, Six Degrees and Inconceivable. Cake also has appeared on two episodes of Law & Order as a corrupt defense attorney and two episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent as the fiancé of Detective Wheeler, portrayed by Cake’s wife, Julianne Nicholson (who just wrapped up an off-Broadway run in Parents' Evening at the Flea).
During my recent interview with Cake in a New York Theatre Workshop rehearsal room, he was coughing repeatedly—the last symptoms, he said, of bronchitis that he’d caught from his 1-year-old daughter (he and Nicholson also have a 2½-year-old son). It didn’t keep him from being generous with his thoughts about performing in Restoration, being half of an acting couple, and living and working on both sides of the Atlantic.
Have you spent much time in Italy?
I have, actually. I’m a huge Italy junkie. I sort of think I’m Italian. I have no reason to think that, it’s completely fanciful. Coming from the south of England, we were invaded so many times, there’s Roman blood all over. When I was in Rome a few years ago doing a job [the ABC miniseries Empire], I had an extraordinary six months. You know that way in which you feel utterly at home in an entirely foreign city? I felt, Of course this is where I’m from. But then, it’s Rome. So maybe everybody feels that way.
I was married just outside Florence, a little place in the Tuscan country called Figline Valdarno. My wife is from Massachusetts; she’s the oldest of, I think, 32 grandchildren on just one side—a huge Boston Irish-Catholic family. So we were going to have this mother of all massive weddings, with people she hadn’t even met, somewhere in New England. We had been looking at places, and none was quite right. Then we were in Italy—I was doing this job all that summer, and she’s back and forth. I said at one point: Look, why don’t we just take a crack squad of our favorite people and find somewhere extraordinary here and get married? She was: [with uncertainty] You know what? [pause, and her tone changes] Yes, let’s do that; that sounds great.
I was working at the time with this actress Trudie Styler—Sting’s wife—who has this beautiful place in Tuscany. That’s where we had the reception. However, we did enter a world of pain because we were trying to get married in an Italian church. All stranieri [foreigners] have to go through an enormously complicated, bureaucratic process. Up until about 20 minutes before the wedding, we weren’t sure whether it was going to go ahead. It took a massive donation to their organ fund to see the thing through. The bishop of Fiesole had to give a special dispensation, and the bishop of Boston had also to give a special dispensation. It was absurd.
