Highland Park actress in Broadway hit

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Updated: December 6, 2011 6:38PM

Despite the bright lights on Broadway, the restaurants off-Broadway in New York’s downtown are better. So jokes Highland Park native and actress Katherine Borowitz, who’s making her Broadway debut in one of this season’s hottest tickets, “Relatively Speaking,” three one-act plays by a dream team of writers: Ethan Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen. Each is directed by Borowitz’s husband of 26 years, consummate character actor John Turturro.

Borowitz appears in Coen’s contribution, “Talking Cure.” She portrays in flashback the shrewish mother of a mail worker under treatment by a psychiatrist after going postal on a complaining customer. It’s a comedy. Borowitz has appeared in the Coen brothers’ films “The Man Who Wasn’t There” and “A Serious Man.” Her husband has done some of his most indelible work in films by the Coens, including “Miller’s Crossing,” “Barton Fink” and the cult fave, “The Big Lebowski.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t have been called in had I not been known to the director and the playwright,” Borowtiz said. “When John suggested me for the role, Ethan said okay.”

Broadway bound

Borowitz moved to New York to pursue an acting career in 1981. Los Angeles, she said, “was not for me.” Her resume includes “Internal Affairs” opposite Richard Gere and off-Broadway plays. One of her most memorable early TV roles was as the abused wife of a pre-“Moonlighting” Bruce Willis in the classic “Miami Vice” episode, “No Exit.”

“He was close to the phone all the time,” Borowitz recalled, “waiting to hear about that TV series that would make him famous.”

“Relatively Speaking” brings her “uptown” for the first time in a career that spans nearly 30 years. “I was kind of surprised that it felt normal,” she said. “Until opening night. On opening night the stairways were all lined with amazing flower arrangements, mostly for Marlo Thomas (who has been earning raves in the Elaine May one-act). There was a buzz that I associate with film openings. There was a huge party afterwards in Bryant Park and between John and me, we were allowed plenty of tickets so my mother and lots of our friends could attend. Now things are back to normal.”

Borowitz, who graduated from Highland Park High School in 1972, was active in the theater and music departments, where she acted in plays and wrote music for the student production, “Stunts.”

She primarily credits her mother with instilling in her a love of the arts. “She would take us to shows all the time in Chicago and at the Tenthouse Theatre in Highland Park. We also went to New York on occasion. My sister and I used to sing along to soundtrack records, starting when I was in about second grade.” 

Another influence was Highland Park High School’s former drama teacher, Barbara June Patterson, who also mentored Gary Sinise. Borowitz considers herself fortunate to have attended a school where arts education was a priority.

“I feel very strongly about arts education in public schools,” she said. “Many people do not have the access to the arts I had with my family. For them, the school system’s arts program provides an alternative universe — don’t think that’s an overstatement — that they might pursue much more productively and constructively than they would anything else.”

Acting couple

Unlike many acting couples, Borowtiz and Turturro, whom she met at Yale, have worked together extensively, most recently in the offbeat romance, “Somewhere Tonight,” an international film festival award-winner that has yet to open in the United States. How do they separate their professional and personal lives?

“John and I have always worked well together, and it gets easier as time goes by,” she said. “We have the same point of view about acting, we have the same taste, and we know each other pretty well, so we understand what the other one is trying to communicate. I relax a bit as an actor when John directs me because I know he won’t let me make a wimpy acting choice, and I love working with him as an actor, because I can feel our energy bouncing back and forth.”

“Relatively Speaking” is an open run at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. The schedule, Borowitz said, is “brutal.” She is understudying three roles, including Marlo Thomas’ show-stopping turn as a spoiled and sheltered wife who winds up on the doorstep of her former nanny’s daughter following the sudden death of her husband.

“When my contract is over,” said Borowitz, “I will happily return to life as a wife and mother — not necessarily in that order.”