In one of the few surprises at the 88th annual Oscars on February 28, theater veteran Mark Rylance won the Best Supporting Actor award for “Bridge of Spies” over the heavily-favored Sylvester Stallone for “Creed.”Rylance was awarded for his brilliant, if understated, performance as Rudolf Abel, an enemy spy whom Tom Hanks is called upon to defend in Steven Spielberg’s Cold War drama. When the 56-year-old actor took to the stage to accept his Oscar, he graciously thanked the Academy in a speech which struck theater aficionados and Rylance fans — of which there are many — to be as low key as his interpretation of Abel in the movie.That’s because when he won the first two of his three Tony Awards, Rylance took advantage on both occasions to recite from the podium two antic prose poems by Louis Jenkins, a Minnesota writer. The first time — winning the 2008 Tony for his performance as a Midwestern rube in the hit revival of “Boeing Boeing” — the English actor intoned, “When you are in town, wearing some kind of uniform is helpful, policeman, priest, etc. Driving a tank is very impressive or a car with official lettering on the side…” Three years later, the win for his voluble and volatile turn as slacker Johnny “Rooster” Byron in “Jerusalem” brought forth another Jenkins poem: “Unlike flying or astral projections, walking through walls is a totally earth-related craft….”Rylance has made good on his fondness for the work of Louis Jenkins in his most recent stage outing, “Nice Fish,” currently at St. Ann’s Theatre in Brooklyn through March 27. In collaboration with the poet, the actor has stitched together from the Jenkins oeuvre an eccentric and somewhat mystifying play about two fishermen waxing philosophically on a frozen lake in Minnesota as they await a nibble. Their reveries — amusing, disturbing, and puzzling — are interrupted from time to time by other characters, including an officious fishing warden in one of the more surreal scenes. Reviews for the play were mixed — “A quirky charmer of a play,” declared Charles Isherwood of The New York Times. But the engagement, which has been directed by Claire Van Kampen, is now certain to become one of the season’s hottest tickets. It was already doing brisk business given Rylance’s stellar reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. He also won the British Academy Award for “Bridge of Spies,” an accolade to add to his two Oliviers, as Benedict in a 1993 production of “Much Ado About Nothing” and, two decades later, for “Jerusalem.”Rylance’s sheer range and command has led him to be touted as the greatest actor in the English-speaking world, and both America and England can claim him. Born in Ashford, Kent, he was two years of age when his parents, both teachers, moved first to Connecticut and then to Wisconsin, where his father taught at the University of Milwaukee. The actor’s formative years in the Midwest — he lived there until age 18 — informed his work on “Boeing Boeing,” and even moreso on “Nice Fish.” “My character has always been partly American as well as English,” Rylance wrote in the program notes for the play. “Louis began his life in the dust of Oklahoma and followed his heart to Duluth, Minnesota, where he too has lived by a big lake…. Perhaps it is our shared experience of these deep, icy, dangerous, and beautiful Midwest lakes that has brought us together.”Prior to “Bridge of Spies,” Rylance’s film work has been comparatively spotty, although the Academy voters might well have been aware of his recent acclaimed performance as Cromwell in the BBC2’s gripping adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall.” And this summer, he stars in the title role of “BFG,” Steven Spielberg’s fantasy-adventure film in which he plays the Big Friendly Giant who joins with a young girl to defeat evil forces.While Rylance may now be standing tall in the film world, there is little worry that it will seduce him away from the stage. He is a creature of the theater and an exceedingly versatile one at that: his third Tony Award came in 2014 for his Countess Olivia in the Globe Theatre production of “Twelfth Night.”Despite all his success, he has remained loyal to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, which hosted the Globe Theatre production of “Measure for Measure” in 2005. He has loved not only the theater’s adventurous and bold programming but also its geography. “I have a feeling that all good theaters are standing near a crossing over water,” he wrote in the “Nice Fish” program, referring to St. Ann’s location just under the Brooklyn Bridge. “It concentrates people.”
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