Five years ago this month, Michele Pawk clutched her new Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a play as an alcoholic mother in “Hollywood Arms.”
Starting tonight, she plays another mother in “The Fall to Earth” at Stony Point’s Penguin Rep in a production that runs through July 20.
Pawk plays Fay Schorsch, a role created by Rondi Reed, who was this year’s Best Featured Actress in a play for her work in “August: Osage County.” Both plays began life at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.
In Joel Drake Johnson’s “The Fall to Earth,” Fay checks into “a typical chain motel in a small American town” with her daughter, Rachel.It’s not clear why they’re here. It is clear that Fay is a nervous wreck. She speaks constantly in rapid-fire fashion, her daughter offering monosyllabic answers.
Rapid-fire she can handle, Pawk says.
“The thing about the memorization process for this play is the total non sequiturs,” she says. “That’s what’s hard to remember. Her brain makes left turns.
“This is a woman who’s deathly afraid of any silence or stillness,” Pawk adds. “If she has to sit still for a moment, she might start thinking about the events” that brought her to this typical chain motel in this small American town.
There’s a reason mother and daughter are here. There’s a reason their relationship is strained. As events unfold in this single-act play, a police officer joins the action and the mystery unravels.
The three-person cast includes Pawk as Fay, Laura Heisler (“Coram Boy”) as Rachel and Amelia Campbell as the cop. Campbell, a Tony nominee for “Our Country’s Good,” has worked with Penguin director Joe Brancato before, in “Tryst” Off-Broadway.
To Pawk, it’s no mystery why she’ll be in Rockland for a month this summer.
Fay drew her in.
“Joe sent me the script,” she says. “We’ve been trying to do something together for a few years.
“He sent me the script and I fell in love with it — I don’t know if love is the right word at this moment — but she’s such a complicated, wonderful woman.”
Fay is in mourning and is unpredictable.
“It’s an interesting place to tap into, where you lose it completely,” Pawk says. “The button for her that switches from on to off is really quick and obviously without any forethought or plan. It seems almost chemical when happens. That’s been interesting to find.”
The journey is a roller coaster of emotions, slights and rage that can take its toll on an actress.
“Sometimes, plays like this that are so cathartic are really cleansing to do and don’t exhaust you,” she says. “And some plays are exhausting. I don’t don’t know quite where this one lays yet, because of the emotional journey. And it is an emotional journey.”
One of the emotions Pawk experienced last week was apprehension, when the playwright dropped in on a rehearsal.
Pawk says she was nervous that Johnson wouldn’t like what they’d done with his play — which he wrote in 2004 — and that it would be too late to fix it before tonight’s opening.
She needn’t have worried, the playwright says.
“I thought they were all just phenomenal,” he says via phone from Chicago. “All very emotionally connected to the material. I feel it’s in great hands.”
Meeting the cast and Brancato kicked off a discussion about the play — and Johnson has taken the unusual step of reworking some lines and scenes, incorporating suggestions from the Penguin group.
“I’m sort of open to that anyway,” he says, “because the life of a play keeps changing. You think about it differently.”
“Everything that Joe has proposed have been cuts that have made the play tighter and the through-line clearer. I’m usually pretty tight with changing a script, but when people come along who make good suggestions, I’m all for it.
“After I saw them, I thought ‘Well, they know more about the play than I do,’ ” he says. “They were so connected to it.”
Part of that connection, for Pawk, is a scene late in the action where Fay loses all control.
Getting to that place as an actress is not difficult, she says. Staying there every night can be tough.
“I don’t like to go there,” she says, “but if I don’t go there and I don’t do it emotionally, I don’t know what it is and I don’t know what the next beat will be. It affects everything.
“Right now, I’m losing my voice so I need to be careful, because I was screaming a lot yesterday. Right now I’m thinking ‘Well, maybe I can scream a little less.’”
The play’s ending — which Johnson calls “deliberately ambiguous” — has been giving the cast a workout.
“We’ve had a really tough time with the ending,” Pawk says. “We’ve made some cuts and some reconfiguring, which I think will help.”
Brancato says Johnson had some advice: “He said ‘just keep plowing, just keep plowing and tell me what your thoughts are.’”
There are still unknowns for Brancato and his cast. How will a summer audience respond to a character-driven play that is far from light summer fare?
“It’s definitely an odd, off-centered kind of thing,” the director says. “I would love to hear what the audience has to say after they see it.”
He’s considering talk-back sessions after performances.
Brancato is certain he’s found something important.
“This is a voice of a playwright I want to continue an association with,” he says. “I’ve read a number of his plays and I can see there’s something happening here.”
Still, it’s a risky move, from a programming standpoint.
“In trying to balance what I present to my audience. I like being able to let them sit back and have a great laugh or to stir the gray matter or to give them a litmus test for their compassion. That’s what this play is: a litmus test for compassion.”
Pawk is looking forward to seeing who the audience sides with, how far will they go with this grieving mother.
That willingness to try, to test, is what attracted Brancato to Pawk.
“This morning, I called her up and she was in the bathtub. So I gave Michele Pawk notes in the tub. Isn’t that cool?” he says.
For the next month, Pawk is making the trek to Stony Point.
“Like it says on the mug: It’s Off-Broadway with a lawn,” she says. “Bring it on. I’m there.”

Photo by Andrew M. Horn: Michele Pawk, right, and Laura Heisler portray mother and daughter in Joel Drake Johnson’s “The Fall to Earth” at Penguin Rep in Stony Point. The play runs through July 20.

“The Fall to Earth”
Where: Penguin Rep, 7 Crickettown Road, Stony Point.
When: Through July 20. 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, with matinees at 4 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday.
Tickets: Individual tickets are $32, and $16 for those 30 and younger. Discounts are available for groups of 10 or more.
Call: 845-786-2873.
Web: www.penguinrep.org.