Streep, Kazan and Rabe kids seem born to act

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Zoe Kazan

Ah, the Redgraves, the Barrymores, the Fondas. If science ever concludes that there’s no such thing as a talent gene, we’re going to have to find another way to explain the existence of acting dynasties.

For geneticists and cultural anthropologists, not to mention grateful theatergoers, the city is suddenly a Petri dish for analysis of ancestral acting chromosomes.

I mean the Gummers, the Rabes and the Kazans. The names are not as easy as the others to identify as lineage. The talent, however, is unmistakable.

In just four years, three young actresses have star-burst into the New York theater with a number of memorable performances. How big a number? I count 15 - that is, five major performances per person since the autumn of 2005.

In each case, a conscientious journalist has had to struggle between the desire to let an individual define herself and the journalistic impulse to identify Mamie Gummer as Meryl Streep’s daughter, Zoe Kazan as the granddaughter of legendary director Elia Kazan, and Lily Rabe as the daughter of actress Jill Clayburgh and playwright David Rabe (“Hurlyburly,” “Streamers”).

All three are in their mid-20s. Each has done some movie work and, no doubt, is on the fast track to more. For now, however, their big moments have been spread around new plays and classics on Broadway and in smaller Off-Broadway houses.

Through March 8, Gummer could be seen being both radiant and heartbreakingly mousy as the lovelorn Sofya in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” opposite Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard at the tiny Classical Stage Company.

Rabe is seducing audiences as the snappy-smart rich girl who’s either damaged or just eccentric in “The American Plan,” the Richard Greenberg drama that also stars Mercedes Ruehl on Broadway at the Friedman Theatre (261 W. 47th St.) through March 15.

Kazan was recently on Broadway with Kristin Scott Thomas in the stunning revival of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” full of deadened hope as Masha, the servant’s daughter with too many brains for her station. (She also can be seen as the naive secretary who jumps into bed with a married Leonardo DiCaprio in “Revolutionary Road.”)

Kazan, the daughter of Hollywood screenwriters, was in her late teens when her grandfather died. She says she wasn’t really aware that he was famous as the director of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront” until she was about 12, and “even after that, it just never seemed that important.”

Obviously, the name couldn’t have hurt at the beginning. But before I even saw it in the program, I was struck by a young actress with prismatic complexity, defiantly holding her own against Cynthia Nixon in the 2006 revival of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” In the following two years, she has identified herself as one of the city’s most gifted, self-challenging adventurers in Kate Fodor’s “100 Saints You Should Know,” then in Ethan Hawke’s staging of “Things We Want” and in “Come Back, Little Sheba” with S. Epatha Merkerson. I was relieved to see her being allowed to escape the sexpot-child-woman typecasting with “The Seagull.” She is obviously so much more than that.

Gummer made her New York debut in 2005, fresh from Northwestern University, playing a 4-year-old girl in Noah Haidle’s strange grown-up-childhood nightmare, “Mr. Marmalade.” The star was Michael C. Hall, but the news was the charismatic, rangy creature in the white tutu and cuddly little-girl pajamas. It was a role that had great ickiness potential. But she was utterly remarkable. She had her mother’s skin, the eerily Cubist ability to look ordinary at one angle, patrician from another. She could play silly, then switch into a wise old soul. She was playful, yet tragic. Needy, but sublimely self-sufficient.

The actress, second of four children of Streep and sculptor Don Gummer, has said, “The nose tends to give me away.” But that’s not the profile that matters. Months later, she had fewer unusual colors with which to paint a more conventional angry, wounded child - the daughter of divorced parents in Theresa Rebeck’s “Water’s Edge.” But even against such stage pros as Kate Burton (daughter of Richard), Gummer’s shimmer dared you to take your eyes off her. She risked affections as the shallow, unlikeable New York college brat in Brooke Berman’s “Hunting and Gathering,” and worried me by playing the wild-hearted convent girl in “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” as a Valley Girl. But her restrained, quietly dazzling performance in “Vanya” has restored faith in her astounding smarts and taste.

Like Gummer, Rabe is the child of an actress who did what bankable Hollywood women were not supposed to do - move to Connecticut and raise a family. Rabe, also a Northwestern graduate, went right to Broadway in 2005. She instantly impressed as the sweet outsider in the revival of “Steel Magnolias” that starred Marsha Mason and Delta Burke.

From a beautician in Louisiana, Rabe quickly turned into a British punk rocker in “Colder Than Here,” then became a cunning romantic in Shaw’s “Heartbreak House” and went nubile Southern gothic as the possibly dimwitted Babe, who shoots her husband in “Crimes of the Heart.” In “The American Plan,” she uses her eerily long limbs and Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole beauty to create a thoroughly unpredictable woman whose motivations lurk somewhere deep and raw.

Speaking of deep - not to mention wonderful - Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson played mother and daughter in a recent one-night concert performance of “A Little Night Music.” There are rumors that they might do it for real on Broadway. Scanning the other end of the dynastic universe, I’m hoping that Carrie Fisher brings to Broadway her acclaimed solo autobiography, “Wishful Drinking,” about life and catastrophe as the offspring of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. I read she once sought drug-addiction counseling from Cary Grant. Now that’s a legacy worthy of the theater.