Mercedes Ruehl Takes Weekly Strolls With Her Acting Students

NEW YORK — “Do you want to ask me about acting?” Mercedes Ruehl said, holding her water bottle. “I also take questions on faith and morals.”

On a wet Wednesday afternoon, Ruehl, the Oscar- and Tony-winning actress who stars in the Broadway revival of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song” (now in previews), had just exited her apartment on West 42nd Street and was marching toward the Hudson River.

Flanking her, with the full-body adoration usually reserved for pet dogs or cult members, were two of her longtime acting students: Francesca Ferrara and Nick Feitel. She is a character actress and sometime caterer, trying to break into leading lady roles. He is a comedy writer and pet walker trying to expand from what he called “creepy guy, crazy weirdo type” parts.

Ruehl, who teaches seminars at HB Studio, a West Village acting studio, reserves Wednesday afternoons for a walk along the High Line and some alfresco mentorship. “A good and practical thing,” she said. She steered them into traffic, then out of it.

As they cruised past a Circle Line dock near West 42nd Street, Feitel, who has scraggly red hair and thick-lensed Gucci glasses, asked how not to go insane while waiting for work to come his way. “That’s a big issue,” Ruehl said, nodding supportively. Her silver earrings waggled. “It took me a hell of a long time.”

The mother Ruehl plays in “Torch Song” isn’t especially nurturing. In a scene opposite Michael Urie, she gives a round-the-world-guilt trip. Offstage, the maternal energy is warmer, more pliable. She talked movingly about getting rejected from every major acting program, about crying on sidewalks after bungled auditions. Chivalrously, Feitel steered her around a puddle.

Ruehl advised her students to keep working wherever and however they could. “As long as you get up in front of other people, even if it’s in a class, a class that you paid for, you’re increasing the chance of word-of-mouth,” she said. “That’s how it happened to me.”

In her 30s, when she was close to giving up, an HB classmate recommended her to the playwright Albert Innaurato, which led to a play at the Public Theater, and that led to another and another, and then a woman broke her leg and suddenly she was on Broadway with “I’m Not Rappaport.” And then the movies came calling.

“I guess the gods took mercy,” Ruehl said. She might have said more, but she was walking by the Blade heliport near 30th Street and the wind snatched her words away.

The conversation turned to fear, to spontaneity, and how Ferrara, sleeker and calmer than her classmate, had smashed a flashlight during a scene. “When you act with that kind of abandon in rehearsal, generally something gets broken,” Ruehl said, approvingly.

It was around this time that Ruehl, absorbed in the conversation, realized she’d overshot the north entrance of the High Line by about five blocks. They doubled back, past the helicopters.

At 34th Street, Feitel dashed across 12th Avenue, just as the light changed. “Oh, you’re going to commit!” Ruehl called from the other side. A traffic cop waved her and Ferrara across.

Up on the High Line, the talk moved to “Torch Song” and the need to reinterrogate a role that Ruehl had already played for months off-Broadway. This time around, she said, she wanted “to drop all the way down into the mother part.”

Feitel marveled that she would rejigger a performance that critics had raved over. “Have you ever been totally satisfied?” Ruehl said rhetorically. “Have you ever come off a performance totally satisfied?” She answered her own questions: “Not totally. Not ever. There would be no reason to go back and do it again.” On the highway below, tourists on a passing double-decker bus waved avidly. Had they recognized Ruehl? Were they just waving to anyone on the High Line? Unclear.

“Hello, people down there,” Ruehl said.

“Welcome to New York,” Ferrara said.

“It’s a MetroCard city,” Feitel added.

“Come see ‘Torch Song,'” Ruehl said, sotto voce.

The talk turned back to the students. Ferrara wondered when producers would consider her for more substantial parts. Feitel mentioned that with Ruehl’s encouragement, he had recently lost 20 pounds. Ruehl reminded him that she’d also encouraged him to chop off his man bun.

She told them that she believed in both of them, in their potential, in their talent. “I don’t think I’ve been wrong yet,” she said.

“Oh my God, I might start to cry!” Ferrara said.

As they reached West 23rd Street, Ruehl headed for an elevator, but it was broken, so the group doubled back to a staircase and walked to Jim Kempner Fine Art, a gallery run by another classmate. They stopped in the courtyard, struck by a giant bronze head, a model of Michelangelo’s David.

“People said I had a big head, and now I do,” Kempner joked as he came out to meet them.

The statue had very orderly hair, and as they headed into the gallery, ringed with neon sculptures by Charlie Hewitt, Ruehl allowed herself a little vanity as she put a hand to her hair. “Does it look insane?” she asked.

“It looks windblown, sexy,” Ferrara said.

The three students talked about going as a group to see Ruehl in “Torch Song” and how eager they were for her seminars to start again. (They are on pause for the duration of Ruehl’s Broadway run.)

“I wish the classes went on and on and on,” Feitel said, sounding like an addict.

Ruehl confessed that she was “a little addicted” to the classes and to these Wednesday walks, too. “It’s fun,” she said. “It’s exhausting. It’s very hard for an actress to spend hours concentrating on someone besides herself. But it’s refreshing.”