Piper Perabo will be forever beloved for her turn in 2000’s cult favorite Coyote Ugly as the aspiring songwriter with a day—or night?—job dancing at—or on?—the bar. But her very first dramatic role was at 14 years old in Our Town, in perhaps an age-inappropriate role (her character died in childbirth). Since then, she’s fallen in love with Game of Thrones’s Lena Headey in Imagine Me & You, starred as C.I.A. operative Annie Walker in the USA Network’s espionage thriller series Covert Affairs, and earned stage street cred in Neil LaBute’s Reasons to Be Pretty both on and off Broadway. This month, she’s headed back to the New York stage in the anticipated MCC Theater production of Lost Girls, a gritty, dysfunctional family drama with dialogue that cuts like a knife.
Perabo plays Maggie, a single mom who re-unites with her ex-husband to find their daughter, who is missing in a snowstorm. “The writing was very true—the stress-love cocktail of a family. And that’s what I could relate to,” the actress muses. “I’ve never played a character like this before. She’s really a ballbuster. I have this line like, ‘I’m 23 bucks away from busting the electric bill.’ She’s really at the edge financially. And I think that kind of stress day-to-day on a single mom . . . You’re near breaking all the time.”
Lost Girls is helmed by acclaimed Off Broadway director Jo Bonney (“She’s that kind of rough-and-tumble, downtown–New York director types that I really like”) and written by playwright John Pollono, whose Small Engine Repair caught critics’ attention at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in 2013. “That combination was kind of irresistible to me,” Perabo says of the duo.
It’s a very different role than Annie Walker, her power-suit-rocking character in Covert Affairs—a difference in just that: white collar to blue. While Maggie never leaves her hometown, marries (and divorces) her high-school sweetheart, and struggles to make ends meet, Annie travels the world, speaks seven languages, and solves international crimes. Plus, the show is filmed on location, quite literally, all over the world. “When you get sent somewhere to film, it sort of forces you to explore things that you never even considered. We were in Istanbul and there were already [Syrian] refugees coming over the Turkish border and sleeping along the banks of the Bosphorus,” says the actress. “You just see the world in a way you hadn’t planned to.” Now she’ll see the world through Maggie’s eyes, which are focused on her family. “It’s sort of why she gets up every day,” says Perabo, “why she puts herself through this grind to keep the lights on. I think a lot of people can relate to that.”
And what’s next after Lost Girls? “I really want to try television again—there’s some really cool television going on in the world. I’m looking for the perfect thing.” Could there be a Coyote Ugly 2, please? She laughs. “Well, all the girls are still alive, so that means there’s always a chance.”
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