There’s a reason why Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater have such great chemistry onstage in “Much Ado About Nothing”: They’re a couple offstage, too.
“It’s not a secret,” Rabe says about their dating, though she remains mum about the details. Nor is this the first time she and Linklater, 37, have performed together at Shakespeare in the Park’s Delacorte Theatre, where “Much Ado” opens Monday night: They were in the Public Theater’s “Merchant of Venice” four years ago. They also co-starred in Broadway’s “Seminar” in 2011, when Rabe, now 31, flew to LA Sunday nights to shoot TV’s “American Horror Story,” returning just in time for Tuesday’s 8 p.m. curtain.
“Because we’ve worked together so many times, it’s just an amazing thing to have this shorthand with someone,” she says, growing more animated. “He’s always investigating and trying new things, but you’re never going to get left in the lurch. He’s always right there with you.”
Which works well for the couple in “Much Ado.” Rabe’s character, the quick-witted Beatrice, has a history with Benedick (Linklater), her lover and sparring partner. It’s part of the reason Rabe calls the sharp-tongued pair “the most amazing of the romantic relationships” in Shakespeare.
Rabe didn’t perform any of the Bard at her alma mater, Northwestern University, but then, she grew up in the theater: Her father is Tony-winning playwright David Rabe, and her mom was ’70s It girl Jill Clayburgh. Neither, she says, pressured her or her two brothers to follow them.
“They were very focused on us going to soccer practice and swimming lessons,” Rabe recalls. “Before I had a license, [Mom] was driving me from soccer to ballet, and I was getting into my leotard in the car and running into class.”
Still, she picked up an acting tip or two from her mother, who lost a 20-year-long battle with leukemia in 2010. The death coincided with Rabe’s star-making turn as Portia in The Public’s “Merchant of Venice,” which moved to Broadway after its summer run in the park. Her Shylock was Al Pacino, who’d dated her mother for five years before she married Rabe. “I had no idea that I would spend nearly a year of my life playing that part with him,” she says. “Onstage, offstage, he’s an incredibly generous human being and such a generous actor.”
Rabe famously returned to the stage at the Broadhurst the night after her mother’s death.
“She was really great with helping me deal with nerves,” she says of Clayburgh, with whom she made her theater debut in 2002, at the Gloucester (Mass.) Stage Company.
“She was the most incredible ocean swimmer . . . [she taught me] when you’re swimming in the ocean, you don’t want to fight it — go with the waves. And that was really her thing about nerves — don’t pretend they’re not there. Just make friends with them.”
The Public Theater’s “Much Ado About Nothing” runs through July 6 at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, entrance at 81st Street and Central Park West; publictheater.org.