Categories
Interviews

Twenty Questions with Tony Winner Blair Brown

In 2000, Blair Brown won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her portrayal of Margrethe in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Brown first appeared on a New York stage in the 1975 New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Comedy of Errors and boasts an impressive theatre resume including the 1989 Broadway production of Secret Rapture, the 1995 Lincoln Center Theater production of Arcadia, two runs as Frau Schneider in the 1998 and 2003 productions of Cabaret, and the 2006 production of The Clean House. She can currently be seen at Studio 54 as Ms. Innes in Tracy Letts’ The Minutes, playing through July 24th only. 

On Screen, Brown appeared in the 1973 Oscar winning film, The Paper Chase, as well as in The Choirboy, Altered States, One Trick Pony, Stealing Home, and A Flash of Green. She received a Golden Globe nomination for her leading role opposite John Belushi in Continental Divide. She received a second Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of Jacqueline Kennedy in the TV miniseries Kennedy. She had a 5-year run on the television comedy-drama, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, where she received 5 consecutive Emmy Award nominations. In 2008, Brown appeared on the Fox television series The Fringe, and was featured as Judy King in 3 seasons of the Netflix comedy-drama series, Orange is the New Black. 

We were fortunate enough to speak with Blair and get Twenty questions with a Tony Award Winner. 

Blair Brown at the 2000 Tony Awards.

1. What were your first thoughts upon being nominated for a Tony Award?

Why wasn’t there an ensemble award?  There still isn’t. I was in a three-character play, Copenhagen, and Michael Cumpsty and Phil Bosco and I were totally dependent on each other for our performances. 

2. What were your first thoughts upon winning?

It’s just nice to win a prize even though we know it doesn’t really matter. 

3. Do you have any fond memories from the night of the ceremony? 

My son in a tux as my date. I got a chance to thank the brilliant wig maker, Paul Huntley, whose artistry in helping actors create characters was largely unrecognized, and I got to sing and dance Irish music on that huge Radio City stage in that gargantuan house. A nice night!

4. What is the biggest change you experienced after winning?

You get better billing. That’s it really. 

5. Where is your award now? 

In a cabinet mixed in with small ceramics my son made as a child. 

6. Who has been a mentor in your career?

I never had a mentor but there were two actors that I wanted to be like: Marian Seldes and Roger Rees. They both brought such genuine joy and enthusiasm to this work they loved. I try to remember that. 

7. What is the best advice you have received in your career?

One day in rehearsal at the Guthrie Theater playing Portia in The Merchant of Venice I was having a crisis of confidence. Michael Langham, the director, took me aside and basically said “You expect people to pay money to watch you think and feel so get on with it”. He said it in a slightly nicer way but that’s what he meant and it’s true, we do! 

8. Do you have any preperformance rituals?

I make up different rituals for every show. 

9. What is the last book you read?

I Just finished rereading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. A wonderful look at Russian short story writing that can inform what actors do creating characters. 

10. What is a dream role of yours?

I wish I’d done more Shakespeare, more Shaw, more Restoration comedies. I was in the wrong country. 

11. What previous role of yours had your favorite costumes?

My Favorite, most favorite costume was a gown designed for Camino Real by Michael Krass that was based on a 1950’s Dior petal dress. I shed sequins and petals wherever I walked. Divine!

12. Which of your previous roles did you feel most similar to?

I always felt Gretta in James Joyce’s The Dead was someone I could have been. 

13. Which of your previous roles did you feel most different from?

When I was in drama school I was cast as a termagant in John Osbourne’s Live Like Pigs because I’d been complaining about playing ingenues. I had to look up the word and I was ridiculous as this older hardened prostitute!

14. Is there a role that you would like to revisit?

I’d like to revisit playing Prospera in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It was such a rich and interesting experience to switch that protagonist’s gender, fascinating to feel the story play out differently. I’d like another shot at it with Emily Mann directing again. 

15. What has been a challenge you’ve faced in your career?

The biggest challenge for me was trying to balance raising my son with the work I loved doing but also needed to do to support us. 

16. What is a song that always makes you smile?

“Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” by Cole Porter always gets me smiling. 

17. What is your favorite cocktail?

Danny Meyer’s Tabla on Madison Square used to make a Citrus Ginger Snap cocktail. Delish!

18. What is a place you would like to visit?

I want to see more of Scotland, those wild islands.  

19. What is your favorite show tune?

No single show tune stands out. It’s a crowded field. Anything from Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George.  Or The Threepenny Opera.  Or The Band’s Visit. 

20. What is your favorite part of theatre?

My favorite part of theater is rehearsal and tech when the play emerges.  Thrilling!  My 2nd favorite is the moment after the Sunday matinee when you’ve run the 8-show gauntlet and you breathe a sigh of relief and accomplishment. 

Samira Wiley and Blair Brown in Orange is the New Black.
Categories
Interviews

Twenty Questions with Tony Winner Jessie Mueller

In 2014, Jessie Mueller won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical for her portrayal of Carole King in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. Along with her 2014 win, Jessie has been nominated for three additional Tony Awards for her Melinda Wells in the 2011 revival of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, originating the role of Jenna in the 2016 hit Waitress, and most recently, her Julie Jordan in the 2018 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. 

Jessie Mueller’s distinguished career has also included appearance on shows including The Family, Blue Bloods, Madam Secretary, Evil, and Candy. She can currently be seen in Tracy Letts’ Tony Nominated Best Play, The Minutes, playing at Studio 54 until July 23rd. 

We are very grateful that Jessie took some time between shows to answer Twenty Questions with a Tony Award Winner.

Jessie Mueller in Beautiful (Joan Marcus).

1. What were your first thoughts upon being nominated for a Tony Award?

When I was nominated for Beautiful, I was thrilled. I was so proud of all the amazing work everyone had done putting that show together.

2.   What were your first thoughts upon winning?

Honestly? Walk and talk fast and don’t fall down. It had been a long night!

3.   Do you have any fond memories from the night of the ceremony?

I remember seeing Nick Cordero perform from Bullets Over Broadway, and thinking who IS this cat? He’s amazing.

4.   What is the biggest change you experienced after winning?

It opened a window to professional opportunities I’d never had before.

5.   Where is your award now?

In a box still from a recent move!

6.   Who has been a mentor in your career?

Oh gosh…I try to pick up a little from all the wonderful people I meet. Steal what I admire and learn from what I don’t. Harry Connick Jr. was certainly a mentor for my early days in NY. He took me under his wing during Clear Day. He’s someone I know I can always come to if I need advice.

7.   What is the best advice you have received in your career?

“Do your thing and don’t worry about other people.” -HCJ

Not easy, but very sound advice.

8.   Do you have any pre-performance rituals?

Lately, a little yoga beforehand helps me get my head in the game and start breathing.

9.   What is the last book you read?

I don’t remember. But the last one that really made me laugh was Phoebe Robinson’s Don’t Sit On My Bed In Your Outside Clothes.

10.  What is a dream role of yours?

Being an animated Disney character…I will be a tree stump. I’m not particular.

11.  What previous role of yours had your favorite costumes?

My costumes as Melinda Wells in Clear Day were pretty fabulous. Cathy Zuber made me feel like a million bucks. There were hats and matching shoes. It was so fun.

12.  What is the best prop you’ve used?

Ok, I have to say the first thing that popped into my head was prop baby dolls. They’re always hilarious. They’re usually very scary looking, and you spend most of the scenes when they appear trying to look lovingly into their dead eyes while hiding their face from the audience at all costs.

13.  Which of your previous roles did you feel most similar to?

Probably each one as I was playing them. I think that’s where I start. I use what I have, so each role brings something out in me that is particular to that moment in time.

14.  Which of your previous roles did you feel most different from?

Maybe Adelaide in Guys and Dolls. I loved that. It was a fun departure.

Jessie Mueller and Joshua Henry (Julieta Cervantes).

15.  Is there a role that you would like to revisit?

Not a role really, but I think I’d like to do Into the Woods again at some point.

16.  What has been a challenge you’ve faced in your career?

Juggling life and work. It’s really hard. Live theatre work especially is extremely demanding. It seems like you only work a few hours a night, but it’s no joke.

17.  What is a song that always makes you smile?

Sunshine On My Shoulders by John Denver was the first thing I thought of!

18.  What is your favorite cocktail?

Oooooh. Spicy margarita or a vodka martini up with a twist, honey!

19.  What is a place you would like to visit?

Ireland.

20.  What is your favorite show tune?

I like the overtures.

Jessie Mueller and Noah Reid in The Minutes (Jeremy Daniel).
Categories
Interviews

Twenty Questions with Tony Winner Elizabeth Ashley

Elizabeth Ashley in You Can't Take It With You

In 1962 at the age of 22, Elizabeth Ashley won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her portrayal of Mollie Michaelson in Phoebe and Henry Ephron’s Take Her, She’s Mine. Along with her 1962 win, Elizabeth has also received two other Tony Award nominations for originating the role of Corie in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park and for her Margaret in the 1974 revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. 

She has been featured in more than 30 movies, including the 1964 film The Carpetbaggers, as well as dozens of TV series, including the currently running Netflix original series, Russian Doll. 

We were fortunate enough to speak with Elizabeth and get Twenty questions with a Tony Award Winner. 

Elizabeth Ashley and George Peppard

1. What were your first thoughts upon being nominated for a Tony Award? 

“To say it was a shock is to underestimate the effect it had on me. You have to remember that I was very young, and I gotten the part in this play because it was just – at the time when Art Carney had left The Honeymooners and the part was not originally that big, and George Abbot kept rewriting and rewriting to the point where my part got much bigger and showier. It became a play more centered on the relationship between Art and my character. It had never even occurred to me but being nominated was a big deal and I felt like the hottest little twinkie on Broadway… I was nominated again for Barefoot in the Park, which was surprising to me. I remember I was supposed to present but had some teenage drama, you know, so I wasn’t able to present… For Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee wanted his original version done, and that was directed by the brilliant Michael Kahn. It got a lot of national press and Roger Stevens brought it to Broadway and then the Opera House… Because it was such a huge success both critically and in every other way it could be, it was totally expected.”

2. What were your first thoughts upon winning?

“When they called my name, I mean, it was like a mental, emotional, and psychological explosion because I was so young and inexperienced. I couldn’t really grasp the meaning of it.”

3. Do you have any fond memories from that night?

“I remember Charles Nelson Reilly won also that night, and I remember he and I sort of walking out together and Charles grabbed my hand as we were trying to cross Park Avenue and he said, ‘Well look at us, we’re the newest stars around here’.”

4. What is the biggest change you experienced after winning? 

“I think I was being paid maybe $100 a week and I think I got a raise to $125. The thing I remember most clearly was being offered star billing, and my brilliant young agent, Stark Hesseltine, said ‘Absolutely not. In the Theatre, once you go above the title, you must never go below it again.’ And he was saying that to someone who was 22 years old, so of course I did what he said, and I took my $25 raise and was utterly happy with it. Because I was so young and it was considered unusual at the time for a young actress to be considered funny, so that got a lot of attention and press, and I think that opened many many doors to me. Overall, let me just say, no one that I know of was luckier than I was at the beginning of my career, and it all happened so fast. It was years before I could begin to start to look back and think what it meant…I remember it was the first time I was sent pages, and they were from Neil Simon and he wanted to write a play for me to be in, which would lead to Barefoot in the Park… I didn’t realize how unusual and remarkable it was.”

5. Who has been a Mentor in your career?

“The great Roger L Stevens, the man who built the Kennedy Center. He had the playwrights company that represented Tennessee Williams. When I was an understudy in a hit comedy called Mary, Mary, and I wasn’t even a standby, I was an understudy where I had to be there all the time and that’s where I met Roger Stevens. I suppose the next great mentor or the man who made me a ‘star’ was the great George Abbott in the play that won me the Tony, Take Her, She’s Mine.” 

6. What is the best advice you have received?

“There is a brilliant director named Michael Wilson that I owe a great deal too. Any actress goes through those times when no one wants to hire them for anything. For many years, Michael was the Artistic Director at Hartford Stage and put together an extraordinary company of actors and designers… On stage, because I was physical, I always tended to move around to much. I’ve never been known to underact. Because Michael and I clicked so well that he went right at all the bad habits I had. He went right for every psychological grab bar or comfort we had, which over all the years, has made me a better actress than I would have been.”

7. Who is one of your favorite playwrights you’ve worked with?

“Tennessee [Williams] and I had an immediate affinity. We became close. Tennessee loved actors. My God he loved actors. He was amazing and extraordinary… His plays are operatic. The soliloquies are like arias in a sense and his use of breaking the fourth wall was remarkable… If I ever became known for anything, it was Tennessee Williams plays. We became very close friends. If one wants to know about Tennessee, they should read the book by John Lahr who spent 13 years writing the biography. Tennessee has never written a play that when I read it or saw it, I didn’t immediately identify and understand the soul of it.”

8. What is a play you would like to re-read? 

“I look forward to re-reading The Visit. I haven’t read it in years and I would like to read it again to see if it still applies the way I have always thought. I’d like to re-read Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. I would also like to re-read some of his [Shakespeare] comedies. I can pull out my big, fat book of Shakespeare.”

9. What is a show you look forward to seeing?

“The play I am really looking forward to seeing after my knee heals is Tracy Letts’ The Minutes. I had the privilege of being in August: Osage County.”

10. What is the last book you read?

“I tend to read an awful lot of peculiar history and detective novels. Give me a good Michael Connelly book any day and I’ll go for it.”

11. What is a dream-role you want to play?

“The one Tennessee I never played was Streetcar Named Desire because by the time I could’ve done it, it had been done brilliantly by several actors… The one part that I lusted after and longed to play and have never had the opportunity is The Visit. It needs a great translation… I knew that woman. I knew that situation. I knew that was me.” 

12. What previous role of yours had the best costumes?

“I think when I played Isadora Duncan in a play called When She Danced at Playwrights Horizons. I’ve had brilliant costume designers, but Jess Goldstein, those were the most gorgeous costumes I’ve ever had. One of the first things I did after coming out of retirement and coming back to New York, there was the designer Peter Joseph for The Enchanted by Giraudoux at the Kennedy Center. Those costumes were ones that I kept and loved forever… This sounds very diva-ish, but one of the things I won’t work without is a Paul Huntley wig.”

13. Which role of yours did you feel most similar to?

“For Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, what can I say, this will sound like arrogance, but that’s not in the least in the way I mean it, but that part [Maggie] had my name on it. I knew Maggie. There was not one thing in that play that I hadn’t lived or known or experienced in my life of in the lives around me. In part she was my mother.” 

14. Which role of yours felt the most different from you?

“Well, this Netflix series, Russian Doll. That character was, in many ways, quite distant from me. Much more contained. I had to approach it in a totally different way. Also, Isadore Duncan in When She Danced, I had to really stretch out for that.”

Elizabeth Ashley at the Russian Doll Season 2 Premiere

15. What has been a creative challenge you have faced in your career?

“Probably Ceasar and Cleopatra. I didn’t know what I was going to do with that play, because it was Shaw, but the first famous scene you are kind of on your own in a sense. I had done so much research and I knew her age and that she was exiled because they wanted her dead. She was like a feral child that had grown up in the sewers, which led me to make a more radical choice in how she looked so you would see the story of a powerful man creating a queen. Developing it, towards the end, became a challenge because I had to age her and tame and teach her. It was challenging to find the truth and comfort zone of that without ‘acting’ it.”

16. What is one of your favorite theatrical experiences to have been a part of?

“I think my best work ever and the part I identified with the most was in Sweet Bird of Youth. I think that’s my favorite role I had the privilege to play. Again, under the direction of the wonderful Michael Kahn.”

17. What is a song that always makes you smile?

“Desperado by The Eagles.”

18. What is your favorite cocktail?

“Straight gold tequila in a shot glass.” 

19. What is a place you would like to visit?

“The most joyous and happy times of my life were when I was retired and became a sailor and lived in the Caribbean on an ocean raising sailboat. When I went, the islands were a secret. There were no roads, no electricity, no phones. The one thing I have done is travel all over the world and lived all over the world… I think where I’d like to go again is the Scandinavian countries. There are islands off Norway that I’d like to see what happening there.”

20. What is your favorite part of theatre? 

 “The theatre is my home, you know. A stage, it’s instinctive. There is something in my DNA that understands it, respects it, adores it, loves it, and damn well knows what to do on it. The thing I have always loved the most is the research. Basically, I’ve always said I’m a mechanic. I like to go under the hood and take it apart and put back together and make it go like a race car. Good directors have helped me when I need to make it into an old Plymouth and not Ferrari.” 

Elizabeth Ashley in The Best Man (Photo: Joan Marcus)
Categories
Long Form

Austin Pendleton: 60 Years Of Theater And Loving It!

Imagine having a true life “in the theater”, what would that mean? Austin Pendleton, now celebrating his 60th year in the theater can tell you. Pendleton, the prolific actor-director-playwright, currently appearing prominently in Tracy Letts’ The Minutes at Studio 54 has just been honored this Spring with the New York Drama Critics Circle Special Citation for his 60 years of work in the theatre, The Actors Equity Foundation Richard Seff Award for veteran actors and was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. 

Pendleton, now 82 years young, developed his love for theater when he was as a child, as theater rehearsals were happening in his living room. You see, he grew up in Warren, Ohio. After WWII–it was an industrial hub–but the people wanted to begin a community theater. They came to his mother, actress Frances Manchester for help. “She told them to raise money and she helped them and they pulled her into directing and acting. Their early productions were rehearsed in our living room and I got so into it,” recalled the actor, director and playwright. “I grew up with theatre literally in my own home. There are all kinds of wonderful advantages to theatre, where you get to do the play every night. Once theatre is a bug in your system it stays there, you just keep wanting to do it.”

It’s not surprising that when he went to school he got involved in school plays. But, it wasn’t just being bitten by the bug that inspired him to be involved in theater. “What attracted me to acting was when I was a kid, I stuttered very badly and I found that when I would act in school plays that went away. That was before there was a sophisticated approach to treating stuttering. I escaped into acting,” Pendleton shared.

Pendleton began his professional New York acting career in the 1962 Arthur Kopit sensation, Oh Dad, Poor Dad Momma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad. Now six decades later he is on Broadway in The Minutes. 

The Minutes, about a City Council meeting that goes awry, beginning as, The New York Times declared, an “expert comedy” then morphs into “jaw-dropping horror”. Pendleton plays the character of Mr. Oldfield, a stick in the mud. He’s been on the City Council year after year and he has views that are not with the times. “I want them to find that amusing, but I also want them to feel like what it would be like to be that person. That’s what you want with any character, you want the audience to know what it would feel like to be that character,” Pendleton added.

Looking at his journey with The Minutes and the pandemic, Pendleton reflected, “We got within three days of the official opening night two years ago. We got it together, we were working on the day of the night the press was coming, then came the lockdown.”

Austin Pendleton’s 1964 breakout role on Broadway as the tailor Motel Kamzoil in the original cast of Fiddler on the Roof.

Pendleton has had the privilege of working with some of the crème de la crème of theater. And one opportunity has led to another. He began his career in Oh Dad, Poor Dad…, which was directed by Jerome Robbins. His performance led Robbins to cast him as Motel in the Original Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. Later Pendleton played the role of Leo Hubbard, in Mike Nichols’ famed production of The Little Foxes. Pendleton is quick to admit that while playing the role, he feared getting fired and was saved by simple advice from his co-star Anne Bancroft. “There was something not working about my performance. Anne Bancroft gave me the key–she said you walk the wrong way for the character. Lillian Hellman was so impressed with the way my performance suddenly turned, that 14 years later she thought of me to direct a revival of Foxes, which also served as the Broadway debut of Elizabeth Taylor.”

Pendleton developed his acting craft while training at HB Studios with Uta Hagen. He was also in the Lincoln Center Training Program and worked with theater legend Robert Lewis. Pendleton has found over his six decades that while acting was fulfilling, he also had the propensity for directing and playwriting. He found himself writing musicals, while an undergraduate at Yale. He wrote the script for Tom Jones and Booth Is Back In Town!  in his Junior year. He later made Booth Is Back In Town! into a straight play called Booth, which is still performed today. He wrote a dark play called Uncle Bob, which is his most produced work. Reflecting on how he came to New York, he recalled coming to pursue being a writer due to the two musicals he had done at Yale. “I got ambushed into doing Oh Dad…,” he mused.

Directorial opportunities came about due to Robert Lewis, who also taught at the Yale Drama School and saw something else in Pendleton, something that he shared with Nikos Psachopoulos, who ran the Williamstown Theatre Festival. “There was something that I did in a scene as an actor and Robert said that is an idea a director would have. Lewis told Nikos that I had talent as a director. I knew about directing because I would watch rehearsals of the community theatre at home, and there were three directors, including my mother. I would watch how they worked. Nikos invited me to Williamstown and the first two shows I directed there were huge hits. I was able to direct three shows on Broadway that got Tony nominations. When I worked with Jerome Robbins, I watched the clarity of his storytelling. He was unmatched at that.”. 

Pondering the role that the audience serves to inspire him when he’s on stage, Pendleton said, “The key word in putting on any theatrical piece is suspense, which is much more important than the laughs. If you feel the audience literally and figuratively leaning forward wanting to know what’s going to happen next that’s what you look for. If they are not leaning forward, then you know that’s something you have to fix.”

In his six decades Pendleton shared that he’s had ups and downs, but he’s stayed the course. “There were a couple of times my acting was pronounced officially over. I had a late lunch with Lynn Redgrave, I had career killing reviews and she said you just have to keep acting, it will take seven years. In those years you can’t stop acting. Act in showcase productions, theaters outside of town and that was a professional life changing conversation. So that’s what I did. When they were able to come back around to me I was ready. So that led to this longevity. If you stop for too long, you’re going to be afraid to do it again and no one will want you to. You will fade from the memory. If you keep doing it, it’s just one long continuum.”

Whenever Pendleton takes on a role he brings such an authenticity to it. Talking about his process he shared, “It’s kind of different with every role. You keep reading the play or the script and look at how your role contributes to the storyline. Sometimes you feel an immediate identification and sometimes you don’t. You find a small thing you identify with and you build on that. Like with The Little Foxes, I started with the walk. Anne said angle your body differently when you walk and she was totally right. I had no way of identifying with the character, nothing in my life identified with his. When I changed my walk things began to happen.”

Madeline Kahn and Austin Pendleton in What’s Up, Doc?

For 60 years Pendleton has not only acted, directed, written plays, but he also has taught directing at The New School and teaches acting at HB Studios. He has been a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble since 1979 and served as Artistic Director of Circle Repertory Company. He simply lives an all-encompassing “life in the theater”. When asked why, he said, “It just fascinates me. There are vast numbers of things that I don’t know. I can’t understand how they operate. I stick with this because it’s the only thing I have any skill at.”

Over the years Pendleton has received accolades for his work. In 1970 he won both an Obie Award for Performance and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance in The Last Sweet Days of Isaac. In 1981, he received a Tony nomination for Best Direction of a Play for The Little Foxes. Other Tony nominations for Direction included Shelter and Spoils of War. In 2011 he won the Obie Award for Directing for The Three Sisters. In 2015 he was nominated for both The Lortels Outstanding Director Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play for Between Riverside and Crazy. He was also honored as a Legend of off-Broadway in the same year.

Accolades are still coming as Pendleton is the subject of “Starring Austin Pendleton,” a documentary film about his life and legacy, in which many of his famous challenges reflect on their friend including Meryl Streep, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Olympia Dukakis, and Ethan Hawke. Pendleton, while epitomizing a life in the theater, he has also appeared in 100 films and television shows.

Linda Armstrong is a theatre critic with the New York Amsterdam News, Theatre Editor for Neworldreview.net, A&E Editor for Harlem News Group and has written for Playbill Online, had a Theatre column “On The Aisle” for Our Time Press, Network Journal Magazine, Show Business Weekly Newspaper, Headline Magazine, Theatre Week Magazine, Black Masks Magazine, and the New York Daily News. Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library interviewed her for their “Critical Perspectives” series, and she was cited on the Jeanne Parnell Radio Show in March 2021 as a Woman Making History.

Categories
Creative

Stupid Kids

STUPID KIDS
By John C. Russell
Directed By Michael Mayer
Starring John Clay III, Lauren Patten, Ali Stroker and Taylor Trensch
With Stage Directions By Christian Borle

Stupid Kids premiered Wednesday, September 22nd, 2021 at 8:00PM ET/5PM PST and was available to stream on demand through Saturday, September 25th at 6:00PM ET.

STUPID KIDS follows four students at Joe McCarthy High School as they make their way from first through eighth period and beyond, struggling with the fears, frustrations, and longings peculiar to youth. With his magical touch, John C. Russell turns these familiar stereotypes into moving and provocative archetypes of adolescence whose lingo takes on a lyricism that is both true to its source and revelatory of the hearts and minds of contemporary youth.

Categories
Creative

Dear Elizabeth: Introduction

“Sometimes it seems…as though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.” – Elizabeth Bishop, from her notebook

Dream

I see a postman everywhere

Vanishing in thin blue air,

A mammoth letter in his hand.

Postmarked from a foreign land.

The postman’s uniform is blue.

The letter is of course from you

And I’d be able to read, I hope,

My own name on the envelope

But he has trouble with this letter

Which constantly grows bigger & bigger

And over and over with a stare,

He vanishes in blue, blue air. 

–Elizabeth Bishop, Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments

“Elizabeth told me about Robert Lowell. She said, “He’s my best friend.” When I met him a few years later, I mentioned that I knew her and he said, “Oh, she’s my best friend.” It was nice to think that she and Lowell both thought of each other in the same way” (Thom Gunn, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 244.)

“While we were with her, she managed to finish ‘North Haven,’ the poem [or elegy] for Lowell. She read it to us and walked about with it in her hand. I found it very moving that she felt she could hardly bear to put it down, that it was part of her. She put it beside her plate at dinner” (Ilsa Barker, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 344)

“I can remember Cal’s carrying Elizabeth’s “Armadillo” poem around in his wallet everywhere, not the way you’d carry the picture of a grandson, but as you’d carry something to brace you and make you sure of how a poem ought to be.” (Richard Wilbur, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 108)

FORWARD 

The great poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were great friends, and they wrote over eight hundred pages of letters to one other. When I was on bed-rest, pregnant with twins, a friend gave me their book of collected letters Words in Air: the complete correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. I already had a long-standing obsession with Elizabeth Bishop; my obsession with Lowell and their friendship now began. I could not put the letters down. I hungered to hear them read aloud; I particularly longed to hear letter number 157 read out loud. Number 157 is Lowell’s most confessional letter to Bishop, and I think, one of the most beautiful love letters ever written. In it, he says, about not asking Bishop to marry him: “Asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.” 

Reading these eight hundred pages, these strands of two lives, intersecting, rarely meeting–I thought: why do I find this narrative so compelling, even though theirs is not a story in the traditional sense? I was desperate to know how the “story” would come out—how each life would progress, how the relation would end. But I also loved how the letters resisted a sense of the usual literary “story”—how instead, the letters forced us to look at life as it is lived. Not neat. Not two glorious Greek arcs meeting in the center. Instead: a dialectic between the interior poetic life and the pear-shaped, particular, sudden, ordinary life-as-it-is-lived. 

Life intrudes, without warning. Elizabeth Bishop’s great love and partner Lota commits suicide without much warning. Bishop has multiple asthma attacks, and often needs to be hospitalized for alcoholism and depression. Robert Lowell dies suddenly of a heart attack in a taxi cab en route to see his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. As he died in the taxi he held a painting of his third wife, painted by her ex-husband, Lucian Freud. Lowell had bipolar disorder, and often found himself quite suddenly in a sanitarium. Bishop and Lowell’s carefully built, Platonic poetic worlds are intruded on constantly by the vagaries of life and the body. And through such sudden disturbances, their letters were like lanterns sent to one another across long distances. Bishop lived in Brazil most of her life, and Lowell lived in New York, Boston and London. Their friendship was lived largely on paper, though they met at crucial times in their lives. 

Bishop was in New York when Lota commited suicide, and she stayed at Hardwick and Lowell’s apartment. They paid for her ambulance ride through Central Park, a result of a bad fall she took, perhaps induced by too much drink, after Lota’s suicide. Bishop was plagued her whole life with alcoholism; at one point a friend eliminated all the liquor in her house and Bishop was reduced to drinking rubbing alcohol and ended up in the hospital. Lowell visited Bishop in South America and was hospitalized in Argentina for a manic episode. 

Their correspondence spans political epochs—coups in Brazil, the Vietnam war—personal epochs, and literary epochs. Bishop observes Lowell’s trajectory as he creates the confessional movement in poetry. I love, in the letters, the extraordinary dialectic between Lowell’s more confessional mode and Bishop’s formal restraint. Her disgust for the confessional, however, didn’t keep her from loving Lowell’s poetry. They both carried each other’s poems in their minds and in their pockets. Lowell carried Bishop’s Armadillo (a poems she dedicated to Lowell) in his wallet, a kind of talisman for how a poem ought to be. 

Lowell wrote Skunk Hour for Bishop, as well as many sonnets, and a poem called “Water”, about a seminal weekend the two of them spent in Maine. 

After Lowell divorced Jean Stafford in July of 1948, he visited Elizabeth Bishop in Maine. It’s a visit they would both return to again and again in their letters and in their poetry. It’s impossible to reconstruct exactly what happened; we know from letters and poems that they spent the weekend together, at one point standing waist high in water, and Bishop said to Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” Bishop wrote later that they were: “Swimming, or rather standing, numb to the waist in the freezing cold water, but continuing to talk. If I were to think of any Saint in his connection then it is St. Sebastian—he stood in a rocky basin of the freezing water, sloshing it over his handsome youthful body and I could almost see the arrows sticking out of him.” 

We know that shortly after that visit, Lowell told some friends he was going to marry Bishop. Soon after, they had a drunken weekend at Bard where many poets were gathered. Lowell was rumored to have proposed to her that weekend. Bishop wrote to another friend, “Saturday night was worst—a really drunken party, I’m afraid, with everyone behaving very much the way poets are supposed to.” In another account, Bishop remembers that she and Elizabeth Hardwick had helped a drunken Lowell back to his room, taken off his shoes and tie, loosened his shirt, upon which Hardwick said, “Why, he’s an Adonis!” and Bishop said “from then on I knew it was all over.” 

We also know from their friend Joseph Summers that at the end of the Bard weekend, “He and Elizabeth seemed to be very much in love that weekend. He was saying, ‘Now let me know when you are coming back.’ And she said, “I don’t know.’ “Let me know where you are,” and so on.” Another friend reports, “She told us at one point she loved Cal more than anybody she’d ever known, except for Lota, but that he would destroy her.” And from another friend: Lowell “was the one of the few people Bishop addressed in her poems. She said that he had proposed to her, and she had turned him down.” Apparently her greatest regret was not having a child, and she considered having one with Lowell early on, but worried about the history of mental illness in both of their families. 

The gaps between their letters, the mysterious interludes in which Lowell and Bishop actually saw each other, leaves much to the imagination. Their letters are so hyper-articulate that one almost has the impression that no bits of life were lived without been written down. These silences between the letters fascinated me as much as the letters themselves. But rather than invent dialogue for these interludes in which they actually met, it felt important to me to let Bishop and Lowell speak only in their own words. Bishop’s reserve, and her insistence on not mixing fact and fiction, was always with me as I arranged the letters. All the words from the play are taken from their letters and from their poetry. 

There are many ways to do this play. One can imagine the full spectacle I have suggested in the stage directions, complete with planets appearing and water rushing onto the stage, as in its premier at Yale Repertory Theater. I wanted to see the images in their letters made three- dimensional, to somehow see the reach of their imagery. But I’m also interested in how much the language can do all by itself. One can imagine, for example, a simple book club version. I saw pictures of one such event in Illinois and was very moved by the simplicity of non-actors who loved poetry reading the letters out loud to fellow travelers. One could also 

imagine doing the play in a library, at a poetry foundation, or even doing the play on the set for another play on its dark Monday night. You really need nothing more than a table and two chairs for two wonderful actors who could even read the letters straight from the page rather than memorizing them. You might then use someone to read stage directions rather than projecting subtitles. 

Regardless of how the play is performed, in a theater or in a room, when I first read the letters, I felt that they demanded to be read out loud, whether by actors or by lay-people. Bishop and Lowell had unerring, consummate ears, and they wrote poetry for a time when Lowell could command massive crowds in Madison Square Gardens, all gathered to hear him read his poems out loud. I offer this arrangement, then, in the spirit of a contemporary hunger to hear poetry out loud. I think we are starved for the sound of poetry. I wonder if Bishop and Lowell are among the last great people of letters to write out their lives in letter form. Their letters become almost a medieval church constructed in praise of friendship. It’s difficult to write about friendship. Our culture is inundated with the story of romantic love. We understand how romantic love begins, how it ends. We don’t understand, in neat narrative fashion, how friendship begins, how it endures. And yet life would be unbearable without friendship.

– Sarah Ruhl

Categories
Creative

A Show of Titles Preview!

We can’t wait to have you join us for our presentation of Show of Titles, streaming from Sunday, June 13 at 7pm EST to Thursday, June 17 at 4pm EST.

We’ve created a Spotify playlist of some classic title songs you can expect to hear during the show. Check it out below!

Broadway’s Best Shows is proud to present Show of Titles, a musical extravaganza with dozens of Broadway stars performing the title songs from over 20 beloved musicals to benefit The Actors Fund.

With Performances by Annaleigh Ashford, Glenn Close, Len Cariou, Gavin Creel, Darren Criss, Santino Fontana, Kelsey Grammer, David Alan Grier, Jake Gyllenhaal, Isabelle Huppert, Norm Lewis, Patti LuPone, Rob McClure, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Melba Moore, Jessie Mueller, Eva Noblezada, Kelli O’Hara, Laura Osnes, Steven Pasquale, Michael Rupert, Ernie Sabella, Lea Salonga, Phillipa Soo, Will Swenson, Aaron Tveit, Leslie Uggams, Vanessa Williams, Patrick Wilson, and more!

And Special Appearances by Broadway Inspirational Voices, Candice Bergen, Danny Burstein, Bryan Cranston, Sheldon Harnick, John Kander, Angela Lansbury, John Leguizamo, John Lithgow, Lindsay Mendez, Phylicia Rashad, BD Wong & Florian Zeller.

Show of Titles premieres on Stellar at 7PM ET / 4PM PT on Sunday, June 13th and will be available for a limited time only.

GET SINGLE TICKETS ON STELLAR
Categories
Stories from the Stage

STORIES FROM THE STAGE: Lizan Mitchell

At the heart of August Wilson’s ‘Gem of the Ocean’ is a magnificent ritual that takes place in ‘the City of Bones’ which is located many fathoms deep down in the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic is said to be the largest graveyard for the millions of Africans intended for slavery in America but who died en route during the Middle Passage. I’ve done the role of Aunt Ester, the 300 year old woman in the play, many times and somehow, during this ritual, the separation between audience and actors vanishes and together we make the journey into facing who we really are. The surge of Spirit rushing through the space touches everyone open to the experience. It is profoundly moving. 

There are many places that people choose to gather in large numbers. However, to me, the transcendent power of theater penetrates in ways that can unexpectedly shift our consciousness. I am deeply grateful that I can participate in this miracle. 

Lizan Mitchell has appeared on Broadway in Electra, Having Our Say, and So Long on Lonely Street. Her Off-Broadway credits include: The First Noel, Brownsville Song, Cell, Rosmersholm, For Colored Girls (25th Anniversary), Gum, Ma Rose, and Salt. Her film and television credits include “Detroit”, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “Deadbeat,” “We’ll Never Have Paris”, “Golden Boy,” “John Adams,” “The Good Wife,” “The Human Stain”, “The Preacher’s Wife”, “Sesame Street,” and “The Wire.” She can be seen in the Spotlight on Plays production of Ohio State Murders streaming this Thursday through Sunday.

Categories
Stories from the Stage

STORIES FROM THE STAGE: Ben Rappaport

In high school, when the Drama department was putting on a new show, the school would block out an entire day’s worth of English class periods to be spent in the auditorium watching the ‘preview’ of that show. Essentially, a couple of scenes and/or a couple of numbers from the show. Of course, I always looked forward to these days because…duh! No class! An hour’s worth of entertainment! Singing! Dancing! Loud Talking! Sword Fighting! Not to mention the fact that these student actors and crew got to spend their entire school day doing this! It was awesome. My sophomore year, I’m sitting in the audience for the preview of Romeo and Juliet and my mind was blown. In this production, the Montagues were dressed completely goth with eye liner, chains, fishnets, and hair dye and the Capulets wore mostly khaki preppy style clothes. When the lights dimmed for the moment Romeo and Juliet meet at the ball and ‘Colorblind’ by Counting Crows pumped through the speakers, I fell head over heels in love. With all of it. And after a rafter-shaking performance of the ‘Queen Mab’ speech, my fate was signed, sealed, and delivered. I had to be a part of this. I felt it all. The passion, the love, the humor, the rage. All on like a Wednesday at 2:15 in our school’s auditorium in the Northwest suburbs of Houston, Texas! Until then, I’d honestly felt quite lost and passionless. But, in that hour, I fell in love, gained confidence and birthed a dream. ‘I want to do THAT’.

Later that year, I auditioned for Anything Goes with my friend from history class who had been a part of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat the year before. I knew nothing about anything. I didn’t have tap shoes, so I took a bunch of metal thumb tacks from my mom’s sewing kit and stuck them into the soles of my dress shoes. Man, was I intimidated. I was auditioning alongside the actors I had seen in Romeo and Juliet. They were celebrities to me. I even got to read scenes with them! A few days later, after the cast list went up on the bulletin board and my name wasn’t on it, my friend from history class told me that the drama teacher wanted to speak to me after school. I went to his classroom, and he told me I would have gotten the lead role of Billy Crocker had it not been for my subpar grades. I had something special and should be a part of the Drama department. I (kinda) got my grades up, enrolled in Drama class the next year and landed my first role as Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I went on to play many other great roles at Klein High School, but most importantly, I found my tribe. All of us weirdos and outcasts had a safe place to feel free to be us. We loved each other. We laughed heartily. We dreamed big dreams. We took care of each other. The showmances. The nerves. The celebration. The heartbreak. The gaff tape. The musty smell of that old auditorium. The Chinese drive-thru down the street we went to during tech rehearsal dinner breaks. 

And to this day, no matter where I have the privilege of performing…Broadway, Off-Broadway, a reading over Zoom of Ohio State Murders alongside such illustrious talents as Audra McDonald and Kenny Leon…I feel as though I’m back in the Drama department again and everything feels safe and makes sense. The theatre community in New York is full of people with stories just like mine. Who found home in this tribe. 

Ben Rappaport played Perchick in the recent revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” directed by Bartlett Sher and was seen in the Roundabout Revival of “Picnic” directed by Sam Gold. He’s also known for his appearances in television’s “For The People”,  “Mr. Robot”, “Younger” and “Ozark”. Rappaport’s additional television credits include Fox’s “Zoobiquity”, two seasons of CBS’ “The Good Wife”, TBS’ “Do It Yourself”, USA Network’s “Love is Dead”, CBS’ “Elementary” and NBC’s “Outsourced”. His film credits include “Better Off Single”, “Hope Springs”, “The Brass Teapot”, “Ask for Jane” and “Landing Up”.  He can be seen in the Spotlight on Plays production of Ohio State Murders streaming this Thursday through Sunday.

Categories
Stories from the Stage

STORIES FROM THE STAGE: Jessica Hecht

Today is my daughter Stella’s 21s birthday. She studies statistics and Italian, vaguely likes theatre, and is utterly straightforward, charmingly so. Naturally I am spending time assessing whether I’ve been a hindrance or help as she walks into a sea of adults never to be a child again.

We started our mother daughter dance in a kind of protective bubble but within a few short months, I was doing a play and carting her to rehearsals so as not to disrupt her supposed sense of comfort. The play on hand was called Lobster Alice and we performed it at Playwrights Horizons back when Playwrights Horizons was a rickety mid-town haunt and the term Hell’s Kitchen had slightly more meaning. The wonderful director Maria Mileaf was at the helm and she was a new mother as well.

Stella and I felt very taken care of. The rehearsals were complete with breaks to breastfeed and the seasoned nanny, I’d met through a friend, seemed only slightly weirded out by the looks of our 46th street rehearsal space. We rolled into previews and I thought perhaps having Stella in my dressing room, or even backstage for that matter, might provide maximum coddling for her 6 month old self.

One evening, I sang to her in the dressing room as I donned the gorgeous period costume Ann Hould-Ward had dreamed up. It was circa 1940 in our play, I was secretary to an animator that  Reg Rogers brilliantly portrayed. I was in love with said animator. During this particular evening, the love scene we were to enact had been slightly rewritten. I was to raise my voice in frustration and then our mutual attraction was to be realized and some of this romance would ensue. I focused on those new lines and the raise in my voice belted over the monitor. The sound woke Stella from her comfy sleep and she began to cry.

Stella cried powerfully and relentlessly and due to the way in which the stage was situated over the basement dressing rooms, Reg and I could hear the crying but those in the house remained oblivious. My body could not take it. My breasts began to express milk in such a forceful way that two round puddles formed  on the front of my swanky suit jacket and I myself began to silently sob.

My attempt to “mother” while on stage, was the first of many miscalculations as a parent. As much as I’d like to think I’m a swell multitasker-there was simply no damn way to do both tasks at hand.. I could not maintain even a slight veneer of the character. I really should have been a magnet for Reg in that moment, but no, my sense was that he was frightened…or perhaps repelled? 

I raced off stage at the end of the show to Stella now howling and Ann Hould-Ward, the kind nanny and several stage hands, trying in vain to soothe her. Maria arrived minutes later with her usual notepad and said : “I have only a few things from the beginning of the play. I want to shift to the final scene and just ask….”What was WRONG with you. Were you sobbing??? It’s a love scene…..”

And in retrospect it was. Between me and my daughter. If I had it to do over, forgive me, I perhaps would have done it all the same. 

Jessica Hecht made her Broadway debut in The Last Night of Ballyhoo and has appeared on Broadway After the Fall, Julius Caesar, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Broadway Bound, A View From the Bridge (which garnered her a Tony nomination) and Harvey. She is known as Victoria in the indie hit Sideways and as Susan Bunch on TV’s Friends. Her recent Broadway credits include The Price, Fiddler on the Roof, and The Assembled Parties.