Was it good?Was it bad?What was it like working with him?Working with her?You'll hear all the tales you wish you knew Every aspect of the theater, too Feel your love of Broadway anew On Backstage Babble!
Hi, this is Charles Kirsch, and welcome to Backstage Babble.Backstage Babble is a podcast interviewing professionals in the theater industry about themselves, their careers, and the people they've worked with along the way.
And today, I am thrilled to welcome my guest, Tony-nominated actress Kathleen Chalfant, who has starred on Broadway in Angels in America, M. Butterfly, Dance With Me, and Racing Demon.She's also appeared off-Broadway in Wit, Just Say No, Henry V,
12 Dreams, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, Bloomer Girl, Dear Elizabeth, The Crucible, The Vagina Monologues, and more.And now, without further ado, here's Kathleen Chalfant.
So I would love to begin by asking you, how did you first become interested in theater?
I've never, you know when people ask what you wanted to do, I've never, since I was a little girl, ever wanted to do anything but be an actor.
I was first, I think I grew up in California and my grandmother used to take me to the movies when I was a very little girl.And so I think I always, I thought I would be in the movies.That's what I thought would happen.
So for a long time, that's what was interesting to me.But when I was about, 15, by then my family was living in Oakland, California, and there was a community theater in a nearby town called Alameda.
And my parents owned a big boarding house that had 50 guests.And I think that I learned everything I ever learned in my life from somebody in the boarding house.One of the people in the boarding house took me to this theater
And I began to volunteer there.And so that was the first time, except for school theater, which I'd always been involved in, that I'd ever been in a theater, theater, as an actor.And we used to go to the, the theater, A little bit.
There wasn't a great deal of, there was a great deal of community theater in the Bay Area then when I was growing up.This was before 1962, but, and then we went to musicals.
I remember seeing South Pacific and thinking in that way that only a, I don't know how old I was, 14 or 15 year old could think how very advanced they were to have those advanced views on, you know, race and things. was congratulating them on that.
And were there specific actors that you saw on the screen that you wanted to emulate or that you tried to be like?
The funny one was when I was a little girl, my grandmother often took me to the cowboy movies and so I really wanted to be Lyle Wagner.I spent a lot of time perfecting my smirk. And then, but no, then after that, I wanted to do what they were doing.
So the first actor that I knew that I wanted to emulate specifically was Lois Smith because I went to see East of Eden and she played the Navia.I'm not sure she had any lines, but I saw that and I knew that that's what I wanted to do.
And I was very lucky that after I came to New York, I met Lois Smith and I could tell her that.
And were your parents supportive of not just your interest, but your desire to do it as a career?
No, I mean, I don't think they ever took it seriously that that's what I was going to do as a career.
I think my father would have liked me to be a lawyer, maybe, though he was quite conservative politically, so he might not have wanted me to be a lawyer. But the person who encouraged me was my older brother.
I had a brother who was 14 years older than I, that I always refer to as my glamorous gay brother.And it was Alan who encouraged me. consciously brought art into the house.He had friends who were actors.
He worked as a stage manager in the theater for a while.He managed a ballet company.He was a great lover of the opera.I think I was always a disappointment to him because I didn't come to love the opera in the way that he did.
But he took my desire to be an actor seriously. And by the time I was in high school, I knew that that's what I wanted to do.
And where did you begin to train professionally in terms of college and all that?And I know you trained in Rome at one point.
Well, that's where I, no, actually, I went to college fully expecting, I went to Stanford and they had a theater department.And I fully expected at the age of 17 to become a theater major, but I didn't.
And that had to do with my boyfriend, who had dropped out of Stanford.And so the only way I could ever see him was at night, and the theater happened at night.And at that time, my boyfriend was more
important than my idea of being in the theater, because I'm not sure I ever believed it was possible.So instead, I studied classical Greek at Stanford.And for the entire time that I was at Stanford, I forgot that I wanted to be an actor.
And then I left that boyfriend and took up with another boyfriend who is the person to whom I am still married.We've been married since 1966, but he and I took a trip, an illicit kind of scandalous trip in college.
And anyway, we went to Mexico and we were coming back from Mexico. And I was supposed to start a graduate program, a master's program in classical Greek.
And as we were coming back, I said, you know, I really don't want to spend my life teaching Greek to prep school boys.And he said to me, what do you want to do?Because we didn't know each other so well yet.
And I said, well, you know, I've always wanted to be an actress.And he said, well, why don't you do that? And so I did something that I can't actually believe I did.
I dropped out of the university and got a job and went to study acting with a man named Larry Bedini.
who had studied at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, and who was a great disciple of the classical Russian teachers, Stanislavski and Botaslavski and all like that.So that's the first real acting I ever did. And I studied with him for about a year.
And during the course of that year, Henry and I got married.And then we moved to Europe.And we lived in Barcelona for about a year and a half.And then we moved to Rome.And both of us had been in Rome before and spoke Italian a little bit.
And so I began to study in Italy, in Rome, with a wonderful teacher. named Alessandro Fersen, who looked like Stanislaus.His family, they were Polish Jews and they had come to Rome.His family had come to Rome at the turn of the 20th century.
He was in university in Rome in the 30s. And he wrote his thesis on anarchism, which was not a really good idea in Mussolini's Italy.And so eventually he had to escape to Switzerland.
And when he came back from Switzerland, he'd always had an interest in the theater.He was fascinated with what it was that made people want to turn into somebody else.
And so he was, for a long time, the artistic director of the Piccolo Teatro di Genova.And then, lucky for me, he opened an acting studio in Rome, which was just down the street from where we lived.
And we had a friend who suggested I go and study there.So I studied with him for almost two years.And now, every once in a while, In New York, I run into people who have studied with him.
He's died now, but it was quite, so that was my, I think that was my real training.And then when I came to New York, I studied with Wynne Handman. for off and on for two or three years.
And then with his most distinguished disciple and my oldest friend in New York, K. Michael Patton.So I studied with K. off and on.
And you mentioned having been trained in the Stanislavski method.And do you feel that you still use that way of thinking for every role that you do?
I suspect I do.I have said this before, the older I get, the more mysterious how this works becomes.And so now,
I start with the text, I guess, and I just do the work that I can control, which is to learn the words and try to figure out what the writer meant.And then to believe that doing that kind of rote work will lead to the character.
I don't actually also, I don't do a lot of sort of outside research because I have found, because I used to do that, that often leads me to think about the character as the character I would have written with that information.And that's not my job.
My job is to bring to life the character that the, playwright has put on the page.And so I guess I've consciously, I've given up doing, for the most part, consciously doing exercises or things like sense memory and all like that.
I guess I believe they're internalized, and that's what happens.And I guess the kind of acting that I find most moving is the kind where you can't see how it's done. And in a way, I believe that it doesn't matter how it's done.
It matters what comes out.
Right.And so when you were in New York early on, how did you end up as the production coordinator at Playwrights Horizons?
Oh, well.I always refer to myself as the staff at Playwrights Horizons.I'd done plays, when I first came to New York, I didn't have, I thought, I thought I was way too old to ever have a career.I was 28.I thought that, you know, it was useless.
But then, but I went to study with Wynne anyway.And I began, I think my first job One of my, I was in a production of A Woman of No Importance.I had a part of No Importance in A Woman of No Importance.I don't even remember how I ever got that job.
And then my next job was in a play by a playwright named Stephen Shea at then the nascent Manhattan Theater Club. And Stevens was a very modernist writer who has now become a physician.And all his characters had letters instead of names.
And in the first play of Stevens, the one at the Manhattan Theater Club, I think I was H. The next play of Stevens I did, directed by Paul Cooper,
was at Playwrights Horizons when it was a project of the YMCA, YMCA, YWCA, anyway, the Y, at the Clark Center. And Bob Moss was the artistic director.And in that play, a play called Jealousy, my letter was B of three.So I thought I was doing better.
And I did a couple of more plays at Playwrights Horizons.
The Clark Center, the Y sold the Clark Center, and that version of Playwrights Horizons ended, and Bob set up an office in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, so that if you wanted to see Bob, you could go and talk to him. And that was in 1975.
And I was going through a rather difficult time personally, so I went to Bob.And I knew that he had just taken possession of one of the old theaters on what is now Theater Row.It was Bob who made that happen.
really, and needed people to help with construction.
And so I went to help with construction, and in the course of helping with construction, I very nearly killed myself and two or three other people by putting a huge old iron radiator down on top of us.
So I went to the office and I said, you know, Bob, I think maybe construction is not where I belong, but I do have one useful skill, which is that I can type. So I became the staff of what became Playwrights Horizons.
And I was there, that was from January of 1975 to August of 1975.And during that time, we did 30 productions of one kind or another, I think. Is that possible?
Anyway, it was very ambitious what we did and all sorts of people came through and I was the, I guess, I don't know what, I was the staff and I helped with the casting and I acted in a few of the plays and then I got, we finished the first season and the person who had been supposed to be in
in charge of, oh, and at the same time that Bob started this theater on Theater Row, he got a grant from the city to run a theater at the Playhouse in the Park in Queens, in Flushing.So we were doing two, we were running these two things.
That theater had another staff person.And,
We ended the season, the person who was supposed to have been doing the money turned out to have been, if not stealing the money, at least, there wasn't very much money to steal, but at least using a great deal of it on taxi cabs and things like that.
So he got fired.And so it was Bob and me, and he had a grant for the next season, and I was offered a job in the replacement cast of a musical called Dance With Me on Broadway.
And I went to Bob, and Bob said, I said, you know, I've been offered this thing.And he said, you should do that, because you want to be an actor.And so I did.And after that, I was on the board of Playwrights Horizons for a long time after that.
But and so I went to be in this early jukebox musical, which consisted of another person who went into it at the time I went into it was Peter Riegert.
And I don't sing or dance at all anymore, didn't very well then, so I made them let me do the acting audition first, and then I sang, you know, eight bars of Duke of Earl or something.
So I didn't have any vocal solos in Dance With Me, and that ran for six months.
Yes, yes.And what was it like to be coming in as a replacement to that show?Were you given a lot of direction by Joel Zwick, I know, as the director and choreographer?
Well, no, Joel, no, I think, no, it was the stage manager, because I'd been hired by the stage manager who had worked for us at Playwrights Horizon.
No, we were told an important thing about Joel, that Joel, because he had been in West Side Story, knew that you could do any kind of choreography if you could count to four.
And so all the choreographic moves were in straight lines and in four beats, and so that's what we did. That was it.We had to learn the steps, and you had to learn the backup.
We sang backup to what I think had been the five most popular songs in maybe 1958, something like that.They were great rock and roll.They were the rock and roll songs I grew up on.And that was it.
It wasn't too hard, it was a little bit catch as catch can.And we had an early automated light board, which was something of a hazard because the guy who ran the lights was stoned all the time and didn't always push the right buttons.
And we were getting into late December, the Christmas season, of 1975, and clearly we were going to close, because hardly anyone was there.
And one day, it might even have been Christmas Day, we were doing our show, and the lights started in the wrong place, and two or three other peculiar things happened.
And some guy stood up in the audience and said, he wanted his money because it was the worst sleep show. in his life and the guys on the stage all got to him before the house staff did.So there was a sort of melee in the back of the theater.
And then soon after, they made us play all through Christmas and New Year's.And I think we closed on something like the 6th of January.
And working mostly. And working mostly off-Broadway rather than on, as you have throughout your career, what do you like about the sort of form of bouncing from one show to another rather than staying in them for a long time?
Is that a preference of yours or just sort of how that works?
It just happened.And in fact, I was in Angels in America.Angels in America, I was in off and on from 1988 to 1994.
from the beginning, from early developmental work in Los Angeles all the way until Ellen and I were the last original cast members to leave it in 1994.So that was six years.I was in Jules Feiffer's Dance With Me in three or four.
productions of it, the original production at the American Place, and then we moved to West Side Arts, and then we moved to Los Angeles, and then I did it in Philadelphia.So that was a long two years, I guess.
And then in Wit, off and on for three years.So, I've had both experiences.The shape of my career is entirely accidental and has nothing to do with it.It wasn't any plan.
And I think because I didn't go to any of the acting schools, I wasn't in anything like the acting company or anything like that that wouldn't have led to classical roles in institutional theaters, because I had no experience of them.
I began doing new plays, and that's what I did for the longest time.And so I didn't, the first time I ever did Shakespeare in public, I was in my 40s or something.
Henry V, it was Doug Hughes who was the director, and I did, I played Mistress Quickly and the Queen of France. And the opening chorus, which was very exciting because it happened at sunset.
And what did you like sort of on that theme about performing outside?
Oh, performing in the park was wonderful.I mean, it also made you feel as though you were part of what we all understood as the theater in New York.And then it was exciting, because there were a couple of hurricanes that year.
So we had to stop, and we realized they'd tell us to get to a safe place, and we understood that it didn't have anything to do with the actors being struck by lightning.
but that the sound equipment was very vulnerable to lightning and so you had to take your mic off.
And so an early play that you worked on was Just Say No off-Broadway, the Larry Kramer play, and what was it like with him?
Oh, that was wonderful.That was a wonderful experience.I've had a long relationship with David S.B.Ornstein.I've done lots and lots and lots of plays with David.And Just Say No was one of them.And we got...
It was a very complicated production, but all kinds of people were in it.It had an amazing cast.And then there was Larry, of course, and it got a terrible review, a perfectly awful review from Mel Gusso.And so Larry did this amazing thing.
He wrote this thing, it was like Luther's, you know, points, and he wrote it down.He put it on the bulletin board of the theater.And then he walked over to Mel Gossow's house and knocked on the door and gave it to him.
Refuting everything that Mel Gossow had said.Among other things, he'd been nervous that we'd been unkind to Alfred Bloomingdale. was an awful person and deserved you to be bad to him.
And Larry insisted that everything that we said in the play was true about Nancy Reagan and all because his brother was a lawyer and his brother had told him the parts that were true and that they couldn't ever come, that everything he said politically in the play was true.
Nobody ever came after us politically.It was very exciting.And Larry, I... Larry was an extraordinary man.Brave, brave in all possible ways.Outrageous and angry and fierce and did so much to make the world a better place.
And that story sort of brings me to ask you, what do you think of reviews of your own work, and how much attention do you pay to them?
Well, I've stopped.Laurence Olivier wrote an autobiography, which is strange.It's one of those sort of slightly disturbing theatrical autobiographies that is a little more revealing about the person than I think they meant to be.
So he turns out not to be maybe your favorite person, but he did say about reviews that you should never read them because the bad ones are devastating, and the good ones are never good enough.And I think that that's absolutely true.
Before I began to take his advice, I did read them, and two of them One I like particularly for all the dependent clauses in the review.It was a review of me playing Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello.And it was in a paper in New Jersey.
It was at the Paper Mill Playhouse that I was doing this.And the review said, Kathleen Chalfant is a bit, if anything, too pretty to play Eleanor Roosevelt, never a beauty, even in her youth.
And it seemed to me that that succeeded in doing harm to everyone mentioned in the review.And all you could think was how horrifying it would have been to Eleanor Roosevelt to hear that.
And a bit, if anything, I think maybe the definition of damning with faint praise.
Oh, and then the other one, my first, my favorite review ever was the first real review I ever got in New York was written by Michael Feingold in the Village Voice about a play directed by Bob Moss called Cowboy Pictures.
And this is what Michael said.Kathleen Chalfant, transcends the direction as the ferret-faced neighbor woman.And we became quite good friends, Michael and I, after that.And one day, I said, Michael.And he said, Kathy, that wasn't you.
That was the character. And there were a number of, I guess my most damning John Simon review was Kathleen Chalfant, it was in production of Great Expectations.No, not Great Expectations.No, it was another Dickens.
But I don't remember, I forget what it was.Anyway, it said Kathleen Chalfant is not very good in six roles.
But I wish, there are parts of me that wish I'd read Laurence Olivier before I had those words, because of course you can't remember the good ones.
Nothing, there's a sort of a schwa of, yeah, well, any club that would have me as a member, I wouldn't want to join, so.
Sometimes years later, I read them because it's interesting to know, and sometimes you get, even when people say, oh no, this one's fine, you can absolutely read, there's usually a toad somewhere in the middle of it that will leap out and get you that everybody doesn't get.
So it's very, very seldom that there is a review without a toad in it, even the good ones.
And so how did M. Butterfly happen for you?Oh, God.
M. Butterfly was, that was... The only reason I got my part in M. Butterfly was Rose Gregorio's understudy, Mrs. Husted's understudy. And the only reason I got that part was that I was a friend of Franny Stern Higgins.
And Franny had been in Equus and she actually liked John Dexter.She was one of three people on the face of the earth who liked John Dexter.And she wasn't afraid of John and she liked him and cared for him and he for her.
So she recommended that I get the part.So I got, I think I had to audition for it or something.Anyway, I got the part.And the ensuing experience was one of the most horrifying experiences I've ever had because it was like watching a car crash.
Not the production itself, because what John did, he made a machine that anyone could, you know, that worked.It didn't actually matter who was in it.But he was awful.
destructive, sort of on the first day, he divided the company into the people who were on the bus and the people who were off the bus.And I, because of Franny, was always in a kind of middling position.And there were people who were destroyed by it.
And who have never, to this day, recovered.And then the bad thing was that some of the people who were on the bus would all of a sudden find themselves off the bus.And they were like, didn't know quite what to do. So I was in it.
Our out-of-town tryouts were at the National Theater.Where were we, at the Kennedy Center?No, we weren't at the Kennedy Center.We were at the other big theater in D.C.then.
And we were coming into New York, and I just couldn't bear it anymore watching.
And one of the people whom he spent the most time humiliating was Rose, when he wasn't humiliating Brad Wong, who he tried to destroy, but he didn't know who he was messing with.So two weeks later, before you had to give a month's notice.
Two weeks before we opened, I put in my notice, and I had to stay on two weeks, because I didn't, if it hadn't succeeded, it wasn't at all clear that it was going to succeed, I didn't want it to look like I was leaving the sinking ship, but I really had to leave.
So I put in my notice, and on opening night, I was leaving the theater.Was it on opening night?It was after?Yeah, it was on opening night.I was leaving the theater and John was, for some reason, backstage.I don't know why he was backstage.
And I passed him and he looked at me and he said, traitor.And I had to stay on for two weeks and then I left.I made lots of,
friends in it because, you know, David Wong is a friend and David Wong's current wife, Kathy, was the other female understudy in the show. So she became friends, and she and David were beginning their romance then.
And then there were some glamorous moments, because it was pretty glamorous.So once we were, for some reason, everybody, was it Mr. Chow's? And Jean-Michel was there with Lauren Hutton.It was not long before he died.
So anyway, that was quite something.And I've never, it was the only time
I've ever had been in a circumstance in which one of the great, I don't know what to not, monsters is a bad thing to call it, but one of the great scary, those kind of scary English directors, and it was awful, awful.
And were there ever roles that you turned down, and what would make you turn down a role?
I've turned down things if I don't think I'll be good at it, if I don't have any connection to the character, even if I can understand why somebody would have asked me to do it.
And if I see something and I know somebody else would be ever so much better at it, then I think they should do it instead of me.That seems selfless, but it's actually only respecting, I think, respecting the work, in a way.
I have turned down television shows, or I mean, necessarily, I didn't get them, but for political reasons, because I wasn't in sympathy with the politics of the,
of the work, and I once turned down a little part in a Woody Allen movie because I thought that he behaved so appallingly in the audition that as soon as I came out of the audition,
I called my agent and said, I don't think I will get this part, but should I get this part, I want you to say that I would, because of the way Woody Allen behaved in this audition, I wouldn't ever be in any work of his.And I did get the part.
And I did turn it down. But my agents asked if they didn't have to say terrible things to the casting director, which was probably wrong.I should have stuck to my guns.
And so you mentioned Angels in America before.And I know that was around this time that we're discussing now.And how did it first come into your life, the first readings of it?
Well, it first came into my life one spring One night in spring of 1988, Tony, Henry and my husband and I ran into Tony on the Upper West Side.Feels to me like it was across the street from Lincoln Center.I don't know why.
I don't know if we'd been to a play.Tony and I knew each other because I'd worked a lot at the New York Theater Workshop before that, and he was the Associate Artistic Director.And so he stopped me on the street and he said, I've written a play.
I have a part for you. And I smiled sweetly and thought, well, that's nice.So it turned out that that was true.So in 1988, in the fall of 1988, October of 1988, oh, that was another thing about being in Just Say No.
We were watching Michael Dukakis lose. It seemed fairly clear that he was going to lose the presidential election.And so Just Say No was a place for people to come together and mourn our upcoming loss.So in any case,
I was doing Just Say No, and I got a call from the New York Theatre Workshop saying you're doing this reading of this new play at the Macmillan building at so-and-so a time, and could you be in it?I said, sure.
So I showed up, and it turned out to be Angels in America, and I was a little bit late. So they handed me the script and Tony said, I want you to be the rabbi, the doctor, Ethel Rosenberg and the Mormon mother.Okay.
And of course, the rabbi is the first person to speak in Angels in America.And somehow out of my Christmas and Easter Episcopalian mouth came the rabbi.Hello and good morning. I am the Rebbe Isidor Chemeritz for the Bronx Home for Aged Hebrews.
So out came the Rebbe and all those other people.And then a while later, there was another reading of it.And I said, oh, Tony, could I read those same parts?And he said, that's the part.Okay, all right.Fine, fine, fine.So, and then,
There were parallel developmental tracks, one in New York and one in Los Angeles.And I got folded into the law.I mean, actually, there was one in New York and one in San Francisco, and then Oscar went to San Francisco.
the taper, and he took the project with him.So the developmental work, most of the developmental work after that, after the spring of 1989, happened in Los Angeles at the taper.And so at that reading, there were were Ellen.
Ellen had already taken over the part of the angel.Stephen, of course, because the play had been written for Stephen.And me, of the people who ended up being in the original company.And ever after that, We all came with the dinner.
Stephen always, because the play was written for him.And I somehow hung on.There was an awful lot of blood on the sand.
But there's a wonderful book about the making of angels in America called The World Only Spins Forward, which is well worth reading and is pretty accurate.
So for the next few years, we all joked that that was our day job at Angels in America, and then we'd just go off and do other things and then come back to it.So that was, you know, we did it, we did that in the fall of 89, 90, I don't know, we did,
a real sort of production of Millennium that we used to call Mr. Toad's Wild Ride because it was a strange set, but pieces that moved in and out, it wasn't entirely successful.We were always a little bit bedeviled.
The set was always kind of an issue for Angels in America, except the one in Los Angeles when we did the taper, which was glorious.
So yeah, so we did that, and then eventually, it was in the contract that the first full production of the play had to be at the theater in San Francisco where it started.
And that production was directed by David, by David S. Bjornsson, and was a real poor theater version of Angels in America, and in many ways, certainly the most beautiful production of Millennium.
And we did Perestroika as a five or six, depending on which parts we left in, staged reading.And then we did the whole play at the taper.
And by that time, Frank Rich had seen the play at the National Theater and had finally decided, you know, there'd been all this talk and won all these prizes and everything, but nobody would come and see it from New York.
But they did go to London and see it and thought, whoa.So then he came and saw the production at the Taper.And some of us survived his review.
and got to New York, and then George was hired to direct it, and George Wolfe, and it took five of the eight of us who were in the company by that time.And the people he hired were Jeffrey, Marsha, and David Marshall Grant.
Those were the three people he hired.And two of those hires were brilliant.And David was wonderful.And in a way, David held the company together.And David always knew everybody.So, you know, if anybody famous came, he always knew they were.
They knew David and he was wonderful. The person, Jeff King, who is the person for whom the part of Joe was written, was the best Joe always.And I don't, George didn't ever believe in Joe.You have to believe that Joe loved Harper.
And so, and Tony got angry with Joe in a way, so you realize that Joe is the only character in the play who's not forgiven. So anyway, that was a whole, I mean, for a while, it seemed like that was my life and Ellen's life.
We were together, we were the deputy.The two of us together were the deputy.It took two of us to be the deputy.And then after, then we stopped being the deputy and did David become the deputy?I think David became the deputy.
And how did you find that the experience was different under the direction of Oscar Eustace versus George C. Wolfe?And did you prefer one over the other?
That George, George was a wonderful director and protected the show.He protected the company because there was an awful lot of pressure all the time.
This is huge production we were doing and in two parts and hours and hours and everybody we lived at the theater you know and we'd rehearse for hours and hours and then we then finally we got Millennium on and we just got Millennium on and you have to rehearse Paris Troika so everybody was always living there and all the
People were nervous and they'd march back and forth in the aisle behind the seats at the Walter Kerr.And George protected us from them and protected himself by sitting in the middle of the house, surrounded by people so they couldn't get to him.
And he knew, George knows how to put on a show. And so, and he knows what to say, is this great thing that all wonderful directors have, which is first of all, to know when to give a note, when the person can hear it.
And also, if you have to tell somebody the one thing to make them incandescent on the stage, he knows how to do that.It was a wonderful experience.
And did you have the sense that it would be the phenomenon that it was from the very first reading?Or when would you say that that sort of developed?
We didn't know that it would be the phenomenon that it was.But we did know that it should have been.It should always have been.I mean, that's what it was very, very frustrating to be doing all this work.
understand, and Tony was smart to do it, we were all mad he gave it the rights to the National Theater while we were still, but he was right.Because had that not happened, it's quite possible that the play would never have come to New York.
The New York press wouldn't come out to the West Coast to see it.Until they went to London and saw it. And the London production, I never, I wasn't a big fan of the London production.I saw it in the summer.It was awfully sentimental to me.
And what would you give as sort of advice to people who are trying to remount this show, which I know it does happen that it gets done a lot.
I wouldn't dare to, say to them, to give them advice.I mean, people have tried all different possible ways to do it.
It seems to me that, I say this, Tony doesn't much like me to say this, but the thing about Angels in America, the thing about Tony's writing is that it's, besides everything else, beautiful.And it's beautiful in the way that Mozart is beautiful.
So it seems to me, and it seduces the audience by its beauty, and its wit is part of its beauty.It seems to me that subverting that virtue is a mistake, and people do.
And then the other thing I would say is that it is a quintessentially American play.And so, you know, I think it's good when Americans do it.
And what was the experience like?I'd love to know more personally of being at the center of this huge hit on Broadway and being nominated for a Tony and all of that.
Well, it was, I mean, it was, because we were there all the time for years, for two or three years, it was our life. And it was full of drama.I mean, there was all kinds of drama, all kinds of backstage drama, all sorts of things going on.
We had people coming in and out, understudies coming in and out.But it was our life.
And it was a particularly glamorous time on Hollywood, I mean, on Broadway, because people had decided, every once in a while, they decided it's the 100th anniversary of Broadway.
out of the blue, so it was decided that we were some big anniversary of Broadway.So there were parties at Sardi's, and we met everyone, and everyone came to see the play.So it was very exciting.
And it was also very moving to see its effect on audiences, because Once it got to Broadway, you know, Broadway is sort of like a theme park and people don't always know what the play is about.
They come, it's on Broadway, it's a big hit on Broadway and so you should go.And there would be people who didn't know what they were gonna see.
And then there was the phenomenon that was quite common of people inviting their parents to the marathon and coming out between the shows to their parents.So that happened a lot.
Sometimes, Ellen would always say this, you would see single women, the kind of women that in the old, you know, in older literature used to be called spinsters.They were streaming down their faces.
And you sort of knew that they were the aunt who was the confidant of their gay person in their family.
I think since it was the only show about gay Mormons, that was long before the Book of Mormon, every gay Mormon in America came to the play backstage, and many of them said to me, you are exactly like my mother.You know, the art, the beginning.So,
You know, it was quite something.And then to watch different people play, Ellen and I said that we would leave together.And we were, as I said, the last people in the original company to leave.
And I would love to know, with a play like Angels in America or The Year of Magical Thinking, which I know you did recently that deals with such serious subjects, what is the process like of sort of separating yourself from the emotions of the play and managing to have a personal life separate from that?
Well, I'm not sure during the years of Angels in America we didn't have a personal life because we were doing the play all the time.And you couldn't quite sort of separate yourself from the emotions of the whole thing that was going on.
I played lots of different parts in Angels in America so that as an actor, you participate in the emotions of your character, not the thing itself, necessarily.
The really interesting comparison for me has been the difference between wit and the year of magical thinking.Because in a way, the issue is the same. Vivian is deluded.
She believes, in the same way that Joan Didion believed, that if you can get the words right, if you can follow the rules and learn the language, you can beat it.Right.Fix it.But what happened at the end of Wit was that the character
found, understood love, and so the very end of the play was freeing and triumphant.So that's the emotion that I came away with.I know that isn't the emotion that the audience came away with.
The year of magical thinking is much more difficult, and it's also difficult because I will be, on Saturday, 78 years old. And my husband is 83.
And we are both, so far, very healthy and can still do most of the things that we've always been able to do.But we're old.And the year of magical thinking is about, they weren't as old as when it happened, weren't as old as we are.
But what it means, and Henry and I have been married since 1966, so, it is a little bit more difficult for me to separate, particularly when I'm doing it, when I'm telling the story to the people.
First of all, because it isn't triumphant, because, you know, she's left at the end, and the comfort that she finds is basically in geology. as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.And so, it's a different experience.
I just did it on Tuesday, and I'm going to do it again next Tuesday.And it was hard.
Oh, yes.What do you enjoy about the art of solo plays, one-woman plays, and holding an audience almost differently in that way, having the sole responsibility?
I've done quite a number of them.I guess what I like, the ones I've done, is that true, all of them?Yeah.Have all involved direct address to the audience.And so that's interesting and a challenge to get
to establish a communication with the people so that what happens is the audience becomes the second, in an active way, the second character.
I believe that the audience is always an active character in the theater because the event that gets made is something that happens, I often say, between the performer and the audience.
And it's something in the middle that is the thing that you're getting at.So that you're all doing it together.It's lonely a little bit. one-person shows.Little bit, you know, you're just all by yourself in the dressing room.
Right.And I'd like to ask about a play you did with a smaller cast, not a one-woman play, but a smaller cast, which was the Vagina Monologues off-Broadway, and what it was like to work with Nell Carter, who I know you did it with.
I did it with, I did, yeah, I've done a couple of versions.I've done the vagina monologues a few times.And I've known Eve, she's, I'm sorry, that's wrong.
She's now called Vee for a very long time, almost since not long after Henry and I came to New York. because of political work.So it was great to do the vagina monologues.Nell was a little bit challenging because it wasn't work that she was used to.
And she also, she had small children at the time and was often distracted. by them, not when she was performing, but she seemed not a happy person.
And what do you think it is that made that play so successful and able to run for so long?
Because it was true. And you discover there never were very many men in the audience.But I think female-identified people or people who possess vaginas make up a little more than 50% of the population.So there was a huge audience. And V was right.
Those interviews were accurate.And that was important stuff to say.
Right.And you mentioned that you knew V earlier on from doing political work and everything together.And what has it been like to combine your careers as sort of an activist and an actress and to balance that?
Well, it's very kind of people to call me an activist.There are people who are activists.V is an activist.I'm glad that I've been able to use
the work I do and some of the skills that I've learned in it and whatever small notoriety I have to move forward political issues that are important to me.
I think I come from a generation that believed that we live in a community together, in a society together, and we all have certainly we have responsibilities to hold up the community.Oh yes, that's very true.
And you mentioned earlier on that singing and dancing is not really your forte or something you enjoy doing as much, but I know you did work on Bloomer Girl at Encores!around this time, and
I did.I did.I've been tricked into this a few times.And I've done a couple of workshops of musicals, and they're always saying, well, you know, the character doesn't sing.
But when a musician says the character doesn't sing, that's different from when the character not singing.
People who are musical, my son and his wife and our grandchildren on that side are all the kinds of musicians where music just sort of comes out of the ends of their hands.
don't understand that whatever it is that makes you unable to do that, whether it's lack of any gifts at all or terror, is absolutely paralyzing.And it just it just doesn't come out.
And it's more trouble than it's worth to try to get somebody to be good enough to hold their own than to hire somebody who can actually sing.She didn't sing in Bloomer Girl, but I did have to dance.I danced.I mean, I could dance okay.I could dance.
I don't know if I can still dance okay, but I could dance okay. And it's fun.There's nothing more fun than being in a musical.Because you're just surrounded by music all the time and by all these amazing people who can do this incredible stuff.
It's great.I wish I had been a musician.I wish I were a musician.
And I know two of those readings that you did of musicals were Finding Neverland and First Daughter Suite.And I'd love to ask about those and what it was like to be sort of part of the process.
Well, Finding Neverland, as you notice, they replaced me with Carolee Carmelo.So I said to them, when I walked into the room, because it was clear that she had to sing along and then she had one song.
And then when Carolee, when she got more songs, I said, you know, you should hire somebody who can sing.You need actually a musician here.And Harvey Weinstein was the producer, you know.
So Harvey was there and I knew him because I'd made a little movie with his wife. So anyway, it was as usual, it was fun.It was great to be in the room, and it was great to be surrounded by all these people who sang.
And when I had to sing my two bars, I was terrified.And it just wasn't worth it.And so they did replace me with Carol Leigh, which was a good thing.First Daughter Suite was a little bit harder because Michael John really wanted me to be in it.
And Oscar fired me, basically, because I couldn't see.The character didn't need to see.But it's okay, then they would have had to hire, anyway, but it's okay.Anyway, Oscar, it was Oscar's decision. And I loved doing that.
It was great working with Michael John.And those women, again, just being in the room with those women singing, it was, you know, I would have paid them, so.
And you mentioned that Angels in America is a role you did for a long time, and there are others.And one of those I know is A Delicate Balance.And what appeals to you about that play and that role?
Oh, it's so wonderful.I mean, first of all, I was enormously flattered that Edward asked me to do it three times.It was a, I mean... He was something, Edward.
And I knew Edward only toward the, I mean, I knew Edward in the neighborhood, because we'd run into each other in the West Village all the time, but I knew Edward only as a colleague, only in the later part of his life.
And he wasn't quite as scary as he'd been before.And he, and I, love The Delicate Balance.Of the three productions of it that I did, I think the one at Yale was my favorite, the one that Mr. Bundy directed.
And in a way, he was wonderful to direct it because he knew that world.I really loved that production.
Edward saw the final dress rehearsal, and he said, in his way that he said things, he said, that was the best final dress rehearsal of any play of mine I've ever seen.I'm not sure exactly what he meant by that. It was a wonderful play to do.
And Ellen and I, it was fun.Ellen and I did two of those three productions together.I would like to have had a shot at Claire.
And was there ever a character that you felt was especially hard to find for you as an actress to?
Well, my favorite character that was hard to find for me as an actress was Ronald Reagan.In Sarah Ruhl's passion play, I played three parts.I played Queen Elizabeth I, Hitler, and Ronald Reagan.
And I had very little trouble with Queen Elizabeth I, very little trouble with Hitler.
But I couldn't, and I was the, and it was, I know what it was, it was my politics, because as far as I'm concerned, Ronald Reagan is the reason we're in the state we are politically now.But anyway.
I was the only person I knew, including my husband, who doesn't do impressions, who couldn't do a Ronald Reagan impression.And I would try, I couldn't get it.And so I watched endless, endless Ronald Reagan things on YouTube.
And I finally understood the thing, which was while I took quite a dim view of Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan thought Ronald Reagan was swell.And somehow once I got that, then everybody liked my Ronald Reagan better than anybody else.
That was a time when it was important to do research.I had to do research because I just couldn't do it.
And another play that I'd be curious to know if it involved some research on your end was a recent play you did, A Woman of the World at 59 East 59th Street.
And when you're getting into sort of a very specific period of time like that and a specific character, what was that process like?
That was an example of a circumstance in which that it wasn't helpful to do research. I did a little, and then I realized, again, because the job was to do the play that was written.
And there were quite a few views of Mabel, different points of view about Mabel.And so it would have been possible to write two or three different plays.And I thought the play that was written was wonderful, and I wanted to do that.
So I stopped doing research.
And I know that was coming sort of up on before the pandemic, but what were you working on when the quarantine actually happened?
I was doing a whole bunch of little things, because I worked every day, so odd.And I got COVID in the middle of that.I had COVID, the fever of 103, and at home for two days, and then I went back to work.But I was working.I did a little movie in Ohio.
And then I did four quartets at UCLA in California.
And then I was working on various sort of the ongoing project was the Royal Family Productions production of Woman on Fire, which was a feminist political cabaret, which ended up being a super spreader event.
We had six of us caught COVID and I was working on the tectonics and there were blueberries.And we did a whole bunch of workshops and that too was a whole bunch of people got sick then, got sick around it.And that was early,
I was doing, the Women on Fire, we'd canceled, the lockdown canceled our last two performances of Women on Fire.I think we'd, oh no, no.
The very last thing I did was a big reading of And There Were Blueberries at the New York Theater Workshop that ended at four o'clock in the afternoon on March 15th.So I think we might've been the last production in New York City.
Wow.And what is that play about for those who don't know?
It's a play based upon photographs and memoirs of people who worked at Auschwitz about the ordinariness of the workforce, you know, how it happened. how it could happen.People just worked.People worked in the office.People went for picnics.
There were blueberries growing in the fields around it.It's just devastating.They just did it.I couldn't do it.I forget why.They did it in California, in San Diego, I think. not so long ago.It will probably come.
It's a big, it's a big tectonic project.
So what's the experience of the pandemic like for you?I know you did a virtual play with Elliot Gould.
I did, I did a whole bunch of, I worked quite a lot during the pandemic.And I did a movie, I did, you know, M. Night Shyamalan's Old. in October and early November of 2020.I had to vote absentee from the Dominican Republic.I did
A lot, I did the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, doing a huge Shakespeare on tape production of contemporary playwrights' adaptations of Shakespeare, or translations, really.And we did Ellen's Pericles.And that was exciting, because there were
It's a great big play, and we were doing it not on Zoom, but on whatever that fancier thing is.But they were radio plays, and so we all had to set up studios in our closets.
And we would communicate on Zoom, so you'd get to see what was in everybody's closet, how big people's closets were.
I did a documentary, I took part in a documentary of the production of Four Quartets, the Pam Tanowitz Dance Company version of Four Quartets.That was another one of those huge things.
They delivered film equipment and then explained to us, to Henry and me, how to use it. Then we were interviewed.Anyway, I think I did a couple of those.So I worked quite a lot.
I grew to pray for the end of Zoom theater, which is not, I think, a successful artistic form.But it did what it needed to do at the time.
And are there roles as of now that you would like to do coming up or?
Well, I mean, there are roles that I've missed because I'm too old.I'm too old to do any of the Chekhov's and I never, I was supposed to do the Cherry Orchard and then that production was canceled.I'm really too old to do Mary Tyrone.
I was supposed to do Mary Tyrone at the arena and they forgot. which was very peculiar, I found, and that they'd done Mary Tyrone.They had forgotten to ask me.
So no, I mean, now I'm happy and sort of amazed at the things that turn up, so that the year of magical thinking has turned up.I have a part that is a gift from Yvonne Rainer in her dance piece, Hells a-Poppin', in which I rant.
for two and a half minutes.The dancers have to work very hard, I don't.And so that happened at New York Live Arts at Bill T. Jones' place, and then we're going to Baden-Baden, and then to the Hirshhorn, and then maybe to Brussels.
What else is coming up?I have a... I think that's about it.There probably will be more performances of The Year of Magical Thinking kind of floating around.Oh, yes.I'm glad.That's, yes, that's, I'm very glad about that.
And then the final question I'd love to ask you is, with such a wonderful career, what advice would you give to somebody just starting out?
First of all, do it.Give it a try.But you have to give it a try wholeheartedly.You have to believe in yourself.Because if you don't believe in yourself, if you hedge your bets,
then you can't, because the purpose of this is communication, to make community.And if you're not sure you should be doing it, why should anybody else believe you? So you have to take the chance, however scary it is.
There comes a moment when you just have to jump off.Do everything you need to make yourself feel secure.
Be able to do the lines backwards and forwards and upside down and standing on your head in your sleep and all those things if you need to have that security.
Take all the classes you need to take to make yourself feel that you're prepared to do the work. and then do it.
Oh yes, that's great advice.Well, thank you so much for doing this.It's been an honor to talk to you.
Oh, Charles, it's been a joy to talk to you.Thank you so much for doing this.And I presume you do know, but you are very, very, very good at this.Thank you.Thank you.It's been a great pleasure.
listeners thank you for tuning in and remember to come back next time when i will be joined by broadway actress and director daisy prince daisy prince appeared on broadway in merrily we roll along as well as in the follies concert at lincoln center and the petrified prince at the public theater
As a director, she has spearheaded the Jason Robert Brown musicals Songs for a New World, The Last Five Years, and The Connector.You won't want to miss that episode, so make sure to tune back in for that, and thanks for listening!
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