Heart of 'Glass'; Jessica
Lange returns to Broadway for the classic memory play 'The
Glass Menagerie'--and rethinks some memories of her own
by Sean Smith
Source: Newsweek
Date: 3/28/05
On this Sunday afternoon in this dressing room at the Barrymore
Theatre, there are yellow tulips on the table, and Jessica
Lange, shoeless, curled into a soft-green easy chair. "I'm
often my own worst enemy," she says. "I make weird
decisions: I say no to things I should say yes to. I work
when I shouldn't and don't when I should." She laughs.
"I can't say it's been the best-designed career, but,
you know, usually the decisions have been made for some emotional
reason." She leans her head back and exhales. "I
really hesitated before doing this."
"This" is a revival of Tennessee
Williams's classic family drama, "The Glass Menagerie,"
and when it opens on Broadway this week, those yellow tulips
in Lange's dressing room will, no doubt, be drowning in red
roses. Lange plays the Southern matriarch Amanda Wingfield--a
single mother of adult children who's desperately trying to
marry off her unstable daughter before it's too late, as well
as prevent her son from fleeing the family altogether. Lange
has already earned standing ovations from preview audiences.
"Here's what I didn't want to do with Amanda," Lange
says, rising from her chair. She crosses the room to her makeup
table and picks up a published version of the play. "Williams
describes her perfectly, but someone writing the notes here
describes her as..." She scans the text on the back cover.
"Here it is: 'Amanda Wingfield is a faded, tragic remnant
of Southern gentility'." She looks up from the cover
in mock horror, and laughs. "I didn't want to be a faded
remnant ! She's a life force!"
It's both easy and impossible to believe that
it's been almost 30 years since Lange made her film debut
as the beast's beauty in "King Kong." Easy, because
her body of work is so impressive--Oscar-winning roles in
"Tootsie" and "Blue Sky," nominations
for her portrayals of actress Frances Farmer in "Frances"
and of singer Patsy Cline in "Sweet Dreams," among
others--but impossible because the architecture of that face,
that smoke-stained voice, still, at 55, inspire the same sensual
rush. "She's always had that," says director Sydney
Pollack, who cast her in "Tootsie." "She's
got an aura of privacy on screen. She's got a confidence,
a sense of quiet. She's not available to every Tom, Dick and
Harry, you know what I mean?" In recent years, Lange
has transferred those qualities from the screen to the stage.
"I don't have any bitterness about it, but when any actress
hits her 50s, the film work starts to thin out," Lange
says. "It's just the natural order of things. I had a
great run. I got as much out of it as I could ever have imagined
or wished for."
She's not settling for second best on the boards,
either. She has previously tackled two of Williams's other
great heroines, Maggie in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"
and Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire." "I've
always been attracted to characters that have a certain juxtaposition
of feminine frailty and iron will," Lange says. No wonder.
After starring with her in the erotic thriller "The Postman
Always Rings Twice," Jack Nicholson famously described
Lange as "a delicate fawn crossed with a Buick."
Countless men have been captivated by that
combination, but Lange has been as discriminating romantically
as she has been professionally. She's been involved with choreographer
Bob Fosse, dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, and, for 22 years now,
writer/actor/director Sam Shepard. Quite a list. "They
have been interesting, no doubt about it," Lange says,
laughing. "I love the company of men--I always have--and
the crazier the better, I guess. I've always been drawn to
poets, artists and madmen. Sometimes all three in one."
She and Baryshnikov have a daughter, 24, and
Lange and Shepard have a 19-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old
son. "The main thing in my life is mothering," Lange
says. Motherhood was the reason she initially said no to "The
Glass Menagerie"--and ultimately the reason she said
yes. For years, the show's producer had been after Lange to
play Amanda. The actress didn't want to uproot her family
from Minnesota to New York. But there was another reason,
too. "I still didn't know how to play this character,"
she says. "I wasn't sure what I could bring to it that
a thousand other actresses hadn't already explored."
What finally unlocked it, Lange says, "is that I started
to think of my mother, and how heroic she had always been."
You can read hundreds of stories about Lange
and find almost nothing about her mother, who died six years
ago. She was, Lange emphasizes, nothing like the domineering
Amanda on the surface, but at a deeper level, she says, "there's
an emotional valor, a dignity and elegance of character that
connect them. My mother was extremely proud, and a tremendous
mystery. She was a great mother, you couldn't imagine a better
mother, but there was a whole side of her that was so private."
Even now, Lange seems to find it difficult to talk about her.
Her words come more slowly. "When you're young, you have
no curiosity about your parents, do you? You never come home
and ask your mother what she's thinking, or how she's feeling.
Maybe some children do, but..." She pauses. "I have
tremendous remorse that I never did."
"The Glass Menagerie" has given Lange
a way to explore that relationship, and the one with her children.
"Sometimes I'm sitting here getting ready and I can actually
see that lineage--grandmother, mother, me, daughter, granddaughter."
She leans her head back into the chair. "A role like
this is just thrilling. It's this amazing exploration of loneliness,
loss, love, and as you find ways to connect to that, it becomes
about your history, your despair, your joy." And, in
the hands of a great actress, ours.
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