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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