Jessica Lange's haunting role in Mother Play, like so much of her work, is one only she could perform. - MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Sitting in a chair next to a window in a break room at the Hayes Theater, where she’s rehearsing Mother Play, the new work by Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive), Jessica Lange has a regal presence and a storybook narrator’s voice. There’s a subdued gravitas to the way she tells her own tale: She was a hippie intellectual from rural Minnesota who went off to Paris and New York to study mime and dance and figure herself out. Despite having no money, no industry connections, and almost no formal training as an actress, she landed the lead role of Dwan in the 1976 King Kong, played her as a daffy sexpot, made the cover of Time, and got pilloried by critics. She’s still brutal on herself and her work, delivering the sorts of scathing assessments you would expect to hear from the many fearsome women she has played over the past half-century. She also keeps challenging herself, even though, at 74, she has nothing to prove.
MZH: Were you apprehensive about being on Broadway for the first time in 1992, when you did A Streetcar Named Desire with Alec Baldwin as Stanley?
JL: Oh, I should have been. I should have thought about this a lot instead of saying "yes" to Blanche DuBois. I mean, I really opened myself up to being crucified. I know I should never say this, but I didn't have the kind of director I needed for my first time onstage in a big Broadway theater in something like that. I needed a lot of help, even in terms of understanding what it means to project beyond the footlights.
MZH: What do you get from stage acting that you can't get from movies?
JL: The main thing for me is that moment when you step onstage and it's like you've boarded a train and it's going to go, no matter what. There are no stops. And that is thrilling. I just wish I had been better prepared for the experience of playing Blanche. I knew I could play her, but when I signed up, there was a lot I didn't understand about theater at the time. I pretty much drove myself mad because there was no separation. Blanche was there all the time.
MZH: "There," meaning inside your head?
JL: Yeah, through the whole thing, long after the run ended.
MZH: Tell me about Mother Play, which is built around a series of five evictions.
JL: Part of the reason I immediately agreed to do this play, besides being knocked out by it, was the idea of doing a new play. Nobody had ever presented me with that possibility before-to actually create the character. That whole process is fascinating because we're still making adjustments, which of course you don't do with Eugene O'Neill! It's a moveable feast. Also, the idea of playing a character who ages from her 30s to 80 was incredibly interesting because it's not the same as doing something on film where they put on makeup. When I did the older version of Edith Beale in HBO's Grey Gardens in 2009, I spent four hours in the morning with people pasting on all these prosthetics to make me look like I was 78 years old or something. How do you bring a character from 30 to 80 onstage? With the spirit or the energy level? And externally, with the voice, the body language? How do you play somebody in their 30s? Talk faster? I think there would be a completely different energy to it, and maybe you'd even [she raises the pitch of her voice to make it girlish] move it into a head voice, rather than [throatily, scratchily] drop it way down from years of sorrow.
Are they going to do anything with lighting or sound to convey the passage of time?
Without giving too much away, yeah, there will be cinematic properties to it.
Cont’d.