LANGE OPENED LAST NIGHT IN "MOTHER PLAY" ON BROADWAY. BELOW I WRITE ABOUT THE NIGHT 30 YEARS AGO WHEN SHE WON THE OSCAR - AND MY SAD HEART.
KEVIN SESSUMS APR 26, 2024
Paula Vogel’s Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions has opened at the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway in a Second Stage Theatre production directed by Tina Landau. It stars Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, and has received a slew of raves - especially for Lange. I will be in New York from June 14th - 20th and have a ticket to see its last scheduled performance at its matinee on June 16th, the afternoon of the Tony Awards. I have been lucky to have seen Lange in all her previous Broadway appearances in three of the greatest female roles in the American theatre canon: Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, and Mary Tyrone in Long Days Journey into Night. She was magnificent in all of them, but this is the first time she has been able to create a role in a play.
Movie stars, whose faces find the light that longs to find the facial planes that make each, illumined, less plain, know also how to stay incongruously simple so that little snippets of simplicity can then be enlarged, arranged; screen performances are segmental until edited together into a whole after actors have finished doing their jobs. The performances that ultimately result are both static yet, if all the ingredients artistically coalesce, ever stirring having been technologically stirred together. Few movie stars and great screen actors (not always the same) can translate that transitory weigh-station scene-by-scene beat-by-beat mode of recorded acting onto the rigorous evanescence of the stage. Not Lange. She’s a stage creature. She knows not only how to embody a character but also how to live within her own body on a theatre stage and sustain an arc of a characterization without a director calling, “Cut.” She rhythmically rearranges her artistry from beat-to-beat to a symphonic whole.
I wrote a cover story on Lange for Vanity Fair thirty years ago - 29 to be precise, precision also a hallmark of Lange’s artistry - that conflated with her winning her Oscar for Best Actress for Blue Sky directed by Tony Richardson. Our paths have crossed often over the years. I am friendly with her daughter Hannah who was an upstate New York neighbor of mine when I lived up there for five years and whom Jessica often visits. We shared a mutual friend in the late writer and raconteur Julia Reed, each bonding over their singularity and fascination with the south . Julia, like me, was from Mississippi and Lange, a stunningly talented photographer, published a book of photographs of the state she took on the many road trips that she and Julia would take up into Mississippi. I hung with Jessica in Julia’s book-lined place in New Orleans’s Garden District one memorable night. Another mutual friend recently directed her in an upcoming film in which she, in fact, plays a stage creature. He and I were talking about her in London a few months ago - he claims she is giving an astonishing performance in the film, even for her - and I shared an anecdote about how I ended up in the back of a limo with her Oscar between my legs that night she won it almost 30 years ago, which coincided with my birthday, and I tried to explain to him (and to me) why it might have been the saddest moment of my life. “You and Jessica have something in common,” he told me. “Neither of you can let go of your loneliness.”