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    Jessica Lange Portrays a Fading First Lady of the American Theater

    Jessica Lange is ideally cast as a grande dame of the theater who is facing a reckoning in this well-crafted melodrama by Michael Cristofer.“The Great Lillian Hall” is not afraid to embrace its classicism; had it been made in the 1940s, it would have starred Bette Davis. Like many of the best golden-age melodramas, this HBO film fully commits to both unabashed emotion and a complicated female lead, a role filled by Jessica Lange with a finely tuned mix of showmanship and nuance.Lange’s Lillian Hall is a theater grande dame playing the charismatic matriarch in a Broadway revival of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” She is on shaky ground, suffering from memory lapses that affect the rehearsals, but she stubbornly, proudly soldiers on. Even after some devastating news, Lillian keeps refining her performance, both in life and onstage. (What we glimpse of the production made me want to see Lange, who is currently starring in “Mother Play” on Broadway, actually tackle “The Cherry Orchard” next.)Besides its elegant handling of the parallels between Lillian’s character and her own life, the movie’s most interesting gambit is the way it breaks from the lazy habit of portraying stars as narcissistic, destructive monsters. Lillian certainly loves being the center of attention, and she can blithely wound her beleaguered daughter (Lily Rabe) and her dedicated personal assistant (Kathy Bates). But she is also capable of kindness and loyalty, along with a pleasurable wit. “I haven’t decided what age I am,” she tells her doctor (Keith Arthur Bolden), “but I’m not that old.”Even when she is at her most irritating, Lillian has a lock on the devotion of those around her. You may well join the fan club, too.The Great Lillian HallNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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    Review: Jessica Lange Stars in Paula Vogel’s ‘Mother Play’

    Jessica Lange stars as a ferocious matriarch alongside Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons in Vogel’s latest family drama.In the first scene of “Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions,” Paula Vogel’s antic, mournful new drama, Martha, a character modeled on the playwright, offers a version of Ecclesiastes.“There is a season for packing,” Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) says as she slits open a cardboard box. “And a season for unpacking.”Vogel, 72, has spent the majority of her career unpacking. Her work is not strictly autobiographical, but as in the plays of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee or Adrienne Kennedy, she has a canny way of rearranging the emotional furniture of her lived experience into tragicomedy.Here, at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater, that furniture includes a mother, Phyllis (Jessica Lange), and a brother, Carl (Jim Parsons), named for Vogel’s own family. The story begins in 1964 with the family moving into a basement apartment in a Washington, D.C., suburb; Carl is 14, Martha 12. Phyllis is in her mid 30s, barely treading water after a foundered marriage. At times, when she can pry her hands from a gin bottle, she clings to her children as if they are life rafts. Otherwise, she regards them as jetsam. Phyllis, we learn, never wanted to be a mother.On finding herself pregnant: “I thought: Other women aren’t mother material, but they get through it. Just hang on, Phyllis, hang on. But it is never over. It’s a life sentence.” How’s that for a bedtime story?As a single working mother, Phyllis can afford only custodial apartments, and those early evictions come when she complains too loudly about the roaches and maggots. The vermin are brought to life, extravagantly, in Shawn Duan’s projections. And David Zinn’s flexible set nimbly conveys each new abode. The later, more fraught expulsions come when Phyllis rejects first Carl, who comes out as gay in college, and then later Martha, who is also queer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jessica Lange Leads Starry Cast in Paula Vogel’s ‘Mother Play’

    “Mother Play,” set in the 1960s, will feature Lange as a mother raising two children, played by Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger.Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger will return to Broadway next spring to star in a new family drama by the acclaimed playwright Paula Vogel.The show, called “Mother Play,” begins outside Washington in 1962, and is about a strong-willed mother raising two children as the family relocates.Lange, 74, will play the mother. She is a two-time Oscar winner (for “Tootsie” and “Blue Sky”) who won a Tony Award in 2016 for playing another difficult mother — Mary Tyrone in a revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”Keenan-Bolger, 45, is a four-time Tony nominee who won the prize in 2019 for “To Kill a Mockingbird”; she will play the daughter. Parsons, 50, who last appeared on Broadway in a 2018 production of “The Boys in the Band,” will play the son.Vogel, who is considered one of the nation’s leading teachers of playwriting as well as a top practitioner of the craft, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for “How I Learned to Drive,” which was later staged on Broadway in 2022. She has had one other Broadway outing with the play “Indecent,” which was staged in 2017.“Mother Play” will be directed by Tina Landau (“SpongeBob SquarePants”) and presented on Broadway by Second Stage Theater, a nonprofit dedicated to work by living American writers. The play is scheduled to begin previews April 2 and to open April 25 at the Helen Hayes Theater, which is a small Broadway house owned by Second Stage.“Mother Play” will follow Second Stage’s Broadway production of “Appropriate,” a 2014 drama by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, also at the Hayes. That production will be directed by Lila Neugebauer and will star Sarah Paulson; previews begin Nov. 29 and the opening is scheduled for Dec. 18. More

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    Book Review: ‘Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation,’ by Nancy Schoenberger

    Playing Blanche DuBois is shattering, say the actresses featured in Nancy Schoenberger’s “Blanche.” But Tennessee Williams’s most indelible character is now a figure of sympathy.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation, by Nancy SchoenbergerLast we saw of Blanche DuBois, the brittle antiheroine of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” she was being carted off to a state loony bin, uttering her famous line about relying on “the kindness of strangers” that can hardly be improved upon.So when Nancy Schoenberger, a biographer and poet, announced early in her new book, “Blanche,” that she planned to include a few sonnets written from the perspective of DuBois’s ill-fated, unseen young husband, as well as a hypothetical obituary in The Times-Picayune describing how her subject turned her life around after psychiatric treatment, I … yes, blanched.With rare exceptions, such as Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” (a prequel to “Jane Eyre” that imagines the first Mrs. Rochester), messing with another writer’s characters tends to be tricky business. You have to love, for example, the sardonic headline The New York Times ran when it reviewed Susan Hill’s 1993 novel “Mrs. DeWinter,” a follow-up to Daphne du Maurier’s unimprovable “Rebecca”: “Still Dead After All These Years.”Was “Blanche” going to be a “Still Crazy After All These Years” situation? Or like the goofy-sounding off-off-Broadway attempt at a “Streetcar” sequel in 2006, wherein Blanche and Stella, her sister, were at least in passing represented by throw pillows?Fortunately not. Schoenberger, the author of books on the novelist-socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood and the Johns Wayne and Ford, has now written a lean but graceful character study of DuBois, giving Williams’s most indelible but also frequently misunderstood character her due.It seems incredible now that when “Streetcar” was first staged in 1947, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy, audiences sympathized with her antagonist and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski: the brutish factory-parts salesman most remembered for the muscles rippling over his “wife beater” T-shirt and his primordial bellow of “Hey, Stellllla!” (The sympathy was probably in part because young Marlon Brando’s performance was so dazzling.)Even before the #MeToo era, however, Kowalski was being re-evaluated as a domestic abuser, slut shamer and rapist. And as important a proponent of the play as Kazan, who also directed Vivien Leigh in the 1951 film, grew convinced, after his prolonged time with the material, of Blanche’s basic sanity.Schoenberger briefly explains her own fascination with “Streetcar”: Her parents were born in New Orleans, where the play is set, on either side of the Audubon Park Zoo, hearing the roar of the lions there. Her father was an itinerant naval officer — “so handsome in his white uniform!” writes the author, whose enthusiasm sometimes spills over endearingly into exclamation points — but she visited Louisiana often as a child, marveling at the Spanish moss and “dark scurrying cockroaches that seemed to lurk everywhere.” Her mother, a campus beauty queen in Baton Rouge, was an early fan of Williams’s work.If New Orleans and its “miasmal vapors” are pure nostalgia for Schoenberger, for Williams, a gay man who had been mocked as “Miss Nancy” by his cruel father, Cornelius, the sensual city was “liberation,” she notes. He was inspired more tragically by his sister Rose, whose erratic behavior, possibly exacerbated by Cornelius’s violations, led to her institutionalization and then lobotomization at age 26.The dysfunctional Williams family, chronicled extensively in more substantive books like John Lahr’s “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” moves to the background quite quickly in “Blanche,” though, as readers get acquainted with a series of prominent actresses who have played her, a couple of whom Schoenberger has interviewed, all of whom were haunted by their experience. She also relies heavily, though with a light touch, on previously published material, of which there is no shortage. Talking to a journalist about playing DuBois can resemble a particularly wrenching therapy session.For women and not a few drag queens, Blanche is considered one of the plummest roles in all of show business, though its psychological complexities can prove debilitating. “Like climbing Mount Everest,” NPR called it. (Cate Blanchett, naturally, has scaled Everest twice, playing Blanche both onstage and, in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” onscreen, in a modernized version for which she won an Oscar.) Jessica Lange and her partner, Sam Shepard — romantic couples often get oddly enmeshed in the production of “Streetcar” — believed it the equivalent of “Hamlet.” Rosemary Harris: “The loneliest part to live through that I’ve ever played on the stage.” Patricia Clarkson: “It destroys your life when you play that part, you never really recover from it, and everybody who’s ever done it knows.” Jemier Jenkins, one of a few Black women to play her, on the aftermath: “I was very actively trying to release, release, release.”Even the sturdy Ann-Margret found herself “twisted and shaking, confused, agitated, and staring ahead in a daze. I’d lost my grip on reality.” Most starkly Leigh, who turned out to have bipolar disorder, claimed that playing DuBois “tipped me into madness.” “Why has she entered our bloodstream?” wonders Schoenberger, a persuasive proponent of the play’s enduring importance despite its dated elements, most risibly that women hovering around 30 are past their prime. We have lived to see the antiquation of the word “nymphomaniac,” with which the critic Kenneth Tynan dismissed the character, and the reframing of prostitution as “sex work.” (DuBois’s seduction of a 17-year-old male student, regardless, keeps the mantle of moral ambiguity as settled around her shoulders as the “burden” of Belle Reve, the lost family estate, or one of her gossamer scarves.)Talking to Claire Bloom, who played the part on a London stage in 1974, Tennessee Williams once said he imagined Blanche persevering through her time in the asylum and ending up with a flower shop back in New Orleans; in her feminist faux-obit, Schoenberger gives her a co-ownership with Stella, who’s divorced Stanley. It’s a fanciful but satisfying little coda to this project, thankfully confined. (The sonnets, supposedly by Blanche’s doomed young groom, Allan Gray, are gilding the lily.)I’m not sure “Blanche,” which can waft and flit like the butterfly-like creature it chronicles, will satisfy true Williams junkies. But if you’re unfamiliar with this great American classic, or have perhaps let high-school memories of it lapse, this book is a hell of a gateway drug.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation | By Nancy Schoenberger | Illustrated | 240 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $30 More

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    Filming Eugene O’Neill When the Elements (and Investors) Don’t Cooperate

    Starring Jessica Lange and Ed Harris, Jonathan Kent’s adaptation of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” started production, only to lose key financing.WICKLOW, Ireland — “Strong winds, gradually subsiding” read the call sheet.Jessica Lange, Ed Harris and Jonathan Kent, the director of the forthcoming film version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” were standing in a rehearsal room here in early November, listlessly running through lines. Harris, playing James Tyrone, an aging former matinee idol, touched his toes and did squats as he spoke, while Lange, playing his fragile, morphine-addicted wife, Mary, flitted distractedly around the room.Producers and assistants, phones glued to ears, bustled in and out, anxiously monitoring the stormy weather that prevented the cast and crew from heading to the set: a house modeled on the Monte Cristo Cottage in Connecticut, the seaside home of O’Neill’s family that provides the setting of this autobiographical play. The go-ahead came several hours later. The shoot finished close to midnight as Kent and the cast tried to push through the day’s packed schedule.It wasn’t the first storm the production had weathered, literally and metaphorically. One day after filming began on Sept. 19, the lead producer, Gabrielle Tana, discovered that their biggest chunk of financing had fallen through. “I had to go to the set and tell them we were shutting down,” she said.On location in Ireland, the Tyrones’ home is based on Eugene O’Neill’s seaside family home in Connecticut.Patrick RedmondTana (whose credits include “Thirteen Lives” and “The Dig”) said it was one of the worst moments of her long career. “I let them know I wasn’t giving up, and was already in conversations with investors,” she said.During the nail-biting weeks that followed, she spent endless hours in meetings trying to drum up the money. Remarkably, the cast — including Ben Foster and Colin Morgan, playing the Tyrone sons — as well as most of the crew and production team, never wavered in their commitment to the project. A handful of staff members, including the director of photography and some production design workers, weren’t able to stay with the production. The rest waited it out in this coastal region about an hour south of Dublin.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.“We were shocked at first, of course,” said Lange, who played Mary Tyrone in 2000 in London, and won a Tony Award for the role in a production directed by Kent that transferred from the West End to Broadway in 2016. “But never once did we think it wasn’t going to happen. We just hung in, went to the pub, took long walks. We really became friends and cared deeply for one another, because we were going through the same thing.” She added, “I think that in some way it added to our intensity and passion for doing this.”Three weeks of waiting to restart, Harris said, allowed him “to sit back, think about the character, calm down, and just be this dude rather than worrying about playing such a classic, important role.”The actors also made calls. Foster made a connection to the British theater producer Bill Kenwright, who had worked with Lange on productions of “Long Day’s Journey,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Glass Menagerie” in the West End and on Broadway.Ben Foster, left, with Colin Morgan, helped make calls when crucial financing fell through.MGM“I knew we would figure it out,” Foster said. “If we had to do it as a sock puppet show, we’d do that till we raised the money.”The sock puppet show was averted; Kenwright came through. “He was our knight in shining armor,” Tana said. A few other knights had to be found too, including the film producer Gleb Fetisov.First adapted for the screen in 1962, “Long Day’s Journey” is Kent’s debut feature. “This is, probably, the greatest American play, the invention of the dysfunctional family drama, and when you do it in the theater, there is a sort of reverence from the audience,” Kent said. “I thought that perhaps with film, one could shred that reverence a bit and allow its rawness and immediacy through.”Then he factored in current events that coincided, like the opioid epidemic and the coronavirus lockdown. “Here are these four, addicted not just to drugs and alcohol, but to each other, endlessly going over the past, the missed opportunities and failure, trapped in a house by the sea,” he said. “Somehow it felt resonant.”Lange said that she and Kent first talked about a film version during the Broadway run. “I immediately thought, yes!” she said, adding that Mary Tyrone “gets under your skin like no other character I have ever played; you never come to the end of it. And because of the nature of filmmaking, there is so much more subtlety that can be brought to light: the expression in the eyes, the subtle shift in the voice.”Tana first heard about the idea when the actor Ralph Fiennes, a friend of Kent’s, asked her to help with the project, which is scheduled for release this fall. She was intrigued and engaged the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire — his “Good People” had been directed by Kent — to adapt the drama, which needed to shrink from an almost-four-hour theatrical event to an under-two-hour film.“There was never an agenda of ‘Let’s improve this,’” Lindsay-Abaire said in a video call from New York, adding that there isn’t a word of text in the film that wasn’t written by O’Neill. “It was the opposite: Let’s maintain what we love while telling the story in a different medium. It wasn’t using a machete as much as a scalpel. We took the dramatic Hippocratic oath: Do no harm to O’Neill!”Film, he pointed out, has communication tools that the stage doesn’t have. “You can sometimes replace four lines with a close-up,” he said. “We kept asking, does the character need to say that, or can they just act it?” He and Kent also discussed ways to make the drama more cinematic, by withholding some information that O’Neill reveals early. “Ghosts, hauntings, what is Mary doing up there? We wanted to lean into some mystery, to hint at things and reveal them more slowly,” Lindsay-Abaire said.Ed Harris joined the production when Gabriel Byrne had a scheduling conflict. Jessica Lange first discussed the idea of an adaptation when she performed the play on Broadway.MGMGabriel Byrne, who had starred opposite Lange onstage, was slated to reprise the role, but he fell out due to scheduling conflicts. Tana emailed Ed Harris, who had appeared with Lange in the movie “Sweet Dreams” almost 40 years earlier. He said yes immediately. “As tough as it was when the money fell out, it was the most rewarding film acting experience I’ve had in quite a while,” Harris said. Kent, he added, “gave us the freedom to just be those people — that it wasn’t a sacred text, that this was about human beings, not a dried-up historical piece.”Kent said that he had considered updating the 1912 setting, but had decided that too many fundamental details would have to be altered. Still, “to the designer’s chagrin, I asked that the costumes not be too ‘period,’” he said. “Whatever the setting, the text makes it a living, contemporary thing.”Two weeks of rehearsal before the start of the shoot allowed the four main actors to begin to build a family dynamic. “I immediately fell head over heels for my parents,” Foster said, adding that he had brought some foraged greenery from the actual Monte Cristo cottage as a talisman.“The rehearsal time was all about finding out what might work for character,” Morgan said. “A director who isn’t as theater-versed as Jonathan might work out camera angles first, then what the character does within. But I think the best directors work so that the camera is actor-led, and that’s how Jonathan approached it.”Then, almost immediately, came the hiatus and a roller coaster of emotions. “The bonding of that time was actually wonderful,” Foster said. “Historically I don’t socialize a lot with fellow actors. But in this case, it really did become a family.”The difficulty of making the film, Tana said, is indicative of the changing cinematic landscape. “It’s really hard now to make this kind of literary, straightforward, old-school independent movie,” she said. “There is so much value to this: these great, great actors doing a great American play that every kid studying literature will be able to watch. But it’s a sea change moment in our field in the way we access content, how it is monetized, where the resources are.”Kent agreed that the film goes against the current grain, but added: “We all have mothers, fathers, our terrible sense of failures and disappointments and guilt. I think what we crave from film or theater is truth about our human experience. There is an audience for that.” More