Patrick Ryan USA TODAY May 22, 2024
NEW YORK — Jessica Lange has a type.
Over the course of her nearly five-decade career, the stage and screen legend has memorably embodied drug-addled matriarchs (“A Long Day’s Journey Into Night”), volatile housewives (“Blue Sky”) and destitute Southern belles (“A Streetcar Named Desire”). Not to mention, a literal witch ("American Horror Story: Coven").
"They're all survivors in some way," Lange says on a recent afternoon, tucked by a window and sipping a Coke in a bustling hotel lobby near Washington Square Park. “I like playing characters who are on the edge emotionally; women who have a tremendous strength, but are also teetering walking that tightrope.”
The same could be said of her latest two roles: In HBO film “The Great Lillian Hall,” premiering May 31 (8 p.m. EST/PST), she affectingly inhabits a lauded Broadway diva who’s diagnosed with dementia in the throes of rehearsal. And in her Tony Award-nominated “Mother Play,” now playing at the Hayes Theater through June 16, Lange brings prickly pathos to Phyllis, the ferocious mother of two gay children (Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons).
Lange, 75, had been searching for her next Broadway vehicle ever since winning a best actress Tony for “Long Day’s Journey” in 2016. “I'd go through the repertoire of parts I could still play, now that I’m at this advanced age, and I could never come up with anything I really had a passion for doing,” she explains.
That changed when she read Paula Vogel’s “Mother Play,” which is inspired by the playwright’s tumultuous upbringing and her brother’s death from AIDS. Lange had never originated a new character onstage, and was struck by the emotional complexity of Vogel’s script. Set over 50 years, the drama charts Phyllis’ journey as an eccentric, hard-drinking mom who constantly uproots her family. It ends with her as a lonely old women, having rejected her kids for being queer.
“You wonder sometimes what the trade-off is? Why would you shut out your children knowingly?” Lange says. “Hopefully families are more accepting now.”
Phyllis’ isolation comes to the fore in one haunting, roughly 10-minute sequence, as she wanders her now-empty home and makes a sad, microwaved dinner. Lange was elated to do the wordless scene, known as “the Phyllis Ballet”: Before she was an actress, she dropped out of college and trained as a mime in Paris in the early 1970s.
"It was one of the most thrilling times in my life," Lange says with a grin. “It's the only time I've ever consciously used that in a performance."
In “The Great Lillian Hall,” Lange portrays another woman confronting mortality and her shortcomings as a parent. Weeks away from mounting a Broadway revival of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” Lillian begins to experience tremors and sudden memory loss. She’s given a grim prognosis, but refuses to disclose her dementia to her loyal assistant (Kathy Bates) and daughter (Lily Rabe), who has always played second fiddle to Lillian’s career.
“I’m very fortunate that I haven’t experienced any of that kind of dementia in my family,” says Lange, who consulted with doctors on the nuances of how Lillian might move and speak. Plus, "I'll never get to do ‘The Cherry Orchard,’ so this was my opportunity to dip into the Chekhov pond.”
The project reunites the actress with Bates and Rabe after Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story.” Lange starred in four seasons of the long-running FX series, earning an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her delicious, scenery-chewing turns. She has not watched the latest iteration with Kim Kardashian. (“No, no,” she says with a wave. “I haven’t followed it at all.”) But she looks back with particular fondness on “Freak Show,” her favorite of the show’s anthology stories.
Cont’d.