Author: Jane

LET’S HEAR IT FOR ATLANTA!!!

Jane 8 Comments

CLICK TO ENLARGE (photo by Michael Rudd) About thirty friends from Atlanta and other parts of Georgia came to the show this afternoon. Many of them board members and supporters of The Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention that I founded in 1995. It was such fun having them come up onto the stage after the rest of the audience had left, giving them a sense of what it feels like to be up there. Next to me in this group picture is Michele Ozumba, the President and CEO of G-CAPP. The good looking guy with gray hair is Rick Myers, another board member from Dalton, Georgia. The woman in the red suit with thick-rimmed glasses is Dr Betty Siegel, former president of Kennesaw College-also a board member. Scott Peacock (photo by Michael Rudd) Scott Peacock saw the show for the fourth time this afternoon and says it was better than ever and that he saw news things in it this time. Believe or not, he’s coming again on Wednesday. Scott, the award-winning chef, will be on the Today Show on Monday. I asked what he will cook. “Chicken and dumplings,” he replied. Yum. Check him out. I am writing between scenes and was just told that actor Liv Ullman will come back after the show. I feel confident she will feel a special connection to the play. After all, she made countless brilliant films with her husband, Ingmar Bergman, whose films often wove life and dearth together. I am such an admirer of Liv.   Liv Ullman (photo by Michael Rudd) See you next time.

WORKING AMERICA

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The other night, my friends Karen Nussbaum and Ira Arlook came to see the show. In my blog I talked about the work Karen did in the 1970s and early ’80s organizing women office workers but I neglected to mention the incredibly important work she is doing now, work that is changing the political landscape. Five years ago, Karen started Working America, the community organization of the AFL-CIO. Working America organizes Middle Americans to fight for good jobs and a just economy.  In the five years since its inception, Working America has grown to 2.5 million members, bringing these working class moderates into the progressive movement. Karen told me over dinner that this year, they are mobilizing their members to win on issues — health care, green jobs, workers’ rights and new rules for the economy — like they have been winning elections. Karen is a strategist and organizer par excellence! I’m proud to know her. (and Ira isn’t exactly chopped liver!)

Tweets on 2009-03-27

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Had lunch with my pal Rosie O’Donell today and here’s who else was in the restaurant: Anjelica Houston, Angela Lansbury, Barbara Walters # and Griffin Dunne, Bonnie Timmerman…nothing like feeling you’re in the right place!! Rosie’s the best. #NYC #

AH, THE JOY OF GETTING NOTES

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Does it seem weird that I like having our writer/director, Moises Kaufman, see the play and give me notes even though we opened March 9th? I find it comforting. People have been really enjoying the play, are visibly moved by it and by my performance and they don’t seem to be buttering me up. And yet…I knew there’d probably been a subtle drift-not landing a particular line in just the right way; thinking it was to try for a laugh when, in fact, the line was meant simply to contextualize another character; here and there becoming a tiny bit too chummy with my daughter when I needed to remain remote and more judgmental; too emotional here, too enthusiastic there. Mind you, no one would ever even notice these things. Not really. We’re talking subtle tweeking here. But I needed to be reined in and set back on the straight and narrow. I am waiting right now for the call to places at the top of the show (5 minutes from now) and I am chomping at the bit to put Moises’s notes into play. I know it will make my performance that much more rigorous and taut. He promised he’d come back every couple weeks. I wonder if a time will come between now and when we close the show at the end of May when there won’t be any notes from him-because they’re not needed. * * * * * * * We’re now at the point in the second act where I have almost 15 minutes before I go on again and I can’t resist writing– the play feels like its soaring! All Moises’s notes have worked terrifically for me. I wish he was here to corroborate my feelings. I have friends out there tonight…Karen Nussbaum and her husband, Ira Arlook. It was Karen who, when the Vietnam War ended, began to organize women office workers and from whom I would hear stories of what their situations were like in their work places. Karen founded 9 to 5: The National Association of Women Office Workers and that led to my making the film “9 to 5” (which is soon to open as a musical on Broadway with music by Dolly Parton). Ira founded the grassroots canvassing organization, Citizen Action, back in the late 70s. Karen Nussbaum and her husband, Ira Arlook See you next time P.S. And the show ran 4 minutes shorter tonight. We were flying!!

March 25

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Diane Von Furstenberg came backstage after the show, very moved, enthusiastic and generous about the play. Moises was here tonight, too. It’s been 2 weeks since he’s seen the play. He felt good about it but has notes that he’ll give us tomorrow. I will call him when I wake up. I love getting his feedback. His mother was with him and it made me feel good when she whispered to me that she thought I had gotten better in the role. Well, it does happen that, with time, we can sink deeper into it. I guess it could get stale, too. But the themes of this play continue to inspire me. Not that every performance is optimum but every performance can be informed-infused- with the beauty of the themes. I told Moises that I blogged the other day about feeling abandoned by him and jealous that he was on to new projects. I was interested that he, in turn, said that tonight, watching the play, he felt “abandoned” in the sense that the play, like a fledgling bird, has grown wings and is flying without him. I can understand that. I had somewhat the same sensation when I cut about 300 pages from my memoir prior to it’s being published. I read it as though looking through someone else’s glasses so that it became removed from me–someone else’s story. It is an extremely interesting process, this process of creation, and I feel so fortunate to be part of a creative community. I gotta say, before I sign off, I would kill for Diane Von Furstenberg’s cheekbones. OMG!! See ya next time.

March 25

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Last night Kerry Washington saw the play and came back. She loved it. We will be making a film together later in the year and are good friends. She was so happy for me, seeing me in such an exciting, strong play. She just finished a film co-starring Annette Bening and Naomi Watts. This may be the film that allows her to show what a powerful, deep actor she is. We hung out in my dressing for about an hour. Today, Siegfried (of the famed Siegfried and Roy illusionist team) came back after the play full of praise for everyone involved. I forgot to get a photo with him. Dang! Last Sunday, after our 3p show, Samantha and I went to the opening of “God of Carnage” starring Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis, Jeff Daniels and James Gandolfini. It was terrific. They were all extraordinary. This afternoon, for the first time, someone’s cell phone rang during an important scene toward the end of the play. It really threw me and Zach and I was so furious I felt like leaping off the stage and strangling the person. You have no idea how that sound can throw an actor out of a scene. When I mentioned this to Siegfried, he said he could see that it upset us and commented that he’d have threatened to sic his tiger onto the guilty party. Some actors are known to stop a show when that happens and yell at the person-Patty Lupone, Brian Dennehy and Jeremy Piven, for example. Don’t know if I’d ever have the guts but today I was surely angry enough. Sil Reynolds and her daughter also came back after the show. Sil is a therapist. She and her daughter do Mother/Daughter workshops at the Omega Institute. She was stunned when she got backstage. “Jane, I had no idea the play dealt with a mother/daughter relationship like this.” She was rocked. “This is so like what my relationship was like with my mother…and hers with her mother-my grandmother.” If these challenges are a generational thing, Sil has surely broken the pattern with her own daughter. They seem so joyful about working together. And they are about to do a book on the subject called “From Both Sides Now.”   This is a photo taken last week withthe gang of gal friends from Atlanta See you next time.

DREAMING ABOUT THE PLAY

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I have been dreaming about the play all along, since the beginning, going through scenes, coming up with ideas. Nothing huge, just little ideas. Many times I will wake up and have forgotten what I dreamed but here are two examples when I remembered and acted upon my dream: In the first scene, Colin Hanks says something that makes me laugh and then I realize my laughing is inappropriate so I stop. Sometimes this gets a laugh, sometimes not. I dreamed that I should laugh and catch the eye of Samantha who plays my daughter and it is because of her that I stop laughing. It’s a little note that I think Moise gave me way back in the beginning but I’d forgotten. I have been doing that for the last week and it works better, gets more regular laughs. Last night I dreamed that in a scene with Gertie, the woman in charge of Beethoven’s archives, where we meet up in a train station, I should have files with me. I am coming from work. So tonight, I asked props to give me some files and I brought them with me and it felt better. I felt more grounded. It Makes no difference for anyone but me but still…Will this never end, this tweeking? I bet not. I hope not. I am fascinated that the play still holds new things for me, for my character. Frankly, I didn’t expect this. I felt sure that once things were “locked in” that would be that. I did something else tonight that I hadn’t done-at least not consciously: I played that my neck was losing its ability to firmly hold my head up. Someone wrote me yesterday who saw the play on Sunday saying they had a family member who had ALS and they commented how much they had related to the weakness in my neck and my head flopping around. I hadn’t even been conscious of doing this– so now I am doing it more consciously. Moises came back from his vacation and being in L.A. casting a new play, He says he’ll see the play again tomorrow night (Wed) so maybe he will tell me not to do this head thing. I am curious if he feels we’ve strayed at all from his original direction. There’s no question that there are things that have changed. Is it a deepening of our understanding of our characters or–??? What???  We’ll find out. Okay, I will have to fess up: I have felt abandoned by our director. Probably it’s that I am jealous that he’s gone on to new projects while we’re still here. How can he bear to be away from us? That’s how I really feel. It was so hard when he told us that he was weaning us…that he was going away. I so missed his regular input. I wanted every night to hear from him how he thought the show went. I know this is rather irrational. But I’m learning this is how it goes. So different from movies where it’s you, the actor, who leaves, leaving behind the director with her/his editor for maybe a year more, to turn the work we did together into a finished film. Here, in theatre, it’s the opposite. One more new thing to learn to adjust to. Moises won’t even be here, I just learned, for the night of carousing the cast is planning in April. The crew has told me, like they are talking to a baby, “Jane, you must understand. Most directors never come back at all.” REALLY!!! On that note, I will see you nxt time.

HERE’S TO YOU MRS ROBINSON

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So here is what I dreamed last night: I invited Mrs Robinson, Michele Obama’s mother, and her granddaughters, Sasha and Malia Obama, to White Castle where I introduced them all to the tasty mini burgers. The girls loved them. I was very solicitous of them because we were in a small resort on an island made of sand which risked sinking (pretty obvious metaphor there!!) The girls were en route to school with their grandmother and I found their backpacks unbelievably heavy with books. I said to myself, “these private schools ought to get hip to the danger of their young students sinking under such unresonable weight.” So that was last night. Today I went. To the Hospital of Special Surgery for a. Cortisone shot cause I tore my Labrum (like Arod!) Using the walker the wrong way in my play (“33 variations.”) –totally my fault. I feel like a new person today but last night I used a cane, even for curtain call. Wonder if people just thought I am an over-the-board Method actress!! All’s well that ends well. Oh yes, the interview I did with Elizabeth Lesser on Oprah’s radio show will air Monday March 30th at 1pm and will be re-aired that same day at 7pm. See you next time. I want to talk about how things about the play come to me in my dreams.