Zoren: Why Elizabeth Ashley never stops working
Florida-born and Louisiana-bred Elizabeth Ashley says that in her native South, “Conversation is a blood sport.”
The veteran actress, known to television audiences for her stint as Burt Reynolds’s co-star on “Evening Shade” and about to be seen in a Netflix series, “Russian Doll,” with “Orange is the New Black’s” Natasha Lyonne, deftly learned her home region’s art for relating entertaining stories and keeping talk flowing. A relatively brief chat on the telephone covered a myriad of topics and revealed the energy, and smoky voice, that made Miss Ashley famous.
“Russian Doll” is set to debut next year. Currently, Ashley is in rehearsal for Paul Rudnick’s comedy, “I Hate Hamlet,” which opens at New Hope’s Bucks County Playhouse this weekend and runs through Dec. 1. Just hearing how she became involved with the production is a conversational adventure.
“It was the strangest accident,” she said from her New York apartment, where she is taking some time between running lines with her assistant.
“My best friend, Penny Fuller, another Southerner, she being a genteel North Carolinian while I have the hot blood of Louisiana, was supposed to play the part,” a talent agent who books one of her clients, a TV star, to play Hamlet in New York’s Central Park.
“Penny had been ill for about a year, but she recovered (It was a miraculous recovery.) took this part, and half as a joke, told me if she had returned to action too soon and couldn’t do it, she wanted me to take it.
“We have the same agent, and one day I get a call saying Penny wanted to bow out, and said she and I arranged for me to take over if it was too much, and that he’d talked to the producers, and they wanted me, so here I am, rehearsing and having fun.”
Ashley, age 79, has been going through the theatrical process for more than 60 years. She made her Broadway debut in 1958, earned a 1962 as Best Supporting Actress in “Take Her, She’s Mine,” and appeared previously at the Bucks County Playhouse opposite Robert Redford in a play that became a hit as “Barefoot in the Park.”
In 1974, she gave one of the best performances I’ve seen in a theater-going life that spans more than 10,000 plays, as Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
“I made a name doing Tennessee’s characters. We became great friends, I still miss him,” she says.
“I have to say after working as an actress for 64 or so years, that most of the time I enjoyed it. It was more than earning a living.
“You know going in that maybe one part out of 10 has something in it for the actor to dive into and make thrilling. I like ‘thrilling.’ I like deep, hot, thrilling art. It’s seductive. Maybe one piece out of 10 provides that, but it’s fun realizes any part, making any character come to life.
“In my early career, writers for the theater could often be thrilling. Tennessee is just one example. He wrote at the same time as Arthur Miller and William Inge, and plays had a lot of depth and lot for actors to realize.
“Broadway today still offers some wonderful plays. Just the other day I saw one that excited me and rose above Broadway’s current feeling of ‘theme park theater.’ It was ‘Lifespan of a Fact.’ It stars Cherry Jones, one of our best actors, and Bobby Cannavale, and Daniel Radcliffe. It reminded me of the kind of play from what now seems like Broadway’s Dark Ages when there was a regular theatergoing audience, and plays could run more than a season. Years sometimes.
“I don’t want to knock Broadway. To survive, it has to go to a different target audience. That audience doesn’t usually support a play. Musicals run, but plays don’t. It doesn’t always matter if a musical if good, or not good, if it suits a demographic. That’s why it’s wonderful to see a play that has some bite, that thrills.
“Television, cable television in particular, has taken the place the theater had when seasons had new plays by Tennessee Williams and Horton Foote. They kept a Southern actress like me busy.
“I live in New York now, but I don’t go out much. Like most people, I look to cable and TV to provide my entertainment. Besides catching up with movies, I find the level of writing that was once the theater’s but now belongs to television.
“The writing for television has no restraint. For one thing, it doesn’t have to appeal to a nine-year-old or a tourist. You see a lot of subjects explored and hear a lot of voices. It may be a small percentage of television I’m talking about, but there is enough of quality to keep someone occupied. Television is where the young writers are going because, on cable at least, they have the freedom to be provocative and say something.
“You don’t even need to be home and near your television to enjoy it. Programs travel with you. You can watch what you like on…what’s the word?...your device. I feel so modern when I use words like ‘device.’ Even as I say that, I can’t imagine why people would choose to watch a movie on the small screens of their telephones. Why fight it? ‘Devices’ are the thing.”
“‘Russian Doll’ is an eight-part series. Natasha Lyonne conceived it. She wrote it and is starring in it. Another producer is Amy Poehler. I play a therapist, you could call her a ‘twisted therapist,’ in a story about a woman who finds herself at a party in New York that seems to go on and that she can’t leave. It’s a mystery. There’s a Grand Guignol feeling about it. The writing is cutting, like so much you come to find on television, probably because that’s where so many of the young are working.”
In “I Hate Hamlet,” Ashley is working with two actors who have done impressive work in the theater. Tom Hewitt is a sturdy leading man who has done major work on Broadway and on tour. Ben Fankhauser, who appeared in Philadelphia last season in “Beautiful” and made his name in Broadway’s “Newsies,” is building a solid reputation and is bound to land a TV or movie role to expand his fame. Hewitt plays John Barrymore whose ghost haunts an apartment the great actor once occupied and is not being rented by the TV actor playing Hamlet. The play is by Philadelphian Paul Rudnick, who knows how to spin a joke.
Local stages will feature a number of prominent Broadway actors in coming weeks. In addition to “I Hate Hamlet,” the Bucks County Playhouse is mounting a Nov. 14 reading of Delco playwright Bruce Graham’s “The Outgoing Tide.” It cast includes Peter Strauss, who helped make TV history by appearing in one of the first mini-series, “Rich Man Poor Man,” and an important made-for-TVmovies, “The Jericho Mile.” Also appearing are Marsha Mason, a gem in every performance I’ve seen her give, and Michael Nathanson, who has roles in “The Punisher,” “The Knick,” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”
On the same night, Nov. 14, in Philadelphia, Tovah Feldshuh, who had a major role for a couple of seasons on “The Walking Dead” appears in a play, “Dancing with Giants,” by her brother, David Feldshuh, at Rodeph Shalom at Broad and Green.
Meanwhile, Harriet Harris, who will be recognized from “Desperate Housewives” and “Frazier,” is doing a delicious job as Mrs. Malaprop in a musical rendition of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s “The Rivals” at Bristol Riverside Theatre. Noah Weisberg, who played memorable characters on “Modern Family,” “The Good Wife,” and “Law and Order,” is starring as Willy Wonka in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” at the Academy of Music.”