My utterly disastrous tea with Glenda Jackson
Be careful what you wish for. Tea with Glenda Jackson, an actress I’ve admired since watching “A Touch of Class” on TV with my mother as a teenager, turned out not to be the dream encounter this fan imagined.
The 81-year-old English actress, making a triumphant return to Broadway in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” seemed friendly enough when we exchanged greetings at an Upper East Side cafe. But she went into battle mode once the tape recorder was switched on.
Jackson’s clipped replies and occasional pounding of the table with her hands made me wonder if this Labour Party stalwart had mistaken me for the Conservative opposition. Her default position of peremptory bewilderment — “I have no idea what you’re asking me” — was perplexing.
My questions about her reemergence on stage after her long break from acting to serve as a member of Parliament seemed to me fairly straightforward and innocuous. I had come to worship Jackson, not to grill her. I left expertly filleted by that trademark voice she still wields like a scalpel.
Time has reinterpreted Jackson’s stern beauty so that her face now resembles a Francis Bacon portrait of itself. The lines on her face are etched with a deliberateness that matches her unyielding disposition. Her eyes, not quite blue, not quite brown, have a watery quality, as if some sadness in her nature has finally overtopped its banks.
Her practical dress suggested a pensioner running errands on a blustery day. Like Lear, the role she came out of retirement to play in London two years ago, Jackson seems to have grown antipathetic to the finery that conceals the truth of unaccommodated man.
There were rumors that Deborah Warner’s production of “King Lear” at the Old Vic was bound for New York. What better way for an acting royal, last on Broadway as Lady Macbeth in 1988, to make her American return? Jackson’s performance was heralded, but Warner’s rambunctiously modern staging received mixed reviews.
Betraying no disappointment, Jackson said the logistical challenges of a large cast and the difficulty of finding the right-sized theater must have proved insuperable. Broadway, happily, is getting a version of Jackson’s Lear through her portrayal of A, the wealthy despotic widow in Albee’s “Three Tall Women.”
The character, a version of the playwright’s adoptive mother from whom he was long estranged, is given a letter rather than a name in a drama that arranges itself along faintly cubist lines. Haughty, seething with resentment, her memory clouded by age, her will to dominance undiminished by frailty, Jackson’s A is every inch an embittered queen.
The other two statuesque women in the play are known as B (Laurie Metcalf) and C (Alison Pill). In the first act they are identified as A’s caretaker and legal intermediary, but the play undergoes a transformation after the vitriolic, bigoted matriarch suffers a stroke.
In the second act, A, simulated by a dummy with a breathing mask, is on her deathbed. But this is not the end of Jackson’s performance, as the character returns in a lavender dress to review her life with B and C, who have now explicitly become younger versions of this complicated woman at ages 52 and 26, respectively.
In his published introduction to the play, which won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for drama, Albee stresses that, in writing “Three Tall Women,” he was seeking neither revenge nor catharsis but rather the artistic satisfaction of objectivity. He wryly notes that he may have been too generous: “Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?”
Jackson, perhaps unable to leave her character’s acrimony at the stage door, foiled my attempts to understand how she made sense of A’s changing relationship to B and C. “What relationship?” she rasped. “They’re the same person.” That must be very difficult to act? “Acting is always hard. Why else would you bother to do it?”
Rephrasing the question, I asked how she understands the transition that takes place between the first and second acts. “You seem to think I stand outside the play,” she said impatiently. “My job is to see the world through the character’s eyes.” And how does A see the world? “She sees it as she’s made it.”
“What do you got other than scones?” she imperiously demanded of the waiter. After settling on whole-wheat toast with jam, she deigned to shed some light on how she works: “Our job is to unleash the play. It’s not just about your character or interaction with the other characters. There’s an energy in all good plays which you have to find. And that is part and parcel of ensuring that an audience gets what it’s about.”
Her refreshing answer, born out of a career in which realism hasn’t been the ultimate option, enticed me to ask her about Lear. It seemed to me that her portrayal, which combined Brechtian distance with Artaudian savagery, was calling upon Jackson’s groundbreaking work with director Peter Brook.
“I studiously avoid any academic dissections of the play and any kind of previous experience of playing,” she said. “For me, it’s all in the play. And in that play in particular, it is all there.”
How would she describe Warner’s postmodern staging? “‘Fashionable’ is the word,” she dryly retorted. Naturally, I followed up by asking how she got on with Warner. “We strongly disagreed about things,” Jackson said. “I still feel that there were parts of the play where the riff weren’t actively dug out, but there you go.”
A monumental challenge
Playing Lear is a monumental challenge for anyone, regardless of age or gender. Drama critic Kenneth Tynan compared Lear’s final act to a landing by parachute on the top of Parnassus.
“That was my worry, that I wouldn’t have the physical or vocal strength, so I used to go swimming every day,” Jackson said. “But there is so much energy in that play that, yeah, it worked.” One of the things that she finds irritating, she said, is the way “King Lear” is deemed to be about the eponymous hero. “Well, of course, it isn’t, because every single character is unutterably fascinating,” she said. “They’re literally unpeeled before your eyes. It’s a great privilege to be allowed to do it.”
It was around this time in the interview that all hell broke loose. After sharing that I had made the trip from Los Angeles expressly to see her Lear, I told her that she had helped me to hear a line from the play as if for the first time. When Lear painfully acknowledges a lifetime of neglecting the vulnerable poor (“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!”), it seemed as if Jackson’s political and artistic commitments merged in a rich understanding of the play.
“I didn’t write the line,” she roared. “Why do you dismiss Shakespeare?”
“I’m not dismissing Shakespeare at all,” I said. “I’m devoted to him in fact. I just wrote this long essay on the play for an academic journal.”
“You’re the people I avoid like the plague!”
Her adversarial manner, confounding at first, left me feeling defeated. Aware of her contentious reputation, I asked if she thrived on conflict. “I don’t. I have opinions, yes.” “Would you describe yourself as angry?” “Depends on what context.” “This is a conversation.” “I’m not angry.” “You’re quite ferocious in your manner.” “Oh no, really, come on.” Seeing that I was prepared to end the interview, Jackson grew conciliatory. I must say in her defense that her refusal to traffic in bromides and pleasantries is rare and somewhat admirable.
It is her fierce independence of mind, after all, that has set her apart as an actress. Her lack of deference, once seductive in its challenge, retains a regal integrity. When I later listened to the tape of our interview, I was better able to appreciate her rough candor.
Stand-up comics, famously, do not like hecklers.
They ruin shows. They divert from meticulously calibrated jokes. The response to them is often so brutal and hilarious that heckler takedowns is itself a comedy subgenre.
Ken Jeong thought he was being heckled in Phoenix on Saturday when a woman in the third row during his set at the Stand Up Live Comedy Club unmoored the comedian with a disturbance.
The lights came on, and it became clear the woman was having an apparent seizure, an audience member later said.
Then, “The Hangover” and “Community” actor reverted to his dormant profession: doctor.
“He couldn’t see what was going on with the lights. He thought he was being heckled. He was playing with them from the stage for a second,” audience member Heather Holmberg told USA Today. “It was a moment where time stands still. Someone was having a crisis. There was a hush over the room.”
Jeong, an internal medicine practitioner turned Hollywood funnyman, cleared the area and attended to the woman alongside a medic who happened to be in attendance, Holmberg said in a Sunday tweet.
The woman regained consciousness and returned to her feet, and Jeong stayed with her until an ambulance arrived, TMZ reported.
Jeong then returned to the stage after the incident to a round of applause, the entertainment site said.
His representative, Michelle Margolis, declined to make additional comments beyond saying the TMZ story was “accurate.”
At least one audience member thought he killed it. “Great night! He is gracious and grateful . . . AND flipping funny!” Holmberg said in her tweet.
Jeong received his medical degree in 1995 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, though he soon began moonlighting as a comic. A break in a comedy contest led him to Los Angeles, where he performed sets after long days in an HMO clinic.