A West End run for Ms May?
PLAYWRIGHT Kenneth Lonergan said he would love Elaine May, the great comic actress, writer and film-maker, to star in a West End production of his bittersweet masterpiece The Waverly Gallery, based on how his family coped with his grandmother’s decline into senility.
The gentle portrait of heartbreak was first produced in New York 19 years ago, but the revival that I saw (twice in one week) on Broadway back in January has stayed with me.
It’s now up for Best Actress (Ms May, in the role of Gladys) and Best Revival of a Play in the Tony Awards, announced on June 9 in New York.
Lucas Hedges played Daniel, a role based on Lonergan.
The playwright told me that May said recently she’d had the most relaxed time playing Gladys on Broadway.
‘She said she was repeatedly asked if she’d been tired . . . but she enjoyed her time on the show because she knew what she was going to do every day.’
May’s schedule was set and nobody bothered her, because they all thought that she was too busy.
‘As soon as the play came down, everybody’s asking her to do things,’ said Lonergan, who directed the films You Can Count On Me and Manchester By The Sea. ‘So maybe she’ll do it again here [in London], because it was so relaxing!’
Lonergan also told me ‘it’s not out of the question’ that a film could be made of Waverly Gallery, also starring May.
I asked if he’d been discussing that possibility with the play’s director, Lila Neugebauer, and producer, Scott Rudin.
‘No. It’s talk among myself and I,’ he told me. ‘It’s something I’ve decided to do. I’ve always felt it would make a good movie.’ Lonergan was in London for the opening of his play The Starry Messenger at Wyndham’s Theatre, which stars his close friend and frequent collaborator Matthew Broderick, alongside Elizabeth McGovern and Rosalind Eleazar (who was in his BBC TV adaptation of Howards End).
He’s been in the preliminary stages of working on another play for a year now, and has plans for a new film and an original TV drama.