After Years on the Road, New Dreams in New York
Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Jayne Houdyshell in, from left, "The Receptionist," "Well" and "The New Century."
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: April 8, 2008
For many little girls who live in rural America and dream of one day becoming actresses, the fantasy that dances in their heads usually consists of holding a golden Oscar and reciting an acceptance speech, or perhaps playing the diva in a big-budget musical on Broadway.
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Times Topics: Jayne Houdyshell
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Michael Falco for The New York Times
Jayne Houdyshell backstage at the Newhouse Theater.
Not Jayne Houdyshell.
When she was growing up in a big wooden farmhouse in Topeka, Kan., in the 1950s and ’60s, starring in epic dramas and blushing romances conjured from her loneliness and imagination, Ms. Houdyshell’s dreams involved performing in regional theaters, she said: traveling from city to city, getting the juiciest roles and working nonstop.
And that’s precisely what she did for about 25 years.
“The ideal regional theater career really spun itself out,” Ms. Houdyshell said, sitting over a bowl of matzo ball soup at the coffee shop of the Edison Hotel in the heart of the Manhattan theater district. Over that quarter-century, she lived out of a suitcase 9, 10, sometimes 11 months a year, performing in a couple of hundred plays all told. “I got to play huge parts I had no business playing,” she said: Linda Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
“I knew I wanted to work all the time,” she said. “That’s actor heaven.”
So in 2000, when Ms. Houdyshell finally decided, at the age of 46, to empty her suitcase and settle into a studio apartment at the northernmost tip of Manhattan, no one in the theater world — casting agents, directors, producers — had any idea who she was. This middle-aged actress seemed to have spontaneously generated, with superb technique, enormous range and pitch-perfect instincts. “Where has this woman been?” the playwright Paul Rudnick said. “I thought she was extraordinary.”
Ms. Houdyshell is now starring with Linda Lavin and Peter Bartlett in Mr. Rudnick’s play “The New Century,” which is in previews and opens Monday at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. And though she may not have obsessed about Hollywood and Broadway musicals when she was young, she now has a foot in each of those worlds.
On Friday Ms. Houdyshell picked up the script for Robert De Niro’s new film, “Everybody’s Fine,” in which she will appear, and accepted an offer to return to the blockbuster musical hit “Wicked” for six months as Madame Morrible, a part she played in 2006.
Ms. Houdyshell had performed in musicals like “Damn Yankees,” in which she played the devilishly seductive Lola in summer stock when she was 20. (The production resulted in a short-lived marriage to the leading man.) But no one in New York would have suspected she could sing, except Joe Mantello, the director of “Wicked,” who had a bit part as a waiter in a 1980 summer stock production of “Hello, Dolly!” starring Ms. Houdyshell. “He always remembered me as this musical theater diva,” she said.
Those commitments and a few others, including a workshop for a musical based on the children’s story “Coraline,” will keep Ms. Houdyshell occupied through next year.
How can she possibly juggle so many different roles at the same time? “I’m a single woman without children,” she replied.
Still, success in New York did not come easily, she noted. She loved the community of actors at regional theaters, but the constant traveling had worn thin, and she wanted to branch out and perform in new, original plays. But for two years she barely worked.
“That was a very dark time,” she said. “It was a real struggle. I hadn’t been auditioning, so I had to learn how to do that.”
Then she began collaborating with Lisa Kron on her eccentric autobiographical comedy, “Well.” Ms. Houdyshell was cast as Ms. Kron’s idiosyncratic mother, Ann.
Even during the play’s workshops Ms. Houdyshell, who spent most of the play’s two hours wearing a shabby housedress and sitting in a La-Z-Boy, was generating that life-giving force in the entertainment industry known as buzz. Her performance, first at the Public Theater downtown and then on Broadway, was praised by Charles Isherwood in The New York Times in 2006 for its “flawless authenticity.”
“Ann Kron is observed and presented with an honesty, a rigor and an understated compassion that recall the work of the great documentary photographers who capture unexpected moments of beauty on the fly,” he wrote.
In the insular but exacting New York theater world Ms. Houdyshell became a star. (“I love your work,” whispered a man as he brushed by her table at the Edison on his way to pay the check.) Her Broadway debut, which earned a Tony nomination, was everything she had imagined. “There was something really beautiful at having your Broadway debut at 52,” she said. “I felt really ready.”
She drew raves again late last year playing the title character in Adam Bock’s comedy “The Receptionist.”
In “The New Century,” a collection of three short plays with a final scene in which all the characters meet, Ms. Houdyshell is Barbara Ellen Diggs, a woman from Decatur, Ill., whose creative impulses find an outlet in handicrafts like a crocheted tuxedo cover for the toaster. (The primary expenses for her next project are “labor, Zoloft and glue,” she says perkily, screwing up her face like a chipmunk.) Her monologue, by far the most poignant, recalls visiting her son in the hospital as he lay dying of AIDS and a moment of connection with a New Yorker in Central Park.
The show’s director, Nicholas Martin, described working with Ms. Houdyshell as “slightly intimidating.”
“She connects with the character and the play with such ferocity, she doesn’t really need a director,” he said.
Heading toward Lincoln Center for a recent performance, Ms. Houdyshell said just going there reminded her every day of how lucky she is. On the main stage upstairs, a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific” had recently opened. “It’s something to walk into your workplace and hear a 30-piece orchestra playing ‘Bali Ha’i,’ ” she said.
Although Ms. Houdyshell is heading downstairs to the Newhouse, the orchestra might just as well be playing for her. After all, “Bali Ha’i,” as Bloody Mary sings in the show, is where you find “Your own special hopes/Your own special dreams.” And at the moment Ms. Houdyshell’s can be found eight times a week on the lower level, amid tuxedo-clad toasters and crocheted toilet caddies.
