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Williams Fest has a friend in Stephanie, The Times-Picayune, March 24, 2004 The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Williams Fest has a friend in Stephanie, The Times-Picayune, March 24, 2004 Williams Fest has a friend in Stephanie
By David Cuthbert Besides being an excellent actress at home in any medium, a child of Hollywood who's maybe two degrees of separation from anyone in the business and something of a cult figure from her years on "Remington Steele," Stephanie Zimbalist is a good friend to have in a pinch. Especially if you're The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival and one of your stars calls in sick a week before her reading at the fest's opening gala. "You know, it's funny," Zimbalist, "but I actually called the festival to see if there was anything I could do this year, because I love the Williams Festival. I love attending it as a participant, but I love being a spectator, too. The last time I was down there, I got to watch Richard Thomas rehearse his Tennessee piece, 'A Distant Country Called Youth,' with Steve Lawson directing. And I loved 'Roads Not Taken,' with scenes from the earliest versions of 'Streetcar' acted out and buying books by the authors who are there... "But the festival said, 'Sorry, we've got Tammy Grimes coming in to read 'The Two-Character' play with Joel Vig, who did 'Hairspray' on Broadway with my friend Linda Hart, who did 'A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot' with me at the festival. "But then, last Friday, the festival called up saying, 'Helllllp! Tammy Grimes is sick. Can you do the reading with Joel?'" One can imagine how many a star might react. But what Stephanie Zimbalist did was hop a plane to New York to rehearse with Vig, using the drive in from the airport to call and do some press for the show. Zimbalist, who was a wonderful Hannah Jelkes in a fest reading of Williams' "Night of the Iguana" a few years ago, is going to repeat the role "in a full production of 'Iguana' at the Rubicon Theater in Ventura, California; a co-production with the Winnipeg Theater Center, so we'll do it there, too." Rubicon is the theater where our own Lance Nichols will be playing opposite Michael Learned in 'Driving Miss Daisy' next month. "They attract all kinds of good actors there," Zimbalist said, "Linda Purl, Cliff DeYoung, Joe Spano. I did 'Dancing at Lughnasa' for them last spring and played Georges Sand in 'Romantique.'" It's TV for which she's best known, but her heart is on the stage. She recently did episodes of "Crossing Judson" and "Judging Amy," but she's more excited that she got to play Phyllis to her friend Teri Ralston's Sally in "a full-out production of 'Follies' at the California Conservatory of the Arts, with an incredible cast: John Raitt, Betty Garrett, Julie Wilson and Harvey Evans, who was in the original 'Follies'! I got to sing 'Could I Leave You?' and "Lucy and Jessie' and I was in heaven." Tonight at Le Petit, she'll be playing Clare to Vig's Felice in "The Two-Character Play," brother and sister actors whose theatrical troupe has deserted them, leaving them no choice but to perform "The Two-Character Play," which seems to contain elements of their lives. It's a fairly complex piece and when I spoke to her earlier this week, Zimbalist said she wasn't all that familiar with it. "But we'll pull it together," she said. "I didn't know the play before I did a reading of it eight months ago," Vig said. "It's wildly theatrical, sort of Noel Coward crossed with Samuel Beckett, it has a very peculiar, dark undercurrent. "There's a desperation to the characters as this mystery unfolds before the audience's eyes, all of us trying to piece together what's true and what's part of the play. It has humor, but it's the psychotic, black humor of people in absolutely desperate situations, so desperate it becomes funny to them. "It's also about fear. For instance, right now I'm in 'Hairspray,' the longest run of my career -- two years, so far. But there comes a point where you start thinking that theaters are, in the end, prisons for actors. To which Tennessee might have added, 'And playwrights, too.'" Vig has been working with a group called Food for Thought, which stages readings of plays at lunchtime at the National Arts Club in New York City. "You can have lunch and see a reading with well-known actors," he said. "Susan Charlotte, who's the director of Food for Thought, and a playwright, too, will also be at the festival, teaching a master class." Vig, who's done readings at the festival twice with his good friend Patricia Neal, is one of the busiest guys on Broadway. He understudies both Harvey Fierstein and Harve's stage husband, Dick Latessa in "Hairspray" and also plays six roles in the show. Recently, he played Latessa's role for a week. Is it hard adjusting from a huge theater like the 1,400-seat Neil Simon Theatre, to the 400-seat Le Petit? "No, I love Le Petit," Vig said. "It may be small, but it's a real theater. It looks like a theater, sounds like a theater, it even smells like a theater!" The Times-Picayune, March 25, 2004 Intoxicating options Drink in Williams' words at Tennessee Fest Stage Tavern By David Cuthbert
Theater writer The festival itself is providing most of these intoxicating stagings, along with actual mint juleps in the patio of fest headquarters, Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre. And if you remember Blanche's line in "A Streetcar Named Desire" -- "Southern Comfort. What is that, I wonder?" -- you'll find out. A warning, though: You can get pretty hammered on this guy's words alone and the only hangover cure is hair of the dog that bit you. Luckily, there's lots to go around. Already up and running is "A House Not Meant to Stand," Williams' final, full-length and as yet unpublished play, a comedy-drama set in a shaky, leaky old Pascagoula home where its residents, Cornelius and Bella McCorkle, are barely standing as well. Like Williams' family, they have three children, two boys and a girl, and they are returning from the funeral of their eldest son as Cornelius rants about his phantom political career, the state of America, his health and his dead "degenerate" son, who took after his wife's family "where lunacy and sexual confusion run rampant." In many ways a dark, fun-house mirror image of Williams' first success, "The Glass Menagerie," with the father (instead of the mother) as its central figure, "A House Not Meant to Stand" offers the first full-bodied portrait of Williams' father, whose name was Cornelius, tinged with the political aspirations of brother Dakin, and also another character who could be Dakin as a young man. Fighting death and dying are a main concern of the play, as they were for Tennessee in 1980-82 when "House" was produced in three different versions at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Lane Savadone directs a cast headed by John Hammons as Cornelius, Lauren Swinney as the addled Bella, Bob Edes and Janet Daley as the battling couple next door, Andy English as son Charley McCorkle and Leah Loftin as his pregnant girlfriend given to religious seizures. The festival's opening night gala will be a reading of the seldom staged "The Two-Character Play," endlesly rewritten by Williams (another version exists called "Outcry") and a very personal statement about life, reality and art. Two actors, Felice and Clare, abandoned by their theater company and apparently trapped in an old theater, are playing brother and sister -- or are they actually brother and sister? Or two halves of a divided self? -- in a play-within-a-play as Williams examines themes that appear throughout his work. Stephanie Zimbalist and "Hairspray" star Joel Vig are Clare and Felice, while New Orleans' own Broadway star Bryan Batt reads Williams' stage directions. What you're going to hear from most people is, "Why do 'The Glass Menagerie' again? It must be the most familiar, produced and filmed Williams play in his entire canon." True enough. The Williams Festival itself has staged it on several occasions. But this year marks the 60th anniversary of the play's first production in Chicago. It is the play that most closely depicts Williams' family and it also relates to the two other Williams plays the festival is producing. "Menagerie" and "A House Not Meant to Stand," Williams first and final full-length plays, are practically bookends. Also, another interpretation of the characters in "The Two-Character Play" is that they're the young Tom and Laura Wingfield from "The Glass Menagerie" as adults. In Perry Martin's production, Ann Casey plays the overbearing, aging Southern belle Amanda Wingfield; Soline McLain is the crippled, painfully shy Laura; Justin Scalise is rebellious Tom and Ryan Reineke is the Gentleman Caller. >From the University of Illinois at Urbana comes "Caged Hearts," scenes from five early Williams plays: "Candles to the Sun," Fugitive Kind," "Not About Nightingales," "Spring Storm" and "Stairs to the Roof," along with readings of Williams letters, constituting "a nice mosaic of the apprentice works," according to Williams scholar Robert Bray. This presentation is part of the Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference. The 2004 winner of The Tennessee Williams 2004 Festival One-Act Play competition is "Loose Hog in the House of God," by Thomas Kristopher of Bloomington, Ind., which will receive a staged reading. "It's about a boy fleeing an abusive father whose car breaks down and he meets a girl who may be real or not," said University of New Orleans drama professor David Hoover. "It has a 'This Property Is Condemened' feeling to it." It will be followed by a full production of last year's winner, "The World's Longest Kiss," by Peter Morris, directed by David Hoover, with Jane McNulty, Michael Santos and Mike Harkins. There is also a lively fringe festival of Williams plays and satires that has sprung up around the main event. Williams' penultimate full-length play, the 1981 "Something Cloudy, Something Clear," finds the playwright in 1980 returning in memory to Provincetown of 1940, where he fell in love with a dancer named Kip, becoming briefly entwined in the lives of the boy and his alleged sister. He also tangles with Theatre Guild representatives and encounters actresses based on Miriam Hopkins and a voluble, raving Tallulah Bankhead. Luis Q. Barroso directs for DRAMA! the gay and lesbian theater company, with Michael-Chase Creasy as August, the playwright, and Kenneth Thompson as Kip. "To Flee, Flee This Sad Hotel" was Williams' original title for his memoirs, the "sad hotel" being his body. (Williams related to edifices as the human shell: "This Property Is Condemned," "A House Not Meant to Stand.") Performance artist Kathy Randels plays Tennessee and his characters, both male and female: Blanche DuBois, Maggie the Cat, Brick and Big Daddy Pollitt, using text from the plays, poetry, excerpts from letters and his "Memoirs." "He's so paradoxical," Randels says, "and I think he was a real jerk at times, very abrasive to people who were close to him, but I love him. I think I wanted to go into the theater because of him. He's a great artist because his work raised public consciousness on so many levels. "He attacked all aspects of life with an incredible passion. He was definitely in the same sandbox as the beat poets in terms of pushing his own physical limits and then putting those tests into his work. "Changing my body, my voice, the physical way I do things as I slip in and out of sexual identities has been really interesting. I brought my friend AnneLiese Juge-Fox over to ask her, 'How's my drag?,' and she said I was playing up the effeminancy too much." "Pussy on the House" turns out to be a surprisingly literate gender-bender riff on "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" from playwright Ryan Landry and the Running With Scissors guys and gals, with cross-dressing in both directions. Big Daddy, for instance, is now Colonel Sandra, who made her millions in the chicken business and gets birthday calls from the likes of Rosie O'Donnell. Flynn De Marco plays Brick Pollop, a former child star who went into a glue-sniffing decline when his beloved co-star, Skipper, was killed and their TV show canceled. Was there something unnatural about Brick's relationship with Skipper? Audiences are asked not to reveal the surprise nature of who and what Skipper was and trained nurses will be in attendance for the faint of heart. Brian Peterson fills out Maggie the Cat's slip and spills out of it as well. The entire action of the play takes place on the plantation roof, where Brick has his fortress of solitude. The cast includes Rusty Tennant as Colonel Sandra, Jim Jeske, Elizabeth Pearce as Colonel Sandra's lesbian lover Aunt Sukey and Dorian Rush as Sister Woman, here called Queenie. Richard Read and DeMarco direct. The Krewe des Sept's Reader's Theater has another knowing Williams satire in "The Glass Mendacity," from Chicago's Illegitimate Players. Playwrights Maureen Morley and Tom Willmorth combine characters from various plays: Big Mama from "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" with Amanda Wingfield from "The Glass Menagerie," Mitch from "A Streetcar Named Desire" with Tom from "Menagerie," who begins the play by parodying Tom's famous opening lines: "I have no tricks in my pockets or things up my sleeve, or wires running down my pants legs and back behind the flats where an accomplice is rigging smoke bombs." Blanche DuBois is actually married to Stanley Kowalski and tells us, "They told me to take 'A Streetcar Named Desire,' then transfer to one called Wanton Lust and then ride six blocks until I got to Gyrating Torso." Carl Walker directs one of the best casts in recent memory, which will rotate. Among those laying loving waste to Williams: John "Spud" McConnell, Carol Sutton, Maureen Brennan, Tony Molina, Lara Grice, J.P. dela Houssaye, Andrea Molina, Bob Scully, Randy Cheramie and Ann Mahoney. Gawd! After all that, you may need a rum-coco ("Night of the Iguana") or one of Aunt Violet's daiquiris ("Suddenly Last Summer") or maybe just "a lemon Coke with plenty of chipped ice in it" ("Streetcar"). Although, as Blanche knows, "Honey, a shot never does a Coke any harm!" The Times-Picayune, March 24, 2004
BEVERLY HILLS-- EFREM Zimbalist Jr., best known for hunting down culprits on television's "77 Sunset Strip" and "The FBI," has lately gone searching for book buyers. Zimbalist has been touting his "My Dinner of Herbs" at book signings in Southern California. It's not a New Age cookbook, but a memoir of his remarkable life. The title comes from Proverbs 15:17: "Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith." One recent weekday, Zimbalist was playing the uncomfortable role as huckster, promoting his wares at a luncheon of Roundtable West, where book lovers gather monthly to hear authors discuss and sign their tomes. His audience was filled with predominantly white-haired ladies who virtually swooned over elegant Zimbalist. At 86, he cuts an impressive figure: suntanned, a full head of white hair, debonair mustache. He was dressed in a black jacket, gray slacks, conservative tie. After he graciously signed books and the crowd thinned out, he sat for an interview in the hotel dining room. "My Dinner of Herbs" is no tell-all book. Zimbalist writes extensively about his parents, opera star Alma Gluck and violin virtuoso Efrem Sr., both legends in their time. Also detailed are his year of study in the Soviet Union, his five years in the U.S. Army, where he earned the Purple Heart, and his failed scholarship. "I was kicked out of Yale twice," he confessed. "First after my freshman year, then they let me back in and I had to take the freshman year over. I was kicked out again." He attributed his academic failure to the playboy spirit that was prevalent in the prewar years. "My mother died shortly afterward," he said. "All she knew was that her son was a total screw-up. That's the sadness of my life, a great sadness." The book offers close-up looks at stars he worked with: Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn (who drank two bottles of vodka during a day's shooting), Gary Cooper and others. But scandal, there is none. "It wasn't going to be a book that hurt people or destroyed reputations," Zimbalist declared. "It was a book to give pleasure." Unlike James Garner, Clint Walker and other stars of Warner Bros. TV series who battled management over long workdays and short paychecks, Zimbalist appears to have had a placid relationship with the studio. "Maybe it was because I played tennis every weekend with the boss, Jack Warner, at his house," Zimbalist mused. When he was in a turmoil over his second marriage and left "77 Sunset Strip" for a divorce in Reno, Warner kept him on the payroll. "The guy's in trouble," Warner told an underling. "Let's show him who his friends are." Zimbalist changed his mind, and he remains married to Loranda Stephanie Spalding, mother of Zimbalist's actress daughter, Stephanie Zimbalist. His first wife, Emily McNair, died of cancer in 1950. Despite his burgeoning career at the time, the mourning actor left Hollywood with their two children, Nancy and Efrem III, and studied music and taught at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where his father was an artist in residence. After four years, he returned to Hollywood and a fresh start in the new medium of television. Today, Zimbalist and Spalding live in the Santa Ynez Valley north of Santa Barbara, not far from Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. He's never met Jackson, but he's met his orangutan. Zimbalist explains that a few years ago, he appeared at a local animal lovers fund-raiser to which Jackson donated the use of his orangutan so that patrons could pose for pictures with the beast. The animal leaped into Zimbalist's arms, hugged and kissed him. He received the same warm welcome the following year. Except for book signings, Zimbalist spends most of his time around home. His acting jobs are few. "Nobody wants someone my age anymore," he remarked resignedly. "I do an occasional thing now and then, generally not on film. "I'm out of it today. I don't know the people who are running (the studios) today. I don't even know the people who are making movies today. I stopped going to the movies over 20 years ago. The movies I used to be fanatic about, they stopped making. They started making another kind of movie, and it's not my kind of world." The Alameda Times Star, February 27, 2004
Williams Fest has a friend in Stephanie, The Times-Picayune, March 24, 2004 main page |
