Madeline Kahn (44 page)

Set in August, 1991, on the eve of the fall of the Soviet Union and at the height of the AIDS crisis, the play unfolds in Sara Goode’s London sitting room. Sara’s fifty-fourth birthday is the occasion for a family reunion. Played by Jane Alexander, she guards her emotions and conceals her heritage; her seventeen-year-old daughter, Tess (Julie Dretzin) can scarcely persuade her to talk about her past for a school project. Pfeni (Frances McDormand at Lincoln Center, Christine Estabrook on Broadway) yearns to address serious international subjects but writes travel features instead. She’s having an affair with Geoffrey (John Vickery), a bisexual British stage director. Gorgeous, the busybody, has doubts about the relationship, telling Pfeni, “I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, but sweetsie, you’re at the wrong library altogether.” Geoffrey has invited his friend Mervyn Kant (Robert Klein) to join the party. Gorgeous promptly suggests that he marry Sara—and he’s very much attracted to her. But Mervyn is as up-front about his Bronx–Jewish origins as Sara is detached from her Brooklyn–Jewish ones. Seeking any kind of identity, Tess has gotten involved in Lithuanian politics and is preparing to fly to Vilnius. Geoffrey realizes, “I miss men,” and he leaves Pfeni. After resisting Mervyn, Sara falls for him but tosses him out the next morning. By the end of the play, he’s persuaded her to give love a chance, and at last Sara is ready to do for Tess what she’s refused to do all along: sing a song from her youth.

On the page, the role of Gorgeous does initially seem to be as shallow as Madeline feared. Only gradually does the reader realize that she’s the only sister who’s in touch with herself and fully conscious of the people around her. Gorgeous has come to London to lead a tour for another sisterhood, the women from her synagogue in suburban Massachusetts. She paints her circumstances rosily: her wonderful husband and children, her faith, her “funsy” job as the host of a radio advice program that justifies calling herself “Dr. Gorgeous.” But at last she breaks down, admitting that her husband lost his job two years earlier, and she wears designer knockoffs because she can’t afford the real thing she so dearly craves.

In the next scene, the women from her synagogue reward Gorgeous with an authentic Chanel suit and all the accessories. With infectious delight, Madeline dressed up in full view of the audience. “I haven’t been so happy since the day I found out I made cheerleader and I knew Sara didn’t,” Gorgeous exclaims (Madeline made a gesture to keep from getting a laugh after “cheerleader”). Seconds later, she announces that she’s going to exchange the entire ensemble for cash: “Sweetsie, somebody’s got to pay for tuition this fall, and better Chanel than Henry or me.” Madeline made this sacrifice so poignant that the audience gasped aloud at every performance.

“There are certain actors who are so right for what they are doing that it would be very, very hard for them to make a mistake,” Sullivan says. “This is true of Madeline in that role. She was just a kind of perfect fit, like the dress itself.”

For Madeline, this performance required getting under the skin of a character who resembled her only slightly. Both she and Gorgeous were Jewish, but in life Madeline hewed closer to the character of Sara, who has become more British than the British, complete with a London home and a posh accent. (You’d never know Sara was Jewish—and Alexander isn’t. Neither are the two actresses who played Pfeni.) Gorgeous, along with Mervyn, forces Sara to recognize her Jewish identity, and for Madeline, the play was a means of reflecting on her roots. To light the Sabbath candles in act 1, scene 2, she consulted a rabbi to ensure she performed the ceremony correctly. Hers hadn’t been an observant household, but now Paula put her in touch with friends in Charlottesville who advised her further about Orthodox traditions. They videotaped the candle lighting ceremony so that she could study it at home. Wasserstein brought a rabbi to rehearsals, and Sullivan learned the ceremony, too, so that he’d be able to help Madeline and other actresses who might play Gorgeous in the future.

The greatest similarity between Madeline and Gorgeous, Alexander observes, is love of fashion. Beyond this, however, the contrast could hardly be greater. Unlike Gorgeous, Madeline was childless, single, and never a middle sister. Whereas Gorgeous tries to circumvent her mother’s definition of happiness, Madeline strove to live up to Paula’s definition of success. Paula wrapped herself in a cloak of personal mythology, as Lola Wasserstein did, but Lola (and Rita Rosensweig) talked about family. Paula’s stories began and ended with herself. Gorgeous follows a geographic trajectory, from New York to Massachusetts, the opposite of Madeline’s own. Nevertheless, the actress understood the character—perhaps even better than the playwright did.

Sullivan says it wasn’t really a case of indulging Madeline’s desire to play Gorgeous seriously. “That kind of thing has always been her comic forte. She always came to a thing with great earnestness and seriousness, and that’s why it was funny. That’s in all of her work.” “Reality didn’t prevent her from being hilarious,” says Bishop, whose title is now producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. “Madeline didn’t think the play was funny at all. She worried that the audience was laughing
at
her.” Sullivan, too, remembers “that wonderful innocence of ‘Why are they laughing?’ That would often happen in rehearsal. She would say something entirely seriously, but because of her manner, everyone would laugh. There was that—one would think clueless, but perhaps clueless on purpose—‘why are they laughing?’”

At first, the playwright asked the same question. Far from having conceived of Gorgeous as a caricature, or of the play as a broad comedy, Wasserstein “thought the same thing about the play that Madeline thought about the role,” Bishop suggests. Sullivan says, “Because Madeline’s performance was brilliant, with a good deal of hysterical laughter, it could be the
nature
of the laughter that surprised Wendy. I know she considered the character comic, and she is a comic masterpiece, only because she is very, very real.” Madeline made Gorgeous real not by “ennobling her,” Sullivan says, but by focusing on “this character’s sorrow for what has happened to her and to her husband, trying to keep the heart up. That was the soul of the performance.” “The temptation was, Wendy wrote jokes in there and she wanted them done,” Robert Klein says. “She wound up getting laughs, but Madeline was on the ball all the time that this woman not be a clown, not be a buffoon. Her instinct was right.” As a result of her approach, Gorgeous’s revelation in act 2 was “all the more touching,” Klein says, “and even then, she didn’t play it like a wimp; she played it angry. She had a great gift.”

“She behaved and worked like someone who was a Method actor, but she was a comic,” Bishop says, still fascinated by her process. “Everything was real,” Dretzin says. “Everything was funny. She couldn’t say a line that didn’t sound truthful.”

“I am not, in general, a funny person,” Madeline told the
New York Times
. “From inside where I live, I feel like I just perceive events in a certain rational way. I often find it sad or poignant, and it may not make me laugh a bit. But I don’t mind inventing a portrait that allows others to laugh if that’s what they want to do.”
¹⁸

The Sisters Rosensweig
would prove a happier experience for Madeline than almost any other she’d known in the New York theater, and much credit is due the cast. “They’re all theater people, you know, so there was no bullshit,” Dretzin says. “Everyone was excited to get down to work and get to know each other. I was the least experienced, and I’m sure I was the most terrified.” Madeline tried to encourage her, she says, sharing stories of her own work experience and praising her after a good performance. It was the beginning of a close friendship. According to Dretzin, Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow were originally considered for the roles of Sara and Tess, but when Paltrow signed on for a movie, Danner backed out. This cleared the way for Dretzin, who, assuming she wouldn’t get the part, had been ready to start graduate school. Wasserstein and Sullivan took Jane Alexander to lunch, then gave her the play to read. “I loved it from the beginning,” Alexander says. “I think Wendy always was writing romantic comedy. Even if the romance was about feminism or about women bonding, it was a romantic comedy—to me.” She was especially pleased to be working with her onstage sisters, and the presence of so many comedians—John Vickery, as well as Madeline and the “always delightful” Klein—kept spirits high.

A quarter-century after
New Faces
, Madeline and Klein were a seasoned team. During rehearsals, Klein says, it was he who made her laugh, “like George Burns had this power over Jack Benny.” Onstage, “I became her willing and delighted straight man. You know, for a comedian to be a straight man! And sit there for five minutes and watch the audience fall off their seats while I handed her gems. She was there every night, on the money.” “Over the course of the run, she never gave less than 95 percent,” agrees Roy Harris. Describing Madeline as “luminous,” he was impressed by her seriousness, as was Dretzin. “I think often people expect brilliant comediennes like her to be extroverted, loud, always ‘on,’” Dretzin says. “[C]ertainly there are performers who are like that. But Madeline was the opposite: quiet, gentle, thoughtful, serious,
and then she’d come in with some ridiculous voice or hysterically funny little jab, and you would suddenly be reminded that you were talking to . . . Madeline Kahn.”

The only dark cloud in the company hovered over McDormand, who had trouble finding Pfeni’s character. “She just didn’t feel she was right for the role,” Sullivan explains. “It’s a very difficult part. In all cases, when you’re really playing the author, there’s a terrible burden there.” He found it difficult to help her. Wasserstein seemed to presume that her “sadness” was dramatic and that audiences would automatically identify with her stand-ins. McDormand strove to keep from letting her problems spill over into the rest of the production, then left the company shortly before the end of the Lincoln Center run.

Sharing a dressing room at Lincoln Center, all four actresses bonded, and they were thrilled when many of the design houses cited in the play sent them samples. As show time neared, however, Madeline preferred (like most actors) to concentrate and to prepare in silence. “I tend to be, unfortunately for other people, a little too talky in a dressing room,” Alexander says. “I’m more easy; my preparation after a while is nil. It’s kind of—walk onstage. But Madeline was so gracious about me, and she would just very quietly say, ‘Jane, I think we should be quiet now!’ But she never got upset with me, and I think back and I say, ‘Wow, she was really a trouper.’”

During the Broadway run, the Clinton Administration approached Alexander with a view toward naming her chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which had been embattled during the two previous, Republican administrations. Alexander couldn’t discuss the matter until the White House officially announced her appointment. “The one who was most delighted in the whole company was Madeline,” she says. “She was really excited about it, and she laughed and said, ‘Jane, how did you keep this such a secret?’ She gave me a gorgeous, huge silk scarf that had horseshoes on it for luck.”

Remembering Madeline’s performance, Alexander says there was never a time when she worried that Gorgeous was stealing Sara’s thunder, “because it doesn’t work like that, when you’re onstage with a great comedian. I know about that, and my comedy is very different than Madeline’s—I’m known as a dramatic actress.” The play itself was “a careful balance between comedy and drama. I was carrying the dramatic part of it.” Still, she says, “There was something about Madeline and me together that was funny,” and she cites the scene in which Sara comes downstairs the morning after sleeping with Mervyn. “Everybody’s there
in the living room, it’s a dead pause, and Madeline says, ‘So, how was it?’ I look at her, a slow burn, and it’s the longest laugh I’ve ever heard in the theater that I’ve been involved with.”
¹⁹

The Sisters Rosensweig
opened at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center on October 22, 1992, but the production didn’t meet with universal favor, and Wasserstein’s play sustained palpable blows.
Newsweek
was especially tough, and
Variety
called the play “a stunningly mean-spirited affair,” complaining that the sisters “don’t seem to have issued from the same species, let alone the same womb.” Madeline is scarcely mentioned in either review.
²⁰
The
New York Times
was more encouraging, its review a portent of box office success. “The play offers sharp truths about what can divide relatives and what can draw them together,” Mel Gussow wrote. “For Ms. Kahn, Dr. Gorgeous . . . is the choicest of roles. Restlessly changing her costumes and interrupting conversations, she is a delirious combination of extravagant plumage and native intuition.”
²¹
In
Time
, William A. Henry III wrote, “Wasserstein is interested in serious issues . . . [b]ut in form and uproarious dialogue the play is a commercial comedy. On that level,
Sisters
is a delight and is exquisitely performed, especially by Kahn as the ditsiest, daffiest and ultimately most devious of this matriarchal clan.”
²²

Buoyed by Wasserstein’s reputation and building word of mouth about Madeline,
Sisters Rosensweig
hardly needed the critics. And as the run continued, a consensus grew: Madeline was giving a not-to-be-missed performance. Michael Specter’s profile in the
New York Times
reflects that evolving perspective: “[C]ritics have nearly universally praised Ms. Kahn in this role, not only for her ability to bring down the house with the flick of an eyebrow, but for the streaks of sadness she lays on top of the laughs.” And he quotes David Richards’s
Times
review of the Broadway transfer: “She can make the most innocent utterances seem like the wildest of non sequiturs. She winds up stealing everybody’s thunder.”
²³
The play was a smash hit, selling out at Lincoln Center. Friends and family came; it meant a lot that Ginny Kahn, with her high standards and cultivated tastes, expressed enthusiastic approval. Even Hal Prince and Peter Bogdanovich came and found much to admire. “You got laughs where there aren’t any,” Bogdanovich told her. “She would say something like ‘But,’ and it got a laugh,” he remembers. “I’m serious. I’m sitting there, and she’d say something, and the audience would scream, and I’d say, ‘That’s not a funny line, that’s just Madeline’s reading.’”