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Lange's past helps with new role

As Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, Jessica Lange again tackles one of the most challenging roles for women.

NEW YORK - Talk about ghosts.

In the darkened gloom of an empty Gramercy Park restaurant before the dinner crowd arrives, Jessica Lange sits at a corner table, sips a cup of coffee and talks about the extraordinary women created by Tennessee Williams. She has played her share of them.

Blanche DuBois, Maggie the Cat (on film) and now Amanda Wingfield, the domineering mother who propels The Glass Menagerie, the heartbreaking family drama that 60 years ago brought Williams his first New York success.

This memory play, starring Lange, is back on Broadway, with Christian Slater as Tom, the errant son who longs to escape the stifling grasp of his mother, Sarah Paulson as the emotionally fragile Laura and Josh Lucas as the Gentleman Caller, the young man preordained by Amanda to provide her daughter with a romantic relationship.

Lange talks shyly, almost demurely about Menagerie, often described as Williams' quiet play - as well as his most brutal. "It's both of those things," she says softly. "Nothing can be more brutal than family."

Amanda, according to the actor, is capable of "unwitting cruelty," a phrase used by Williams himself to describe this indomitable creature.

"That to me is like a huge clue because I don't think there is anything about Amanda that is deliberate in the sense of being hurtful," Lange says in analyzing her latest stage creation. "But because she has such desperation, I think there are moments where she just doesn't know what she is saying or what she is doing."

Amanda is a woman raised in gentility but who married into a hard life, abandoned, along with two children, by a wandering man.

"Sometimes I think about Amanda in terms of what happened when her husband left her," says Lange, who in the movies has played an array of fascinating females, from Patsy Cline to Frances Farmer to the object of King Kong's affection. "Amanda was still a young woman, a woman who obviously was used to male attention and was used to being adored. In the true manner of a Southern belle, she also was a great flirt.

"But she made a bad choice. That's what always touches me so much about Amanda's first speech, the one when she's talking about all the men she could have had, all these wonderful young planters and sons of planters, "but I picked your father,' " Lange says with the lilt of a Southern accent, turning into Amanda in the empty, expectant dining room.

It's an eerie transformation, watching this casually if fashionably dressed, vibrant woman with clipped blond hair and a minimum of makeup transform herself into the coquettish matriarch.

Lange has not made things easy for herself. She has opted for some of the choicest - and most challenging - roles in American drama.

"Foolhardy, maybe," she says with a laugh.

There is a line, she says, from Maggie, the young woman desperate to save her marriage in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, to Blanche, the fading Southern belle losing her grip on life in A Streetcar Named Desire, to Amanda. And as she has grown older (Lange turned 56 on Wednesday), the actor has played them all, and some, like Streetcar, three times - twice on stage and once on film.

"I find them all to have tremendous valor - a certain kind of heroism," she says. "That might not make them the most likable, easy people to be around but they have iron wills, all of them.

"What makes them interesting for an actor is that you are playing this kind of tenuous hold on reality but underneath there is a hard, basic instinct for survival. Maggie has it, Blanche has it and Amanda certainly does."

Much of Lange's stage career can be credited to the ebullient, perpetually busy British producer Bill Kenwright, best known for his long-running London revival of the musical Blood Brothers.

"The great performances for me are rather like the hand in the glove - you can't see (where they) join. It's just one and the same," Kenwright says.

"Jessica truly does not understand what a great actress she is," he says. "The real greats I have worked with have always simply considered themselves to be doing their job, and that's what I always get out of Jessica. She gives everything she's got on stage."

Kenwright has a habit of matching stars with plays. Next year, for example, he will bring Judi Dench back to London's West End in a revival of Noel Coward's Hay Fever. And he plans to star Lange in a London production of Menagerie after she appears in his movie version of Colette's Cheri, adapted for the screen by playwright Christopher Hampton.

It was Kenwright who put Lange in a London production of Streetcar in 1996, four years after she did a less than rapturously received revival of the play on Broadway. No one was harder on Lange's performance in the New York production than the actor herself.

"It was not the fault of the production. It really was me. I wasn't prepared emotionally for the kind of sustainable energy you need on stage," she says now.

She credits Peter Hall, who directed the London production of Streetcar, with turning things around.

"He talked to me about how, as an actor doing a film, you have to have a certain quality that invites the camera to come closer, a quality that invites the camera in. Whereas when you are doing something on stage, you have to open it all out. Suddenly, everything seemed much clearer."

At a Streetcar news conference in London, Lange was asked what other great female role she would like to play and immediately replied Mary Tyrone, the drug-addled mother in Eugene O'Neill's mammoth Long Day's Journey Into Night.

Kenwright got the rights, and a London production, starring Lange and Charles Dance as the tyrannical James Tyrone, opened in 2000 to rave reviews.

"I love that woman," Lange says with a sigh. "And that play - it's about what happens to the possibilities of greatness within a family. Again, what you have there is a tremendous love story. If it hadn't been for the addiction - well, they all were addicted, weren't they, each and every one of them? Mary Tyrone was kind of singled out because her addiction was different from theirs. It wasn't alcohol, it was morphine."

Kenwright sighs, too, recalling Lange's performance as Mary Tyrone. "She lived it, didn't she?" he asks rhetorically. "When you look at the three women she has played for me - Blanche, Mary and Amanda - they are all upfront personalities. They dominate the plays, but they also are hugely vulnerable. Most of the great actors are great because of their own vulnerabilities. And what greater authors than Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams to capitalize on that vulnerability?"

Another production of Long Day's Journey, starring Brian Dennehy and Vanessa Redgrave, played on Broadway in 2003. But Kenwright is determined American audiences will see Lange's performance as Mary Tyrone, too.

"We are talking quite a few years away," the producer cautions. "But that's one of my dreams. It's to say, "Thank you. You are a true and loyal friend and we have been through quite a lot together.' You will see her Long Day's Journey on Broadway one day - I promise you."

[Last modified April 21, 2005, 09:15:04]