{"id":763,"date":"2018-08-12T22:59:30","date_gmt":"2018-08-12T22:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/?p=763"},"modified":"2018-09-02T15:10:00","modified_gmt":"2018-09-02T15:10:00","slug":"these-actresses-dominate-not-just-the-stage-but-the-screen-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/these-actresses-dominate-not-just-the-stage-but-the-screen-too\/","title":{"rendered":"These Actresses Dominate Not Just the Stage, but the Screen Too"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The most memorable performances in any medium are being given by a remarkable group of industry veterans \u2014 Judith Light, Allison Janney and Audra McDonald, among them.<\/h2>\n

For a long time, you could open a movie with a close-up on a woman\u2019s face, as long as she presented the right knowing gaze, the one that suggested she had the perfect phrase on the tip of her tongue. Think of Jill Clayburgh in 1978\u2019s \u201cAn Unmarried Woman,\u201d responding to Alan Bates with such quietly tentative intimacy that it feels like a home movie. Think of Ellen Burstyn, Joan Hackett, Sandy Dennis. On and on one could go, citing examples from the time before Hollywood\u2019s boys\u2019 club determined that the men (mostly) should wear the armor while the women watch, bored into insensate numbness.<\/p>\n

Now, though, it\u2019s perhaps safe to welcome the return of adult women. They were always there of course, but mostly you had to go to the stage to find them. But today\u2019s screens, no matter the platform, are perfectly suited to actresses whose emotional lives are laid as bare as Elizabeth Bishop poems \u2014 while male movie stars seem stuck in the rust-covered school of the Wounded Male Animal, which parodies itself in an endless loop of tough-guy celluloid or emo-muteness. As more female and queer screenwriters, playwrights and directors refuse to wait for permission to tell their stories, actresses who were once sent out to sea on icebergs have become commodities, no longer forced, as they used to tell me, to \u201ccome back to New York and do plays when Hollywood no longer wants me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of them occasionally play mothers, none more ruthless than Allison Janney\u2019s LaVona Golden in \u201cI, Tonya,\u201d in which she manages \u2014 with one drag of a thin, brown cigarette \u2014 to almost excuse her daughter of her crimes. In 2002, Aaron Sorkin asked me to write an episode of \u201cThe West Wing\u201d that was shot as a play about a single character. I had never written for TV before, and I had my choice of cast members, but it took me exactly zero seconds to select Janney. She can now single-handedly carry a film to the finish line.<\/p>\n

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These women were among the first to move seamlessly between stage and screen, and they quickly calculated that movies and television required a kind of surrender, as much of the work is done with the eyes, in reaction. They returned to Manhattan to whisper their realizations to newcomers trying to break into Hollywood: The camera is the storyteller, not you<\/em>. Onstage, it\u2019s the exact opposite \u2014 the actress is a vessel of transference, and the audience depends on her beat-by-beat immersion in the unfolding events to feel present in the story. (That\u2019s why, when movie stars come to Broadway, the performances can feel anxious and small \u2014 or like an overly boisterous guest at a dinner party, unsure of the room\u2019s temperature.) But because these women came up through live performance, they remain, elementally, theater folk, with all of the flexibility and spontaneity that the stage demands. They\u2019re able to act and<\/em> react, whether or not there\u2019s a camera present.<\/p>\n

This ability makes them not only memorable, but thrilling. Night after night, I watched Judith Light conjure the superannuated and supersaturated Palm Springs alcoholic Silda Grauman in my 2011 play, \u201cOther Desert Cities,\u201d for which she won a Tony. Every performance was different; everything she learned the prior day was absorbed into the whole, adding layers to her character, as if her mind was a 3D printer. Audra McDonald, a six-time Tony winner, does a similar thing, her spine as strong as her larynx, tantalizingly holding something back while appearing not to; both reticent and foot-forward<\/em>, to borrow a British theaterism. It isn\u2019t just range that makes her valuable to both Broadway producers and TV showrunners, but her refusal to be discounted as a \u201cNew York theater actress.\u201d She chooses her roles judiciously, regardless of medium. To cite another test case, think of Laurie Metcalf, who recently shifted between \u201cLady Bird\u201d onscreen, \u201cThree Tall Women\u201d onstage and onward into television\u2019s impending \u201cRoseanne\u201d spinoff. Idina Menzel, back on the New York stage in Joshua Harmon\u2019s timely \u201cSkintight,\u201d arrived on the theater scene in 1995\u2019s \u201cRent\u201d and has never lost the freshness of those first instincts, whether as a green witch in \u201cWicked\u201d or animated in Disney\u2019s \u201cFrozen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Janet McTeer, who is perhaps today\u2019s version of William Holden: a well of intelligence and emotion so deep that it seems bottomless. Indeed, the old character men, the great noble everymen, have been replaced by character women who are also<\/em> undeniable stars. They are the Gene Hackmans, the John Cazales and the Robert Shaws of today \u2014 actors we recognize on a mineral level, no matter where we encounter them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The most memorable performances in any medium are being given by a remarkable group of industry veterans \u2014 Judith Light, Allison Janney and Audra McDonald, among them. For a long time, you could open a movie with a close-up on a woman\u2019s face, as long as she presented […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[46,48],"class_list":["post-763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","tag-46","tag-skintight"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/09tmag-women-superJumbo.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Srnq-cj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":769,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions\/769"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.idina-here.com\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}