Let’s hear it for the great Lois Smith, who rode to the rescue this week when “The Inheritance,” coming in from London, was missing a key cast member: Vanessa Redgrave.
She won raves for her performance as a mother trying to make sense of her son’s homosexuality, and producers Sonia Friedman and Tom Kirdahy had their fingers crossed she’d reprise it here. But they didn’t press the 82-year-old, who, at the last minute, decided she just wasn’t up to reproducing what one critic called an “achingly frail” performance.
The scramble was on to find an actress of her caliber. Director Stephen Daldry met with Smith, and knew he had found the right replacement. The 88-year-old Obie award winner returns to Broadway for the first time since the 1996 revival of “Buried Child.”
Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance” is loosely based on E.M. Forster’s “Howards End,” with a lot of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” thrown in. Gay men fight over real estate against the backdrop of the lingering AIDS epidemic. Politics, sex, death and debates about the mainstreaming of gay culture swirl throughout this meaty epic. One New York theater producer who saw it says it’s the most brilliant, gay-themed play since “Angels.” Another says: “It has 2 ¹/₂ hours of brilliant writing, but it should have been cut. Why does every ‘important’ play have to be in two parts?”
Wherever you come down on it, “The Inheritance,” which starts previews Sept. 27, is shaping up to be a cultural event of the new season.
I hope we see Redgrave at least one more time here. She was rhapsodic as Vita Sackville-West in “Vita and Virginia” in 1994. She held audiences rapt as Joan Didion in “The Year of Magical Thinking” in 2007. And she broke our hearts as Mary Tyrone in the 2003 revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
Brian Dennehy, who played James Tyrone in that production, has a great story about Redgrave. He had done the play in Chicago and thought the Broadway run would be fairly easygoing. After all, he knew the lines, the role and the play. But at the first table reading with Redgrave, he told me, “She was doing so many astonishing things, I realized I had to throw out everything I thought I knew and start all over again.”
Sometimes she’d make her first entrance from the porch, sometimes from the dark at the top of the stairs. Dennehy and co-stars Robert Sean Leonard and Philip Seymour Hoffman were never sure what she was going to be like each night — which made the production all that much more brilliant, since the Tyrones never know what to expect from Mary, a morphine addict.
Redgrave was not playing Mary Tyrone. She was Mary Tyrone. It was a remarkable performance for which she won the Tony.
Speaking of great Dames, another we may never see in New York again is Maggie Smith. Last spring, the 84-year-old returned to the London stage in a one-woman show about the secretary to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Christopher Hampton’s “A German Life” sold out in about 20 minutes. Smith received raves and offers to bring the play to New York. But, like Redgrave, she apparently decided a run in the Big Apple was a bit much at this point in her life. That’s a pity: She hasn’t been here since 1990, when she starred in “Lettice and Lovage” — another performance that, if you saw it, you’ll never forget it.
“A German Life” is a very good play, by the way. I’m not sure Lois Smith is quite right for the part of Goebbels’ secretary, but there are other actresses of a certain age who could do it. I think one of our nonprofit theaters should look into it.
One Dame you will be able to see on Broadway is Eileen Atkins. The 85-year-old Emmy, Obie and Olivier award winner stars opposite Jonathan Pryce in “The Height of the Storm,” previewing Sept. 10.
A generation of great British actresses is receding. Atkins may be the last of that generation we see here. Don’t miss her.
You can hear Michael Riedel weekdays on “Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning” on WOR radio 710.