Molly, plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 4 pm; until Dec. 20. Tickets: $22-34. The Victory Theatre Center, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. 818. 841.5421 or thevictorytheatrecenter.org
Anne Gee Byrd
Anne Gee Byrd oozes authenticity. Her lack of artifice and zero tolerance for bullshit place the former repertory circuit player squarely in Geraldine Page territory. Think Molly Ivins with a Thelma Ritter twist.
Brecht’s Mother Courage. McDonagh’s Mag. Miller’s Kate Keller or Linda Loman. Critical triumphs all. Byrd admits while “those Miller women are right up my alley” because they possess “a harsh supportive quality I seem to get completely,” she is most drawn to the same roles as her acting icon Page.
“The woman who is easy to ignore,” she offers over cappuccino and cookies one afternoon at her North Hollywood home. “It’s like Alma in Summer and Smoke. That’s a woman most of us would dismiss in real life. Geraldine was attracted to a lot of those roles and so am I. Her son was working at LATC when I was there and he said, ‘Oh, you’re an actress like my mother.’ My heart just went baboom baboom!”
Byrd is currently playing just such a person in The Victory Theatre Center production of British playwright Simon Gray’s Molly directed by Jeffrey Passero and starring Giselle Wolf in the title role with Don Moss, Max Roeg, Geoffrey Wade and Bryant Weber. The play is inspired by the infamous 1935 London trial of Alma Rattenbury, whose affair with a 17-year-old chauffeur led to the murder of her husband Francis Rattenbury, the principal architect of Victoria, British Columbia. Gray originally wrote the story as a BBC teleplay called Death of a Teddy Bear starring Alan Bates before adapting it for the stage after discovering the tapes had been destroyed.
Byrd plays Eve, a spinster companion housekeeper torn between personal allegiances. She is astonished to learn not only did fellow Antaeus Company member Christina Pickles originate the role of Molly in the 1977 world premiere at the New Spoleto Festival in Charleston but another old theatre rep pal had tackled her role there as well.
“Oh my god! Where?” she exclaims, when handed a copy of the original Time magazine review. “I love Christina. We worked together one season at the McCarter. She was doing Portia. We did the John Webster play, The Duchess of Malfi. I stood backstage to watch whenever she had something she was doing. Her choices are so interesting.” She reads further. “Wow! Tom Waites played Oliver! Pauline Flanagan played Eve! I’ll be damned. Pauline and I worked together in Cuyahoga Falls with Arthur Lithgow before he founded the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival. I love Pauline. So she played this. Son of a gun!”
When Byrd discovers Michael Higgins played Teddy, it triggers another early theatre memory. “Geez, this is so funny because my first job in New York was as a costumer. I was still sort of doing both at the time. Michael Higgins and Marian Seldes were doing the O’Neill Sea Plays at the little Maidman theatres, which were just starting up. They hired me to do the costumes. I think they paid me like $150. So here’s this little girl from the Midwest and I get on the subway because I found out there’s an Army surplus place somewhere in Harlem. So I get to Harlem and I get this stuff and I come back.”
When asked what attracted her to the piece, Byrd admits a certain penchant for the prolific playwright and memoirist best known for such works as Butley and Otherwise Engaged starring Alan Bates and directed by Harold Pinter.
“Simon Gray is just so understated and complex and fascinating to me,” she says. “Impish, I think. Here’s the joke. If you get it, fine. I’m still amused if you don’t like it. It’s what the writing is. The Molly character is so complicated. What he’s essentially saying is this: the people who entertain us in life by having a good time deserve latitude. We judge them by our standards and you can’t do that. The character of Molly is totally unique in my experience of watching. Here is what seems to be a total narcissist but whom in fact is one of the most generous kinds of people you’d ever want to meet. She makes life fun for these people who don’t know how to do it for themselves. But then their judgment is what ultimately sucks the fun out of her.”
Byrd’s Eve is a British Geraldine Page type character provoked, unsettled and ultimately undone by Molly. “I’ve always been interested in playing the characters you would pass on the street but who really ought to be looked at for evil or good. A person who would be easy to dismiss as dull or conventional but their repressed resentment and need is very dangerous to the Mollys of the world. I think that’s interesting.”
What quickly becomes equally interesting is Byrd’s budding realization her own life is offering up a few parallels to the story. “Where I am in the Molly/Eve scale, I don’t know. I know my husband was a very witty, very entertaining guy and I liked that. But with that came the destructive aspects and the fact he was an alcoholic. He needed taking care of. Much of my life was spent taking care of his problems. I don’t know how much you know about dealing with alcoholics but their problems and their life is so important there’s no room for you to have a problem. Just keep things smooth because the air’s been sucked out of the room.”
She admits her 35-year marriage to the late actor David Byrd exacted concessions both personal and professional but valued the partnership over the alternative she frequently saw during the many years of regional repertory theatre work the couple did before moving to Los Angeles in the mid ’70s.
“I didn’t want to be that woman I saw on the rep circuit who had nothing else,” she reflects. “So, there it is. I’m not unhappy the way it’s turned out. Yes, it would have been different. If I’d either been ruthless enough or not had to have such an interesting man to be married to. I could have chosen someone a little more boring who could take care of me but that was never my way.” She pauses then smiles. “God, I haven’t really articulated how this circles around back to me. You play it but you don’t analyze it really…” She pauses again. “Hmmm, this is going to be good for my performance!” she laughs.
Toledo to Los Angeles
Like her life, Byrd’s house is undergoing an internal and external transformation. Contractors are busy finishing a kitchen remodel that includes among other things new windows and French doors. An adobe wall now encloses the currently askew front yard, whose centerpiece feature is a rustic wooden door complete with an embedded artisan metal speakeasy weathered to a lovely patina. The same might be said of the silver-haired Byrd who possesses the kind of quintessential American persona John Ford liked to immortalize.
Clad in jeans, clogs and brown cardigan over a black t-shirt, she greets you with apologies for the mess, explaining she is working with the Japanese concept of wabi sabi, which according to Andrew Juniper in Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence is “an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect or even decayed; an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things.” Somehow it suits Byrd, who shifts often these days from actor to associate artistic director to painter. Her exhibition quality works dot the walls including a portrait of old friend actor Larry Pressman, a founding member of Antaeus.
“Sometime in my 40s my agent moved onto a bigger agency,” she explains. “I was without an agent for awhile and I thought this is the end of my career. So I started drawing. That was 30 some years ago. When I first started doing it, I just got it. I don’t know why. It was just thrilling to me to find that outlet. I’m actually not much for paintings. I like the doing of them. I went from acrylics to watercolors to oils. Oils are now the most fun for me.”
Pressman calls Byrd “utterly unique. There’s no one like her. She has an extraordinary range. She’s also that rare person whose work feeds their life and their life feeds their work. A real beacon of sanity in an insane world. To have Anne in a company is to have the full essence of what a company is about. She came up in the company system as I did. That’s her ethic. She’s got a huge work ethic and is adored in the theatre here.”
Los Angeles is a long way from Reynolds Corners, a small town outside Toledo, Ohio where Byrd grew up. Her father was a truck driver and her mother worked as a secretary for the government. They sent her to the University of Toledo to become a teacher, which Byrd says was a lucky break for a working class girl. She joined the Chi Omega sorority, which “didn’t last long” she adds but long enough for her big sister to “drag her off” one day to audition for Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a Lifetime. She got cast and changed her destiny.
“It was the straight woman. But somehow I knew the straight person was as much a part of the laugh. And when those first couple of laughs came, it was like phew!” She imitates the sound of fireworks exploding. “Yes! That was really it for me. So I go to my dad and say, this has happened. This is what I want to do. He didn’t know anything about theatre. He said, well, I gave you this education. What you do with it is up to you. This is a guy who finished 8th grade maybe. He punched the teacher and they threw him out of school.” She smiles. “What can I say?”
Byrd as Rosalind
Byrd graduated with a speech degree and got a scholarship to attend the University of Michigan where she obtained her master’s degree in speech as well as appearing as Rosalind in As You Like It. During the summer in between, she landed her first theatre job under the direction of Arthur Lithgow, the legendary founder of the Antioch Shakespeare Festival and later the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival before becoming artistic director at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, when he brought an Antioch offshoot company to perform at the Toledo Zoo’s theatre. It was the beginning of a long professional relationship.
“The Antioch festival was the birthplace of people like Ellis Raab and Bill Ball at ACT. One of the first things I saw was an exciting A Midsummer Night’s Dream on an outdoor stage at the zoo. When Puck and Titania were talking about all this stuff, you could hear lions roar and peacocks call every now and then. It was really quite wonderful and magic.”
After graduate school, Byrd went to the Erie Playhouse in Erie, Pennsylvania, a winter stock company run by L. Newell Tarrant, who went to New York each year to scout the latest Broadway plays in order to stage them the next season. “In those days, they were very easy about letting him do it in Erie because they weren’t going to lose any money over that. He would go take notes about how it was staged!” she laughs. “Then he would come back to Erie and do it. He hired a lot of people right out of school like Frank Langella. We did Look Homeward Angel.
“Newell would have all the women put stoles and pearls on and they would shoot these real Hollywood glamour portraits of all the actors to put in the lobby. He was very concerned about how you dressed when you went to town to go to the grocery store. This was in the days when ladies were still wearing gloves to go out. We weren’t quite doing that. But if you didn’t pay attention to your appearance going around town, he didn’t like it at all. I met my husband there and got married.”
After Erie, she and her husband David would spend the rest of the 1960s riding the crest of emerging repertory theatre movement at places like Great Lakes in Cleveland, Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut, the Front Street Theatre in Memphis and the Cincinnati Playhouse. At the time they thought it was the “answer to everything.”
“We thought this was going to revitalize theatre in this country. We worked at the McCarter for a number of seasons together. Indiana Rep. A bunch of them. They’d often hire a couple because they thought there was a kind of stability to that, less romances to send the company off the deep end. They would hire people for a full season and we would do real rep where you had four plays up. You were doing a different one every night. It was so much fun; I can’t begin to tell you.
“Toward the end of that period, what started to happen was they hired you for the season and you got this and this and this role. Fine. You got a small one here, a good one there and another, whatever. Then we began to find that in order to sell their season, suddenly the Macbeth role would come up and some half assed TV actor would come in and do the Macbeth. So we thought, screw this. We might as well go off and become half assed TV actors ourselves. Which we did!” she laughs.
But before they headed west, the two landed in New York where David performed in shows like The Great White Hope on Broadway with Yaphet Kotto, Off Broadway in Vivat! Vivat Regina! with Eileen Atkins and in The Public Theatre’s celebrated 1971 Shakespeare in the Park all-night Central Park marathon of the Henry VI plays and Richard III condensed into a single evening billed as The War of the Roses.
Byrd found herself on a different track following the birth of her daughter. An emotional reaction to leaving the six month old with a relative during rehearsals at the McCarter an hour and a half away caused her to quit the business for nearly five years. By the time she felt she could return, the family decided it was time for California. Byrd had visited before while on tour with Will Geer in An Evening’s Frost and later, Jean Erdman, one of Martha Graham’s early dancers.
“David and I had the same agent. I visited him when I was in town. He says, oh you’ve got to move out here. David will work all the time and you can sit by the pool. I thought, you bastard. So I’ve never had a pool!” she laughs.
Film and network television turned out to be more demanding than they thought but each became regular fixtures in both mediums. “TV for me, that’s hard work. Truthfully. When I’m on stage I feel like I’m in command. I feel like it’s my territory. But when I get on a film set, I know my little job but I certainly don’t know the whole picture. They always love me because I’m a one-take tomato. But that’s not always good for me. I see really skilled film actors and they often screw up a take because they don’t like something in it. I’m not smart enough to do that yet.”
Once in California, Byrd says she initially found theatre where she could; later, worked out of town at places like the Old Globe in San Diego, American Conservatory Theatre, Seattle Repertory Company and South Coast Repertory but never thought about Broadway again.
“There was a brief moment after David died in 2001 where I almost moved to New York,” she confesses. “But I thought, it’s starting all over again. There are other women my age doing it there that can barely find work. Why am I going to try? So along the way I’ve decided no, I don’t care if LA’s not a theatre town. There’s theatre in this town and somebody’s got to keep it moving. Why not me? And I have a life here. So that’s why.”
Antaeus & Mother Courage
Byrd has been a big mover of independent theatre since she got here. She was on the ground floor of the Los Angeles Theatre Center and its Classical Theatre Lab as an associate artist. She joined the Antaeus Company in 1992 during its second year at the Mark Taper Forum and was a member of The Matrix Theatre Company.
“I loved it,” Byrd says about LATC, where she did Come Back Little Sheba with Tyne Daly among many others. “I mean I didn’t like a lot of the stuff they did but the place was so vital. There were like three interesting things going on at the same time. There would be Tennessee Williams here and some new hip hop thing there and who knows what else. The dressing room walls only went up so far so you could hear the ladies from the other shows. It was so much fun. Whenever I had a long time between entrances, I would go backstage of some other play and watch it. Just great.”
She starred in a number of Taper productions before working with Antaeus including Johnny Bull directed by Dana Elcar at the Anson Ford which Byrd says was a seminal experience for her. “Dana cast me as this Hungarian miner’s wife and I thought, I shouldn’t be playing this. Albert Salmi was my husband. It was the thing that made me take myself a little bit more seriously than I had.”
Despite ventures at other theatres, Byrd considers the Antaeus Company her artistic home now, having journeyed from acting in its inaugural 1993 production of The Wood Demon at the Taper to associate artistic director of a NoHo based classics focused organization ready to present its first full season in 2010 with Cousin Bette, King Lear, ClassicsFest 2010 and Autumn Garden in which she will perform. The company earned rave reviews for its 2007 revival of Noel Coward’s complete repertory of 10 one-act plays entitled Dinner at 8:30.
“Antaeus now has become a really important thing for me,” she emphasizes. “I think it has potential for doing exactly what I think is so important and that is maintaining a level of theatre so somebody can come and say, oh that’s what it’s about. Not some vanity whatever that often passes for theatre in LA. I don’t want to bad mouth LA theatre but a lot of it is an open audition for television. Antaeus isn’t that. I call myself the Queen Mother. I don’t want to run it. I don’t want to direct. But I do want it to work.”
When asked if she might be inferring a queen of another sort, she laughs. “Please, not Queen Bee! They have large abdomens and ugly things come out of them. Queen Mothers get to say, ‘yes, that’s good,’” she laughs. “And they can wear hats.”
Byrd as Mother Courage
“I think her talent came into its full peak when she did Mother Courage with us,” says Jeanie Hackett, Antaeus Company’s Artistic Director, who has known Byrd since the LATC Classical Theatre Lab days. “I saw Meryl Streep do it in New York and she was wonderful but Anne Gee has this kind of honesty you just cannot deny; this intensely truthful emotional life that moves me every time. But she’s not sentimental. She doesn’t go for the easy choices. She’s truly original in the way she mines a character’s inner core I think. Different from everybody else. There’s just no faking with her.”
It was Hackett’s idea to stage Antaeus’ critically acclaimed 2005 production of Mother Courage and Her Children directed by Andrew Robinson in an abandoned warehouse next door to their former New Place Theatre home in North Hollywood. It earned Byrd critical acclaim including LA Weekly’s Award for Best Actress and an Ovation Award nomination for Best Ensemble. Following it were double Ovation nominations in 2007 for Lead Performance by an Actress as Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Valentina in The Bay at Nice at Andak Stage Company.
Mother Courage had a profound effect on all involved. “That was an extraordinary experience,” Byrd reflects. “Most of us were doing it for what we thought were political reasons that extended beyond all of us and it was right at a time. The process started when they were deciding whether or not we were going to go to war in Iraq. We wanted to have it done before that decision was made but by the time we were doing it the decision had already been made. That was the soup that came out of. I think there was a really important, larger commitment in that whole project. Sure it was a great part for me but I wanted to do that piece. I felt tremendously supported both personally and every other way by everybody involved in that. Those kinds of situations where you really have a larger purpose and everybody comes together are unusual.”
When told some people have called it the definitive production, she shrugs. “Probably. But then they haven’t seen the others. It’s like Johnny Bull was a really important thing for me but who saw it? People who saw it thought it was great. I mean I had casting people say, if you’d done this (Mother Courage) in New York, you’d be a star or some kind of shit like that.”
Fame never called her, claims Byrd. “I never was interested in being famous. Ever. First of all you can’t relate to anybody in a normal way so you don’t get to see the world in a normal way. But I did always want to be admired by the other people I was working with. That was important to me. I’m not interested in dull work. No, I don’t take a small interesting part. Maybe I take a big dull one but it’s got to be big.”
While Byrd says she’s willing to go where the work takes her, she admits her repertory days are behind her. “I’d always envisioned I would go to Oregon. I did a co-pro with La Jolla and Seattle and when I got up there you rehearse and then you have no life. I can’t do that anymore. Antaeus is my family. It’s part of my life. My daughter is part of my life. LA is now part of my life. I don’t want to go live in a rented room with a tacky pillow or spend my days wandering in a city waiting to go on. It’s too late.”
What’s not too late is for a self-described theatre animal to keep testing herself in local productions where seating capacity matters less than the role itself.
“That’s exactly true. It doesn’t matter how many people are going to see it. Which is not good for a career but it’s been great for the work. Because I’ve had some really interesting stuff to do. As a result, your triumphs are seen by 200 people instead of enough that would make a career!” she laughs. “But what the hell. It’s been a great life.”
Feature image of Don Moss, Anne Gee Byrd and Gizelle Wolf by Tim Sullens
Article by Deborah Behrens
