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Interview with Director BJ Jones and Musical Director Doug Peck

MBM: What attracts you both to Grey Gardens?

BJ: I can't think of a time when Grey Gardens has become more relevant to what we call the "sandwich generation," the age group that is in between raising children and caring for their parents in their decline. The economic tenor of our time has created a crisis for all of us, but for those on the margins of society, who may have been well-off when they were in the prime of their employed years, now face peril in the face of rising health care and living expenses and the shadowed indifference of society.

In addition, these two eccentric women cling to each other in the lifeboat of Grey Gardens, tortured by each other and yet loving each other in deep, disturbing and dysfunctional ways. It creates a theatre piece that is unlike any I have encountered. The music in the first act is evocative of the period, 1941, creating a kind of "Phillip Barry play" on musical steroids, and in the second act strikes out on its own, in heartbreaking melodies and sentiment. It provides a pair of tour de force performance opportunities that are the hallmark of some of Northlight's more memorable productions.

DP: My attraction to Grey Gardens centers around the dynamic personalities of the Beale women. I've been familiar with these women for some time now, and any encounter with either the film or the musical reveals new layers in the strange wisdom of these women. Also, Scott Frankel's score and Michael Korie's lyrics are masterpieces of heart and form.

MBM: Which parts of the story resonate with you most strongly?

DP: The child-parent relationships, the creative/artistic impulse, and the historical fiction aspect of the first act always resonate with me when viewing or thinking about this piece.

BJ: I'm also struck by the co-dependency of the edit/Edie relationship. Who doesn't find the challenge of loyalty and loathing in a parental relationship? Who doesn't experience the pain of attachment and the fear of dependency on your child or parent, and who doesn't yearn for freedom to find their own way in a world increasingly cruel to the damaged or the disenfranchised?

MBM: How do their biographies influence your work?

BJ: Grey Gardens is blessed/cursed with a responsibility to honor the original women and to highlight their hidden nobility, their courage and their handicaps. I want to completely acknowledge the Beales women, though I don't want to dip into camp or easy imitation for the sake of laughs or "drag show" gratification. It is a difficult piece to do, walking the fine line of fascination and illumination or one of slavish mimicry, to rise above the sideshow thrills of sending up the film, and really looking at the greater issues. We must honor and celebrate, not degrade or indulge in snide derision.

DP: As musical director, I must study the film and the cadences of the Beale voices. I'm already working with Hollis Resnik and Ann Whitney on perfecting the accent and style to render these personalities onstage with truth and artistry.

MBM: Why is GG a good fit for Northlight?

BJ: I think back to the way our audience embraced the themes regarding "the outsider" with Side Show. Certainly those two women had to find their own way through inner strength and mutual dependence. I think Grey Gardens has the same qualities and I believe we all feel "outside" at times, alienated by societal strictures and hypocritical mores.

DP: Grey Gardens represents my first time working at Northlight, but having seen a number of shows at the theatre, I know the audiences will love the strong personalities and fascinating script.

MBM: What challenges do you face going into design meetings and rehearsals?

BJ: Our theatre is a deep thrust configuration and we I sat down with the ever inventive and brilliant John Culbert, or set designer and my neighbor in Evanston, we talked about the need to focus on one spatial gesture that would allow for varied locales and yet evoke the spirit and grandeur that was, and is no longer, Grey Gardens. The house is after all a character in the play, as it is named Grey Gardens. I think we have come up with a stunning representation of that "home cum prison" that provides for a bit of a Coup de Theatre, while remaining imminently practical and sublimely simple.

MBM: What made you want to get into this business? What drives you as an artist?

DP: I think actor/singers are the bravest people in the world. My craft as a musical director is to guide them to finding the most honest vocal performance that fits into the world the playwright and composer have created. Also, I'm driven by collaborations with directors and designers like BJ Jones, John Culbert, Jacqueline Firkins, Cecil Averett, and all the other greats I see every time I come to work.

BJ: Doug is right; I believe acting is the hardest job in the world. You are your own product, seemingly invincible and yet at oncecompletely vulnerable. It is a lonely profession truly, despite the seeming social aspect of it. And the inherent cruelty behind any criticism and casual callous audience observations can be as brutal and horrifying as murder, bloodless but no less criminal.

When I was 15, I studied with the Cleveland Playhouse in classes taught by the company to their summer home in Chatauqua NY. I did my first professional play with them, Our Town. We rose every morning to do exercises with one of the company, then did scene work and in the afternoon rehearsed one play, went to dinner and that night performed another. It was a dizzying, daunting, thrilling experience.

One night walking home from a performance, running the next days lines in my head, it hit me. This is how I want to spend the rest of my life! Regardless of remuneration, to leap from one production, character, style to another, to live out of a suitcase and go from one company to another, that would be sublime.

The artistic director was Richard Oberlin, an actor who had been at the company for years. Never did I dream I would become an Artistic Director, nor was it, at 15, my goal. My goal was to be an actor, pure and simple. To serve the play, to support other actors to live in suspended animation in the dark until I stepped into the light at 8 PM in front of an eager audience who regarded the event with as much reverence and passion as I did.

Whew... Well...aren't you glad you asked?....

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ARTISTS

CAST
Hollis Resnik (Little Edie/Edith)
Ann Whitney (Edith Bouvier Beale)
Tempe Thomas (Little Edie)
Sean Blake (Brooks Sr/ Brooks Jr)
Arielle Dayan (Lee Bouvier)
Grace Etzkorn (Jackie Bouvier)
George Keating (George Gould Strong)
Dennis Kelly (Major Bouvier/
Norman Vincent Peale)
Patrick Sarb (JP Kennedy/Jerry)

PRODUCTION
BJ Jones (Director)
Doug Peck (Music Director & Orchestral Reductions)
Marla Lampert (Choreographer)
John Culbert (Scenic Design)
Jacqueline Firkins (Costume Design)
JR Lederle (Lighting Design)
Cecil Averett (Sound Design)
Meghan Beals McCarthy (Dramaturgy)
Rita Vreeland (Production Stage Manager)

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All photos by Michael Brosilow

Photo Gallery

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Scene 1

Scene 1	Scene 2	Scene 3
Full Interview: BJ Jones, director and Doug Peck, music director	Short Interview: BJ Jones, director and Doug Peck, music director

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Eccentric lives pull you into 'Grey Gardens' at Northlight

THEATER REVIEW: "Grey Gardens" (three stars)

By Chris Jones | Chicago Tribune critic
November 23, 2008

If you're still living at home with Mom, a trip to "Grey Gardens" might just get you packing.

This deliciously quirky Broadway musical, now in its regional premiere at Northlight Theatre, is about the famously eccentric relatives of Jackie Kennedy, who, racked by divorce, scandal and personal eccentricities, traded the aristocratic life for one of deep squalor in their Long Island home.

The mother-and-daughter pair of Edie and "Little Edie" Beale were discovered by documentary filmmakers David and Albert Maysles in 1975 and were happy to perform their sad personal show for the camera. The resultant movie turned the ebullient and weirdly attired Little Edie, exquisitely played here by Hollis Resnik in BJ Jones' production, into a kind of cult, camp heroine.
She became the forgotten black sheep of Camelot.

American eccentrics are often interesting-in part because they make us feel better about ourselves-but never more so then when they are only a couple of well-manicured steps away from the seat of political and social power. One wonders whom the Obama administration might throw out.

You can appreciate this odd-duck of a musical (book by Doug Wright, music by Scott Frankel, lyrics by Michael Korie) without prior interest in the Beales, because its authors teased out universal meaning in their biographical story. That's what John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim tried, but failed, to do with their similarly biographical musical "Road Show" (formerly "Bounce") which I saw in New York last week. But back to Skokie.

In the first act of "Grey Gardens," when we see the Beales still with a chance of making something of their lives, we are shown both the fleeting nature of happiness and how one single screw-up-in this case an implosion of a desperately unhealthy mother-daughter rivalry-can send a life careering toward destruction. We often don't get a second chance. And in the second act of this show, you're forced into confronting your own relationships with your parents (living or dead) and into an examination of the joys and pitfalls of interdependence.

Clearly, Resnik has been waiting for the role of Little Edie. You can tell by the pitch-perfect rasp in the Chicago diva's voice and the way her eyes dart hungrily inside her character's trademark head scarf. But you see it most in Resnik's devastating rendition of this musical's climatic ballad, "Another Winter in a Summer Town."

At Northlight's Thursday opening, Resnik's gripping articulation of middle-age regret and desperate fatigue at the constant, uncaring churn of the seasons seemed to shock an entire theater into silence.

This is, after all, Chicago in a suddenly frigid November. We might not live with dozens of cats and a crazy mother, and we might not have a failed engagement to Joseph Patrick Kennedy to regret, but we know what it's like when a recessionary winter approaches, the president-elect has failed to invite us to Washington and we don't know if we have the energy to stand being left behind in the cold.

"Another Winter," and the effect of that number, is emblematic of what I liked so much about "Grey Gardens" when I first saw this musical on Broadway in 2006.

With top-drawer musical direction from Doug Peck, the Northlight production is a notable achievement and offers a Broadway-style experience without the Broadway prices. And although I think this production, which features a revolving, perhaps over-revolving, slightly miniaturized set from designer John Culbert, would have looked better in the larger theater at the North Shore Center for the Arts, some themes are enhanced by more intimate surroundings.

In particular, the link between Tempe Thomas, who plays Little Edie in the first act, and Resnik, who moves from mother to daughter in the second, is far more explicit than was the case in New York, starring Christine Ebersole. Thomas, a spunky performer with a fabulous voice, foreshadows her character's later-in-life eccentricities but still makes you care about her one chance for love and escape.

In the second act, the redoubtably honest Ann Whitney takes over the role of elder Edith-and she is, for sure, a profoundly sad figure, sitting there and singing, among her cats.

Jones' production should descend further into darkness. George Keating, who plays the pianist and hanger-on known as George Gould Strong, has glimpses of the self-loathing that's part of the character but could go much deeper. And in the second act, the magnetic, soul-destroying power that the elder Edie exerts over the other needs articulation with much greater force.

There is an intermittent niceness to these Chicago Beales that you'll struggle to see in the Long Island documentary, where they're both well off down a road to a scary place from which it's almost impossible ever to return.

Families grow more eccentric in entrancing 'Grey Gardens'

Stunning performances highlight tale of mother and daughter's plunge into dysfunction

BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic
November 23, 2008

It is inspired by a true story --the sad descent of a pair of mother-and-daughter relatives of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, who plummeted from New York socialite glory to a half-demented, penniless existence and were the focus of a 1973 documentary film by the Maysles brothers. Yet the 2006 Broadway musical version of "Grey Gardens," which is very much its own ingenious creation, might easily be mistaken for a modern-day Grimm Brothers fairy tale that hauntingly unspools in reverse.

Of course if you've never been one to believe in happy endings, the outcome of this story will only confirm your philosophy of life. That, however, will have no effect on the complete and utter sense of dark, heart-shattering enchantment that takes hold in this show whose clever construction and intricately tooled emotional detail is the work of Doug Wright (book), Scott Frankel (composer) and Michael Korie (lyricist).

The musical, now in a sensational Chicago debut at Northlight Theatre, also is a particular triumph for Hollis Resnik, an actress whose long, wide-ranging career might very well be at its apex in this show's plum dual role -- one she inhabits with every last fiber of her being. And in director BJ Jones' pitch-perfect rendering (backed by that invariably impeccable music director Doug Peck), Resnik, who plays a middle-aged mother and then becomes her own very damaged middle-aged daughter, is surrounded by a superbly chosen cast that makes the ghosts of time past morph ideally into their calamitous (if inevitable) future forms.

The radically different halves of the show are the key to its dramatic and stylistic punch, yet it is the shocking but exquisitely seamless rendering of the parent-to-child inheritance described here that is its most powerful and devastating weapon.

It all begins in 1941, as great expectations fill the richly appointed East Hampton living room of the Bouvier-Beale family's Grey Gardens estate. Little Edie (the easily aristocratic Tempe Thomas) is about to announce her engagement to the dashing young careerist Joseph Kennedy Jr. (Patrick Sarb), who intends to occupy the White House one day. Her only fear is that her spotlight-grabbing (some might say truly monstrous) mother, Edith (Resnik), might once again undermine her by performing her cabaret act. The actual events, heightened by the news that Edith's marriage is truly over, turn out to be far worse.

Flash forward to 1973, and the smoldering dysfunction and decay at Grey Gardens has become full blown. Mother (Ann Whitney, in a phenomenal performance that has the ring of absolute truth) is still controlling her psychologically damaged but fiercely rebellious daughter (Resnik). The local health department wants to condemn the property for its feral cats and filth, but it is the mental health authorities who really should be called.

Dennis Kelly's spikey turns as both Edith's bully-boy father and preacher Norman Vincent Peale are delicious. There is sparkling work from Grace Etzkorn (as a supremely graceful 12-year-old Jackie Kennedy) and tiny Arielle Dayan (a wholly beguiling Lee Radziwell). And Sarb (as both Joe and a hippie handyman), Sean Blake (as the family's black butler and his loyal son) and George Keating (as Edith's gay companion) are flawless. This is a "Grey Gardens" in full (and fearsome) bloom.