Sally Field: Breaking The Glass Ceiling

Sally Field has coveted the role of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie for years. As it turns out, she’s tackling it on Broadway at just the right moment.

- Jada Yuan

Really, what else is there to talk about? This blustery winter evening, as Sally Field arrives at a quiet restaurant in Greenwich Village, thousands of Yemeni bodega owners are gathered on the steps of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall to protest President Trump’s immigration order. Field turned 70 two days before the election and spoke at two protests on Inauguration Eve, and she’s feeling weird not being out there with them. “Not just weird, but is it wrong?” she wonders. She sheds a black coat, black backpack, and black velour scarf to reveal a mood- appropriate all-black outfit, and locks eyes with the waiter: “I’d like a glass of Chardonnay—asap.”

The need for wine isn’t just Trump related. Since January 2, the acting legend has been rehearsing six days a week for one of the most demanding roles in American theater: strident, big dreaming matriarch Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, which will be, astoundingly, only her second time on Broadway. (Her first was replacing Mercedes Ruehl in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? in 2002.) Her call time is usually around noon. “But Sally, I think, is rehearsing 24 hours a day,” says her director, Sam Gold (of Fun Home). “She comes in having already done the play three times in her living room.”

One luxuriously sipped glass of Chardonnay is her “end-of-the-day ritual,” along with watching Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Turner Classic Movies, to stop her Glass dialogue from running through her head. Is it also her coping mechanism for the new world order? “Oh, boy, I hope we don’t all become alcoholics!” she says. “No, I think we have to do a lot more than that to get through it. A glass of wine in the evening is not gonna cut it.”