Made for Her

Jessica Lange's haunting role in Mother Play, like so much of her work, is one only she could perform.

- MATT ZOLLER SEITZ

Sitting in a chair next to a window in a break room at the Hayes Theater, where she’s rehearsing Mother Play, the new work by Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive), Jessica Lange has a regal presence and a storybook narrator’s voice. There’s a subdued gravitas to the way she tells her own tale: She was a hippie intellectual from rural Minnesota who went off to Paris and New York to study mime and dance and figure herself out. Despite having no money, no industry connections, and almost no formal training as an actress, she landed the lead role of Dwan in the 1976 King Kong, played her as a daffy sexpot, made the cover of Time, and got pilloried by critics. She’s still brutal on herself and her work, delivering the sorts of scathing assessments you would expect to hear from the many fearsome women she has played over the past half-century. She also keeps challenging herself, even though, at 74, she has nothing to prove. 

Were you apprehensive about being on Broadway for the first time in 1992, when you did A Streetcar Named Desire with Alec Baldwin as Stanley?

Oh, I should have been. I should have thought about this a lot instead of saying "yes" to Blanche DuBois. I mean, I really opened myself up to being crucified. I know I should never say this, but I didn't have the kind of director I needed for my first time onstage in a big Broadway theater in something like that. I needed a lot of help, even in terms of understanding what it means to project beyond the footlights.

What do you get from stage acting that you can't get from movies?