Entertainment

In a New Play, Gloria Steinem Is in Fine Hands

NEW YORK — “Could you share your #MeToo moment, Gloria?” actress Christine Lahti asked. “Or should we save it for the play?”

Posted Updated
In a New Play, Gloria Steinem Is in Fine Hands
By
Laura Collins-Hughes
, New York Times

NEW YORK — “Could you share your #MeToo moment, Gloria?” actress Christine Lahti asked. “Or should we save it for the play?”

The play is “Gloria: A Life,” and when it opens off-Broadway in October, Lahti will be in the starring role she lobbied to land: portraying her friend the feminist hero Gloria Steinem, who on this muggy August afternoon was seated beside her, in the cool tranquility of Steinem’s Upper East Side duplex.

Elegant and unflappable at 84, Steinem acquiesced, mildly relating a memory from the 1960s, “pre-women’s movement,” of waiting on a couch in an office with novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern, whom she called “a perfectly nice guy.”

“While we were sitting there, he reached over and grabbed my wrist like this,” Steinem said, clamping a hand firmly to demonstrate, “and tried to kiss me. And I bit him on the cheek.”

Lahti said: “Blood was running down his cheek. Isn’t that the best story?”

Tapping her cheek, Steinem added: “Ever after, I would see him, and he would say, ‘See? I have a little scar.’ But he was very nice about it.”

Lahti said, “He assaulted you, but he was very nice about it.”

Steinem replied, “It wasn’t much of an assault,” and anyway, as she explained, the point of her story was about the instincts that girls are socialized to suppress. Physically defending herself was a reflex, not a conscious decision.

This is the sort of nuanced recollection you get from Steinem, a journalist who became one of the leaders of second-wave feminism and a founder of Ms. magazine.

Lately, she’s been experiencing a pop-culture resurgence. Not only the play, written by Emily Mann and directed by Diane Paulus, but also two movies are in the works: Julie Taymor’s “My Life on the Road,” adapted by playwright Sarah Ruhl from Steinem’s memoir of the same title, which stars Julianne Moore, and Dee Rees’ “An Uncivil War,” about the battle to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, with Carey Mulligan as the young Steinem.

But first comes “Gloria: A Life,” starting previews on Oct. 2 at the Daryl Roth Theater and intended to inspire its audience with the admirable, fallible example of the woman at its center. The first act traces Steinem’s life from her childhood with a mother incapacitated by anxiety and depression, and the second takes the form of a talking circle for the audience.

Introduced years ago by “Thelma and Louise” screenwriter Callie Khouri, Steinem and Lahti, who is 68, have a rapport based on feminism, of course, but also on their Midwestern roots, dysfunctional childhoods and a sense that — as they told me in unison — they were living “the unlived lives” of their mothers. The day after the cast’s first read-through, they got together to talk about it all. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Tell me about that feeling about your mothers.

CHRISTINE LAHTI: I wrote a story about my mother after she died, and I realized that I had spent so much of my early adult life doing everything I could to not be her. As much as I loved her, I judged her, until I realized that she did the best she could with what was handed to her, which was second-class citizenship.

GLORIA STEINEM: The same was true for me, maybe more dramatically, because my mother couldn’t function, and by the time I came along, the period of her life in which she’d been a newspaper reporter and loved her work, I didn’t even know that. So it took me longer to discover who she might have been.

Q: Do you think that this play and the movies are a form of writing about our mothers — about what you and your generation gave birth to, culturally?

LAHTI: I had no idea about feminism until 1970. Because of people like Gloria, I had a whole awakening. I thought that being second-class was biological. I remember marching against the war in Vietnam. We were marching with the men, but we were still making the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

STEINEM: At some big anti-Vietnam rally in Washington, there were vets who were against the war. There was a woman speaking onstage, and the vets were yelling, “Take her off and [expletive] her. Take her off and [expletive] her.”

LAHTI: [Sharp intake of breath.] No. You didn’t tell me that one. That’s got to go in the play. That’s so disgusting.

Q: To what degree, when you’re with Gloria, are you taking mental notes?

LAHTI: I’ve already picked up a few mannerisms.

STEINEM: She’s so much more animated than I am. I would have to be on LSD to be as animated. [Laughs.]

LAHTI: But you do use your hands in a beautiful way. I’m slowly watching and observing in ways I haven’t before. I have so much inside that I feel understands Gloria on a very deep level. So now it’s really the external things.

STEINEM: And also, she does this all the time. What was the play in which you spoke an entirely different language?

LAHTI: Oh, “_______ A,” the Suzan-Lori Parks. [The play is written mainly in English, but some of the dialogue is in a language Parks invented.]

Q: You were so brilliant in that.

STEINEM: I rest my case. If she can do that, she can do anything.

LAHTI: I’m not intending to do a perfect impersonation. It’s more the essence of Gloria. I’m not trying to copy her voice — nothing like that.

STEINEM: Which is good because I’m very monotone.

LAHTI: She’s so not. She’s so warm and full of life and humor. But I’m thinking wigs and glasses will help a lot.

Q: Gloria, Mary Kathryn Nagle told me you became friends after you went to one of her plays. How much of a theater person are you?

STEINEM: I grew up being a movie person, because there wasn’t theater available.

LAHTI: We go to musicals a lot together — like, the ones that none of our other friends will go to. We went to “Beautiful” together, weeping. “Bridges of Madison County,” weeping. Then we went to one that we disagreed on whether we liked it or not, which we don’t need to say.

STEINEM: I had just come from spending two or three hours with Julie Taymor, who is the smartest, fastest person on earth. If I hadn’t just come from being with Julie, I probably would have liked it better. Q: You wrote in “My Life on the Road” that “people in the same room understand and empathize with each other in a way that isn’t possible on the page or screen.” Is that part of why you said yes to a play?

STEINEM: It is. When I started to speak in public, I would leave at least as much time for discussion because that was less terrifying. And, in that way, I discovered that audiences have a life of their own. I also learned from living in India that talking circles are the crucible of human contact and change. I mean, we haven’t been sitting around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years for nothing.

Q: Was the talking circle in the play your idea?

STEINEM: Yeah. Somehow that made it OK, if you know what I mean. Because, as you can understand if there were a play about you, it does feel a little odd.

Q: Did you think it was presumptuous somehow to agree to a play about you?

STEINEM: Yeah.

LAHTI: This is the least narcissistic person on the planet. But also, we’re telling a story about a human being, not the icon Gloria.

STEINEM: There are no icons, is the truth.

LAHTI: When we go out together, I feel like her bouncer. It’s like going out with Bruce Springsteen, because people come over — floods of women, and they’re weeping, and they say: “Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for saving my mother’s life.” And I’m like, “OK, just stay back.” But she’ll say: “No. Thank you,” and she means it.
Q: The play’s all-female creative and producing team: What difference does that make?

LAHTI: I find that women listen better, are more collaborative, more open, and there’s less ego in the room. Yesterday was just thrilling because it was all women.

STEINEM: I was part of starting New York magazine. There, I was the girl writer with all the — Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe and, you know. The difference between that and Ms. magazine was profound. In an editorial meeting at New York magazine, we were all trying to interest Clay Felker, who was a brilliant editor. But in our meetings, we were much more trying to interest each other, not ——

LAHTI: The man.

STEINEM: Yeah.

Q: And you didn’t have to explain the importance of stories about women.

STEINEM: Well, sometimes. I mean, as I guess will remain in the play — we don’t know — it isn’t just that we live in a patriarchy. The patriarchy lives in us.

Q: Even at Ms.?

STEINEM: Yeah. But the good news is, the diversity of female experience kind of helps you get out of that.

Q: Is there anything about this play that scares you?

STEINEM: Well, yes. The scariest category of things is feeling profoundly misunderstood, because it makes you feel invisible. And every once in a while in public life, that happens: Something that you have done, meaning one thing, is taken to mean something completely different. And that is hard. But there’s a level of trust here. I don’t feel worried about that.

Q: It truly is meant to be a warts-and-all portrait?

STEINEM: Yes. Because you can’t be helpful by pretending to be perfect.

Copyright 2024 New York Times News Service. All rights reserved.