New York — Talk about ghosts.
In the darkened gloom of an empty Gramercy Park restaurant before the dinner crowd arrives, Jessica Lange sits at a corner table, sips a cup of coffee and talks about the extraordinary women created by Tennessee Williams. She's played her share of them.
Blanche DuBois, Maggie the Cat (on film) and now Amanda Wingfield, the domineering mother who propels "The Glass Menagerie," the heartbreaking family drama that 60 years ago brought Williams his first New York success.
This memory play, starring Lange, is back on Broadway, with Christian Slater as Tom, the errant son who longs to escape the stifling grasp of his mother, Sarah Paulson as the emotionally fragile Laura and Josh Lucas as the Gentleman Caller, the young man preordained by Amanda to provide her daughter with a romantic relationship.
Lange talks shyly, almost demurely about "Menagerie," often described as Williams' quiet play -- as well as his most brutal. "It's both of those things," she says softly. "Nothing can be more brutal than family."
Amanda, according to the actress, is capable of "unwitting cruelty," a phrase used by Williams himself to describe this indomitable creature.
"That to me is like a huge clue because I don't think there is anything about Amanda that is deliberate in the sense of being hurtful," Lange says in analyzing her latest stage creation. "But because she has such desperation, I think there are moments where she just doesn't know what she is saying or what she is doing."
Amanda is a woman raised in gentility but who married into a hard life, abandoned, along with two children, by a wandering man.
"Sometimes I think about Amanda in terms of what happened when her husband left her," says Lange, who in the movies has played an array of fascinating females, from Patsy Cline to Frances Farmer to the object of King Kong's affection. "Amanda was still a young woman, a woman who obviously was used to male attention and was used to being adored. In the true manner of a Southern belle, she also was a great flirt.
Actress Jessica Lange is starring in a revival of Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" at the Barrymore Theater in New York. Lange portrays Amanda Wingfield, the domineering mother who propels the heartbreaking family drama that 60 years ago brought Williams his first New York success.
"But she made a bad choice. That's what always touches me so much about Amanda's first speech, the one when she's talking about all the men she could have had, all these wonderful young planters and sons of planters: 'but I picked your father,"' Lange says with the lilt of a Southern accent, turning into Amanda in the empty, expectant dining room.
It's an eerie transformation, watching this casually if fashionably dressed, vibrant woman with clipped blond hair and a minimum of makeup transform herself into the coquettish matriarch.
Lange has not made things easy for herself. She has opted for some of the choicest and -- most challenging -- roles in American drama.
"Foolhardy, maybe," she says with a laugh.
There is a line, she says, from Maggie, the young woman desperate to save her marriage in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," to Blanche, the fading Southern belle losing her grip on life in "A Streetcar Named Desire," to Amanda. And as she has grown older (Lange turns 56 on April 20), the actress has played them all, and some like "Streetcar," three times -- twice on stage and once on film.
"I find them all to have tremendous valor -- a certain kind of heroism," she says. "That might not make them the most likable, easy people to be around but they have iron wills, all of them.
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