Wolfbane takes on tale of two Edies
By Casey Gillis on Jul. 07, 2010
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The inside of Heritage High School’s theater has been transformed.
Old vines wrap around the edge of the stage and spill out into the aisles. The exterior of a dilapidated house — Grey Gardens, the East Hampton mansion that belonged to Jackie Kennedy’s aunt and cousin, both named Edith Beale — sits in the center of the stage
When the play version of their story, “Grey Gardens,” begins, Little Edie, wearing her signature headscarf, sits inside and talks to her mother through the screen. She’s just found an old recording Big Edie made years ago, called “The Girl Who Had Everything.”
“I was the little girl who had everything,” Little Edie says wistfully.
“Well,” her mother pipes in, “that’s ancient history.”
The musical, being put on by Lynchburg’s Wolfbane Productions (see box for performance dates), is based on a 1975 documentary about the women, who went from wealthy socialites to eccentrics who lived in isolation in a deteriorated Grey Gardens.
“The first time you watch (the documentary), it awes you,” says Sarah Hoffman, who plays Little Edie. “These women are so over-the-top. Clearly, there’s some mental illness going on.
“On second watching, you start picking up the little details. You see the love they have for each other. You see their relationship more clearly, and their reasons for closing themselves away.”
The play’s two acts show the women at very different points in their lives.
The first, set in 1941, is an imagined account of what Grey Gardens — and the Edies — were like before they became recluses, complete with an appearance by a young Jackie, many years before she would become a Kennedy.
The second act picks up 32 years later and takes moments and dialogue directly from the documentary.
“You couldn’t write the stuff that’s in the documentary,” says director Dustin Williams, who has watched it more than 30 times to prepare for this production.
At first, Williams says he wondered how the women could let their house and lives fall into such a state of disrepair. But he eventually realized they weren’t that different from the rest of us. They bickered constantly but, at the end of the day, loved each other and wanted to take care of each other.
“Neither one stayed against her will. They wanted to be there,” he says. “They’re … people who chose to live their own way and made their own world inside Grey Gardens.”
For the purposes of the play, their world in the first act is played to comic effect at first, as they spar over Big Edie’s plans to sing during an engagement party for Little Edie and Joe Kennedy (in the documentary, she claimed to have had relationships with several prominent men, but the Kennedys always denied Joe was one of them, Williams says).
“It’s interesting to see an idea of her life where she would’ve been OK,” Hoffman says.
“She’s such a character. Very full of herself, just a natural performer. She’s very vibrant and alive, but also fragile. To see her at 56, that’s what I think is the hardest part. She’s so totally different.”
In the second act, Little Edie is bitter about her failed dreams and, Hoffman says, blames her mother for it all: “She feels like her mother has taken (everything) away from her.”
But Big Edie isn’t the villain she may sound like.
“As outsized as this character is, it’s still the love of a mother and daughter,” says Kathryn Clay, who plays the Beale matriarch. “Those ideas of always wanting to protect and nurture. Sometimes you do things that, on the surface, look very selfish.”
She says the two acts are like two completely different worlds.
“You realize how (much) people do change … especially when monumental things happen to them.”
IF YOU’RE GOING
WHAT: Wolfbane Productions’ “Grey Gardens”
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday and July 15, 16 and 17 and 6 p.m. July 18
WHERE: Pioneer Theatre, inside Heritage High School
TICKETS: $15 general admission and $10 for students or seniors.
INFO: http://www.LynchburgTickets.com or http://www.wolfbane.org
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