November 8, 2024: Theatre Yesterday and Today, by Ron Fassler

In New York City this week, an unseasonably warm November gave off something of a chill after Tuesday's election. Searching for some solace I turned to the theatre (as I often do) and found the warmth and security I was seeking in the story of how the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage Country handled its influx of new actors during its Broadway between 2007 and 2009. One of its chief replacements was the great Estelle Parsons, still working well into her nineties. An Academy Award winner in 1967, she toiled in the theatre for years prior to her sudden burst of fame in Bonnie and Clyde, one of the most groundbreaking films produced in that turbulent decade. On the night of the Oscars, she was starring in The Seven Descents of Myrtle, a new Broadway play by Tennessee Williams, with no intention of attending the ceremony and missing a performance. According to Parsons, her producer, the formidable David Merrick, had other ideas:

“David Merrick said to me, ‘You’re going to the Oscars.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not. I have a show that night, are you kidding? Why in God’s name would I come out there [Los Angeles]? I’m in a Broadway show!’ And Merrick said, ‘I’m putting your understudy on that night and if you stay here you won’t have anything to do.’

So, I flew out, and yeah, it was really fun to win and hear your name and walk up the aisle and it was very sweet to win, like getting a piece of candy. But I couldn’t have cared less . . . It just was not meaningful to me. But it has been extremely meaningful in my work because then everyone says, ‘Oh, she’s the Academy Award winner,’ so it’s helpful when you’re looking for work.”

And in her thirty-second acceptance speech, Merrick was the first one Parsons thanked “for letting me out of my play.”

In 1977, she was a Holy terror as a teacher from Hell on Broadway in Roberto Athayde’s Miss Margarida’s Way. Set with the stage as the front of a classroom, only one child appeared in the show, seated in the theatre. In the Playbill, it stated: “The Rest of Her Students . . . The Audience.” Banned in its first production in his native country, Athayde’s satiric comment on Brazil’s authoritarian leadership offered an allegory of teacher as dictator. Sparing no prisoners, Parsons lit into anyone and everything in her path in a particularly grueling theatre experience, not for the squeamish. At times, the improvisations Parsons employed with her “students” forced her to be truly at one with the material, possessing an ability to speak the playwright’s language leaving it difficult to know where his words started and hers left off. The best part was that during intermission, audience members were encouraged to come up onstage and write graffiti on Miss Margarida’s blackboard.

Though it managed a few months on Broadway, it ultimately proved too difficult for audiences to fully appreciate. When Parsons brought the show back thirteen years later to a smaller theatre, her efforts were praised but didn’t translate to any business. It closed in ten days.

Always up for a challenge, Parsons has taken on the occasional musical role, too. In the early part of her career, she was in the singing ensemble of the 1956 Ethel Merman-starrer Happy Hunting and appeared at the tail end of the long running off-Broadway production of Threepenny Opera as Mrs. Coaxer. In 1981, she played Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway, replacing that English treasure Patricia Routledge, who had first played it in its Central Park iteration. Of Parsons in Penzance, Frank Rich in the New York Times wrote, “she brings the show both a fine contralto and an adorable dizziness.”

But it took guts for Parsons—at the age of eighty no less—to replace Tony winner Deanna Dunagan in August: Osage County. Those who got to see her bite into the meaty leading role of Violet Weston were left with their jaws hanging open. When critic Charles Isherwood returned to the play, he wrote in the New York Times that “the challenge of embodying this complicated, terrifying woman seems to burn away the years; if I didn’t know Ms. Parsons was 80, I would never believe it. I hope she’s having the time of her life. She is certainly giving a performance to remember, one that may prove to be a crowning moment in an illustrious career.”

Tracy Letts, the playwright/actor who wrote August: Osage County, called Parsons “phenomenal . . . When Estelle [succeeded Dunagan] on Broadway, she was robbed of a real rehearsal time,” Letts said, “but when she got on the tour she got a real rehearsal period, and recommitted herself to the process and further investigated the role. She even flew down to Tulsa, where my mother took her to spend the day in Pawhuska [the setting for the play]. Now, Estelle is even better on the road than even she was on Broadway.”

And August was hardly Parsons’ swan song. She’s been on Broadway three times since; one of them a hilarious cameo as Matthew Broderick’s mother, entering right before the finish to wrap up the 2012 Gershwin musical Nice Work if You Can Get It. And in 2020, at age ninety-three, she was in Unknown Soldier at Playwright’s Horizons—another musical—only this time, she sang! With Covid striking four days after it opened, few saw a performance Ben Brantley in the New York Times labeled “incomparable.”

Phylicia Rashad is another who took on the volatile Violet during August’s year-and-a-half tenure on Broadway. It wasn’t her first time as a replacement either. She was the second person to try on the ugly nose and gorgeous gown of the Witch in Into the Woods after Bernadette Peters left to shoot a film. A few years later, Rashad followed Tonya Pinkins’s Tony winning turn as Anita in Jelly’s Last Jam.

While doing publicity for Into the Woods, Rashad gave an interview to the Daily News and was asked how she felt about a recent survey that named her TV’s “best-known and best-liked woman?” Her response to the interviewer was to laugh. “Okay, but how many more people are fed by that? Or how many wars has that stopped? So, if you stop to think about it, how really important is it? Plus, some day that will change.”

That Rashad’s high-profile gig on The Cosby Show is what got her Into the Woods in the first place was not lost on her. “In the theatre, you’re not afforded the exposure television gives you. You can work in the theater for years, and even people in the theater won’t know who you are; they’re working, they don’t have time to see you in a show. My work on The Cosby Show is what most people have seen. But had it not been for my training in the theater, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the job.”

James Lapine, who wrote and directed Into the Woods, returned to put Rashad through her paces, for which she was grateful. “He helped me explore it and find my own truth,” she said, “which is what I would do anyway. It’s like rebuilding a costume that was made for someone else. You take it in a little in one place and let it out just a bit somewhere else.”

When Rashad went into August: Osage County, the Daily News’s Joe Dziemianowicz returned for a third visit and wrote that “[she] blends in beautifully and delivers a knockout performance. It’s finely calibrated, fiercely funny and frightening and all too human.” Having first seen the play from the audience, Rashad was enamored of the part and excited to get to work. “What I like to do as an actor is to find the heart of the human being,” she told the Amsterdam News. “Some hearts reveal themselves easier than others. This is a woman that has given birth to three children, and there’s one that she’s particularly fond of. I haven’t understood her particular choices. I’ve got to understand her choices as a human being; in order to understand that I need to understand her heart. It’s not something I’m used to articulating in this way. It happens. It begins to reveal itself, and sometimes it’s not in rehearsal.”

After years of understudying and replacing, Rashad became the first Black woman to win the Tony for Best Actress in a Play as Lena Younger in the 2004 revival of A Raisin in the Sun. Considering this milestone came at the awards’ 58th annual ceremony, it was a long overdue recognition for Black actors everywhere. Rashad won a second Tony in 2022 in the Featured Actress category for Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew.

John Cullum is another actor who went into August: Osage County. In 2009, he replaced Tracy Letts’s own father, Dennis, in the role of Beverly Weston, who has a long monologue in Act One, then dies and is never heard or seen again. At seventy-nine, Cullum not only took the job but took another one in an off-Broadway show —and appeared in both at the same time! August was at the Music Box on 45th Street and once Beverly died he would head over to the Harold Clurman Theatre on 42nd Street and play a leading role in Gérald Sibleyras’ Heroes. From a March 20th NPR broadcast, you can hear him speaking live while huffing and puffing a bit walking alongside the interviewer during his commute between shows: “I catch the lights the way I catch ’em. It takes 12 minutes to walk briskly from down there at the Harold Clurman, Theatre Row, to the Music Box. It takes about 11 minutes, usually to go in [this] direction, because it’s got a slight downhill.”

Now age ninety-four and with thirty-one Broadway shows and twenty-one off-Broadway behind him, who knows if the current generation beginning their stage careers will have the same sort of opportunities for a career like that. Or, for that matter, possess the fortitude and commitment of someone like John Cullum. They’d be wise to take the time to study the theatrical lives Parsons, Rashad and Cullum have led and how they conducted themselves personally and professionally. There’s a hell of a lot to learn.

Ron Fassler is the author of Up in the Cheap Seats: An Historical Memoir of Broadway and the forthcoming The Show Goes On: Broadway Hirings, Firings and Replacements. For news and "Theatre Yesterday and Today" columns when they break, please hit the FOLLOW button.