another eye opens

Seeing Beth Henley’s play Family Week reminded me of the one and only time I met the playwright. I was doing a story about the director Ulu Grosbard, who was staging Henley’s play The Wake of Jamey Foster in 1982. The play had a very short run on Broadway, where it was largely considered a disappointing sequel to Crimes of the Heart. But I distinctly remember the remarkable performances of the late great Susan Kingsley and of Holly Hunter, in her Broadway debut. The play mixed comedy and drama in a way that unnerves and unsettles audiences, and in that way it’s a lot like Henley’s Family Week, which Grosbard also directed in its initial (and also brief) Off Broadway appearance in 2000. I met Henley at a dress rehearsal of The Wake of Jamey Foster — I remember that she was petite, pretty, shy, funny, and surprisingly impressed that I’d recently met Barbra Streisand, of whom she was in awe. Grosbard is not the most exciting director in the world, but I liked him, and I know that many people in the theater consider him a mensch. See my New York Times article on him here. He’s pictured below with the cast of his film Straight Time — Dustin Hoffman, Theresa Russell, John Carlen, Harry Dean Stanton, and Dawn Hudson.

This entry was posted on May 16, 2010 at 5:22 pm and is filed under from the deep archives.

Tags: beth henley, ulu grosbard