After a few weeks in Chicago working on a Strawdog Theatre Company production of her first play, a dark comedy called “A Mother, a Daughter and a Gun,” Barra Grant says she’s “in heaven.”
It’s certainly not the weather that makes her feel this way, but it is an atmosphere particular to Chicago–that of a hard-working theatrical community.
Grant, a screenwriter, television director and former actress in town to fine-tune her play during rehearsals, says that “after all the work I’ve done–and I’ve had some success–this is really an apex for me, because everybody here is enjoying it so much. Even the people with smaller parts. They say, `I think if I come on with this action then I’ll really solve that problem. Let me try. Can I try it?’
“We’re all just discovering this thing, and they’re very excited about it. I go to my hotel at night and say to myself, `You’ve paid a lot of dues in terms of suffering and now you’re not. Isn’t that interesting?’ I’m hardly used to it.”
An earlier version of “A Mother, a Daughter and a Gun” was produced last year in Los Angeles and won Grant the DramaLogue award for best new play, but Grant describes the production experience as nightmarish.
” don’t grow up in theater in L.A. They grow up in sitcom, movie of the week,” says Grant, a tall, thin blond woman perched on a sofa on Strawdog’s stage prior to a rehearsal.
“They don’t even think about features. Equity waiver–that’s what they call it in L.A.–is a bunch of teeny, tiny theaters where people because ` will see me be sexy in this part. I never get an audition where I can be sexy.’ There’s a sense of actors doing you a very big favor by rehearsing a play and doing all those things. Or they say, `Oh, I can’t do the show anymore. I’m in the movie of the week with Joey Buttafuoco.’ ” She laughs uproariously.
“I realized it was out of control from the beginning. I think the strength of the play kind of pushed it. Audiences appreciated it, but if anyone knew what the behind-the-scenes truth was. . . .
“Usually you have to be at the theater half an hour . Well, we’d sit there and it would be 8:10 p.m. and the people in the cast weren’t there yet. I’m not saying this is true of all the actors but it was true enough. I couldn’t work , and the poor director was so consumed with holding together this TV-starlet group of people that I never had help. I never worked with anybody like I did with Richard .
“Not that I’m in this category, but from Tennessee Williams on, playwrights have had artistic directors; they had editors who said, `I’d change this.’ Whether people know it or not, it’s true.”
Grant’s background is theatrical. After college on the East Coast she studied theater in England and then went to work as an actress associated with the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
In the mid-1970s she gave up acting and wrote a screenplay, “Slow Dancing in the Big City,” about a newspaper columnist who falls for an ailing ballerina. It was made into a film directed by John Avildsen (“Rocky”) and starring Paul Sorvino.
Grant also wrote the screenplay for the 1984 film “Misunderstood,” a story about a boy and his neglectful father that starred Gene Hackman and Henry Thomas.
There were other screenplays that didn’t get made into movies, and Grant also did television work, directing some After School Specials for ABC-TV, producing the series “Dirty Dancing” and directing its final episode.
Television is what spurred Grant to return to her theatrical roots.
“I know TV’s good and I know a lot of people make a lot of money from it, but it kills you,” she says. “Whatever soul, intellect, I don’t know, that individual thing you have, your voice, gets sublimated to the lowest common denominator.
“I never felt like that with movies because the movies I’ve written have been very fulfilling. Since they’re dialogue-oriented movies they’re always about something. But after this TV stuff I thought I’d better get somewhere else fast so I can find my voice again.”
The result, of course, was “A Mother, a Daughter and a Gun,” a play about a pregnant Jewish woman named Jess, who buys a gun after she learns her husband has been cheating on her with an office temp. The comedy ensues when Jess’ self-involved mother arrives on the scene, interrupting Jess’ plans for revenge.
Although there are male characters–notably Jess’ father, who makes a shocking revelation–it’s really not a comedy about husbands and lovers, but rather Grant’s wicked take on mothers and daughters.
“Once you have incredible information and deep passion about something and have lived, suffered through and then arisen with some understanding, you can write about it and take joy,” Grant says.
“I mean, if it were too painful, it wouldn’t be a comedy. There is pain, to be sure, but it was so great to write about an important part of my life I had never written about–being a mother, my mom and also my grandmother. The women in my family were kind of exposed to everybody’s insanity and problems.
“I was going for a real truth about how competitive it is, how emotionally warlike it can be. I’m not saying anything people haven’t lived through; I’m taking a megaphone and I’m talking loudly about it in a way where I know people will see something of themselves and they’re going to go, `Oh,’ because I take it that one tiny place further.”
For the record, Grant is the daughter of Bess Myerson, the aspiring pianist from the Bronx who became the first Jewish Miss America in 1945.
Myerson parlayed her brief fame into a lifelong career as a television celebrity, newspaper columnist and politician. New York mayor John Lindsay named her consumer affairs commissioner in 1969, and his successor, Edward Koch, appointed her the city’s cultural affairs commissioner. She campaigned with Koch and in 1980 ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat.
An only child, Grant says she grew up in Manhattan in the company of women after her parents divorced and her father “was, like, gone from my life when I was 9.”
She came of age during the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and settled down in 1980 when she met her future husband, Brian Reilly, a Hollywood producer (“The Santa Clause,” “Don Juan de Marco”). The two have a 12 1/2-year-old daughter.
She says she has maternal instincts that are different from many other women’s.
“When I had my child, I thought, `This is great. It’s also an amazing intrusion in my life,’ ” she says. “I mean, I love my daughter but there would be women around me who 24 hours a day breast-fed, powdered, showed the baby off, and then they stopped being able to talk to me because they hadn’t read a book or gone out. And I couldn’t talk to them because I was working and had a nanny.”
All of Grant’s life experiences would seem to have informed “A Mother, a Daughter and a Gun,” Strawdog’s first show under an Equity contract, which came complete with a lead actress, TV star Valerie Landsberg (“Fame”).
“Valerie was the conduit by which the project came to us,” says Richard Shavzin, who directs the play, which opened Thursday in its pre-New York tryout. “I had to find a way to make that work and that’s why we’re doing this Equity.
“What attracted me to the play? It’s funny. It made me laugh.”
For her part, Grant already is hatching plans for her next project, a screenplay she will write for Michael Douglas and his father, Kirk.
“Part of the wonderful process of these films is that you often spend months working with greats,” she says. “I worked with Barbra Streisand for a year on a picture that didn’t get made. Even if the movies don’t get made, you learn quite a bit.”
