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Marian Seldes on Albee's play The Play About the Baby

STERLING SELDES

If you telephone Marian Seldes and she's not at home, her answering machine ask you to please leave the subject of your call.

The actress who was so bitingly perfect a few years ago in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women knew that Albee had a new play ready to go, but that's all. It was not her M. O. to ask to be considered for part, nor is it Albee's M. O. to write for any particular performer.

[[image – full face photograph of a woman with pulled-back dark hair and some kind of black shirt]]

"And then one day, my birthday, August 23, and my telephone machine was blinking, and a voice on the tape said: 'The subject of my call is The Play About the Baby. Would you like to do it in Houston next March?'"

The voice, of course, was that of Edward Albee, and now Marian Seldes has done The Play About the Baby both in its post-London American premiere at the Alley Theater in Houston and it smash-hit New York premiere at Off-Broadway Century Center on East 15th Street.

But this, my friends, is a new Marian Seldes, and and in a hard-edged comedy about a Boy, a Girl, a baby and a Man and Woman who take the baby away from them — in short, a play about destruction of innocence, the exile from Eden — Ms. Seldes knocks the audience dead with more deliciously preposterous things that she has ever allowed herself to indulge in throughout a multi-award-winning career.

She vamps, she camps, at one astonishing point she even does Leonardo's The Last Supper in a signing for the death while Brian Murray — the Man, the heavy, the urbane, omnipotent baby-snatcher – is attempting center stage to keep the exposition on track.

"It's all in there, in the script," Ms. Seldes says, taking over a salad between a matinee and an evening performance. "Every single thing Brian and I say has been written by Edward."

And the signing? "It just says, 'She signs.' Everything was invented in Houston, where Edward was the director. That's what gave me the confidence, because you knew he would be there to say 'Do something else' or 'Not that,' and not have to have it go through another person to him."

And that Last Supper, with you mooning and swooning? She smiles and silently indicates her own bosom.

"So much of this part," she says, "has to do with being servant to the Man. It demands a certain outrageousness, else it would fall flat and couldn't get away with it. And then I have Brian. If you have an actor like Brian carrying the play, you don't have to worry."

Seldes won her Tony Award in Albee's a delicate balance back in 1967. There was Tiny Alice, there was Three Tall Women, and now the baby. So this is her fourth marriage to Edward Albee?

"Yes," she says with a laugh. "And it keeps getting better – but it doesn't get easier." [[image – an empty white square with a black shadow to its lower right]]

by Jerry Tallmer

[[image – photograph of a modern stage set, bare except for large props – a gray-haired man in a three-piece suit stands at the back, in front of a giant-sized donut-shaped toy face-on and looking thoughtful – closer to the front is a middle-aged woman wearing a dress and sweater, sitting on a giant alphabet block, legs crossed hands reaching out to the young woman and young man closest to the viewer – they are wearing simple light colored clothes and are listening intently to the woman – caption:(l.—r.) Brian Murray, Marian Seldes, Kathleen Early and David Burtka in The Play About the Baby – attribution: Carol Rosegg]]

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Among the delights currently on Broadway stages are the laugh-out-loud performances of stage & screen vets Kathleen Freeman and Shirl Bernheim

THE GOLDEN GIRLS OF BROADWAY by Harry Haun

This year the New Faces, who filed by to collect their Theatre World Awards for best debut performances (Off-Broadway or on) in the season just ended, had a new wrinkle.

One recipient had—prior to this N.Y. coming-out—logged up seven decades onstage, screen and TV. This she did on that other coast, arriving here (1) a full-blown character actress, (2) a household face and (3) the oldest performer ever to get this prize.

Kathleen Freeman accepted her "newcomer" nod with grace, good humor and a heartfelt sentiment that made even Lea DeLaria cry, "I thought, by now, the whole thing had gone down the street flying," confessed the happy veteran. "My heart is very deeply full for your generosity and your inclusion for this. That feels good after years of summer stock."

Freeman is one of several senior citizens gleaming white gold on Broadway these days. She plays den mother and accompanist to a pack of male-stripper wannabes in The Full Monty — a role that gives this season seen stealer license to kill, and she slays away…

She has been spending a lifetime getting her pre-Broadway act together. "Every year I'm doing something," says Freeman, who has started her own theatres in California and even taught acting to a few sunbaked Stars of Tomorrow. "I've been in the theatre forever."

Actually she wasn't quite three when she first hit the boards with her vaudevillian parents. "It was a system that no longer existed, so we kept right on going, which was typical, and finally made our strange way to Los Angeles." Her mother wanted her to be a serious musician – none of that presentational stuff – so Freeman matriculated to that effect in L. A. High and UCLA. "Then, a terrible thing happened. I got in a play at UCLA. I came on stage and opened my mouth and got a laugh, and the whole thing was over."

[[image – stage photo of older woman in blouse and long fringed denim coat, smiling and laughing with her two hands, palm forward raised as if she were going to raise the roof – caption: Kathleen Freeman in a scene from The Full Monty]]

Her subsequent screen credits spanned two generations of Nutty Professor, Jerry Lewis and Eddie Murphy. In between: The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blues Brothers, A Place in the Sun, Myra Breckinridge, The Naked City, The Bad and the Beautiful, et al. is it any wonder that, in The Full Monty, when she swivels around on her piano

See GOLDEN GIRLS, page 50

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