Brooke Adams was a huge star in her 30s after appearing alongside a brooding Richard Gere in Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick’s tragic and masterful film about farm workers. But she walked away from the business in her 40s and instead devoted herself to painting and parenting. Adams was decidedly retired. “I had quit acting,” she says.
But actor Caroline Aaron, her longtime friend, had other ideas. “I tried to bring her out of retirement,” recalls Aaron, who has notched up more than 40 years in the business, most recently playing mother-in-law Shirley in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. She approached Adams with Madwomen of the West – the timing was right, it was going to co-star other friends – and Adams agreed to appear in the comedy before she’d even read the script.
After runs in Los Angeles and New York, the play, written by Sandra Tsing Loh, has just opened in London, which is where the two American actors meet me, at the theatre cafe. Both are warm and funny, teasing and challenging each other in the easy way of long friendship. Aaron is a talker, more dominant. Adams seems more reticent, but is equally no-nonsense.
The play came out of the pandemic, when Loh had time on her hands. “She called me and said, ‘I want to write something I’m not in,’” recalls Aaron, who had appeared in Loh’s previous production, The Madwoman in the Volvo. “She started describing these archetypes.” Marilyn, Aaron’s character, is the dynamic founder of a school for disadvantaged children. She has commandeered the pristine mansion owned by her friend Jules, played by Adams. The aim is to throw a surprise birthday party for their depressed friend Claudia (Melanie Mayron). Fourth friend Zoey (Marilu Henner) is a celebrity wellness guru none of them has seen for 20 years. When she crashes the party, it all kicks off.
Each woman has her own issues: with partners, children, careers, money and the pressure to stay relevant in a society that considers ageing abhorrent. “Sandra kept saying, ‘I’m one of these women who’s becoming invisible and I don’t want to sit by and let that happen,’” says Aaron. Loh recognised, adds Adams, “that the demographic of theatregoers is predominantly women over 50, and so why is nobody writing for them?” There’s a hunger for it, Aaron says: “We’ve had so many women come up to us afterwards and go, ‘That just felt so good.’ In our country, it’s all about money. If something makes money, its demographic will be anointed. But if we don’t put women of a certain age on screen, or tell their stories, how can they ever be the demographic people gravitate toward?”
As Loh wrote, she would meet up with Aaron on Zoom to read the pages, gradually bringing in the other actors as they were cast. They would talk about their lives, dreams, frustrations at the fights feminism lost, and their occasional bewilderment about the modern world, from the changing nature of what is considered offensive to fluidity around gender. Politics, in a country where many women no longer have access to abortion, was a big topic. Aaron’s character, like herself, is a Hillary Clinton fan. “I had resigned myself, until a couple of weeks ago, to the fact that [having a female president] would never happen in my lifetime,” she says. “Even when they were making noises about Biden not running again, Kamala Harris never came up. It was always about what man would be the best.”
Some elements were inspired by the lives of the actors, most notably in the case of Henner, who is a celebrity wellness guru in real life. Others were accidental: Adams’s character Jules is a stay-at-home mother, as she was, and struggles with alcohol. Adams hasn’t had a drink for 35 years but would still describe herself as an alcoholic.
Aaron and Adams have both worked with, as Aaron puts it, “the Mount Rushmore of directors”. Adams’s big break was in Days of Heaven, which Malick made in the late 1970s. “I thought he was a genius,” she says. “He was really funny, but he was not an actor’s director. If you said a line in a way he didn’t like, he just cut the line.” It’s one reason, she says with a laugh, why she had so little dialogue. “When I saw the movie, I thought, ‘It’s weird these two men are so crazy about this woman.’ They’re willing to die over her – and yet I say nothing!” Was it frustrating? “It was insecure-making. We all thought we were terrible.”
Aaron has worked with everyone from Mike Nichols to Robert Altman and Nora Ephron. Altman, she says, “would shoot and shoot and shoot. It’s like what they say about Rodin sculptures – you can see them crawling out of the stone. You would feel Bob’s movies crawling out of days and days of his gambling, smoking pot, bringing his friends around. Sort of a genius by accident.”
Aaron also made several films with Woody Allen. She is a defender of the director, who has effectively been cancelled following renewed attention to the allegation that he sexually assaulted his adopted daughter, which he has always denied. “They have successfully dismantled his legacy in America,” says Aaron. “I find it dangerous and sad.”
One famous young female actor told her that she and her friends had all agreed never to go for a part in an Allen film. “I said, ‘Since you don’t know [the truth about the allegations], why can’t you say you don’t know? What about collateral damage? Like, perhaps you’re wrong?’ She said, ‘We’ve discussed that and we’re OK with it.’”
Loh’s play highlights the generation gap between what some people might consider infuriating “wokeness” and others a justified correction. “I have children who are part of it,” says Aaron, “and it drives me out of my –” She stops and smiles. “I think it’s the death of nuance. I’m often saying to my children, ‘I want to learn but I can’t learn from a place of being condemned.’ And I feel like the generation condemns us.”
As for the hot subject of which actors have the right to play which roles, how does she feel about The Marvelous Mrs Maisel being criticised for casting non-Jews in Jewish roles? It’s something Aaron, who is Jewish, doesn’t have much time for. “I believe acting is the art of transformation. We’re supposed to be athletes of the heart, representing the human condition. I feel if I do my job well, I should be able to portray a huge variety of people.”
When Aaron was nearing middle age, she could see her roles changing. “At 40,” she says, “it seems like the axe falls.” She remembers talking to one Oscar-winning actor who was having to audition for roles now she was older. “She said, ‘I really know what I’m doing now as an actress – and no one is interested in what I have to say. And when I didn’t know what I was doing, all people wanted to do was talk to me.’ I think there’s that in this play: these women all have a lot to say, and they only say it to each other, because no one else is soliciting it from them. How do you feel? What do you want? Where are you going? No one ever asks that after a certain age. People just want you to –” Adams quickly steps in: “Go away quietly.”
When Adams walked away in the 1990s, she was in her 40s, the career of a romantic lead being harder to sustain, of course, if she has the audacity to get older. “It was really hard to get work,” she says. She watched the career of her husband, the actor Tony Shalhoub, take off. “I was going to award shows with him, and they were pushing me out of the way to get a picture of him. It was horrible. That’s when I said, ‘I’ve got to just say I’m not an actor any more’, because at least that will feel like I’m taking charge.” Does she regret stepping away, not trying to make it work? “No, I had other things – the kids, painting. I thought, ‘I don’t want to go back to square one.’ It would have meant finding an agent, which is a horrible thing, then finding work.”
But it’s been fun to be on stage again, she says. “It gave me a new desire to do it.” She is now writing a memoir, is keen to show her paintings, and has even found herself an agent. Aaron, meanwhile, has no intention of ever retiring: “I say yes to everything. I’ve been doing it a long time – and I’ve never not liked it.”