INTERVIEWING: Dorothy Lyman’s new play cuts close to home
Photo: Abigail Hawk, Jeanne Lauren Smith and Dorothy Lyman star in In the Bleak Midwinter. Photo courtesy of Sally Davis / Provided by Alton PR with permission.
As a performer, Dorothy Lyman is best known for her Emmy-winning turn on All My Children and her hilarious work as Naomi Oates Harper on Mama’s Family. Behind the scenes, she directed 75 consecutive episodes of The Nanny, a three-year stint of work that continues to pay residuals.
In recent years, Lyman stepped away from Los Angeles and has been enjoying the serenity and peace of a dairy farm in upstate New York. Her experience on that homestead, and her eventual move to be closer to her children and grandchildren, inspired In the Bleak Midwinter, her new play that continues through Sept. 23 at the Shetler Studios & Theatres in New York City. Abigail Hawk also stars in the production, which is directed by Katie McHugh.
“I’ve been going down to Mexico the last four or five winters in a row and doing my plays down there, and when I got back last April, I had this new play,” Lyman said in a recent phone interview. “And I just didn’t want to wait a year to see it, and I thought, you know, I don’t need to go down to Mexico anymore. I can be a big girl and brave enough to do my play in New York.”
Lyman’s own life and the life of the character she plays on stage, Elizabeth Gladstone, mirror each other.
“I bought an old dairy farm in upstate New York in 2001, and I was still living in Los Angeles at the time,” she remembers. “And my TV career, which had been pretty robust for quite a few years, was winding down. You reach a certain age as a woman, and the parts are getting smaller, not bigger, usually. In 2003, I actually left Los Angeles when my youngest child went off to college, and I had been living up in Delaware County, New York, ever since.”
The development of the play, in many ways, helped Lyman with these big moves in her life. In order for her to be closer to her children and grandchildren, she relocated from upstate New York to Connecticut. It was not easy, but it seems to have paid off.
“A couple of years ago, my son had a child,” she said. “My daughter had a child. … And I was too far away from everybody. I was missing everything I felt, since I’m not really good at Facebook, so this play is about an old farm woman whose family decides it’s time for her to get off the family farm after the death of her husband. … I wrote the play to try to make myself feel better about leaving my homestead that I created upstate. I moved down to Connecticut to my son’s outfit. He’s got a 36-acre little farm in Connecticut, and so now I live down there in their guest house. And I get to see my 8-year-old granddaughter every day. It was a good move, but it was very difficult and painful for me. So writing this play really helped me come to terms with making a big change in my own life.”
Lyman has written three plays in her career, in addition to adapting the book My Kitchen Wars for the stage and offering a new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Writing plays was an interest of Lyman’s in the mid-1990s, but success got in the way when The Nanny came knocking.
“I wrote my first play in 1995, and we did it out in Los Angeles,” she said. “It was actually very successful, and during the run of that play is when I began to direct The Nanny on CBS. And so I spent the next three years completely involved directing 75 consecutive episodes of The Nanny, and I didn’t write another play until three years ago. This is now my third play. … And maybe there will be another one. I hope so.”
In the Bleak Midwinter has been through a fairly extensive development process. Lyman started writing in February when she was still enjoying the warmer temperatures in Mexico, and she had a reading in that country before coming back to the States in April.
“This [current] cast did a reading at Shetler Studios, where it’s being performed now,” Lyman said. “Kind of my home away from home is Shetler. It’s a great place. It’s full of rehearsal halls and two lovely little theaters. The play was 44 pages in April, and it’s 62 pages now. So after the April reading, I did some more work, and then in June, we did a three-day workshop of the script where the cast and I and the director just sat and talked about it. I spent the month of July rewriting it, and we went into rehearsals Aug. 8. And for the first week of rehearsals we just sat around the table and combed through it carefully.”
When Lyman develops a play, she is always trying to offer greater opportunities to female performers.
“My personal mandate has been always to create roles for women when I write,” she said. “I usually let other people play the roles that I’ve written. This time I just thought, it would take me longer as a director to explain to another actor how to do this role than simply just put on my boots and do it. I must say I’m pleasantly surprised by the reaction that this play is receiving. I said to somebody last night, ‘This may be the most successful thing I’ve done yet.’ At 71, that’s kind of surprising.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
In the Bleak Midwinter, written by and starring Dorothy Lyman, plays through Sept. 23 at the Shetler Studios & Theatres in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
