Conversation with “Lady Randy” Playwright Anne Undeland

Conversation with “Lady Randy” Playwright Anne Undeland

Anne Undeland sat down for tea with WAM’s Associate Artistic Director Talya Kingston to talk about her motivations to write Lady Randy and her excitement about performing the titular role.

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A Role for Women Like Me

There are very few roles for women like me.  I’m really too old to play the ingenue; the leading lady-type.  I realized that there’s this gulf and that I probably have to wait about 20 years until the roles start getting good again for women, but then those roles are kind of Driving Miss Daisy – you know what I mean?  That’s the reward?  That’s just so patriarchal and messed up!  

I was also getting tired of complaining about it, when it came to me that actually, I can do something about this.  So I started writing – not only for myself but to create great roles for women my age. It’s a really rich vein artistically for me, but it also feels like there is a real response in the world.  It happens to be dovetailing with a movement of older actresses speaking out; “me too” and “Time’s Up”; and older women like Nancy Pelosi showing some chops and showing some power. We’re not just receding into the background and becoming irrelevant after our child-bearing years – we’re more relevant than we’ve ever been.  

Portrait of Lady Randolph Churchill, c. 1880.

“Winston Churchill’s American mother… that’s kind of interesting”

I was looking for a well-known nineteenth century woman to write another one-woman show about – someone with the same sort of living room name recognition as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain.  There’s Queen Victoria, there’s Mary Todd Lincoln, maybe Susan B. Anthony, but it was so incredibly depressing how few women are universally known — it soon became clear that if I wanted name recognition, I had to find a woman who was associated with a famous man. Dammit!

I was doing some research for another project at Ventfort Hall and I came across a reference to Jennie Jerome and I thought  “Ah, Winston Churchill’s American Mother, that’s kind of interesting.” Her mother was from South Williamstown, she may have briefly attended Mrs. Sedgewick’s School for Girls in Lenox, so there are local ties. Winston Churchill is kind of hot right now now (if one can call Winston Churchill “hot,” but I digress) because of The Crown and various other movies. Quite frankly in these awful times in which we live we may need another Winston Churchill sometime soon—only I hope the next one won’t be male and white. Flawed as he was, if Churchill hadn’t held out against Hitler, I don’t know what would have happened to the world.

I had seen photographs of Jennie Jerome when I was a child. Here’s a story: when I was really little, I was blonde, and when my hair started to darken at the age of three my mother would put lemon juice in my hair and make me sit out in the sun to keep me blonde. So I got in my mind that it was physically impossible for a dark haired woman to be beautiful. Then I remember coming across pictures Jennie Jerome in a biography when I was about five, and seeing that she had dark hair and she was beautiful – it is possible!  So she’s always sort of been in my thinking.  

Photograph by B. Docktor from “Performing Olana.”

“And then falling in love with this woman who was so complicated”

What made her so fun to write about is that she’s so flawed and so open with her humanity.  I connected with her wit, her love of drama and her theatricality. I’m in awe of her audacity – she simply wasn’t afraid of things, she would just go and do them.  She had a ‘fish out of water’ quality that I identified with.  We travelled around a lot when I was a kid and I often felt like an outsider– maybe one of the reasons that I’ve lived in the Berkshires for so long is a kind of quest for belonging.  So I really related to her being a stranger in a strange land.  Even though by the end people said that she was indistinguishable from other women in English Society, I don’t know if she ever lost her American accent or her American “Go get ‘em” attitude.  I think she may have deliberately held on to her American-ness because it set her apart and made her a little more interesting, maybe giving her a little edge over everybody else.

She really understood the power of making a strong presentation, that there’s power in keeping people watching. She loved nothing more than to dazzle people with her wit, her beauty, and her talent.  It’s deeply theatrical and I think Churchill took that on himself. He had a finely tuned sense of the moment, which words to use, how to make an impact. Jennie had that same sense, what’s more, she loved words too and was a wonderful writer.  She was really smart and it makes you wonder what would have happened if she’d have been born male or at a different time. (Photos in slideshow below by Kevin Sprague and Steve Potter.)

[ngg src=”galleries” ids=”2″ display=”basic_slideshow”]She also just seemed like she was a lot of fun. She had a wonderful sense of humor and she was quite loyal to her friends.  For a woman who was so beautiful and attention grabbing as she was, she didn’t seem to have been resented and had a lot of female friends– among them the Berkshires’ own Edith Wharton. Her warmth was such that people kind of fell for her.  She was preternaturally young throughout her life – she had a habit of marrying younger men – and she never stopped being curious.  She  always had this vital interest in life and what she was doing and what her son was doing.  She never surrendered.

I had this conversation with a friend my age who said to me “don’t you find it reassuring that whatever we were going to do in life, we’ve probably done it already ?”  That’s not how I feel at all. I feel like I have so much more to give and say, so much more confidence than I ever had and a wealth of information, wisdom, and knowledge.  I think Jennie was like that too – she never considered closing up shop, it just wasn’t in her makeup. I feel like she’s a person who went through life saying “Why Not?” It’s really inspiring.

“Why does it have to be a one woman show? Why don’t you make it a two hander?”

It was [director] Jim Frangione’s suggestion to make it a two hander.  I thought, “have someone else play everybody?” Then I thought  “It could be really great!”  A lot of my experience doing one woman shows included playing multiple characters, for example in Xingu (an adaptation by Dennis Krausnick of an Edith Wharton short story) I played five different characters who talked to each other. So I knew it was not only possible to do, but really fun to do. It’s exciting for the audience to see that magic; the transformation of the same actor into different people before your eyes.  So I started writing it.

The history can box you in

My initial idea was that I’ll just do lots of research and get lots of Churchill quotes and just sort of piece them together, but I soon found that wasn’t going to work. A play is a play, not a lecture. Interestingly, the scene I did the most research on was the hardest to write.  I must’ve re-written that scene about ten times but because there was so much history in it that it just became clunky and expositional. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted Lady Randy to be accurate and true, but to find an emotional truth to the characters was more important than adhering to a literal timeline.  

Photo by B. Doktor of “Framing Churches.”

Reclaiming the gaze

One thing I especially enjoy in telling my interpretation of Jennie’s story is to reclaim her from the male historians who want to dismiss her as a whore. The first thing they say about her is that she had so many lovers, whereas had she been a man it probably wouldn’t have even been a question, or it would have been something to admire.  I remember I was talking to a military historian saying “I’m writing this play about Lady Randolph” and he leaned in saying, “Oh her, she was a grand horizontal wasn’t she?” That’s the French term for courtesan and it was the first thing he said about her. They tend to want to write her off as this wanton flibberty-gibbet.  It makes me crazy to see them  relegate her to this insignificant role in the larger Churchill story. They can’t stand it that she was sexually liberated. They can’t stand her independence and accomplishments, skills and political savvy, and they want to diminish her and say “Oh she was just a socialite, a loose woman, Winston got everything he had from his father.” I kept coming across this attitude in my research, so there’s definitely an aspect of my wanting to correct the historians and change the gaze.

Channeling the vitality

As an actor, I’m looking forward to channeling Jennie’s vitality; that life force that she embodied. I want to bring audiences into the heart, mind, soul of a human being who just didn’t give up.  Yes, she was spoiled and privileged, but she really stepped up when it mattered and I don’t think everybody would have done that. What I hope is that the audiences will connect with the production, the character, the story, the energy so that they themselves feel more human, more alive, more able to go out into the wide world and say “Why not?”

Photo by Steve Potter.

Lady Randy
World Premiere
by Anne Undeland
Directed by Jim Frangione
Presented at Shakespeare & Company’s Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre
70 Kemble St, Lenox, MA

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Performances:

Thursday, April 18 at 7:30p (Preview)
Friday, April 19 at 7:30p (Preview)
Saturday, April 20 at 7:30p (Opening)
Sunday, April 21 at 2p
Thursday, April 25 at 7:30p
Friday, April 26 at 7:30p
Saturday , April 27 at 7:30p
Sunday, April 28 at 2p
Thursday, May 2 at 7:30p
Friday, May 3 at 7:30p
Saturday, May 4 at 7:30p
Sunday, May 5 at 2p (Closing)

This production is sponsored in part by an anonymous donor.