The Great Lillian Hall, and Jessica Lange

Photo: HBO

For my theatre friends and colleagues
Reprinted from The Washington Post article by Naveen Kumar
A “Russian doll of a role” This sounds soooooh good – Watch party anyone?

[Kaveen Kumar to end] “It may surprise you to learn that Jessica Lange, whose work onstage and screen spans nearly 40 years, had never done Chekhov. Now, she’s given us a taste of what we’ve been missing. In “The Great Lillian Hall,” released on Max this spring, Lange plays a venerable Broadway star headlining a production of “The Cherry Orchard.” It’s a sensational and awesomely layered performance — among the best of Lange’s career — and a must-see for anyone who believes in the vitality of theater.

The HBO film follows Lillian’s struggle with dementia in the tense lead-up to opening night, an unraveling that’s all the more devastating in light of Lillian’s steely professional rigor. Weaving through her experience in rehearsal and in a world that feels increasingly unreal, the movie explores what an artist’s life can teach the rest of us about how to live our own.

That’s not to say we should all go about our days with Lillian’s main-character energy, treating the people around us like supporting players. Lillian, referred to by her director (played by Jesse Williams) as “the first lady of the American theater,” appears at first to be cut from familiar cloth: a self-obsessed grande dame who lives on her own planet.

But Lillian is no Norma Desmond, the washed-up has-been of “Sunset Boulevard,” played with wide-eyed delusion by Gloria Swanson in the 1950 film (and by Nicole Scherzinger in a hypermodern revival of the Broadway musical). She’s still at the height of her powers and revered by her peers and the public. And “The Great Lillian Hall” is a kind of reparative response to “All About Eve,” also from 1950, in which an ingenue usurper threatens to shove Bette Davis’s Margo Channing over the hill at the age of 40.

There’s no Eve nipping at Lillian’s heels, just an understudy (Rebecca Watson) dutifully standing by in case her grip on reality continues to slip. Nor does Lillian lament her years, pine for younger days or question whether her devotion to craft has been worthwhile — even as she acknowledges that it came at the expense of being a decent mother to her only child (Lily Rabe), who is both resentful and floundering to find her own sense of purpose. Like Margo, Lillian has a tough-as-nails right-hand woman (a pugnacious Kathy Bates) as her steadfast ally.

If you’ve seen Lange on Broadway before — as the toxic matriarch in Paula Vogel’s “Mother Play” earlier this year, or in her skittish, Tony-winning turn as Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in 2016 — you know the wonders of sharing the same room with her prickly grace and emotional lucidity. The quicksilver way she can express hopefulness, sorrow and bitter regret with a breathy half-giggle. The wryness and ironic innocence she conveys with a flicker of the eyes.

It is a privilege and a pleasure to witness all of this up close in the film, directed by Michael Cristofer, both when Lillian is onstage playing Chekhov’s stubborn, fading aristocrat, and as she steps into a similar role in the face of her diagnosis. Her character in the play, Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya, is blindly reluctant to cede her land and position despite the inevitability of their loss. The clear resonances with Lillian’s situation offer Lange a Russian doll of a role, in which she unifies the inner lives of multiple characters into one stunningly multifaceted performance. The result is utterly transfixing, and unlike anything onstage or screen this year.

The most transcendent moments come when Lillian’s hallucinations overlap and intrude on the play, her practiced art of make-believe blurring with the apparitions in her mind. For Lillian, who likens her job to leaping “every night into the unknown,” perhaps acting has always been akin to inhabiting ghost stories.

Another figure echoes through the movie, which was written by Elisabeth Seldes Annacone, niece of the late Broadway legend Marian Seldes. The end credits insist the film is fictitious, but some resemblance is evident to Seldes’s own towering reputation and ultimate decline into dementia. A framing device, in which a documentary crew chronicles Lillian’s illness, appears to be another reparative aspect of the project: A few years after her death in 2014, a doc about Seldes was scrapped over criticism that it dishonored her legacy.

Lange’s frequent presence on television over the past 15 years, including as a muse of Ryan Murphy’s in “American Horror Story” and “Feud,” signals a shift in Hollywood, which not only has found extraordinary parts worthy of seasoned talent like hers, but also increasingly questions its own rationale for discarding women with age. “The Great Lillian Hall” joins that growing tradition: No one is trying to throw Lillian over because of her advanced years, and her tenacity, futile though it seems at times, is framed as heroic rather than as personal folly.

Certainly Lange remains a formidable performer with an iron grasp on her abilities, and, fortunately for us, she found this vehicle to demonstrate so many of them at once. Now, if only we can convince her to do Chekhov.”