Grey Gardens: Little Edie Come To Life

An in-depth review by Brooke Allen.

You know, I had the same response:

Grey Gardens originally struck me as a thoroughly grotesque idea for a new musical, almost as low on the taste level as the ill-fated attempt, a few years back, to base a musical on the life and death of the suicidal actress Jean Seberg.

I had seen the documentary – and also experienced it as fascinating, yes – unforgettable certainly, but also rather lurid and awful – andnot at all funny. There were moments – and Edie actually is quite witty, but it was not comfortable laughter, it was laughter out of shock, disbelief, amazement … I could never let myself forget how far they had fallen and the state of squalor they both lived in. That tempered my response to their wit.

I saw it with two friends, gay men, who had seen it a bazillion times – and they howled with laughter throughout. They rewound certain sections to watch it again. I only mention they are gay because it’s been gay men and cinephiles who have kept this movie alive and in circulation. So. They were howling, and I was not. I know it’s weird to watch a movie with people who basically know it by heart – but that wasn’t what was going on. It was such a different response I was having. I felt that movie in my molecules. I didn’t feel like laughing at ALL. I had a very bad night that night, as I recall. The movie completely disoriented me, knocked me out of balance for a couple of days, leaving me rather shaky – and I felt like their constant laughter throughout was … I guess I took it personally, as irrational as that may seem. I identified with Little Edie. It was not that I saw myself in her, it was that I saw that I COULD be that. I could be that woman. It terrified me. Almost like she was a huge Medusa or something, and just by looking at her I was solidifying, petrifying. I was unable to think with any confidence, “Nope. That will NEVER be me.” I couldn’t get the distance from her that I needed in order to just sit back and laugh.

It’s like Blanche Dubois,or any of those other Tennessee Williams characters. While there may be humor there, and while Blanche’s fluttery nonsense may seem funny and ridiculous, and if you actually met her, you might want to stay as far away from her as possible, to me it seems not right to laugh. OR – if you laugh, then you are implicated in the tragedy. That’s probably part of Williams’ point. Blanche has found only ridicule and abandonment in the world. Judgment and scorn. Her last line is “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”. She found so little kindness in this world. It’s easy to ridicule Blanche. It’s easy to ridicule the overly made up lady at the end of the bar who still thinks she can pick up 22-year-old men. It makes me uncomfortable to be in the presence of somebody so addicted to fantasy, so stuck at one point in her life, now long past. It makes me uncomfortable, though, because it strikes a nerve. I have no distance from such people. I cannot sit back comfortably to watch them, knowing I am safe. I am not safe.

That’s what happened when I saw Grey Gardens.

I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach, a fear of BEING like that … a fear of having things get THAT bad … and yet at the same time, to be honest, Little Edie is not “tragic” in her own eyes. Tennessee Williams said that he had never written a ‘tragic heroine’ and he had no idea why critics and audiences insisted on referring to Blanche or Miss Alma or whomever as “tragic”. He saw them as vibrant tough survivors, sensitive people who were trying desperately to hang on to their sensitivity in a world that was determined to crush them. Perhaps they did not get what they wanted out of life. But they survived. Blanche did what she had to do to survive. It may have looked ridiculous to Stanley, and to us watching. However: this was how she survived. Her protection. And who can call that tragic?

Little Edie dresses up in the weirdest outfits, all worn backwards and sideways and upside down and held together with safety pins and clips, puts on turbans, plays the records from her girlhood, does shockingly embarrassing dances right at the camera, comes up to the camera and whispers confidentially to it … She is riveting. I wasn’t feeling sadness because SHE felt sadness. My response was not one of sympathy. She seemed to be more irritable and pissed off and resentful than SAD. I felt sad because I could see her struggle to survive (not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually) in a callous world. A world that probably laughed at her from the beginning. And if they didn’t at the beginning, then things went downhill pretty quick for her and the lovely debuttante soon became the butt of a million jokes. A recluse. A crazy cat lady.

Obviously I’m not saying that everybody needs to have the same response to the movie that I did. But it’s one of those things where I sat and I felt like I was seeing a different movie than the ones my friends described. They called it “campy”, “hysterical”, “amazing”. Maybe I’d call it “amazing” but hysterical? Campy? Are you kidding? I saw, in Little Edie, the sadness of the woman who never marries. Who has let one disappointment sink her entire life. She did not “bounce back”. Perhaps she was constitutionally unable to bounce back. Perhaps her mother, who completely dominated her, made it impossible for her to break away. It was like the two of them were one person. Who knows.

And Brooke Allen in her review goes on to analyze what it is about the musical that works.

Christine Ebersole’s performance is a dead-on impersonation of Little Edit, it’s uncanny. Because it’s a musical, and not completely literal already, the show can ask questions like: what was going on in Edie’s mind when she fled the house? Did she regret it? Who IS this woman? In the documentary, we see her exterior, carefully put together by her expressly for the benefit of the film-makers: she flirts for them, primps, preens, sidles up to the camera. And to be honest – like I said earlier: she is witty, quotable, very smart, and in LOVE with being the center of attention. She is not a gloomy person, despite her circumstances. In the documentary, you only get glimpses of how she came to this point: living with her mother in what is legendary squalor, playing her old records, sleeping surrounded by filth, no plumbing in the house, 80+ feral cats roaming around, unsafe for human habitation circumstances. It is as though Little Edie and Big Edie don’t even REALLY realize the filth. They just keep on their way, bickering, bantering, gossiping, whining … and yet the real question is (or, it was for me): Ladies. Don’t you notice the smell in your house? Don’t you notice the squalor?

The musical delves into all of the “whys”. We get all the elements from the film: Mother-daughter relationship, their obsession with the past, the flirting with the delivery boy …

but then … in songs like “Another Winter in a Summer Town” … Ebersole, with her beautiful voice, opens up the doors to her soul, her heart – and out it all comes. She’s not weeping, or wailing or emoting. She doesn’t have one drop of self-pity during that song, and it’s key to its success. There are other moments in the show where she has little self-pitying tantrums but that last song is not one of those moments. All of that drops away, her resentments, and she stands there, stock-still, the rest of the stage in darkness … and sings. Simply. You could have heard a pin drop in that theatre. I was holding back what felt like volcanic sobs.

My desire to sob was related to the heart-break I felt when I first watched the film, yet it was more sympathetic, it was softer. It didn’t have that same underlying FEAR that I had with the movie, the feeling of: Oh God, if I identify too much with this woman, then I really will become her … and oh … oh … how will I bear it ….

But the play? Somehow – everything else dissolved, all of that vaguely paranoid fearful stuff in my first response, and all I felt was love for this woman, and awe at her survival skills, and searing grief at what she had given up.

This is all due to Christine Ebersole.

Brooke Allen doesn’t find it hard – she comes right out and says it:

Grey Gardens —the musical—is a real work of art, and Christine Ebersole, who portrays Big Edie in the first act and Little Edie in the second, delivers a full-scale star performance which will undoubtedly go down as one of the tours de force of Broadway musical history.

Here is Christine Ebersole as Little Edie:

And here is the real Little Edie Beale: