Despite the fact that "Surviving Grace" opened and closed in one night on Broadway in another life (in 1996 under the title "The Apple Doesn't Fall"), veteran actress Doris Belack, who stars in the play's latest incarnation, insists that its history is irrelevant to her. "The past is the past. For me, it's the first time."
In the revised version of the play, slated to open Off-Broadway at the Union Square Theatre on March 12, Belack plays Grace, a controlling wife and mom who is losing her control thanks to Alzheimer's disease. The narrator is Grace's daughter (played by Illeana Douglas), a successful TV writer.
Part memory, part fantasy, "Surviving Grace" considers a woman's—and by extension, her family's—disintegration, and then re-integration and reconciliation when Grace gets a miracle drug (this is the fantasy part), regains her lost mind, and has a second chance, as does her daughter, to make amends.
"It's fascinating to play a character with so many facets," says the stylishly clad New York City-born Belack, who meets with us at a Union Square restaurant before a rehearsal. "In the beginning, Grace is in charge. She has enjoyed her upper-middle-class life and her role in it. But she also has regrets. She had writing talent and chose not to pursue it. She lives vicariously through her daughter, yet she is jealous of her.
"Later, she develops Alzheimer's and begins to decline rapidly," Belack continues. "And then the fantasy plot comes into play with the discovery of a medicine that puts Grace's disease into remission. Grace comes back to life. But she does more than that. She chooses to live in a way that she never did before. For the first time, she is taking chances. It's an enormously rewarding and challenging role to play."
Although Belack is best known for her recurring role as the no-nonsense judge, Margaret Barry, in the TV show "Law & Order"—and earlier, as the abrasive TV producer in "Tootsie"—her theatrical background is eclectic. And, interestingly, Belack sees Grace as both an extension of and departure from what she has done up until this point.
"I'm often cast as a strong woman who is vulnerable underneath," Belack remarks. "What's new for me is playing a woman with an illness. Bringing to life someone suffering from mental deterioration is a great challenge."
In an effort to strike the right note, Belack viewed hospital videos featuring Alzheimer patients in various stages of their disease. "I have spoken to doctors who have done research on the topic. But what I soon realized is that every single case is different. Some patients can last for years. Others, like Grace, go into a decline quickly.
"I made a number of choices that I'm especially pleased with," Belack continues. "Not to give myself kudos or compare myself to Judi Dench in 'Iris' [a movie about the late novelist Iris Murdoch, who also suffered from Alzheimer's], but it did make me feel good when I saw Dench smiling the way I smile as Grace in the latter stages of her disease. The [vacant] smiling was not an intellectual decision. It just felt right."
Belack is genial and outgoing with an understated sense of humor. Asked if there are any roles she is dying to play, she quickly quips: "Survivor." Beat. "In life."
Belack is a woman with strong convictions. "I never had any desire to be a star," she underscores. "My goal was always to be a journeyman. And audience size does not have any bearing on the roles I've most enjoyed doing. I loved being in 'Tootsie'—it was a classic film and a great commercial success. It had audiences in the millions. But I also loved playing Sylvia Plath's mother in 'Letters Home' at the American Place Theatre, where we may have had an audience of 500.
"If I were not an actor," she continues, "I'd be a political-social activist. My husband and I are impassioned about social injustice." (Belack's husband is the trailblazing producer Philip Rose, who brought the Lorraine Hansberry classic, "A Raisin in the Sun," to the stage in the late '50s, when the prospect of a successful Broadway play about black family life, written by a black woman, seemed close to inconceivable.)
A Lifetime Love of the Arts
As Belack tells it, she came out of the womb knowing that she was headed for a career in theatre. But then nature was enhanced by nurture. Her parents—especially her father—were cultivated arts lovers, despite limited economic means.
She recalls a poignant tale that brings an era—a home—to life: "My father, a Russian immigrant, was a self-taught classical musicologist, although he worked as a window washer. He loved the outdoors," she chortles, only half-kidding, and then again, perhaps she's not kidding at all.
"He was a window washer at Carnegie Hall, and at the Park Avenue home of Douglas Dillon, who became secretary of the treasury under Eisenhower. One day, in the home of Mr. Dillon, my father heard classical music being played in another room, and he stopped to listen. When Mr. Dillon walked in and saw my father listening to the music, my father admitted his love of music. They talked a bit, and finally Mr. Dillon said to my father that what he should do is invest $500 in AT&T. He said if he did that he'd be set for life. Years later, when my father told us the story, we couldn't understand why he didn't take Mr. Dillon's advice. 'Why didn't you invest the $500?' we asked him. My father said, 'I had to pay the rent. I didn't have $500."
Still, the family made it its business to have enough money—or save what little they did—for theatre, and even on occasion, opera.
After high school, Belack went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, an experience that she calls "a waste of time. I just didn't know what I was doing," she admits frankly. "I needed more help than they were able to give me."
She did find, however, "nine glorious years in summer stock a great experience," and regrets the demise of an institution that gave actors a kind of apprenticeship where they could develop and grow and, in her case, earn her Actors' Equity card.
Over the decades, Belack has rolled up many credits. On Broadway, she appeared in "The Cemetery Club," "Social Security," "Bad Habits," and "The Last of the Red Hot Lovers." On TV (besides "Law & Order"), she guest-starred on "The Cosby Show," "The Golden Girls," "Sisters," "Chicago Hope," "Picket Fences," and "Touched by an Angel," among others. Film credits, besides "Tootsie," include "What About Bob?," "Opportunity Knocks," "Naked Gun 33 1/3," "Batteries Not Included," and "Odd Couple II," as Walter Matthau's ex-wife.
Belack has worked fairly steadily, although she acknowledges that throughout her career she has encountered typecasting; in the early years, she was called "a character-ingénue as opposed to a classical blonde, blue-eyed ingénue," she remarks. In more recent years, she has been pigeonholed as "the upscale urbanite," which, she says, is a code word for Jewish.
"It's very irritating, but I've learned to live with it. I can't tell you how many times I've been up for parts [not upscale urbanites] in TV movies that I know I could do. In fact, I got callbacks and was told I was wonderful. And yet, when it came down to it, I didn't get the job—and I know why."
At the moment, not surprisingly, her thoughts are focused on "Grace" and the myriad issues the play examines—from the horror of Alzheimer's to parent-child relations to unresolved anger and the possibility for second chances.
"I hope audiences leave the theatre realizing that resolution can be achieved and that they should attempt it—say what they have to say to the important people in their lives—before it is too late.
"This play has resonated with a lot of audience members, especially the women," Belack points out. "Quite a few have come up to me afterwards and told me they had a parent or sibling with this disease. They said the play affected them deeply."