Kenneth Lonergan and Lila Neugebauer on Their Creative Kinship with The Waverly Gallery
The fall theater scene is kicking into high gear with an exciting crop of plays, revivals and new musicals hitting the stage. The Broadway.com 2018 Fall Preview highlights the stars and shows of the new season.
The Waverly Gallery, Kenneth Lonergan’s autobiographical play about a family grappling with the matriarch's battle with Alzheimer’s disease, is getting a starry Broadway production. This incarnation of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize finalist marks Oscar-winning scribe Lonnergan’s third play produced on the Great White Way, and its up-and-coming director Lila Neugebauer’s Broadway debut. It’s fitting that Neugebauer and Lonergan’s first theatrical venture together focuses on family. According to Neugebauer, they’re kindred creative spirits.
“It is a tremendous gift to collaborate with someone whose work you've admired for a long time,” Neugebauer says. The director has been familiar with Lonergan's work since her adolescence, when she encountered This Is Our Youth and Lobby Hero. “I feel tremendous kinship. There's something really gratifying about stepping into a process with an assured sense from the outset that you're coming from the same place.”
Neugebauer has become something of an off-Broadway queen within the last few years. She most recently helmed the off-Broadway staging of Tracy Letts’ Mary Page Marlowe and recently tackled Edward Albee’s Homelife and The Zoo Story with the twice-extended two-parter At Home at the Zoo, starring Paul Sparks, Robert Sean Leonard and Katie Finneran. She won an Obie Award for directing Sarah DeLappe’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist The Wolves. She’s already been tapped to direct a production of Christopher Shinn’s Dying City in July 2019 as part of Second Stage’s 40th anniversary season.
“She tackles difficult plays and does so beautifully,” Lonergan says. “Anybody would want to work with a director like that. Not just me.”
Lonergan received an Academy Award in 2016 for the screenplay for Manchester by the Sea, which he also directed (and received an Oscar nom for doing so); like fellow New York native Neugebauer, the theater scene is where he cut his teeth. This Is Our Youth brought him breakout success in 1996. He then went on to write Lobby Hero, which premiered off-Broadway in 2001 and bowed on Broadway just last season. Both of those Broadway productions featured Michael Cera, who is also appearing in The Waverly Gallery. "He's just a wonderful actor," Lonergan says of Cera. "He goes very deep; he's very fluent. He's got a great sense of humor. There's very little negative you can say about him. He's from Canada. So that's another plus, if you like Canadians, which I do."
"There's something really gratifying about stepping into a process with an assured sense from the outset that you're coming from the same place."
The Waverly Gallery won accolades for its original star Eileen Heckart in 2000. Nineteen years after the original Scott Ellis-helmed production premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1999, the play is arriving on Broadway with a star-studded cast, including Lonergan stage staple Cera, Tony winner and Oscar nominee Joan Allen, Oscar nominee Lucas Hedges and the incomparable Elaine May in the Heckart role.
“The project of of turning a company into a credible family on stage always contains particular beauties and challenges," Neugebauer says. "Thankfully, this cast is really falling in love with each other. That kind of empathetic care for one another is pretty essential to constructing the world of this play on stage.”
In Waverly Gallery, which is unabashedly a memory play, Hedges takes on the role closest to Lonergan: Daniel, a speechwriter in his twenties (Lonergan worked as one for the Environmental Protection Agency after graduating from NYU), who lives in the same apartment building as his grandmother, Gladys Green (played by May). Allen plays Gladys’ daughter while Cera takes on the role of Don Bowman, a painter from Lynn, Massachusetts who shows his artwork in Gladys’ Greenwich Village art gallery. All are affected by the matriarch’s decline.
“It's a tremendously personal play,” Neugebauer says. “And I mean that not only in the sense that it came out of the actual truth of things that transpired in Kenny's life, but I think it's quickly personalized for everyone in the room. It's about fundamentally decent, well-meaning, flawed people who are attempting to overcome insurmountable odds and trying to be decent and take care of each other.”
"It's about fundamentally decent, well-meaning, flawed people."
In revisiting the play years later, Lonergan says he didn’t change a word. “There's two lines I thought I might change, but I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out the first time,” he says. “I have a hard time writing characters who I don't like. These particular characters are largely based on my own family, who I like very much. When people are struck with adversity, you often see really wonderful traits coming to the fore.”
Photos: Emilio Madrid-Kuser | Makeup: Morgan Blaul
"The Waverly Gallery" begins previews on September 25 and opens on October 25 at the John Golden Theatre
