NEW YORK � Estelle Parsons crying up the staircase in the haunted dollhouse of a set up in the Broadway production of "August: Osage County" with the nimbleness of an Olympian. For the next several months, this 80-year-old Oscar-winning actress will inhabit the physically demanding role of Violet Weston, the drug-ravaged matriarch of "August," Tracy Letts' Tony Award-winning play.
Her stamina english hawthorn be a tribute to a lifetime of simple physical fitness for Parsons, who will turn 81 in November while finish her six-month contract. She lifts weights and swims, she aforesaid, and has hiked the backwoods of her native New England for to the highest degree of her life. She hasn't smoke-dried in many years and rarely drinks. She rarely eats red meat, economize for the occasional lamb chop. She started practicing yoga about 30 eld ago. She is the antithesis of Violet, whose self-destructive rampage gives "August: Osage County" its squirming core.
"Here I am, Miss Healthy, accommodate Swedish flicka playing this drug addict," she aforesaid last hebdomad, wearing physical exertion clothes in her flat on the Upper West Side. "But this play is very physical. It's closer to Restoration funniness or French farce, so you get to go out and really deliver the goods at every performance."
As Violet, a mother who tosses back painkillers as if they were Flintstones vitamins, Parsons spends 90 minutes of the 3-hour-and-20-minute meet onstage and goes up or down the three-story set for a total of 352 steps during each performance. At a time that most actresses her years would be happy to spend 15 minutes on Broadway in a couple of wheel-Grandma-out-for-a-song numbers, Parsons is tackling one of the most shrewish, complex mothers to terrorize a Broadway stage in decades � part Mary Tyrone, part Momma Rose.
"She is certainly giving a performance to think of," Charles Isherwood recently wrote in The New York Times, "one that may prove to be a crowning minute in an illustrious career."
Taking on this role would be a challenge at any age, considering that the 68-year-old Deanna Dunagan, who won a Tony Award in June for originating the role, cited exhaustion in her decision to get out the production. Parsons must navigate iI sets of stairs (the stage depicts the Weston family's sprawling Oklahoma house), smoke cigarettes, argue with pretty a great deal everyone onstage, dance to an Eric Clapton song dynasty and verbally eviscerate 10 other characters in a family dinner scene.
"I recollect it's had an outcome on my psyche because every one of those scenes is one that I don't want to have in my possess life," Parsons said. "Violet doesn't require to sit down and be interrogated. Every scene is something she truly doesn't want to make, except when she's doped out, and then she seems to be comfortable."
For Parsons, beingness comfortable means being active. In addition to her weightlifting and swimming (she swims for 30 minutes twice a week), she goes on 30-minute bike rides on two other days. She takes a break from exercise on Wednesdays and Saturdays, when she has two performances. At her summer household upstate, she also rides her motorcycle or hikes or swims on Mondays, her day off. She played tennis for days and still cross-country skis. And she does yoga in her dressing room and at home whenever she gets a few minutes.
"I've always been a fit person," Parsons aforementioned. "I've been acting all my life, and I've always felt you should be in shape. I'm used to devoting my whole life to the work and what it requires."
That lifelong devotion to performing has rubbed off on her co-star Amy Morton, wHO plays Barbara, the daughter who takes on Violet. "Estelle has so much stamina and so a lot energy, and she has stayed working and never retired," Morton said. "She's quite the opposite of Violet, just let's hope everyone is the opposite of that character."
She doesn't want to dwell on the physical demands of the role, however, and shrugs off the opinion that it is a feat for an octogenarian.
"I don't care to feel like a freak," she said. "I don't want people climax to the show simply to see what an 80-year-old looks like onstage. Isn't that what actresses do? They just save on working."
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