Grey Gardens, the Maysles Brothers’ 1975 cinema-verite documentary portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ most eccentric cousins, has now become a very unlikely source for a new Broadway musical, following a successful Off-Broadway run. Some of its scenes and its structure don’t entirely come together, but, on the whole, it is a remarkable achievement, both hilarious and touching.
The movie developed a devoted cult following in the ’70s and ’80s, particularly among downtown New York’s artsiest fashionistas. At the time the movie was made, “Big Edie” and “Little Edie,” as Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter are universally known, were 79 and 56. They lived in East Hampton in Grey Gardens, a 28-room house of infamous squalor: “52 cats, fleas, practically no running water,” not to mention a family of possibly rabid raccoons eating through walls and taking over the attic. To call the two Edies eccentric and their relationship dysfunctional is certainly an understatement. Little Edie’s unique fashion sense and equally unique way of speaking have to be seen and heard to be believed.
The musical imagines, in its first act, what life was like for the Edies 30 years earlier, before Grey Gardens fell into disrepair, when they had money and moved in high society circles. Then the second act basically brings the film to life on the stage. In a performance that has already drawn extravagant acclaim and a new cult of admirers, Christine Ebersole plays Big Edie in the 1941 scenes and Little Edie in the 1973 scenes. Her recreation of Little Edie’s appearance and voice is quite extraordinary. I had just watched the film on DVD a few days before seeing the play, and the effect was startling.
The first act is much more conventional, with superficial resemblances to any number of family drawing-room musicals, like parts of Meet Me in St. Louis or Mame. But the dark seeds of the Edies’ future are there, and both the film and the play’s second act enrich, and are enriched by, this backstory. We see the preparations for the engagement party of Little Edie and Joe Kennedy (John Kennedy’s brother), and little Jackie Bouvier, the future Jackie Kennedy, age 12, is there. What starts cheerfully becomes steadily gloomier, sadder, more foreboding. Scandal will end the engagement, and the wedge between mother and daughter is strengthened. Little Edie goes off to try for show business success and an independent life in New York.
But we have already glimpsed the rather creepy, manipulative bonds between Big Edie and Little Edie, and when the curtain rises on Act Two, we’re not surprised to find that Little Edie moved back home and hasn’t left since 1954. She’s trapped – by her mother’s grasp and by her own inertia. But the dialogue between the two of them, and the accompanying songs, provide about half an hour of outrageous hilarity at the beginning of the second act. Doug Wright, who wrote the script, has done an uncanny job of incorporating almost every noteworthy line from the film, even though the film was totally unscripted and the lines were caught on the fly. (Wright is also responsible for I Am My Own Wife, another true story about an amazing eccentric, and one of the best Broadway productions of recent years.)
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