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Tony winner Jayne Houdyshell discusses taking the stage alongside Glenda Jackson in KING LEAR, her stage career and more.

Here are some of the must-read highlights:

ON GLENDA JACKSON
“I grew up in Topeka, Kansas and knew that I wanted to be an actor at a surprisingly young age for having grown up in Topeka, Kansas. By the time I was in high school, I was firmly entrenched. I remember seeing MARAT/SADE on PBS when I was 15. I didn’t know that theater could be that. Glenda Jackson was so unique in that production. That was my first exposure to her. She was very inspiring to me as a really young aspiring actress who didn’t know much about anything at that point. Glenda loves hard work. The more challenging the thing, the more thrilled she is to be doing it. I briefly met Glenda when she was doing THREE TALL WOMEN. I was starstruck and inarticulate. I was that 15-year-old kid when I saw her.”

ON KING LEAR DIRECTOR SAM GOLD
“He’s totally lacking in pretense. He’s very down to earth with people. But he’s just madly creative. He is always looking for a way in to plays-particularly with revivals-that break rules and shake up people's previous notions of what a particular piece is. It requires them to look at it through a different lens.”

ON HER BACKSTAGE ETIQUETTE
“The atmosphere in the wing space is quite congenial, sometimes rather light-hearted and fun. I have a lot of entrances and exits pretty much interspersed throughout the play. I live in terror of missing an entrance, so I sit backstage for the whole show every night and listen to the play. I’m listening to the audience, and I’m listening to my co-workers every night. I love doing that. I often do that in the plays that I’m in, find a chair and a corner, and sit there and listen. I find it educational and also very interesting to see the growth of a production over time. It fascinates me.”

ON HER CAREER
“It was never a plan. It’s not like I sat down and had things mapped out for myself at all. One job just kind of led to the next. In 1980, I moved to New York. At that point, I really wasn’t ready for New York. I went there because that’s what you did. I had $250 and had never been east of Detroit. I was 27 years old. I started auditioning for the larger regional theaters and working. Those jobs just snowballed. I loved that life because I was usually hired to do multiple shows and a wide range of roles, good parts with in interesting places with interesting actors. I was able to support myself as an actor, and that was really my measure of success.”

ON PLAYING MADAME MORRIBLE IN WICKED
“It was a great gig. It was the first time I actually ever saved money from a job. I wasn’t just paying the bills. I had surplus. Because of that, I was able to leave my one-room studio in Inwood that I’d been in for 27 years and move downtown to a larger apartment. I lived very close to the bone for most of my adult life. I wouldn’t consider myself an extravagent person.”

ON GROWING UP DOING THEATER WITH JOE MANTELLO
“Joey Mantello. He was 18. I did EQUUS with him, and he was stellar in that. He was a very sweet guy, and a brilliant young actor. He had not been trained much at that point. He had virtually no technique. But when we did EQUUS, he was raw. He was emotionally available. He’s done very nicely.”

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