Kelly Bishop: The Lure of Playing Nasty Ladies
When Tony Award winner Kelly Bishop started out as a high-kicking Broadway chorus gal 40 years ago, she never would have dreamed that the delicious twists and turns of her career would eventually fill a resume with some of the most biting, funny and choice female roles out there. First the iconic A Chorus Line pulled Bishop, and the role of Sheila, out of the line and into the limelight, landing that Tony in the process. Then she replaced another tough cookie, Stockard Channing, in Six Degrees of Separation before going on to play the mom of “Baby” in Dirty Dancing. Most recently, she scored big on TV, spending six acclaimed seasons as blunt-speaking grandma Emily Gilmore on Gilmore Girls. Now, the ever-amiable Bishop finds herself again walking the line between outright mean and outright funny as a sharp-tongued mother who censors nothing in Gina Gionfriddo’s hilariously dark comedy Becky Shaw, currently running at Second Stage. Here, Bishop reflects on the kinds of women she has consciously chosen to portray on stage and screen—and why doing so is so damned fun.
The first time I read Becky Shaw, I thought it was fascinating. I like anything that’s a little skewed—a straight out comedy or drama is fine, but it’s always more pleasing to me when something’s just a little off, and that’s definitely true of the play and my character, Susan, who is strong, not terribly worried about being kind to people, and funny. I mean really, deeply funny. She throws a few zingers out there, but she’s funny because she says things the way she sees them. It’s a joy to play, especially with this cast and at Second Stage.
I’ve always loved comedy. I mean, I’m funny in real life, too. I don’t think I ever was an ingenue, even when I was five, and that really showed when I got to play Sheila in A Chorus Line. Sheila was my chance. I had decided I wasn’t going to do chorus work anymore—the jobs were there for me if I wanted them, but I knew I was going to have to force the break if I wanted to move past that. So when the workshop of A Chorus Line came along, I just thought, “My god, this is perfect.” I had the protection of being in a rehearsal process, of being able to develop a character, and Michael Bennett gave me a lot of leeway and guidance. I didn’t know where it was going to go, if there was going to be enough money to mount it; it was a dream come true when it all happened.
But while that show opened every door for me, I made a very conscious choice not to do musicals again for many years afterwards, because I didn’t want to get locked into musical comedy, especially because I’m not a singer. So I made a very conscious effort to avoid it. Ouisa in Six Degrees of Separation, Boo in The Last Night at Ballyhoo—that was the direction I was heading. And, of course, Gilmore Girls.
When Gilmore Girls came along, I remember looking at the size of the script and thinking, “What is this?” A sitcom script is a certain thickness, a drama is thicker, but that? There was so much dialogue and it was so funny, so much better than usual. I got my wish to do television in spades. Hopefully something else will come along, because I’d like to do more TV! It’s a happy place for me.
There is a big separation between my characters and me, however, because most of them are people I would not be friends with. I like the nasty ones because I don’t particularly like women like that in real life, so in playing them I get to show them for what they really are. We all see them in the high-end department stores, and sometimes I think, “I can hardly wait to get my hands on you so I can play you!” But I do have a few things in common with them: I am outspoken. I have a lot of trouble lying. I shock people sometimes. So on that level, I suppose we’re there. Besides, nice characters are dull.
What I would say about all these wonderful women I’ve played in recent years is that it’s probably time to investigate a character who isn’t wealthy. Having been a dancer, the “sexy tootsie,” I was very happy to prove I could play the upper-crust, fancy woman. Now I don’t want to get stuck in that either. Let’s investigate a blue-collar woman, someone more ordinary—but not nice!
It’s a reality that as actresses get older, work dries up; I know a lot of really great women who are not working. But it’s been more than 40 years for me in this business, and I intend to keep going and going and going. I have no idea what will be next, but for now, I’m just loving Becky Shaw.