In a bare, fluorescent-lit dressing room at the Second Stage Theater in Manhattan one afternoon in August, the actress Anna Deavere Smith was running lines. For any actor, learning lines requires considerable focus, but for Smith, who delivers every word of “Let Me Down Easy,” her one-woman show about health care and the body, it’s like a mental martial art.
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October 5, 2009
The Health Care Monologues
October 4, 2009
The Tangle of Branches in a Royal Tree
ROSEMARY HARRIS has been watching a significant chunk of her life flash before her eyes, and it’s played by Jan Maxwell. Ms. Harris, 82, has the role of Fanny Cavendish, the spicy matriarch, in a new production of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s “Royal Family.” Ms. Maxwell, 30 years her junior, is Julie Cavendish, Fanny’s daughter — the role Ms. Harris very much made her own the last time the sharp-eyed comedy, about a grand theater dynasty and the histrionics it thrives on, played Broadway, in 1975-76. The 1927 original was intended to satirize the Barrymores. This one, now in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, opens on Thursday.
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