200 Years of Experience, and Still Learning Onstage
Lois Smith, Estelle Parsons and Vinie Burrows on age, agility, perseverance and steering clear of “self-pitying old” roles.
“I am rarely cast as an ingénue anymore,” Lois Smith was saying on Monday afternoon. It was a joke, obviously, and her fellow actresses — Estelle Parsons, 92, and Vinie Burrows, who recently turned 95 but rounds that up to 96 — burst into laughter.
At 89, Smith was the baby of this bunch. Between them, they have more than 200 years of performance experience, including the film “Lady Bird” and the title role in “Marjorie Prime” (Smith), the movie “Bonnie and Clyde” and the sitcom “Roseanne” (Parsons), the American premiere of Jean Genet’s “The Blacks” and experimental work with the director Rachel Chavkin (Burrows).
They’re still busy adding to their résumés: Parsons currently at the Public Theater in Tony Kushner’s “A Bright Room Called Day,” as a character whose name translates to “The Old One”; Smith on Broadway, with a talky role in Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance”; Burrows back Off Broadway next month in “Chekhov/Tolstoy: Love Stories,” at the Mint Theater Company.
In the room with them, you’d never guess their ages from their appearance, only from the discussion’s vintage details — as when Burrows and Smith tried to figure out what they might have worked on together, and the closest they got was a play each of them did on Broadway with Helen Hayes. (Burrows was in the original 1950 production of “The Wisteria Trees,” Smith in the 1955 revival.)
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