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A Study Guide: Book by Doug Wright Music by Scott Frankel Lyrics by Michael Korie
A Study Guide: Book by Doug Wright Music by Scott Frankel Lyrics by Michael Korie
A Study Guide: Book by Doug Wright Music by Scott Frankel Lyrics by Michael Korie
A Study Guide
Prepared by vicki cheatwood
Sponsored in part by
GREY GARDENS
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Edith Bouvier Beale
Little Edie Beale
George Gould Strong
Brooks, Sr.
Jacqueline Jackie Bouvier
Lee Bouvier
Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr.
J.V. Major Bouvier
Brooks, Jr.
Jerry
Norman Vincent Peale
Sister Marla
SYNOPSIS
Based on the landmark documentary, Grey Gardens is the story of eccentric socialites
Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (Big Edie) and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (Little
Edie), the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The women became
notorious recluses, living in squalor in wealthy and conservative East Hampton, New
York.
Prologue
The play opens in 1973, with Grey Gardens in ruin and the news on the radio: the health
department of East Hampton has declared the Beales home unfit for human habitation.
Former First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis - Edith Beales niece - has
released a statement: this is a private, family matter. As the radio fades, Edith (79), a
trained mezzo soprano, heads out to sunbathe, singing along with one of her old records
(THE GIRL WHO HAS EVERYTHING). Her 56-year-old daughter Edie follows her,
fearful of the neighbors and curiosity-seekers. Former debutante Edie truly once was
The Girl Who Had Everything, and yet, she says I never lived.
Act One
The song takes us back to 1941, when Grey Gardens was in its heyday. Looming over the
parlor is a portrait of Wall Street tycoon Phelan Beale, husband and father. Theres a
party today: Edie is engaged to Joe Kennedy, Jr. (eldest brother of John F. Kennedy). As
Edith sings, accompanied by her soulmate George Gould Strong on piano, Edie listens
dutifully, vexed that her mother will hijack the party with an uncommanded command
performance. Edies counting on her stern father to keep her mother in line; Ediths
counting on Phelan to arrive in time for the big announcement (THE FIVE-FIFTEEN).
When Edie exits, its revealed that Edith has an entire concert planned - much to the
delight of nieces Jackie Bouvier (age 12) and Lee Bouvier (age 8).
DOUG WRIGHT was born and raised in Dallas. He received the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony
Award, the Drama Desk Award, a GLAAD Media Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award,
a Drama League Award and a Lucille Lortel Award for I Am My Own Wife, which
premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2003. For Grey Gardens, he was nominated for
Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for Best Book of a Musical. In 1995, Doug
won an Obie Award for his play Quills. His screen adaptation was named Best Picture by
the National Board of Review and nominated for three Academy Awards. Plays include
The Stonewater Rapture, Interrogating the Nude, Watbanaland, Unwrap Your Candy,
and the book for the Disney musical The Little Mermaid. For career achievement, Doug
was cited by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and awarded the Tolerance Prize
from the Kulturforum Europa. Currently, he serves on the board of the New York Theatre
Workshop and the Dramatists Guild Council. He lives with singer/songwriter David
Clement.
MICHAEL KORIE, lyricist of Grey Gardens, wrote book and lyrics to Scott Frankel's
music for Doll (Sundance Institute, Chicago's Ravinia Festival; Richard Rodgers Award)
and Meet Mister Future (Cardiff Festival, 2005). His librettos for operas composed by
Stewart Wallace include Harvey Milk (San Francisco Opera), Hopper's Wife (Long Beach
Opera; NYFA Award) both directed by Christopher Alden; Kabbalah (Next Wave
Festival) directed by Ann Carlson; and Where's Dick? directed by Richard Foreman
(Houston Grand Opera). His libretto to composer Ricky Ian Gordon's The Grapes of
Wrath premiered at Minnesota Opera, Utah Opera and Houston Grand Opera in 2007-8
with direction by Eric Simonson, conducted by Grant Gershon. He co-wrote lyrics with
Amy Powers to composer Lucy Simon's Zhivago, book by Michael Weller, directed by
Des McAnuff (La Jolla Playhouse, 2006). Korie's lyrics were awarded the Edward
Kleban Award and Jonathan Larson Foundation Award. He lives in New York City with
Ivan Sygoda.
SCOTT FRANKEL was nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for
his work as composer of Grey Gardens. He's written music for Doll (Ravinia Festival;
Richard Rodgers Award) and Meet Mister Future (winner, Global Search for New
Musicals), both with lyricist/librettist Michael Korie. As a musical director, conductor
and pianist, he has been associated with the original Broadway productions of Les
Miserables, Into the Woods, Jerome Robbins' Broadway, Rags and Falsettos as well as
Off-Broadway's Putting It Together starring Julie Andrews. Motion picture credits
include Mike Nichols' Postcards From the Edge, where he can be seen (and heard)
playing for Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. His many recordings include Barbra
Streisand's Back to Broadway and a slew of original cast albums. Mr. Frankel is a twotime fellow of the MacDowell Colony and a graduate of Yale University.
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STUDY QUESTIONS
1. Almost every family has an eccentric. Whos the eccentric in your family? How is
he/she treated by others in the family? What do people say about him/her? Do you know
what (if anything) caused this person to be eccentric?
2. Edith and Edie Beale experienced both great wealth and great poverty in their
lifetimes. What did you think about rich people before you saw this play? What did
you think about poor people? Did the story of the Beales change your thinking about
people from either economic class? How?
3. Since the early 1990s, Americas been obsessed with reality television shows. What
do you think about reality shows? Do they serve a purpose other than entertainment?
What elements make Grey Gardens different from reality television? What elements
are the same?
4. Imagine youre part of the Bouvier-Beale family. What do you do about Big Edie and
Little Edie? How do you feel about your relatives becoming the subject of a documentary
- and a Broadway musical?
5. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was relentlessly followed by the media from the time she
became engaged to John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s until her death in the late 1990s.
How much attention do you think Big Edie and Little Edie would have gotten if they
hadnt been related to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis? How often/how much time do you
spend reading about celebrities or watching entertainment news shows?
6. The Grey Gardens documentary, the HBO film, and this play exploration or
exploitation?
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But the camp is also something of a red herring. As divine as a kooky cross between Diana Vreeland and
Lee Radziwill sounds, Drew Barrymore herself will tell you that Little Edie is far more complex. "She has
this brilliant fashion sense and these great lines -- I don't know a movie I quote more," Barrymore says.
"But when you go deeper than that, what's there is a truly remarkable injured bird with the most amazing
feathers."
Without the trappings of a single coherent narrative -- Little Edie would never be tied down to just one -Grey Gardens is, in its mangled, tangled way, one of the clearest and most sophisticated expressions of
gayness the world has created.
"Gay men think they're latching on to Grey Gardens because they think it's camp, but it's really because it's
about a parent-child relationship," explains John Epperson, whose performance-art persona, Lypsinka, has
turned the mimicry of movie-queen line readings into an art form of its own. "The best movies are always
about identity, and that movie certainly is."
He draws a parallel to Imitation of Life, another gay favorite. The film is famous for Lana Turner's overthe-top acting and costumes, but it's the supporting story of the black maid and her daughter, Sarah Jane -who can pass for white and tragically tries to -- that really resonates with gay viewers, Epperson says.
Sarah Jane is like a gay man in that she's trying to find a place in the world where she fits.
Sucsy says he wasn't trying to place his Grey Gardens film within the context of the old-school Hollywood
women's pictures; it just turned out that way.
"I remember, it wasn't that long ago, I was just catching up on my classics, and I rented Now, Voyage ," he
says. "It didn't have anything to do with [my work on Grey Gardens]. I started watching it, and I just
thought, Oh, my God, the way the two overlap is eerie."
And the similarities don't end with Bette Davis's Now, Voyager. What's surprising is how many other
haunting mother-daughter stories there are in the gay cult canon: Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce, Gypsy,
Carrie, Female Trouble, Postcards From the Edge. Throw in the house mothers of Paris Is Burning too.
Even films like Baby Jane and All About Eve (not to mention Showgirls) are power struggles between two
women trapped in a world somewhat of their own making, echoing the mother-daughter push-pull.
"There's a certain kind of identification with this mother and daughter who are locked together," says
Charles Busch, the playwright and performer whose play Die, Mommie, Die! -- later made into a film -was a send-up of 1960s gay cult hits like Dead Ringer and Strait-Jacket. "Until recently, gay people, since
they didn't get married and didn't have kids, often had unusually intense relationships with their parents. I
was raised by my aunt, who during her last years was an invalid. I'd be making her lunch and she'd start in
with the bell. I felt just like Baby Jane."
The Edie resonance goes even deeper than that, Sucsy says. While researching, he was struck by how
closely Edie's status during her time in New York -- young, single, and "bohemian" -- corresponded to that
of gay men at the time. In his film, which alternates between re-created scenes of the filming of the '75
documentary and flashbacks of the Edies' lives through the '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s, Little Edie is always
longing to get away. First she evades her father's desire for her to settle down and marry a nice rich WASP,
and later she escapes Grey Gardens altogether.
Flamboyant, witty, and childlike -- traits that for years were ascribed, accurately or not, to gay men -- she
tries and tries but, despite her enthusiasm, can't make her way in New York City. She runs out on her social
debut in the 1930s, has trouble holding a job in the 1940s, and embarks on an affair with a married man in
the early 1950s.
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"Part of [our attraction] is generational," says Doug Wright, who wrote I Am My Own Wife and the book for
the Grey Gardens musical. "In a closeted culture, there were no public figures who identified as gay. So
many gay men came to see themselves in these high-functioning, artistically expressive, heartbreakingly
single, and deeply neurotic women. That world undervalued [Edie's] extravagant expressiveness, and she
couldn't find love in any successful way. If that doesn't describe your average gay man, circa 1950, I don't
know what does. Our stories were closer to Stella Dallas than John Wayne."
Even so, if you think it's strange that gays should gravitate toward two women whom most people would
call insane, remember this: It was only in 1973 -- around when David and Albert Maysles were first
knocking on the Edies' front door -- that the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality
as mental illness. Little more than a decade earlier, films like Suddenly, Last Summe ; The Manchurian
Candidate; and, most famously, Psycho were all painting portraits of weak but dangerous young men with
troubling attachments to a forceful mother. Gay men and women today may identify with racial minorities,
but for most of the past century, gays were lumped in with crazies, alkies, spinsters, and eccentrics -- they
all ate at the same unmentionable table, preferably hidden.
Barrymore, who comes from a famous family herself and whose own wild-child behavior has resulted in a
headline or two, can relate -- but mostly to the Edies' love-hate filial relationship.
"In my experience the term apron strings doesn't even begin to cut it," she says. "There's an insane amount
of pain and guilt with mother-daughter relationships, and some people are eaten alive by it. It's a really
interesting dynamic."
Barrymore was also drawn to Little Edie's freewheeling way of saying one thing and then coming back
with the completely opposite point of view. This fast-twirling yin-yang of contradictions is something most
people might attempt to hide behind a cool and composed facade. Not Edie.
"I remember meeting with a studio executive once who said, 'Look, I read your script, and frankly, this is
full of contradictions,'" Sucsy says. "That's one of the things that was so amazing about Drew -- how she
was excited by that. She really understood."
The most frequent (and poignant) of the contradictions is Little Edie's wish to be married versus her desire
to remain single and free. While superficially opposite, both betray the loneliness Edie felt as well as her
sad suspicion that she was inherently too flawed to be loved.
The theme of contradiction is echoed in the house itself. Although broken-down and decrepit, Grey
Gardens is right there in glamorous East Hampton, the cream of America's summer resorts, less than 200
yards from one of the nation's most desirable beaches. In many ways, gay people live that close to the
country's culture and may even go to that beach; but we are, in other ways, still as far away as Little Edie
was.
For all the heartbreak, though, the growing cult around Grey Gardens seldom dwells on the down spots,
and the new film ends on a sweetly high note. Young gay men today are less likely to sing along to the
bittersweet strains of "I Will Survive." Today's camp icons are characters like Cher Horowitz from
Clueless, Elle Woods of Legally Blonde, and the gals from Sex and the City. So while there may not be
much for them in the mother-daughter melodramas of yesterday, there's plenty for fashion-besotted 20somethings to be had in Little Edie and her take on style.
And that style, Barrymore explains, has a mystery all its own. "Cat and I would have to freeze-frame [the
documentary] to figure out how [Little Edie] pinned things," she says, referring to the film's costume
designer, Catherine Marie Thomas. "One time, it took us forever to figure what she'd done. It was two
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shirts, one worn as a shirt and one worn as a skirt -- with the arms wrapped around for a belt. These were
extremely theatrical people. Life was a stage."
Robb Brawn, custodian of the fan site MyGreyGardens.com, agrees that Little Edie's fashion sense was
far from superficial. The two of them became friends in 1979, after Big Edie had died, Grey Gardens had
been sold, and Little Edie moved to New York City to launch her long-dreamed-of, short-lived cabaret
career. (She gave 16 performances at Reno Sweeney in the West Village.)
"To me, Edie's thing wasn't just that it's OK to be different -- and this was the 1970s, when it wasn't OK,"
Brawn says. "She was saying, 'I'm not just here to be accepted, I want to be celebrated.' They were happy in
their own skin, she and Big Edie, being who they were, and that's what a lot of gay people relate to. We
shouldn't have to explain why we're here or be tolerated or accepted. We're not all as philosophical as Edie,
but we feel that way."
So why settle for Gloria, Mae, Joan, Bette, Judy, Rita, Katharine, Marilyn, Lana, Barbra, Faye, Liza, Sissy,
Jessica, Meryl, or Madonna? Edie is all of them, stripped down to one sparkling, hilarious talent yearning
to be loved and applauded.
And brimming over, as she always is, with the fervent hope that tomorrow will be different and with the
nagging fear that it won't be, she is also, so clearly, all of us.
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Keeping It Real
Legendary director Albert Maysles on the truth about documentary filmmaking
By Matthew Hays
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/maysles.html
May 13, 2005
Forty-five years ago, a young Albert Maysles scored one of his first film gigs as a cameraman. Using 16mm camera equipment, Maysles followed around John F. Kennedy as the charismatic young politician ran
successfully for the U.S. presidency. The film, Primary, directed by Robert Drew, would become a
landmark documentary, capturing what appeared to be unrehearsed moments in the campaign and allowing
the audience a unique sense of intimacy with JFK and his wife, Jacqueline.
Albert and his brother David would go on to become one of the most accomplished filmmaking teams in
history, true pioneers of direct cinema the 60s documentary movement that rejected authoritative
narrative voiceovers and interviewer questions.
The Maysles Brothers body of work is staggering; they profiled the famous actor in Meet Marlon Brando
(1966), chatted up the author in A Visit with Truman Capote (1966) and chronicled the Fab Fours taking of
America in Whats Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964).
But their greatest achievements came in a triptych of films that offer a surreal glimpse into the lives of their
respective subjects. In 1969, they released Salesman, a bruising documentary about the desperate lives of a
group of salesmen who sell bibles door to door. In 1970, the Maysles delivered Gimme Shelter, their
unblinking look at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, at which a young man was stabbed to death by
Hells Angels bikers. And in 1975, the filmmakers found two relatives of Jacqueline Onassis, a mother and
daughter who lived in a dilapidated mansion called Grey Gardens in the East Hamptons. Grey Gardens
captured the tortured relationship this octogenarian mother shared with her schizophrenic daughter. The
film has since become a lightning rod for critics who charge it represents the very essence of documentary
exploitation.
David Maysles died in 1987, but Albert has continued to create documentaries, following the projects of
the artist Christo in a series of films (he just finished editing a feature on the Gates in Central Park), and is
now putting the final touches on The Jew on Trial, his film about the infamous trial of Mendel Beilis, a
man accused of blood libel in Kiev and acquitted in 1913. This weekend, Maysles will be venturing to
Montreal to hold a master class at the citys Jewish Film Festival. He spoke with me from his New York
office.
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Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Model. The impulse to amass a large collection of some item or
items...simply for the sake of collecting it, can be symptomatic of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
What differentiates these people from other collectors is that the collection is often associated with
a significant neglect of personal and environmental conditions. Such disorders are more common
in women and often have their onset when the person is in her late 20s or 30s. Many animal
collectors have been reported to have huge piles of newspapers, bottles, junked cars, and other
refuse in addition to their animal collections. In many cases, the onset of the disorder coincides
with early or sudden loss of a loved one, usually a parent, spouse, or sibling. This may contribute
to the individual's universal resistance to any consideration for euthanasia for their animals and
their overriding ability to deny the deteriorating conditions of their animals' health and
environment. Such disorders can be quite resistant to treatment. This is certainly true of animal
collectors, who almost invariably renew their collections if given the opportunity.
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Addiction Model. Several professionals, including Houston veterinarian Dr. Karen Kemper, have
pointed out many of the parallels between animal collectors and substance abusers, thus they apply
the term "animal addicts" to the collectors. Traits common to collectors and substance abusers
include a preoccupation with the addiction (animals); denial that the addiction exists; alibis for
behavior; isolation from society except those who also deal in the addiction, i.e., enablers; claims
of persecution; neglect of personal and environmental conditions; and repetition...of the addictive
behavior.
Zoophilia Model. A small number of collectors may fit into the category of zoophilia, a
psychosexual disorder in which animals play a major role in the individual's sexual fantasies or
practices.
Need for Power or Control. Most cases of outright animal abuse (e.g., torture, burning) seem to
be motivated by a need to exert power over something on the part of an individual who is often
otherwise lacking in skills or abilities that might allow him or her to exert power through more
normal channels.
These models are not mutually exclusive; several may apply to a single individual. Regardless of which
model best characterizes a particular animal collector, the important point is that keeping a large number of
animals in ill-health and unsanitary conditions is both a crime and symptomatic of an illness.
It is ironic that some of the most severe suffering encountered in animal welfare work is perpetrated by
collectors who profess to love animals. These tragic situations point out the continuing need to educate our
society that animals are not objects to be collected, but living creatures whose physical and emotional needs
must be recognized and met.
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