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ST. LOUIS — With a frankness you don’t often hear from actors, Estelle Parsons admits the truth: She doesn’t much enjoy going to the theater.
Of course there are exceptions. She eats up avant-garde work, European imports, downtown productions.
“But I don’t go to commercial Broadway theater, which is what I do (professionally),” she says.
Why not?
“I want to be up there myself.”
Now 82 years old, the acclaimed actress remains up there herself, reprising her Broadway performance as the vitriolic matriarch Violet Weston in the road tour of “August: Osage County.”
“I’ve been interested in the theater all my life, but I have never been interested in the movies,” said Parsons, who nevertheless has shone in performances on screens big and small.
Her performance as Blanche Barrow, the prissy preacher’s daughter turned outlaw in “Bonnie and Clyde,” brought her the 1967 Academy Award for best supporting actress. On the long-running TV hit “Roseanne,” she played a recurring role as Roseanne’s pretentious mother, Bev.
And in both cases, she enjoyed the experience. But she took the part of Blanche strictly to work with director Arthur Penn, whom she had worked with on stage and admired. She was glad to play Bev because the opportunity came along at the right time.
Parsons’ twin daughters and son are grown now; Eben Britton, starting right tackle with the Jacksonville Jaguars, is her grandson. But, like any parent, she can recall many “times when I simply had to be available.”
“My son turned out to be dyslexic, but it took a long time to figure that out,” she said. “So I stopped doing theater, but that’s when ‘Roseanne’ came along. I could take care of my kid and keep my hand in.
“Movies and theater came in handy when I couldn’t take a serious theater job, because that consumes your life. You spend all day preparing for the night.
“When you’re working, you eat and sleep. I also read the papers and work out. That’s just the way it is. The theater is a lifestyle commitment.”
A dancer from her childhood in Lynn, Mass., Parsons began her stage career with musicals and revues, which beckoned after a brief stint in law school. She got her start at Julius Monk’s Downstairs, a pioneering New York cabaret where lots of unknowns first made their mark.
“I still love to sing more than anything,” she said. “I just fell into acting. But I was a performer then, and I am a performer now.”
Her workouts are as important as ever, maybe more so. Parsons suspects that if she weren’t in top condition, she couldn’t play Violet, a physically demanding role that has a lot of lines and requires running up and down stairs on an enormous set.
Parsons and her husband, lawyer Peter Zimroth, continue to enjoy her lifelong loves — skiing, tennis and canoeing — at their cabin near the Catskills and at their summer house in New Hampshire. When they’re at home in New York, he goes to the gym every day; she takes exercise classes and yoga. A few years ago, she added weight training to her routine because “they recommend that when you get older. When you get older, you get weak faster than you did. So you can’t stop.”
She certainly hasn’t; Violet is big role in a very big play, one that’s been compared, in terms of scale, subject, and quality of writing, with massive American works including “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and “Angels in America.” (Running over three hours, it’s long, but shorter than those are.)
The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for best play, “August: Osage County” debuted at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, where playwright Tracy Letts is a member of the company. Letts’ mother, novelist Billie Letts, wrote the best-selling “Where the Heart Is.” His father, Dennis Letts, an English professor and actor, originated the role of Violet’s husband, the alcoholic Weston patriarch, in Chicago and played it on Broadway until a few weeks before he died of cancer.
In the play, Letts puts the Weston family through the wringer. The patriarch has disappeared, prompting children, grandchildren and in-laws to return to the Oklahoma family home and the venomous, pill-popping Violet.
“My momma was a nasty, mean old lady,” Violet reflects at one point. “I suppose that’s where I get it from.”
It sounds pretty grim, but Parsons finds that audiences seem to savor every vicious word.
“I don’t think people ever forget that they are in a theater being entertained,” she said. “The audience responds because we’re a catalyst that gets them involved with their own dreams and nightmares. It’s not about us. It’s about them.”
