How ‘We Had a World’ Star Joanna Gleason Learned About Art

We Had a World —a funny, moving, and at times startlingly intimate new memory play from Joshua Harmon (Prayer for the French Republic), currently running off-Broadway at New York City Center Stage II—features Joanna Gleason as Renee, a woman as charming and whimsical as she is...

a bit of a nightmare. The doting, worldly grandmother to a young Josh (Andrew Barth Feldman, of Saturday Night and No Hard Feelings ), she exposes him to art of every kind: Robert Mapplethorpe, Dances with Wolves , the revival of Medea starring Diana Rigg, the revival of The Heiress starring Cherry Jones, Tom Friedman’s Soap . Yet her relationship with his mother, Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), is decidedly more complicated and less fun—especially as Renee nears the end of her life.



Gleason, known for her roles in productions such as Into the Woods (for which she won a Tony), A Day in the Death of Joe Egg , and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels , as well as films like Hannah and Her Sisters and Boogie Nights and series like The West Wing and The Good Wife , is magnificent in the role. “I just thought it was so beautifully written that it was too good to pass up,” she tells me, Zooming in from her home in Connecticut, from which she commutes to the city each day. “It’s coming up on eight years since I lost my parents.

They were old—94 and 96—and here’s a woman who goes from 60 to 94 and goes through almost exactly what I saw my mother go through. And I thought, this is a chance for catharsis. It’s a chance for honoring her point of view.

” It’s also a chance to work with two wonderful actors, Feldman and Serralles (both also magnificent). “It’s three protagonists, as they’re written, and three antagonists, as they’re written,” Gleason says. “They’re two very, very fine, skilled actors who dig deep.

Nothing’s just on the surface. We come off the stage and we are in each other’s arms every night. You can’t fake that, and you can’t force it.

” Here, in a nod to We Had a World ’s rangy exploration of Harmon’s cultural education, Gleason shares the shows, artists, and experiences that made her an artist. On first falling in love with theater “We were living in New Rochelle, New York, and my parents took me and my brother to a matinee of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying , with Robert Morris, Michele Lee, and Rudy Vallée. We stayed overnight in a hotel, which was very special, and that night, I kind of locked myself in the bathroom and sang back the score.

I was maybe 11, maybe 12, and something just stirred inside me so that I gravitated toward theater programs in high school and in college. But many, many years later, there was a revival of How to Succeed with Rudy Vallée and Robert Morris, and I got to understudy the lead, Rosemary, and be in that and meet him. And it was kind of like a full-circle moment.

My parents played show tune albums when we were growing up, and we moved a lot, so for me, the theater was a constant. It was a place where a curtain goes up and you have this family that lives there, and they don’t move, and they start their story and they end their story, and they get to do it over and over again. For a shaky career choice, it had more stability than life seemed to have at that time.

” On first embedding in New York’s art scene “It was a great finishing school. I felt a bit like a hick because my then-husband’s mother, they had lived in France after the war. They knew about art.

They had art. One of the sisters had paintings that she had to sell when she needed to sell them, and the other had paintings that she could donate to museums all over the world. My exposure to the art world and my exposure to the circle in which they ran—there was Hal Prince, since my then-husband had grown up a little bit with Judy Prince; and there was [Leonard] Bernstein, and we had dinner with him at Elaine’s—I went, whoa, whoa.

I am just a hayseed from California. I’ve got to pay attention, because the vibe is fast and smart and sophisticated. It’s about exposure, so I took advantage of that, and I started to go to museums, and I started to go to art shows, and I hung around these galleries that were owned by friends of my husband’s, and I liked what I saw.

” On the first painting she ever bought “When I first moved to New York, I was doing I Love My Wife and was making, I think, $700 a week, maybe $750. I had an apartment I was renting for $250 a week. Now, you know times have changed, but I was walking up Madison Avenue and saw in the window of a poster and art print shop a framed painting by Erica Morley of two kids playing in a yard, with a forest behind them, a red barn, a red main house, a garden, and some animals running around.

Something in me just said, ‘This is where I want to live.’ I had never lived anywhere remotely like it. I bought it for $125, and I still have it today, 48 years later.

[Since then], many of the things that I’ve loved and many of the things I’ve tried to collect are by women: Leigh Behnke, Candace Jans, and Jessica Rice.” On her first experiences directing “Diane English, who created Murphy Brown , gave me an episode of Love & War , the series I was on for her, for CBS to direct, and three episodes of another series she had. And she’s the first one who said, ‘I’ll tell you how to do it.

’ And then I directed for Lifetime. So I directed in television, but then I wrote this screenplay [for The Grotto , Gleason’s feature directorial debut] a while ago, but didn’t have the courage to show it to anybody—you know, the voice that says, ‘Who do you think you are? You didn’t go to film school,’ and ‘You’re too old,’ and ‘Aren’t you happy enough with all your shiny stuff over here?’ And then I showed it to a dear friend, Todd Shotz, who has a production company, and he said, ‘We’re going to make this movie.’ And we did.

And we had a single producer who gave us the money to make this movie: Laure Sudreau of Ouroboros Entertainment. And she, it turns out, lives down the road. So there’s providence, there’s plausible magic, everywhere.

” We Had a World runs t hrough May 11..