When asked if she considers herself to be a comedic actor, Ashley Austin Morris purses her lips. “I think those are the roles I get,” she says, thoughtfully, “I would be flattered to be called a comedic actor.”
Even if Morris is hesitant to claim the title, her performance in Reading Under the Influence: The “Real” Westchester Women’s Book Club has been receiving great reviews. One reader of the New York Times online gushed of Morris: “There could not be a funnier human on the face of this earth!”
Morris (left, above) plays Kerry, the loopy yoga practitioner equally into unlocking her chakra as in “Vajazzling [her] vajayjay” in the new play written by award-winning writer Tony Glazer and directed by Wendy C. Goldberg. Morris passes the praise for the performance on to the rest of the cast, which includes Joanna Bayless (Sweet Bird of Youth, The Golden Pomegranate, American Home), Summer Crockett Moore (Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Kings), and Barbara Walsh (Company, Falsettos, Hairspray). Though the youngest of the four, Morris has an impressive resume of her own, having done work in the Off Broadway, television, and film circuits, including such projects as PBS’s The Electric Company, Norah Ephron’s Love, Loss and What I Wore, and Charles Busch’s Die Mommie Die!
Growing up watching classics like Bringing Up Baby and the Marx Brothers’ movies, Morris says she knew by the age of four that she wanted to be an actress. As we talk, it comes up that Morris’ parents were missionaries, a calling that took their family all over the country and Mexico. Meeting so many different people from different places opened her eyes to the universal nature of comedy. “A pratfall is funny in any language,” she says. “And once you’ve broken that barrier down—once you’ve made somebody laugh—you understand people much better.”
As for the success of Reading Under the Influence, she owes much, she says, to the spirit of generosity that characterizes the nature of the cast’s communal effort. “Everyone really wants to help everybody else succeed in this show,” she says, earnestly. “Which is not, you know, how it always is. But when you’re getting ready for a line from Jocelyn or Sara or Megan, or a part that’s more Kerry-heavy, you can feel everybody getting ready to pitch it to you in this effort to help you land it. It’s so amazing.”
And there are certainly more than a few lines for Morris and her fellow cast members to knock out of the park. Though the offstage relationships between the actors may be warm, it’s the cattiness of their characters’ well-placed digs that give the show its funniest moments. Reading Under the Influence: The “Real” Westchester Women’s Book Club takes place in the home of Jocelyn, played by Joanna Bayless, an impeccably coiffed widow whose deceased husband’s estate places her above the “bottom 98 percent.” Through Jocelyn’s conversation with soccer mom Sara (Moore), the audience learns that Jocelyn has plans to sell the rights to their weekly book club to a reality TV production company. The twice-married, no-nonsense Megan (Walsh) and floopy Kerry (Morris) arrive later and, like Sara, are indignant when they learn not only of Jocelyn’s impending deal but also that producers (Maria-Christina Oliveras and Jeremy Webb) will be stopping to observe the club. Buoyed—or set afloat—by copious amounts of white as much as by this new development, the women sling increasingly barbed one-liners at one another as the night goes on and hijinks ensue.
The characters’ simultaneous finger-pointing and lack of self-awareness are where Reading Under the Influence lands the majority of its laughs. Sara’s habit of treating her friends like children opens her up to their jabs at her own less-than-cerebral kids; Megan’s denouncements of Jocelyn and her lawyer, both of whom she accuses of lacking in character, only lend hilarity to Sara and Jocelyn’s cracks about her recent lip-service conversion to Judaism. With each exchange, Tony Glazer dances the four women closer and closer to the thin line between hilarity and cruelty until finally one of them two-steps right over it. It’s Mean Girls meets Golden Girls—and a good reminder never to throw stones if you live in a glass house, even if it is a McMansion.
The success of the production owes a great debt to the quality of the performances given by the actors. Summer Crockett Moore’s harassed Sara is endearingly pathetic as the mother with a clenched-fist blind spot towards her childrens’ total scholastic ineptitude; Joanna Bayless is perfect as she squints at Kerry’s southerly decoration and tuts, “It makes you look like a Lite-Brite!” As for Kerry herself, Morris combines physical comedy with a semi-permanent, sweetly earnest expression of confusion to earn big laughs and palm-to-forehead groans from the audience. Tony Award nominee Barbara Walsh gives a great performance as the self-assured dynamo Megan, whose sense of propriety is profoundly affronted by the idea of the reality show. Walsh manages perfectly to play a seemingly serious-minded and savvy character who nevertheless is capable of musing, “In some ways, I’ve always been Jewish” with a straight face.
The claws really come out at the close of the first act, where the ladies ratchet up the stakes on the lighthearted gibes exchanged earlier in the evening. Watching four overindulged housewives go for each other’s knees is entertaining, as we of the Bravo generation well know, but there are one or two moments where a particularly harsh pronouncement has even the audience squirming uncomfortably. And these are what Glazer uses to draw us back in. Suddenly, the four characters find themselves forced to see each other and themselves with uncomfortable new clarity. It’s a familiar tale, in many ways; a character is confronted with something about herself that she has long avoided addressing. Challenged, our protagonist can go in one of two directions: turn away from the cold, hard truth or bravely accept the facts and change for the better.
I think we can all raise a glass to the fact that Under the Influence opts for the latter.
We have no doubt that next week’s meeting will involve the requisite four or five bottles of chardonnay, same Whole Foods organic hors d’oeuvres plate and a total absence of any mention of the reality show, the insults, or Jocelyn’s little mishap.
And that, says Ashley Austin Morris, is what attracted her to Reading Under the Influence. “So often, you get four women on a stage together and you automatically think, Steel Magnolias. What’s great about these characters is that we’re not just all sitting around and crying and hugging each other. There’s that, too, but it’s not your usual story; the script is funny and fun and atypical, and I am definitely grateful for that.”
Photos by Orlando Behar
Reading Under the Influence: The “Real” Westchester Women’s Book Club
The DR2 Theatre
103 East 15th Street
For tickets, call 212-239-6200 or visit www.readingundertheinfluencetheplay.com
Now through May 15, 2011
