Musing about the extraordinary magnitude of the success she enjoyed early in her career, Marsha Mason was reminded of something Elia Kazan, the influential stage and film director, once said. “He thought that actors get three or four lucky breaks in their career, and they have to be ready for them,” she said the other day. “I was, always.”
Was she ever. In an eight-year span, from 1973 to 1981, Mason received four Academy Award nominations for best actress, starting with her role as the sultry pool hustler opposite James Caan in director Mark Rydell’s “Cinderella Liberty.” Three more Oscar nods would follow, all for movies written by her then-husband, Neil Simon: “The Goodbye Girl,” “Chapter Two” and “Only When I Laugh.” Yet, when she reflects on that heady time, she can’t categorically confirm that it exhilarated her.
Being ready for the breaks is different, it seems, from fully absorbing their meaning. “I wasn’t really paying attention,” she says, over a bowl of soup in a restaurant across from the Waterfront Metro station in Southwest Washington. “I was sort of going through it all with blinders on.”
The spate of coveted roles, the avalanche of work, accolades and adulation, were a lot for a onetime struggling young actress from St. Louis to absorb. Not to mention the distractions of the turning-point professional and romantic relationship of her life, with the widowed Simon, the prolific Broadway playwright and screenwriter whom she married in 1973 — just three weeks after meeting him.
These days, the 74-year-old Mason is far more centered about her place in the world, and happy to be finding doors opening for her. The latest to be unlocked is at Arena Stage, where she’s about to begin preview performances of “Watch on the Rhine,” a 1941 play about the Nazi threat, set in a Washington inclined toward isolationism. Like “The Little Foxes,” staged at Arena earlier this season in a well-received revival that starred Marg Helgenberg, “Watch on the Rhine” is by Lillian Hellman, around whose work Arena has assembled a mini-festival.
Early on, Molly Smith, Arena's artistic director, informed the play's director, Jackie Maxwell, former artistic head of the Shaw Festival in Canada, that she wanted Mason for the production. Maxwell knew Smith well; they've directed productions at each other's theaters. (Maxwell staged Arena's "Good People," by David Lindsay-Abaire, in 2013.) But Maxwell had never met Mason. "I said, 'Okay, well, sure,' " Maxwell recalls, sounding as though she had a trace of uncertainty, having had the choice made for her. If that existed, it evaporated after the actress and director met in New York, where Maxwell was conducting auditions.
“We had emailed, and she asked, ‘Could I sit in on some of the auditions?’ ” Maxwell remembers. “Someone of that ilk could dominate the room, but she was very friendly. We went out to dinner and shared some wine and laughed a lot. She’s one of those people for whom there’s no B.S.”
Hellman’s play is not often revived, perhaps because it requires a fairly large cast (11 actors) and has a plot with a somewhat bygone sensibility, mixing intrigue with melodrama. It enjoyed a healthy Broadway run in the early 1940s and was adapted for the movies in 1943, winning an Oscar for Paul Lukas’s performance as a German engineer and Nazi resister who, with his American wife, is visiting her mother at a comfortable manse outside Washington. Mason portrays the imposing matriarch, Fanny Farrelly, a diplomat’s wife who, along with her son, is hosting not only her daughter’s family, but also a Romanian count, working with the Germans. (At Arena, Andrew Long plays the German son-in-law, and J. Anthony Crane is the Romanian.)
The notion of an inward-gazing America being forced to face the challenges to freedom in Europe and the rest of the world seemed to Mason a concept contemporary audiences would relate to. “This is today,” she says, “dressed in ’40s costumes.”
The actress comes to Washington — and the rigors of working in the round, in Arena’s largest space, the Fichandler Stage — at a time in her life when the work may not be as high-profile as at the height of her fame, but it remains nourishing. She has a recurring role on ABC’s long-running sitcom, “The Middle,” playing the mother of Patricia Heaton’s character, and takes stage roles off-Broadway and elsewhere. In 2010, she played the countess in Shakespeare Theatre Company’s “All’s Well That Ends Well.” She alternates acting and directing gigs around the country. In the fall, for instance, she directed Paige Davis of “Trading Spaces” fame in a production of “An Act of God” in Arizona. She’s even returned to the work of Simon, from whom she was divorced in 1983. At Pennsylvania’s Bucks County Playhouse three years ago, she directed a revival of the stage version of “Chapter Two,” a play based on her relationship with Simon and his recovery from the death of his first wife, Joan.
She met the playwright in 1973, when she was cast in the original Broadway production of “The Good Doctor,” Simon’s short-lived adaptation of stories by Anton Chekhov. They soon discovered that they meshed well at home and at the office. “A lot of married couples can’t work together. But Neil and I had such an extremely professional relationship. I was the actor, and he was the playwright.”
Although her movie breakthrough came before she met him, she blossomed as the widely perceived leading lady of Simon’s work, appearing in five of his scripts for the big screen. It’s fair to say that their collaboration was one of the most mutually productive of the mid-1970s to early ’80s, although the last of the films, 1983’s “Max Dugan Returns,” performed anemically at the box office. And then, seemingly simultaneously with the end of their marriage, Mason’s movie career dissolved.
“The only picture I did after that was ‘Heartbreak Ridge,’ ” she says of the Clint Eastwood film she made in the mid-1980s, after she turned 40. “The business changed in ’84, ’85, ’86. Everything got youth-oriented. There just weren’t that many roles for me,” she says. Having lived in California for several years, she decided to leave, in part because, “When you’re a single woman in L.A., everything changes.”
Mason moved to Santa Fe, N.M., where she bought a farm she had learned about from Shirley MacLaine, herself a Santa Fe resident. On the 247-acre property, she grew medicinal herbs, which turned into a business. (She sold the farm in 2014.) Other pursuits far from the back lots and the stage transfixed her: It was another famous friend, Paul Newman, who helped her immerse herself in another of her passions: auto racing.
“I traveled with the pit crew,” Mason says. “I loved it so much.” Newman encouraged her to take some driving classes and eventually, she bought her own race car, a Mazda RX-7 — “I’ve spent a lot of money,” she confesses — and went on the circuit, entering a dozen or more events a year on tracks all over the country. She never won, she adds, but she did break 200 mph.
It’s safe to say, then, that Mason knows a thing or two about the fast lane. The pace may be a bit slower in a vintage play, but it looks as though she’s still not ready to give up on going full speed.
Watch on the Rhine, by Lillian Hellman. Directed by Jackie Maxwell. Tickets, $55-$118. Feb. 3-March 5 at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW. Visit arenastage.org or call 202-488-3300.
