Bridging the Age Gap to Find ‘Grandma Moses’ : Q & A with CLORIS LEACHMAN

Cloris Leachman just got back from two months on the road. Not counting Los Angeles, she’s already played 24 cities as Anna Mary Robertson Moses, the legendary farm wife who started painting late in life, then turned out hundreds of colorful paintings before dying at 101.

Stephen Pouliot’s play, “Joy Ride: The True Story of Grandma Moses” is now on its third tour, each time starring Leachman as Grandma Moses. Both player and play return to Southern California where Leachman and Craig Richard Nelson, who plays the many men in Moses’ life, open tonight for three weeks at the Westwood Playhouse.

Leachman won an Oscar--for “The Last Picture Show,” in 1971--and six Emmys and is perhaps best known for Phyllis Lindstrom, first on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” then on the spinoff series, “Phyllis.” From Broadway in the ‘40s, through “Young Frankenstein” and countless TV movies to last year’s “The Beverly Hillbillies,” she seems always to be working.

How could Leachman, now 68 and a grandmother herself, turn down the chance to play “a genuine self-taught primitive” as a girl, in middle-age and at 100?

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Question: You’ve been involved with this show now for at least eight years. What hooked you in?

Answer: The challenge was that (Grandma Moses) is 45 in the first act and 100 in the second act. She lived an entire life as a farm wife and another as an international celebrity. How do you connect them? Trying to bridge that gap was like finding the missing 18 minutes of the Watergate tape. You don’t want to fabricate it. We insisted on being authentic.

When things are easy, you can get a lovely outcome. When things are difficult to impossible, you can come up with something that becomes mighty and marvelous because of the digging you have to do, and the extrapolating from the clues, the detective work. And the firm resolve to bring that woman to life. Not anybody else, not our idea of her, but who that woman was.

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Q: Do you feel you succeeded?

A: On tour, one woman collapsed in the audience. They ran to call the paramedics, but she said “no, no, just let me sit here awhile. I’ll be all right. I knew Grandma. She was my close friend. I saw Grandma tonight.”

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Q: Who was Grandma Moses?

A: She would have told people that she was a farm wife. But inside that little woman was such fun, such bubbly good humor, such attention to the task at hand.

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Q: Was that the secret to her longevity?

A: Oh, yes. Humor. Laughter. Hard work--but don’t take yourself too seriously. Industry, thriftiness. Caring for those about you. And a deep connection to the land . . . the earth. And to life itself.

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Q: Do you see her as a symbol of fruitful old age?

A: You could say that about her and it has been said of her. But she would never say it. She would laugh and say, “Ishkabibble!”

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Q: Aside from the obvious make-up and such, how do you become 100 onstage? What did you draw on?

A: I’m playing more the circumstances of a disenfranchised person than imitating an old lady. I don’t think “how do I walk, what do I do with my hands?” It just happens. I think your skin gets thinner, even in your mouth. Maybe a little drier. You don’t know what’s happening with your bodily functions.

Bifocals terribly distort distance and space. The world gets narrower and narrower, with only the bottom of the bifocals to magnify something close at hand. The wider experience is reduced.

If you realize the reasons (older people) do these things, you don’t imitate them. You put yourself in the circumstances. It’s how you do any part.

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Q: I know this play is constantly evolving; have you played an active role in the writing as well?

A: Yes, very active. But I’m more like Isadora Duncan was to artists of her period, like Rodin. She was a great inspirer, I think, more than a great dancer. She woke people up. She brought something fresh.

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Q: Are you making an analogy between what she did and your role with playwright Pouliot?

A: Yes. The playwright is a much better dancer than he used to be. He’s doing things he never dreamed possible before (pause for laughter).

I’d call the playwright after every performance and tell him about how it was going; I’d say I need a more specific or more colorful word, or a richer word, or a rhythm. I’m a good editor, for one thing. We’d never talk but that something didn’t get better.

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Q: This show has toured so many places in such a short time, many of them places where reviewers even noted such things as your being “by far the biggest marquee name” to ever hit town. Why do you keep doing this show?

A: The language--I could say these words 10,000 times and never get tired of them. They are fresh every single time. They tickle and amaze me every time. I can’t wait to do it again. I can be past exhaustion, gasping for breath, and I’m suddenly new again. We’re all so passionate about this play. We convene to do it again.

I will put anything and everything aside--and have--to get in her high-button shoes again. I will stop my life to do it.

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Q: Do you sense parallels to Grandma Moses in your own life?

A: We are both women. We’ve been married. We had children. We lost children. We survived. We kept the family together. We worked hard. We enjoyed the fruits of our labors and the labor itself.

* “Joy Ride--The True Story of Grandma Moses” opens tonight at Westwood Playhouse, 10886 LeConte Ave. in Westwood, (310) 208-5454. Performances Tuesday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m., Sunday at 7:00 p . m. Matinees at 2:00 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Through May 29. Tickets $38.50 and $32.50.