Mason seeking the simpler life on stage

Marsha Mason has been growing herbs on an organic farm in northern New Mexico for a decade, juggling the demands of the land with her big-city commitments on the stage and screen.

Now she’s trying to sell the 250-acre riverside property. She plans to buy something close to New York, where she opens Thursday off-Broadway in “A Feminine Ending,” a new play by Sarah Treem.

It’s time to downsize and simplify, the 65-year-old actress said. “I would like to have more time to just sit and take in the view and smell the roses instead of worrying about whether or not the crop’s going to be OK,” she said. “The grasshoppers this year nearly put me away.”

Mason’s company, Resting in the River, makes skin-care products and wellness sprays from her lush, colorful fields of herbs along the Rio Chama near Abiquiú, about an hour northwest of Santa Fe.

A four-time Academy Award nominee, Emmy and Golden Globe winner, Mason has found much of her work in recent years in the East, including in “Steel Magnolias” on Broadway in 2005 and “Wintertime” off-Broadway in 2004. Last year, she had the title role in “Hecuba” at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

“A Feminine Ending,” directed by Tony Award winner Blair Brown, runs Thursday through Nov. 11 at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater. Mason plays a woman going through a divorce just as her daughter is trying to decide whether to get married.

Mason said while she has made a few films in recent years, the stage offers a greater variety of roles and the opportunity “to broaden people’s perceptions of what you’re capable of doing.”

Women tend to get more typecast in movies and television, she said. And for older women, “the parts aren’t there. They’re just not there.”

Mason recalls how she was pigeonholed as the prostitute with the heart of gold after 1973’s “Cinderella Liberty” -- for which she got a best actress Oscar nomination -- and then as the muse of playwright Neil Simon, her husband at the time.

Her other Oscar nods were for three films with Simon scripts: “The Goodbye Girl” in 1977, “Chapter Two” in 1979 and “Only When I Laugh” in 1981. The couple divorced in 1983. “I wound up in New Mexico by just saying, ‘I can’t deal with L.A. anymore,’ ” Mason recalled.