WASHINGTON — She’s a four-time Academy Award nominee and two-time Golden Globe winner who’s worked with some of the biggest names in showbiz.
Now, Marsha Mason stars in Lillian Hellman’s “Watch on the Rhine” at Arena Stage through March 5.
“It is a play that Lilian Hellman wrote about the rise of fascism in Germany at that time,” Mason told WTOP during a visit to the Glass-Enclosed Nerve Center. “We have a suspenseful, political, domestic [production] and there’s a lot of humor in it as well, so I think there’s a little bit for everybody.”
Set in Washington, D.C. in 1940, the play follows German engineer Kurt Muller (Andrew Long) and his American wife Sara (Lise Bruneau), who have been raising their three children in Europe. Upon the outbreak of World War II, the Muller family travels to D.C. to stay with Sara’s wealthy relatives, the Farrellys, including brother David (Thomas Keegan) and mother Fanny (Marsha Mason).
“[Fanny] comes from the Washington social scene,” Mason said. “Her husband was an ambassador and lecturer, and her entire family has been a part of that D.C. social environment. … There’s a line where Kurt says to me, ‘Madame Fanny! It is no longer the world you knew!’ The arc of my character and family … is we become aware and informed and have to take a stand. ‘Will we?’ is the question.”
But conflict arises when another house guest, penniless Romanian count Teck de Brancovis (J. Anthony Crane), conspires with the Germans. Snooping around the Mullers’ bedroom, he finds a locked suitcase holding a gun and $23,000 to finance underground resistance operations in Germany.
Born in New Orleans before moving to New York, Hellman originally wrote “Watch on the Rhine” in 1939, just as Hitler invaded Poland. By the time the play hit Broadway on April 1, 1941, it was still months before Pearl Harbor, meaning the United States had not yet entered World War II. Just like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in “Casablanca” (1942), Hellman didn’t know the outcome of the war.
“America’s position at that time was much more isolationist,” Mason said. “When I come home after the play at night, I can’t go to sleep right away, so I was trolling through Netflix and [found] ‘Foyle’s War,’ a series about what was happening in England during that time. … They didn’t tell the American public what was really going on in Europe … and because of the Treaty of Versailles, we also were partly responsible for the devastation that happened to Germany, which did give the rise to Hitler.”
While “Watch on the Rhine” was a play of its time, it still has plenty of relevance in today’s politics.
“There’s a line in the show that gets applause every single night that we do it — because it is so contemporary to what’s happening — and the line is: ‘We don’t turn away refugees,'” Mason said. “We have to be really, really careful and we have to demand from the journalists the truth about what’s really happening everywhere. It’s very difficult now, because we do have ‘fake news,’ but there are a lot of resources at our feet that they didn’t have in those days and we have to become more active.”
Such a poignant production is only made possible by Arena Stage’s ongoing Lillian Hellman series.
“I think you have to really give [credit to] Molly Smith,” Mason said. “She is just one of the best artistic directors in the country. She has great vision, she really thinks about it and it was her idea [to have the festival]. About a year and a half ago, we did a reading of both ‘The Little Foxes’ and ‘Watch on the Rhine’ to see what they sounded like around a table, then she put together this fabulous festival.”
Fittingly, it was Hellman’s lover Dashiell Hammett (“The Maltese Falcon”) who adapted the play into the Oscar-winning 1943 film starring Bette Davis. Mason can relate, as she and ex-husband Neil Simon cranked out numerous hit plays and movies during their 10-year marriage from 1973-1983.
“Neil and I had a phenomenal relationship, personally as well as professionally,” Mason said. “Not a lot of married couples can work together, but I guess we both had such respect for each other’s talent, he for mine and mine for his. We had the best time. We just had the best time working together.”
It all began on Broadway when she was cast by Simon in his original work “The Good Doctor” (1973).
“I showed up for the first day of rehearsal and we were all seated around a big table on the stage of the [Eugene] O’Neill Theatre that he happened to own,” Mason said. “During the break, he came around to the back of my chair and put his hands on my shoulders. I reached up and patted his hand, and it was such a shockingly familiar thing. It really unnerved me. I had to excuse myself and go to the ladies room and go, ‘Wow, what was that?’ We wound up being chemically attracted almost instantly.”
That happened on Oct. 3 and the two were married three weeks later — much to the joy of Simon’s daughters, who had lost their birth mother to cancer. Professionally, Simon penned three of Mason’s four Oscar-nominated movie roles, the first of which came for “Cinderella Liberty” (1973), playing a prostitute who falls for a Navy sailor (James Caan). The role won Mason her first Golden Globe.
“I never thought I would be in the movies,” Mason said. “Twentieth Century Fox liked the picture so much and really felt really strong about the performances from both of us that they rushed it out that year, so I wound up having two pictures coming out the same year and getting nominated. All the while, I couldn’t go to the Golden Globes, because I was doing ‘The Good Doctor’ [on Broadway].”
Four years later, she won her second Golden Globe in Simon’s “The Goodbye Girl” (1977), playing an unemployed dancer who moves in with a struggling off-Broadway actor (Richard Dreyfuss) along with her 10-year-old daughter. Dreyfuss won the Oscar, while Mason earned her second nomination.
“It was fabulous,” Mason said. “Dreyfuss and I had this great chemistry. We just always have and we have it to this day. If we see each other or we wound up going to London to do ‘Prisoner of Second Avenue’ together, we just have great, great acting chemistry together.”
Mason earned her third Oscar nomination working with Caan again in “Chapter Two” (1979); her third Globe nomination across Ned Beatty in “Promises in the Dark” (1979); and a fourth Oscar nomination for “Only When I Laugh” (1981), for which her co-star Joan Hackett won the Globe.
“That picture, ‘Only When I Laugh,’ is one of my favorites because it’s really an ensemble piece with all of those actors, so it was really great,” Mason said. “I’ve had a really spectacular career, you know? It’s really good. And there was a picture I did called ‘Drop Dead Fred’ that winds up constantly getting revived and they’re even thinking of doing a remake of it and all kinds of stuff. I’ve been very lucky.”
Speaking of lucky, she worked with Mr. “Do You Feel Lucky” himself, Clint Eastwood, on “Heartbreak Ridge” (1986). Mason says she was constantly amazed at his ability to juggle acting and directing.
“He was standing, waiting for a shot to get set up,” Mason said. “We were on a dance floor, we had to move around, they were using the camera and he had lines. So we start the scene and we’re dancing and saying the dialogue and the camera’s moving around, and I can tell he’s pushing me in certain ways. So after they called cut, he said, ‘I was watching the play of light across your face to make sure we got a nice shot.’ So he was acting and directing and dancing all at the same time! It was really cool.”
Now, in “Watch on the Rhine,” Mason works with director Jackie Maxwell.
“She’s just one of the best,” Mason said. “Her work in this play is phenomenal because we are in the round and we have 11 people. That is not easy. A lovely woman who’s an actor here came and saw the show and she moved around the theater and said, ‘In every area, nobody was blocked [from view.]'”
Not only will you be able to see every inch of the production, you will feel its timely themes deeply.
“It’s so important to see good material,” Mason said. “Hellman has written a well-plotted, strong, funny, deep, subtle, political play. I think it’s great. You will have missed something if you don’t see it.”
Listen to the full conversation with Marsha Mason below:
