In Praise of Linda Lavin

Jonathan Silverman and 
Linda Lavin in
Broadway Bound

Just saw that Linda Lavin died. She was best known for a so-so but long-running sitcom Alice (1976-85), based on Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1976-85), but she was a brilliant stage actress. She got her start in musicals, delivering the stand-out solo numbers in The Mad Show ("The Boy From..." (music by Mary Rodgers and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim under the pen name of Esteban Ria Nido) and It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman ("You've Got Possibilities," music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Lee Adams). She won a well-deserved Tony Award for Neil Simon's Broadway Bound. The highlight was her monologue describing the night her character, based on Simon's mother, danced with George Raft. Every performance of hers was so precise, insightful, full of details revealing characters such as The New Century (Drama Desk Award), Collected Stories, Death-Defying Acts, The Lyons (Obie Awards for those two), Hollywood Arms, Other Desert Cities, The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, Cakewalk (as Lillian Hellman), and The Diary of Anne Frank. In the early 70s before Alice, she made numerous entertaining guest shots on Rhoda, Barney Miller, and Phyllis. More recently, she appeared in Netflix's No Good Deed and Hulu's Mid-Century Modern.

I once encountered her on the street and told her I was just thinking of her performance in Broadway Bound and the desperate, intense way she said "I need to talk to you" to Phyllis Newman who played her sister. That one line conveyed everything that was going with the character. Her husband was having an affair and her marriage was breaking up. I went on to tell her her Nana in Carol Burnett and Carrie Hamilton's Hollywood Arms reminded me so much of my own grandmother, particularly when she yelled at her granddaughter for forgetting to take her muddy shoes off on the newspaper on the floor and then tapping her brain to indicate that the girl must think before acting. My grammy would do the same gesture.

In Collected Stories, she brought new life to a role already played by Maria Tucci and Uta Hagen, that of a famous writer in conflict with her former protege who has taken intimate details from her mentor's past and incorporated them into her own novel. In the climactic confrontation scene, Lavin's character has a cold and she uses that condition to perform specific tasks such as finding tissues and cough syrup so the scene is not just angry confict. She is doing something specific. That's what made Lavin's work so special she was always specific.