Johanna Day: Misery Is Optional

 

Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.
―Katherine Mansfield

PART ONE

Johanna Day, the actress, is the youngest of nine children, was born with a caul covering her face, and is frequently followed by snakes. These aspects of her biography are sometimes credited with giving her special powers: She can diagnose illness and is very good at treating people of both mental and physical maladies, her gift for friendship is phenomenal, and she can overlook the odious with admirable rapidity. A lot of Day's positivity she credits to her mother, who had hanging in her kitchen a sign that read "Misery is Optional." Day's mother, Eileen, was close to Johanna, her youngest, and knew about and supported her dreams. Diagnosed with cancer during a peak in her daughter's career--the Broadway run of "Proof"--her mother remained as active as she could, involved in the lives of all of her children, and getting to Chicago less than two weeks before her death to see Johanna in a play. "I remember her looking at her legs, and saying, 'Look how skinny they are,' and then she was gone." When my own mother died recently, the person offering the greatest comfort to me was Johanna Day. (Full disclosure: Johanna and I are friends, but we have issues. I often think she is far too gullible and forgiving, and she occasionally points out that I’m a corrosive asshole. Both of us are correct.)

Johanna Day, early in life, with an early fan.

Johanna and Eileen Day, 2003.

Day is very tall, has flaming red hair, aqua eyes. She makes an impression. More to the point, Day is the sort of actress who has done “all the right things” in her career, by which I mean that she has been doing good plays with talented people and being consistently excellent. Johanna Day has not self-produced plays through Indiegogo and performed in basements or living rooms; she has not been the leading lady of a Folding Chair Classical Theatre, which, to the bewilderment of many, is now considered legitimate by some. She does not promote herself constantly on social media, giving the world wishful-thinking press releases. Instead, Day has appeared in the original casts of three plays that ultimately received the Pulitzer Prize: Paula Vogel’s "How I Learned to Drive," David Auburn’s "Proof," and Lynn Nottage’s "Sweat." (It used to be said that playwrights coveting the Pulitzer Prize should be sure to cast Day. The caul or the snakes attract glittering prizes.) The list of playwrights whose plays she has graced include Craig Lucas, Edward Albee, David Adjmi, Theresa Rebeck, Lanford Wilson, Tracy Letts, Diana Son, David Lindsay-Abaire, Yasmina Reza, Wendy Wasserstein, Stephen Belber, and Will Eno.  Day is much loved by her peers: She is easy and fun to work with; she lifts every situation in which she is found. Mary-Louise Parker says of her that “there is no one better to be in a rehearsal room with, on a stage, backstage, in the wings, in the greenroom—anywhere, even near a theater.” Eric Stoltz, the actor, who confesses to a twenty-year crush on Day, and who now produces and directs, remembers working with her on “Madam Secretary”: “She wasn't a regular on that show, but we all wished that she was. Whenever she came to us, there was a great deal of laughter in the hallways, stories to tell and catching up to do.”

Many of us wonder why such a resume and such a reputation hasn’t led to greater work for Day. She worries about work and money; dreams of snagging a role on episodic television, and, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, depressed and repeatedly steamed about hoisting a cumbrous folding screen out of a closet and doing self-tapes in closets and corners, with curious pets and neighbors, Day considered becoming a nurse. She had traveled to Virginia to help care for a dying sister, and realized that life was getting ridiculous. “I’m not going to leave the business, such as it is,” she told me, “but I need to make a living, and I’m good at nursing, like I am at acting, but I need some damned money.”

Johanna Day, in Virginia, 2020.

PART TWO

Day is now in a revival of Paula Vogel’s "How I Learned to Drive," making its Broadway debut at Manhattan Theatre Club, and she is again taking the multiple roles assigned to what is called the Female Greek Chorus, a part she originated twenty-five years ago, first at the Vineyard, and then at the late and lamented Century Center. “I am quite happy,” Day says. “Actually, I am very, very happy, and it's like a dream to be back with all these people who mean so much to me.”

Manhattan Theater Club has reassembled the original primary players of Vogel's play: Director Mark Brokaw, a man Day loves; David Morse, an actor who perpetually impresses her; and Mary-Louise Parker, who is “like a sister to me. I often feel that I was put on this planet to make Mary-Louise laugh; to keep her cheerful. She teaches me how to act. Outside of someone like Gena Rowlands, whom I worship, I can’t think of another actress who is always so real, so determined to get the real heart of a character and a play. This play, at this time, is a gift, a blessing,” and Day confesses that every night she stands offstage, waiting for the lights to dim and the play to begin, and gives thanks for where she is, although this reverie is often interrupted by jokes and embraces from Parker. Their latest inspirational tactic is to utilize a line from the 1980 film Ordinary People, and they emphatically exult "Let's have the best Christmas ever!" And on they go. Gratitude and good will is all around. Paula Vogel says that “Johanna is a gift to playwrights. So many of us have been aided by her vulnerability and visibility on stage: she illuminates the characters she plays from within. And I feel that, if she has a difficulty with a moment or a line in a first draft, it’s probably the script. I have been blessed to work with her.”

Johanna Day, Mary-Louise Parker, Alyssa May Gold, and Chris Myers in Paula Vogel's HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE, at the Manhattan Theater Club.

Day and Parker are a sort of intellectual vaudeville act, sharp, funny, mordant. The two are committed to each other and to sleep: naps are a requirement, and at the Vineyard, in the 1997 premiere of "How I Learned to Drive," they shared a dressing room, utilizing the single sleeping device provided, feet to face, surrounded by signs warning of rats, with the admonition that bags and purses should be kept off the floor. “Great play, shitty dressing rooms,” Day remembers, and adds that sleeping like that, protecting each other and their belongings, made them a duo--as actresses, friends, and painters, with the two scheduling painting times to create their works, all the while smoking, when you could do such a thing inside a building.

David Morse once poked his head in their dressing room and quipped that the work made him think that two children--albeit smoking versions--were doing the work. Parker and Day glared at him and continued, ultimately putting together a curated exhibit of their work, taking on the personalities of Valentine La Tart and Cassandra Macintosh, and a friend and actress from that first production, Kerry O’Malley, starred in a videotape providing commentary on the paintings, assuming the waspish character of an art critic. “Those tapes exist somewhere,” Day says, “and they are priceless. I pray someone finds them.”

Mary-Louise Parker does not just say that she loves Day--she has proven it in various ways over the years, including the time, in the summer of 2020, when she arrived with a big bag of groceries for her friend. “Isn’t that great?” Day asked me. “Someone, someone, doesn’t want me to go hungry. Well, a few probably do, but Mary-Louise got in a car and came to my door and told me to eat.”

When you ask Parker, with whom Day also appeared in "Proof," to say something about their times together, she responds quickly and voluminously: “Where do I start? I have spent more time on stage with Johanna than any other actor.

“She is that rare thing, a true stage animal,” Parker continues. “There aren’t many, and no one like her. She can break hearts in the last row of the balcony and can make even the most reluctant theatergoer choke with laughter. Johanna overflows with authenticity. Her work is truthful and generous, just like she is. She can give me chills just by the timber of her voice, stop my breath with the tiniest gesture. I can promise you also that no one has ever made me laugh harder in my life.”

Johanna Day and Mary-Louise Parker in David Auburn's PROOF, 2000.

On the matter of their sisterhood:

“During ‘Proof’ there was a whole discussion about our hair color,” Parker says. ”I thought she should darken her eyebrows, and I lightened my hair to make us look more like sisters--and then I was listening to her in the scene with Ben Shenkman, and when she said ‘She’s my sister,’ there was such a searing level of irrefutable truth and conviction in her voice that I suddenly realized it did not matter one lick what either of us looked like. Johanna acted us into the same gene pool.”

“I revere her talent, “Parker adds. “Getting to act alongside her is one of the greatest gifts of my life. She takes risks and makes them look like she’s just playing. She looks like she’s making it up on the spot though she has worked like mad to create it.”

Parker is clear with me that she wants to make sure that Day is treated well with this piece, and that attention is given to her, because she “is so special, so unlike anyone else.”

“You don’t spend this much time in a theater with someone and not know them in a particularly intimate way,” Parker says, “and I can say she is as deeply good a person as she is an actress. By now she feels like my family, and I can imagine a part of an afterlife that involves both of us haunting a theater together-- torturing the latecomers and wandering the wings and the concessions-- making each other laugh and sleeping under the ghost light. I love her so much.”

When she is told this, Day quips: “We have to wait until we’re dead? That sucks. I remember wanting to sleep overnight at the [Walter] Kerr when 'Proof' was up. You know, stock our fridges, put on some pajamas, and stay the night, with the ghosts and telling stories. We have to die? I don’t like that. I don’t want to wait.”

PART THREE

Johanna Day has a rare, intense, immediate connection to others--a bond develops, you are initiated as family. It wasn’t very long after Day and I met that we joked about getting married (“You’re a gay,” Day joked, “but I can work around that”), and I was soon friends with her siblings on Facebook, who warned me about a family review. I follow their pets and their artwork, and when Margy, Day’s sister, died two years ago, I felt it, not only because I spoke to Day daily while she was in Virginia, waiting for the “awful inevitable,” but because I had heard so many stories about the family, that ineffably funny, wild, and huge-hearted clan.

The Day family, in travel. Johanna had not been born yet, but this is the clan into which she arrived.

A family--wild and funny and devoted-- is present in "How I Learned to Drive," presided over by playwright Vogel, whom Day calls “Mama Paula,” a sweetly present help who watches over everyone and sends food. “I’m here to tell you,” Day says, “there are days I wouldn’t be eating if it weren’t for Paula.” Vogel has gifted the cast of "Drive" with her language, which opens with a burst of prose, given by Parker as Lil’ Bit, that seduces, startles, and charms like a novel or a short story. We can see a changing South; feel the sensual, heavy warmth; imagine some fireflies and the scent of night-blooming jasmine.

When I first saw "How I Learned to Drive" in 1997, my date was my friend Marian Seldes, and she was delighted that I knew nothing about the play. “Give in to it,” she told me, and she loved watching me become, as she put it, “ensorcelled.” I did not know what was coming, but Seldes did (she saw the original production five times), and she slipped her hand in mine when, in a scene of pure affection and physical intimacy, Lil’ Bit refers to her male companion as “Uncle” Peck. Marian squeezed my hand, and there was a gasp in the audience. A handful of people hurriedly left the play that evening, and while I am not denying that they might have been triggered by the story of a young girl being seduced by her uncle, the play is a loving and devastating study of love and forgiveness. Yes, people do awful things, but to survive, to understand, is to accept, and during the one hundred minutes or so of "How I Learned to Drive," we not only come to love Lil’ Bit and Uncle Peck, but we learn to navigate both a car—a 1956 Chevy Bel Air—and our lives. A viewer is put into gear and is floored, just like that car that has been a place of so much sharing.

Day provides rich characterizations as Lil’ Bit’s mother and as Aunt Mary, the wife of Uncle Peck, and her statement about her husband being so good with girls at a certain age will remind you of the shock of your own discoveries within your family. (Day’s recitation of the drinking etiquette of Southern ladies is a very real, very funny showstopper.)

Alyssa May Gold, David Morse, Mary-Louise Parker, Johanna Day, and Chris Myers in Paula Vogel's "How I Learned to Drive" at Manhattan Theater Club.

Elia Kazan told me that he advised the actresses playing Blanche and Stella in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" to imagine they were tied to Stanley by invisible ropes—of need, desire, dependency. With his every move, these actresses lurched, retreated, sighed, started—whatever he gave them. This technique was utilized in both the stage and screen productions, and Brando knew nothing of it until Kazan told him years later. There is a similar bond among the actors in "How I Learned to Drive": They are bound by language, history, love, and the catharsis of the play—for me, as well as for Seldes—is to realize that acceptance is not a forgiveness of people or their behavior, but an understanding of oneself, a clear-eyed inventory of who we are, right now. Hate is not an option. As they said of hate in Louisiana when I was growing up: “That dog won’t hunt; that car won’t drive.”

The sense of family is most intense with Paula Vogel’s play, but Day has found it and loved it many times before. During Craig Lucas' "Blue Window," in which Day played a very shy, quiet woman (“Not like me at all!” Day cracks), she was the “new kid. I was so green. I didn’t know anything, and those people were so good to me.” Those people included John Benjamin Hickey, who would maneuver himself behind her and let out a stream of farts most nights. “I don’t know why,” Day says. “To warm me up? [The play did open during a frigid January.] To try to break me up? No, I think it was friendship. They did lots of things to cheer me up. They were the greatest.” They, you should know, included not only Hickey, but director Joe Mantello, J. Smith-Cameron, Allison Janney, David Aaron Baker, Ellen McLaughlin, all of them pure theatre gold.

“And then,” Day interjects, “the review.”

The review in question came from the caustic John Simon, who wrote of Day, after praising everyone else, that “she sticks out like a sore thumb. Or ten.”

“I kept silent about it,” Day remembers, and then I mentioned it one night, and everyone swarmed around me, laughing, comforting. I was in a family. Again.”

“Solitude has its limits,” she tells me. “I like to be in a group of people who are happy and working well, and I want to make things better.” Day is bewildered by cruelty, and when she was witness to the actions of a particularly toxic actress, whose soul is like something you’d scrape from a subway-station floor, she was not judgmental or critical, just sad. “I really don’t know why people are mean,” she confesses. “I don’t know why people hate so many things. Why they speak so badly about other people. I don’t know why people are upset about the sexuality or the gender of people. I am not threatened at all by what other people choose to be or say or do. I don’t have to agree with it, and I damn well don’t have to comment on it. I just go about my way.” Well, not always: Day not only possesses an Amazonian figure, but the mindset as well. I sometimes think she’d kill for her friends. She shows up. She sends bourbon when you’re blue, and she is always planning a road trip. “We’ve gotta get a trailer, a rig,” she says. Day also has land in Virginia, and she dreams of building a compound there, where friends can come and write and sing and dance and smoke and drink and put on airs.

PART FOUR

"I was with my mother when she died," Day says. "She fought so hard, and I let her know that she could go. It was time. I was on that bed with her, and downstairs was the family, all that chaos, laughing and arguing and cooking. Pots and pans. Laughing. Dogs barking. And my mother loved it. That was what she loved. And I'm the same way. I want to be surrounded by happy chaos."

Day can find the beautiful moment—the pearl—from negative experiences. When she was working on a Lanford Wilson play, she walked about in a state of disbelief that she was with this great playwright. “I loved it all,” she says, but one night Wilson, tanked to a distillery level, tried to sucker punch her. “Yeah,” she says, “right through a car window! Lanford Wilson! And all I did was to ask him to behave. He was being…not nice. I dodged the punch. And his behavior improved.” Day quickly adds that Wilson went out of his way to find her and apologize for his behavior. “I loved him. I love him still. I never thought, even when he swung at me, that our friendship was over; that I was never going to look at him or speak to him again. And then this beautiful moment together. The apology, the remorse, was the real Lanford, and I got to be there.”

People are famous now for shaving online; walking about and bitching about things. Talent is often considered elitist, unnecessary, and like Brooke Smith, another multifariously gifted actress I recently profiled, Day is flummoxed to find acting treated almost as a “hobby, a lark. Talent is sort of overlooked sometimes,” Day tells me. “Things are 'branded' or an attitude is worked up, and, boom! It’s up on a stage. I look at things a lot and ask, Is that acting? Are we going to call that acting now? And there are so many terrific actors around, better than I am, wondering where the work is.

Day says these things matter-of-factly, with no bitterness. “It’s gonna work out,” she tells me. “I mean, look at the difference in the past two years. I’m back with my family of actors and creatives. I bump into other people who are excited, eager. Look, we’ve gotten this far, and so many people are always so nice to me.”

One of those is Stoltz, who remembers meeting Day backstage after a performance in "Proof," admitting he had been “a bit starstruck. I stuttered out some compliment about her work that night (heartfelt) and she looked at me with those giant blue/green eyes, burst into laughter and gave my shoulder a little push. In my memory she even said, 'aw shucks' even though I'm sure it was rougher language. I was smitten.

“I didn't really get to know her until she came on to 'Madam Secretary,” he adds. “Sometimes she had reams and reams of dialogue describing policy, which certainly wasn't the best use of her deep emotional well, but we were thrilled that she was with us just the same.”

Tea Leoni and Johanna Day in "Madam Secretary."

“I've seen hours of her dailies over the years,” Stoltz continues, “and even when the scenes weren't singing, she's great fun to watch - you're never sure what she's going to do. It's like watching a cat. She has that spark in her that transcends the material and makes you want to see what she'll do next. She can even make exposition sound interesting, which is invaluable on a long running tv show. I think of her right up there with Lois Smith—an American treasure that deserves to be working constantly, and whenever I can, I pitch her to anyone who is casting something. Not only is she deeply talented, but she's the kind of human that you want to be around - she's smart, she has opinions, she's hysterically funny--she's an authentic human.”

Johanna Day during the run of Lynn Nottage's SWEAT, 2017.

Michelle Wilson and Johanna Day in Lynn Nottage's SWEAT, 2017. Both actresses received Tony Award nominations for their performances.

PART FIVE

Johanna Day has earned: two Tony nominations (for "Proof" and "Sweat"); an Obie award; a Helen Hayes award. She has shared a dressing room and a stage with Elizabeth Ashley during "August: Osage County,", flirted with James Earl Jones during a revival of "You Can't Take It With You," helped Lois Smith onto a pitch-dark stage in a matter of seconds in "Peace for Mary Frances," and once blew up at talkative audience members during her highly praised performance in Brandon David-Jenkins’ "Appropriate." “I was onstage yelling,” she remembers, “a domestic incident on the stage, and I felt that another domestic incident was brewing in the audience, and no one—no one—was doing anything. I got louder and louder and angrier and angrier, screaming at poor Patch Darragh, and then I just turned and yelled at them. I cursed. I think I may have told them to shut the fuck up or get the fuck out. Anyway, I stormed off and went outside to the Yotel nearby and had a cigarette and burst out crying. But everyone was so supportive, and I got a great ovation at the curtain call, so, you know, it doesn’t take much to turn me around.”

A few months ago, the battery in Day’s car died, and she was momentarily without the funds to replace it, so her car sat, perfectly legal, on the street across from her apartment building. Some neighbors objected, on “principle,” and Day, fearful that the police might be called, considered sleeping in the car overnight, to be there for the officer who might tap on the window to ascertain if the car had been abandoned. However, the image of Day, awakening suddenly to an inquiring policeman, rolling down the window, and trying to explain the situation, became very funny. “I’d be out there on the street,” she said, “saying I was broke, but I’m an actress, and some royalty checks are due, and I’m heading back to Broadway, and the cop would stop and say, ‘You’re an actress? Have I seen you in anything?’ and I would just say, “Oh, Christ, take the fucking car.”

© 2022 James Grissom