Too Soon
Jan Maxwell, in black, with Rosemary Harris on the opening night of the 2009 Broadway revival of "The Royal Family." Maxwell died on Feb. 11.
I READ THE NEWS on Facebook, of course. It was a Sunday night in mid-February. I’d hoped it was a social media hoax, but she wasn’t famous enough for that (except within the New York theater world). Jan Maxwell, not quite three years after her surprise premature retirement from the stage, was dead at 61.
I sent emails to my editors in the Obituaries department at The New York Times, just in case they hadn't already heard the news. At first I was told that Neil Genzlinger would be writing the obit the next day, but then Bill McDonald, the department head, asked if I could get started on it earlier (that night -- right now, in other words); if so, the assignment was mine. I could not have been more honored.
The News
Maxwell's obituary in the Feb. 13, 2018, print edition of The New York Times.
LAST MONTH TODAY
There was, for lack of a better word, a party. On Tuesday night, Feb. 20, 2018, friends, family, neighbors and colleagues of Maxwell gathered at the West Bank Cafe on West 42nd Street (in its hidden-away Laurie Beechman Theater) to remember her.
"I'm calling it a memorial gathering, because it wasn't a real party -- and it certainly wasn't a service," said the actor Robert Zukerman, whose professional relationship with Maxwell began in the 1980s with the original Pearl Theater Company.
Zukerman said he was struck by the vibrant photo of Maxwell that was projected at the rear of the stage that night, a shot from "Follies." In an email message, he described it as "almost holographic."
"You looked at that image, and you just couldn't believe that she was gone," he continued. "You half expected her to burst through the screen and begin performing."
In addition to her husband, Robert Emmet Lunney, and their son, William Maxwell-Lunney, speakers included Lynne Meadow, the longtime artistic director of Manhattan Theater Club, and the director Doug Hughes.
Lunney just remembers that there was a "lot of hugging going on." He and his son, he pointed out in an email interview with Press Nights on Feb. 26, were glad they were able to help others that night with their grief, which meant "there wasn't much time to dwell on ours." They had been living with Maxwell's health problems and the possible outcome for a long time, but others in her life had not. "It was such a shock to everybody else."
Jealousy
Maxwell on Broadway as an opera star's justifiably suspicious wife in "Lend Me a Tenor."
ACCESSING THE FURY
Lunney will be back with more thoughts on Maxwell and their life together -- right after this commercial message:
If anyone reading this doesn't know who Jan Maxwell was, I am happy to try to explain. Ben Brantley, the New York Times theater critic, however, managed to sum up her talent in 35 words or so: "A sharp and playful intelligence that without being grand or self-conscious transmits the joy of being able to create a character out of air, in real time and a shared space for an audience's delectation." That's from the appreciation that ran in The Times on the same day as the obituary. Transmits the joy. Yes.
If you are a theater devotee, you may recall that in the 20th century, elderly people used to say, "Oh, my God, if only you'd seen Laurette Taylor in 'The Glass Menagerie'!" or "If only you'd seen Laurence Olivier in his prime or Marlon Brando's first Stanley Kowalski!" For this century, please add: If only you'd seen Jan Maxwell -- in anything.
I saw her first in the 1997 Broadway revival of "A Doll's House," but it was a small role (the heroine's old friend, who needs a job), and I was paying more attention to the star, Janet McTeer. The first time I recognized Maxwell's greatness was in "The Royal Family" (2009).
The star attraction of that revival was expected to be Rosemary Harris, 79 at the time, who had played the lead role, Julie Cavendish, back in 1975. And Harris was as elegant and sublime as I'd hoped (playing the star's mother now). But who was this angular, expressive, bright-eyed, brilliant blond playing Julie now? Jan Maxwell, said my Playbill Here she is, sharing some strong feelings about a wedding.
She was glorious as a jealous wife in "Lend Me a Tenor." That was the season she was nominated for two Tonys. In the 2011 revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Follies," she outshone everyone, and the cast was filled with performers who could eat you alive if they wanted to. In between that sort of thing, she'd go and do one of the British playwright Howard Barker's daring political plays in a basement theater in Chelsea. For some reason, her raw performance in "Victory" as a determined 17th-century widow in Reformation England reminded me of Max von Sydow in "The Virgin Spring."
Politico
Maxwell (with Kristen Bush) in "The City of Conversation." (2014) at Lincoln Center.
Every time I watch even a 30-second-or-so video clip from one of Maxwell's stage performances, I fall in love again and ask myself where that passion and power could have come from in a mild-mannered (?) judge's daughter from North Dakota. In "The City of Conversation" (2014), an Off Broadway saga about a Washington political hostess, she roared her outrage: "Women are doing fine? Blacks are doing fine?" (The subtext is "Are you fucking kidding me?") I think: Well, yes, I feel the same way, but I could not come close to accessing that fury. She could.
We all wonder where our energy goes when we die. But where on earth (or beyond) does that kind of energy go when Jan Maxwell dies? I start to wish for a literal heaven, where she and Philip Seymour Hoffman are collaborating, with Carrie Fisher tweaking Nora Ephron's script. No. Sam Shepard's. Let's do a drama.
THE BIRTH ORDER THEORY
So I asked her husband where he thought that passion might have come from. Lunney mentioned the influence of his father-in-law, Ralph Maxwell, known as Buzzy, "a very strong, outgoing personality," a lawyer, judge, soldier, community-theater actor and star athlete -- but not necessarily as a role model.
"Jan's four older siblings, I think, to varying degrees were subject to a home ruled by that strong personality," Lunney said. "Then Jan came along, the baby of the family, and let's face it, the baby has it easier -- most of the time." After Jan's birth, Maxwell's mother, thinking her family was complete, decided to get her degree and go to law school. Eleven years after Jan was born, a younger brother came along (the New York director Richard Maxwell), but 11 years as the youngest had been enough.
Maxwell's son, asked about her innate differentness, offered visual proof. "Look at the family pictures," he said to his father, indicating photos from the late 1950s to mid-1960s. "Everybody's lined up, serious and straight-faced, and there's Mom at the end, making faces and out of line."
I asked if the terrifying fury that was so beautiful onstage ever showed up at home. For instance, I wondered, what would one of Maxwell's characters do to a person who left an empty toilet-paper roll in the bathroom? "It was an almost funny running joke that Jan couldn't seem to replace a roll of toilet paper," Lunney said, addressing the immediate question. But in general, no.
"We've always been good at leaving our characters at the theater," he said. "And remember, under all that ferocity was so much heart, vulnerability and depth of soul.... At home, we got to see the heart-and-soul side."
When Lunney and I were going over family details for the Times obituary, I asked as politely as I could if Maxwell had lied about her reason for retiring from the stage in 2015. Was it perhaps not all about the roles she was getting? Was it, in fact, all about her health?
"Fact and fiction blur," looking back, he said. She'd talked for years about giving up acting -- for various reasons. But in the Feb. 26 interview, Lunney revealed the truth about that big retirement announcement in Time Out.
Here's how he remembers that day:
ROB (in the living room, looking at a Facebook post from Time Out New York): "Hey. Did you tell an interviewer that you were retiring from the stage?"
Silence.
ROB: "Jan?"
JAN (from the kitchen): "Oh. Yeah."
JAN: "Wow! Did they print that?"
ROB: "Yeah. Did you ask them not to?"
JAN: "No, but who would care? I mean, O.K., so yeah, I guess that's it, then."
Jan enters living room to find her husband, head in hand, laughing.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly referred to Jan Maxwell's brother as Rob Maxwell. He is Richard Maxwell.
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Écoutez!
Maxwell, with Peter Friedman, as a Parisienne with a great apartment in "My Old Lady" (2002).