At the outset of her one-woman show, Turning Page, perfectly staged in the intimacy of Dixon Place on Chrystie Street, Angelica Page explains why her mother’s spirit keeps calling out to her. For one thing, Geraldine Page was an Academy Award winning actress who rose to fame in several Tennessee Williams’ plays, and despite the kind of accolades and honors that anyone at Sunday night’s Oscars would die for, no one has written her biography or truly told her story. Encouraged by a psychic, Angelica Page, Geraldine’s daughter with her third husband Rip Torn, does just that, and the play, Turning Page, as its title suggests, is a journey.
This week’s opening was a tour de force of movie and theater legend, with Angelica moving fluidly from her own girly voice to her mother’s most queenly drama, a trick of wigs, outsized sunglasses, and head scarves (as in one the actress wore in Woody Allen’s Interiors). Angelica exploits her own movie star panache, her luminous skin and curvaceous full figure to go the limit. But she also gets into her mother’s fierce work ethic and dedication, telling a story, for example, of when a cast member in a production of Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind was out sick; rather than shut down for the evening, she offered to play both parts—and did. Another actor in that production, Will Patton, on hand for the celebration at Freeman’s just before starting rehearsal for Annie Baker’s The Antipodes, an upcoming play at Signature Theater, recalled his astonishment and admiration. Angelica Page said she’s been developing this monologue for five years, at first telling it through her own lens, but more and more bits of her mother crept in, taking over. In this crafting, she rediscovered what she already knew, “She’s a great character to play.”
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