At 78 years old, Kathryn Grody is tapping into the experience of aging for her latest one-woman show, ''The Unexpected 3rd,'' premiering at the People's Light theater in Malvern, Pennsylvania. (Emma Lee/WHYY)
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“One of my goals is to get rid of the word ‘senior.’ I hate it,” said Kathryn Grody, 78, as she began previews for the world premiere of her new, one-woman show “The Unexpected 3rd” at the People’s Light theater in Malvern, Pennsylvania.
“I mean it. Been there, done that: High school, not my best time,” she said. “I prefer ‘elder.’ It gives some gravitas.”
Funny, angry and gray, “The Unexpected 3rd” is an autobiographical play about the many, many things on Grody’s mind as she gets older.
The stage acts as a huge notebook, its white walls scribbled with key words and phrases, as though Grody were jotting down things she needs to remember for later. Over the course of the show, she leafs through a sheaf of papers that is the actual script she is performing, one that she has been writing, workshopping and re-writing for three years.
The loose pages of script appear on stage as a theatrical device evoking a life that resists a final draft. They are also necessary for Grody to remember which version she is currently in.
“I have done now 58 drafts,” she said. “I need insurance that I won’t slip into the 45th or the 22nd.”
Grody has had a long life in the theater, going back (at least) to the early 1970s in off-Broadway productions. She is known for film roles like “My Bodyguard” (1980), “Reds” (1981) and “The Lemon Sisters” (1989).
“The Unexpected 3rd” is Grody’s defiant response to getting old. Around the time she turned 60, she noticed her prospects were expected to diminish.
“I liked my life. I was an off-Broadway theater person. I did this great play in 2013 and then, suddenly: ‘Hello?’” she said, referring to her role in Donald Margulies’ “The Model Apartment.” “There was a period in my 60s where I was pretty lost.”
The COVID pandemic changed everything.
Grody is married to actor and singer Mandy Patinkin, with whom she became an unwitting Instagram star in pandemic-era video posts made by their son Gideon. At first, he was helping Mandy and Kathryn make messages for the humanitarian aid organization International Rescue Committee, for whom they are ambassadors. But their humor, warmth and uncensored daily life as a couple took off.
“What good came from this horrific pandemic was an opportunity to be seen in a way that just stunned me,” Grody said.
That exposure became a TV pilot for Showtime, “Seasoned,” which was ultimately dropped. Grody and Patinkin recently screened it at the Tribeca Film Festival to attract new support. In October, they will debut an advice podcast “Don’t Listen to Us”, and they were recently profiled in The New York Times.
Putting her life on stage is not new for Grody. In 1990, she created “A Mom’s Life” about raising children. In 2015, she premiered “Falling Apart…Together,” a comedy about navigating her tumultuous family life. As the third in her solo series, “The Unexpected 3rd” is about the trials and rewards of becoming elderly.
“I have been pissed off since my 50s, if not before, about how age was viewed in this culture,” she said. “My generation started it: ‘Don’t trust anybody over 30.’ I apologize for that. We couldn’t have been wronger.”
“I never saw any examples of grown-ups that you would want to be like,” Grody said. “You only saw people losing their minds, needing Depends, failing, frailing. There was nothing that said, ‘Wow, this is how lucky it is to be older. How lucky that you’re not finished. How lucky that you can still discover new aspects of yourself.’”
“Unexpected” is a comedy, although Grody says it was probably funnier in its earlier drafts. She said that as she honed the script, it became more rebellious against accepted social norms.
Her sense of outrage is not just for the elderly. Grody says the best compliment she has gotten out of “Unexpected” came from a younger audience member during a workshop performance at a theater in Rosendale, New York.
“This 30-year-old, gorgeous young woman comes up to me crying, and says, ‘Kathryn, my generation tells me if I don’t have my person, my place, my profession and my Botox account by 35, my life’s over. Your play says that’s bullshit,”” she said. “That just moved me so much.”
The run of “The Unexpected 3rd” at the People’s Light theater has been extended to Oct. 26.
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