Island audiences have the opportunity this weekend to spend an evening with Obie Award-winning actor and playwright Kathryn Grody, who is bringing her latest one-woman show to the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse for performances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
In The Unexpected 3rd: A Radical, Rollicking Rumination on the Optimism of Staying Alive, Ms. Grody explores, with humor and insight, what she considers to be life’s third act, the years that follow middle age.
“I’ve probably been pissed off since I was in my 50s... about our youth-obsessed culture,” she told the Gazette, during a rehearsal break at the playhouse Tuesday morning. “Stopping coloring my hair was a radical act.”
Ms. Grody is a stage and film actor who began developing the show after turning 75 a couple of years ago. People began treating her differently as soon as she let her hair go gray, she said.
“It’s about being made invisible,” she said.
The title of The Unexpected Third also refers to its place following her two earlier solo shows, A Mom’s Life and Falling Apart Together. After marrying actor Mandy Patinkin and starting a family in the 1980s, Ms. Grody created A Mom’s Life after people kept asking her if she was a “mother now, and not an actress,” she said.
“I said, ‘Let me answer that question theatrically.’”
Ms. Grody earned a Drama Desk Award for the 1990 run of A Mom’s Life at the Public Theater in New York.
In Falling Apart Together, which she premiered in 2015, Ms. Grody continued to share her story as a working wife and mother.
During the pandemic, she became an internet celebrity for a series of off-the-cuff home videos, often featuring her husband, created for Mr. Patinkin’s Instagram account by one of the couple’s sons.
With The Unexpected 3rd, she takes the stage again to tackle another existential question: “Does being an elder mean you’re finished? My answer is no,” she said. “You’re never finished unless you choose to be.”
The Unexpected 3rd, she said, is about the surprises — positive as well as negative — that come later in life.
“Things happened that I never would have guessed,” she said.
Ms. Grody tempers her upbeat approach with some harder truths about aging, such as declining health and the loss of friends.
“I’m going share insights that make me optimistic, and also share the sorrow,” she said. “I just wanted to address the cliches while also honoring the challenges, because they are real.”
During the performance, Ms. Grody dances, hollers and even crawls across the stage.
“There’s a lot of delusion about what you can control and what you can’t, [and] it’s very different being kind and respectful to seniors... than being inside your older self,” she said.
The Unexpected 3rd is directed by another Obie-winning actor, Timothy Near, a friend and collaborator of Ms. Grody’s since college days and the director of her two previous solo shows.
“We are one brave pair,” Ms. Grody said.
They have brought the show to live audiences only a handful of times so far, most recently in June at the Cleveland Playhouse in Ohio.
“We’ve never done the same piece twice,” Ms. Grody said. “I’m never the same person. My body is never the same.”
Political news and other headlines also work their way into the show, which Ms. Grody said she is constantly rewriting.
“We really learn from where the audience goes with us and where they don’t,” she said.
“It’s definitely a work in progress — like me,” she added.
The Unexpected 3rd: A Radical, Rollicking Rumination on the Optimism of Staying Alive plays Sept. 26, Sept. 27 and Sept. 28 at 7 p.m. Ticket and performance information is available at mvplayhouse.org.
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