Barra Grant tells the story of a difficult relationship with her mother, Bess Myerson, in Miss America’s Ugly Daughter.
The life of Bess Myerson, the only Jewish woman to have won the Miss America title, in 1945, was two sides of a coin: the face was that of a very beautiful, proud, and successful woman, but her private life involved difficult relationships, most notably with her daughter, Barbara (Barra) Grant. Their mother-daughter interaction, and Bess’s attempts to create her daughter in her own image, are the center of Grant’s solo play/memoir Miss America’s Ugly Daughter. The audience never sees the subject, but she is sometimes heard offstage, her voice (by Anna Holbrook) always booming and intruding in her child’s life.
Bess, even at her most invisible, intimidates and deprecates the sensitive Grant, who is largely ignored, or used by her mother to humor visitors, or put down to prop up her gorgeous parent’s ego—at least that’s how it appears through Grant’s lens. No matter how vulnerable and degraded Grant seems to be as a result of her mother’s criticisms, she manages to make light of it and use humor as a shield. In Shakespeare’s time maybe the vicissitudes of this family would have been considered tragicomedy. Today it would probably be considered poignantly dysfunctional.
“Grant shares with the audience Bess’s many love affairs and the lengths to which her mother would go to prove herself attractive to men.”
The audience initially sees the neediness in Grant, but as the story unfolds, a profound neediness in Bess also becomes apparent. She is a product of the Depression. She takes airline blankets, toilet paper from stalls, condiments galore, and eventually shoplifts a lipstick she could easily afford. Her mother stole it, says Grant matter-of-factly, because she wanted to show she was indomitable. These habits embarrass Grant, who always stands in the shadow of Bess, as did Allan Wayne, Bess’s first husband and Grant’s father, whom she adored. But he died not long after her parents’ divorce.
It seems like Grant has no respite from the cycle of harangues from Bess and the latter’s two failed marriages and multiple relationships. Of one of them, Grant says, “She dated Sidney for a while until she found someone better, then she dumped him, and on and on and on. No matter what, I could never hold a candle to any of these guys. I was only her kid, after all.”
Grant plays herself in the solo show. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
Grant shares with the audience Bess’s many love affairs and the lengths to which her mother would go to prove herself attractive to men, particularly younger men. Bess stocks her bathroom with feminine hygiene products so that a much younger man, Jean Paul, will think that she is young enough to start a family. Even more ludicrous is the fact that in order to maintain this fantasy, Bess insists that Grant leave their home through the rear door, so that Jean Paul will not know that she has a grown daughter.
Grant spends so much time dwelling on her mother’s idiosyncrasies and self-centeredness that, as much as she rejects Bess’s treatment of her and the choices her mother made, she seems unable to extricate herself from Bess and waxes almost nostalgic about the relationship. This is also true of the incessant calls, especially in the middle of the night, during Bess’s older years. Grant answers them with impatience. They seem frivolous and narcissistic, stemming from loneliness. Grant grudgingly answers them but, one might ask, “Why doesn’t she just hang up or stop answering the phone altogether?”
The one glimmer of happiness is Grant’s marriage to Brian Morgan Reilly, and their daughter, Samantha. Her family home is the one safe space for her, where she seems happiest and most ease with herself. Grant’s attempts at achieving joy, like Grant’s acting career, don’t seem to gather much traction. Her career as a writer for television and films, though, is far more successful.
As a performer (the direction is by Eve Brandstein), Grant shifts back and forth seamlessly among her childlike, pubescent, and adolescent selves, helped by the music, movement, and lighting. Tom Jones’s projections take the lead in moving the action, which is a flashback to Grant’s childhood that subsequently advances in time until she reaches the millennium. The set (Elisha Schaefer), sound (Jones), and lighting design (Yael Lubetzky) help scope out the decades of Myerson’s triumphs and decline, as well as Grant’s awkward initiation into the world of men, the Swinging Sixties and beyond, where she navigates identity and the angst of her past. It is only after Bess’s passing that Grant is able to better understand why Bess was who she was, to forgive her and to become Miss America’s beautiful daughter.
Miss America’s Ugly Daughter runs through March 1 at Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, 10 West 64th St. Performances are Wednesdays and Sundays at 3 p.m, Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m., and Saturdays at 5 p.m. For more information, or to purchase tickets, call (212) 630-9600.
