It’s fitting then that, at age 86, May made her triumphant return to the Broadway stage this season, after more than 50 years, playing a relentlessly voluble woman who is slowly losing her grip on her existence, her identity dissolving before our eyes, in the superb Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery Vintage 1954 67 Year Old 67th Birthday shirt . As Gladys Green, a West Village gallery owner and former lawyer fighting to talk her way through the ravages of dementia, May gave—in a season teeming with mightily talented actresses, from Glenda Jackson and Janet McTeer to Annette Bening and Laurie Metcalf—the most thrilling and memorable performance I’ve seen in a long time. Genuinely hilarious and utterly heartbreaking, May’s performance should—and I believe will—earn her this year’s Tony Award for best actress in a play. I first became aware of May as a boy, when my father would play me his old Nichols and May records. Though a lot of it went over my head, I still laughed and knew that this was the kind of insightful, sophisticated humor that I wanted to make my own. As I got older, I started getting the references, appreciating the subtleties, and marveling at their ability to satirize contemporary life with surreal flights of fancy and complete conviction. Listen to May as a psychoanalyst unravel during a session to uproarious effect while letting us feel the genuine pain and loneliness beneath the surface in “Merry Christmas, Doctor.”
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