“There’s a simultaneous wink and arms-openness to what they do,” Gilpin says. She and Escola has a further connection, she says, because of the kinds of character they channel or portray—moms, ’80s soap actresses—as well as an arch campiness that the two share. “I would try to lace in some commentary or wink, ‘She’s been in a terrible accident!’” Gilpin says, “and the director is like ‘Cut! What are you doing? You’re just the mom. There is no mezzanine. Lets do it again.’” Fortunately there are two mezzanines at the Lyceum.
The Lyceum also happens to be the same theater where her father, the veteran actor, Jack Gilpin, made his first Broadway appearance, an understudy in The Players (1978). Fans of HBO’s The Gilded Age will recognize Gilpin Sr. as Church, the pragmatic head butler to Fifth Avenue’s favorite arrivistes, the Russells. “He has strong butler energy,” she jokes, beaming with pride. In another bit of family coincidence, her mother, Ann McDonough, once played the role of Mary Todd’s sister, Elizabeth Todd Edwards, in the 1993 play Abe Lincoln in Illinois at Lincoln Center Theater.
Growing up in a family of actors, with much of her childhood spent in the city, Gilpin takes a surreal pleasure in seeing her name above the marquee. She has had a few different lives here, with the city as a palimpsest for each one. “Now I’m a tired mom shuffling to the dentist, but 10 or 15 years ago, I was on this block, drunk with a Camel Light. Or 30 years ago, I was skipping down the streets in Mary Janes with a wedgie. New York, especially now, can feel so Chobani, so eyebrow studio. But this is where Cafe Wah? was, Allen Ginsburg, Alexander Hamilton. I feel the history smack me in the face, and I think that I certainly feel that in this theater.”
Gilpin’s latest New York iteration is with her husband, Cosmo, a nurse, and their two young daughters, one four years old and the youngest born last May. “I do rabid hamster Mary Todd for however many hours of rehearsal, then come home for bed time with two children, which makes Mary look like Charlie Rose. Any parent knows, 6 to 8 p.m. is like an enema of broken glass, nervous system wise. By 8:30, there are nights where you are just staring into the distance,” she laughs.
