Julie Bloom

“It’s like doing a boxing match and then swimming the Channel,” she joked recently.

Everything seems to be falling into place for Ashton, who also released her first book this year and starred with Jake Gyllenhaal in the dark art-world satire “Velvet Buzzsaw.”

Her play, which began previews the same day it opened at the Hackney Showroom in London, has its New York premiere Oct. 27 and has already been extended. But the moment was a long time coming.

Ashton, who grew up in London and whose mother moved from Uganda to England as a teenager, wrote “for all the women” 11 years ago, when she was just 24. She delivered the draft by hand to the Royal Court Theater, the culmination of her participation in the theater’s young writers program. But the experimental play has had multiple starts and stops since then.

It features a constellation of women ranging in age from 8 to 65 and is based on months of research Ashton did on the myriad ways the British health system has failed black women, particularly when it comes to mental health and overmedication.

The career-focused protagonist, Joy, begins to fall apart after witnessing a woman falling past a window, presumably to her death.

Joy soon starts taking pills prescribed by a doctor. The other women surrounding her are a mixture of contemporary and ancestral voices. At times they serve as a kind of African-inspired chorus, interjecting and instructing Joy; their poetic text is influenced by Ugandan lullabies among other sources.

The script, although set in Britain, feels relevant in the United States in light of recent disturbing data about black women’s health, including their significantly high maternal mortality risk.

Ashton is both accepting and frustrated by the decade that it took for the play to find a home.

“When I’m thinking about it in the most positive way possible,” she said, “I believe it had to brew and had to find its time and find its zeitgeist and find its conversation, which is very much a conversation that’s happening now in the U.S. in regards to the black female body.”

“And then when I’m more my cynical 35-year-old self, I wish this could have just been produced earlier, at its most pure. Because it’s had a lot of face-lifts, it’s been handed around to many theatrical institutions and brilliant minds, and it has changed a lot on the way.”

She went on: “Everyone has wanted to make this play make much more sense. They wanted to turn it into a much more linear and literal document, and that was never what it was. My 24-year-old self wrote it in 24 hours. I don’t say that in a boastful way — I say it as an invitation to understand what it’s like when things you’ve deeply intuited for a long time, even as a young person, are suddenly unlocked. That’s what happens when you are 24. You get married in a night — you break up in a night — you change countries in a night.”

She declined to offer too direct a connection between the material and her own experiences but admitted she was influenced by women she has known and said the voices of the characters had been floating in her head for some time.

The nonlinear, destabilizing nature of the piece appealed to Sarah Benson, artistic director of Soho Rep, which regularly takes chances on formally experimental works, recently including “Fairview,” which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in drama.

“It can only happen in theatrical form, this melding of content,” Benson said. “She’s making vivid something that black women have experienced for decades.”

Whitney White, who is directing the Soho Rep production, said the play’s abstractions make sense for the current moment in New York theater.

“Refracted black conscience is hot right now,” she said. “New writers, emerging writers are chopping and screwing all our lives, and spewing it out in an interesting, visceral way.”

White said that often black women who are misdiagnosed or overprescribed drugs don’t report what they’re going through and can be demonized by the medical field. “There’s stigma. It’s unfortunate and it’s real and it happens,” she said.

Even as Ashton gets ready for her own play’s debut, she is still performing eight times a week in “Betrayal,” where Ben Brantley in The New York Times praised her “breakout” turn as a vulnerable, world-weary wife caught in a love triangle between her husband (Tom Hiddleston) and his best friend (Charlie Cox).

Despite the intense schedule, Ashton said she’s finding strength and inspiration in Pinter.

“He’s not concerned with the truth, necessarily, in art, and I love that,” she said. “You’re supposed to stumble across it in the dark every night. Good writing shouldn’t be wrapped in cellophane. It should be open to the elements and full of maggots and it should be left to grow and deepen and fester. I hang on to that.”

In New York, she has found rare moments of solace wandering Chelsea and the halls of the Guggenheim, spending time with the Basquiats. She sees herself aligned “with the poets or the writers during the jazz era, more improvisational, truly collaborative. I’m in a nostalgic place, and I’m in America trying to figure it out.”

Ashton said she finally knows herself well enough to trust her instincts. No longer does she believe, she said, that there can be real distance between the person and the creative artist.

“It’s closed up since I’ve gotten older,” she explained. “I can’t be in a situation where I feel distanced, othered, underrepresented, cross-questioned, put down, unseen as a person or as an artist and pretend that I will be OK. That’s suppression I have released myself from.”

Finally seeing her play onstage is part of that release. “Eleven years of this group of women in this play not having an audience to commune with has been a phantom limb,” she said. “I can’t wait to see it soar or fail. I just need to see it.”

This article originally appeared in

NEW YORK — For the last five weeks, British actress and playwright Zawe Ashton has been zipping back and forth between West 45th Street and Lower Manhattan. She has gone from speaking the words of her character Emma in an acclaimed Broadway revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” to watching her own words brought to life by a cast of others in her play “for all the women who thought they were Mad” at Soho Rep.

Stumbling Upon Art in the Darkness

<h1>Can a divorced, 50-something woman with a penchant for wrap dresses and bad decisions be the center of her own story? The question sounds absurd, until you consider just how few films have focused on such a character.</h1>

But that’s just what Sebastián Lelio’s slice-of-life “Gloria Bell” does.

A remake of the Chilean director’s award-winning 2014 Spanish-language film “Gloria,” the movie is a radical proposition for American audiences accustomed to seeing characters like Gloria relegated to the sidelines.

Set in a hazily lit Los Angeles, the new version stars Julianne Moore as a funny, irrepressibly optimistic and deeply flawed divorcée who in the course of the film does her best at navigating the day-to-day drama of middle age on her own. She lives in a modest apartment, works a boring job in insurance, sings out loud to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in her beat-up car and goes out dancing by herself.

Orbiting around her are her adult children, played by Michael Cera and Caren Pistorius, her friends (Rita Wilson and Alanna Ubach), her mother (Holland Taylor) and her disaster of a boyfriend (John Turturro), whom she meets out one night at her go-to disco.

Lelio, whose 2017 identity study “A Fantastic Woman” won his country its first foreign-language Oscar, said he wanted to revisit Gloria now because of this particular moment in American culture, when the view of women is shifting with the help of #MeToo in Hollywood and beyond.

“The story of a woman in America today, claiming her rights to be seen, felt urgent again,” he said in a phone interview, adding later, “There’s a political dimension now, and that’s part of the excitement of it.”

He explained that there was something moving about turning the camera on a character who in most films would be “the mother, or the auntie, or the friend. Normally, the camera goes with the rest of the characters, but here it stays with her.”

Of course, plenty of films dealing with the trials and joys of middle age have starred, and have often been made by, women. Director Nicole Holofcener achieved critical success with movies like “Please Give” (starring Catherine Keener) and “Enough Said” (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). And Nancy Meyers became a household name with her ebullient romantic comedies starring Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton.

Still, such films remain few and far between. Only a handful of the 100 top domestic movies last year featured women over 50 in lead roles, according to a study, “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World,” from San Diego State University. In 2018, women accounted for 36 percent of major characters overall, and female characters remained younger than their male counterparts. The majority of female characters on screen were in their 20s and 30s; only 16 percent were in their 40s, 8 percent were in their 50s and 7 percent in their 60s or older.

“Gloria Bell” is an exaltation of Gloria but also an examination, Lelio said. “It is quite intense to show her from every angle going through the entire emotional spectrum, to really get to know this woman.”

The movie has already drawn praise for Moore’s performance. “The genius of Moore,” Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker, “is how plausibly, and how patiently, she fills the spaces of ordinary living.”

It’s Gloria’s exceptional ordinariness that drew Moore as well. “There’s more drama in a single day of a person’s life than all these manufactured versions with explosions and car chases. When do you ever see a car chase?” she said. “The drama that I’m interested in is human drama and relationship drama.”

For Moore, 58, it was also crucial to show that women don’t become less interesting or less desirable as they age. “It’s important to see women make mistakes at different stages. Just because you get older, you don’t know everything and it’s not like you stop living.”

She added, “I think in the weird narration of our world of entertainment, there are these central figures who are in their 20s and 30s.” That focus misses a lot of human experience, and Lelio took pains to show the full spectrum of a woman’s life in the way he approached shooting the film, which includes nudity and a nonchalance around sex.

The only people who see Gloria in her entirety, though, are the viewers. Everyone else, as in any life, Moore pointed out, only gets little bits. Her mother, children and boyfriend each experience different iterations of her. “So there’s a marvelous feeling of looking at her life and thinking about your own.”

The movie rides a fine line between making you feel sorry for Gloria and inspired by her. How audiences read her is a Rorschach test of sorts for how they think about single women and their capacity for happiness in a society that rarely celebrates being alone. Moore said she talked about this idea with her friends and daughter, too, when it came to shaping the character.

“There’s nothing tough about Gloria, and sometimes people talk about female characters as being tough or strong or powerful. I’m always like, I don’t like those words. I don’t know who those people are. That idea of being impermeable, that’s not very human. What’s interesting about Gloria is that resilience when you allow pain and shame and difficulty to penetrate you, and you still manage to move forward and find a way to be.”

Lelio said he made some adjustments in adapting the film for American audiences — Los Angeles required different details. Her character remains a collage of women from his own life, complete with oversized glasses and streaky blonde highlights.

“I grew up surrounded by women, my grandmother, my mother, her friends. I was the minority, and I always loved it,” he said. “Somehow all that turned into this strong desire to make female portraits.”

Gloria, he said, is more or less of his mother’s generation, even though she is younger than his mother in real life. “She was my main first source of discovery of what it’s like becoming older for a woman in life, to see the violence of that process in a youth obsessed society,” Lelio, now 44, said. “I was always listening to her stories, laughing with her, but also realizing that what she and her friends are going though is also really hard.”

Hollywood hasn’t always ignored stories like Gloria’s. Lelio pointed to a period in the 1970s when movies like “An Unmarried Woman,” starring Jill Clayburgh, and films by John Cassavetes starring Gena Rowlands took on such subjects. “There was a moment and that era of cinema was a big influence of Gloria Bell, it’s not that it was never there, it just got lost,” he said.

For the most part the men in the film come up short. They are stunted characters who consistently fail Gloria. John Turturro was hesitant at first to take on the role of her boyfriend, Arnold, who can’t commit, but said he appreciated the idea that like so many people he knows, his character keeps trying.

“It’s like in a Chekhov play,” Turturro said. “People try, but life sometimes takes over; we’re all still primitive in lots of ways and we all still do childish things.”

The fact that the movie doesn’t revolve around a male character was not only appealing, “it’s radical in fact.” He also said it made sense to focus on middle age. “When you’re facing questions about mortality, loneliness, your parents death, your children, and it’s really, really complicated time in women’s lives.”

It’s a subject area that Lelio plans to keep probing, at least for a while: “I feel moved by the idea of telling stories about women and creating complex portraits of them. It’s as simple as that.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="888acde8-22f9-44d7-b3e5-72267637f074" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/movies/julianne-moore-gloria-bell.html">The New York Times</a>.

Making room on the big screen for a woman over 50

Set in a hazily lit Los Angeles, the new version stars Julianne Moore as a funny, irrepressibly optimistic and deeply flawed divorcée who in the course of the film does her best at navigating the day-to-day drama of middle age on her own.

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Julie Bloom

Articles written by the author

Stumbling Upon Art in the Darkness

Making room on the big screen for a woman over 50