Garden of Ediths

A MAYSLES FILM MAKES ITS STAGE DEBUT

Would you bring my little radio? ... I have got to have some professional music," says Edith Bouvier Beale in the 1976 cult-classic documentary Grey Gardens. And now she will, as Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Doug Wright, composer Scott Frankel, lyricist Michael Korie, and director Michael Greif have transformed the Maysles brothers' film into a musical, opening this month at New York's Playwrights Horizons, and starring Mary Louise Wilson as Edith Bouvier Beale—the sister of Jackie O's father, "Black Jack" Bouvier—and Christine Ebersole as her aspiring-actress daughter, Little Edie. In the 1970s the Maysles brothers shot 60 hours of film of the two women living as recluses at Grey Gardens, their mansion in East Hampton, in squalid conditions, with innumerable cats, piles of trash, and, for a time, no running water. "Maybe Big Edie was a narcissist who needed an audience or maybe she provided a safe haven for a daughter who was unable to cope with the real world," suggests Frankel. "Either way, it's a complex family romance," says Wright. Notified of the musical by Albert Maysles before her death, in 2002, Little Edie reportedly said, "It's perfect. My whole life is a musical."

A. M. HOMES