Fall 2004 Preview

Edie Falco Takes Back ’night, Mother

By Sean Kennedy
Published May 21, 2005

Edie Falco.

(Photo: Courtesy of Nigel Parry)

“I feel very safe exploring some of these darker places, because I’ve been there,” says Edie Falco of her role in ’night, Mother. Though the Sopranos star won’t elaborate, recent history supplies some clues: her split with Broadway co-star Stanley Tucci (in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune), and her bout with breast cancer, broadcast by “Page Six.” “I’m completely fine,” she declares, “but I’m still getting over how angry I am that the Post thought it was so important to tell the world.” Lucky for her she has a new play to think about, the first Broadway revival of Marsha Norman’s dark 1983 Pulitzer winner. In it, she plays Jessie, a divorced, druggy mom who decides that life isn’t worth living, despite the efforts of her mother (Brenda Blethyn) to tell her otherwise. “A part of me thinks, Well, Jesus, why depress everybody?” she says. “But I think there’s a reason we do plays that are sad. It’s like a purging or something. And I feel like, Let me go there so you won’t have to.” Jessie is a polar opposite to the fierce Sopranos character we know and love—and what of it? “Carmela is no more who I am or who I can play than Jessie or anybody else,” she says. “In college, I was constantly cast as the Annie Hall character, goofy and weird and weak. After a while I was like, Am I ever going to get cast as anything else?”