Marsha Mason juggles stage with farming
Deborah Baker

SANTA FE, N.M.—Marsha Mason has been growing herbs on an organic farm in northern New Mexico for a decade, juggling the demands of the land with her big-city commitments on stage and screen. Now she’s trying to sell the 250-acre, riverside property. She plans to buy something close to New York, where she opens next month off-Broadway in “A Feminine Ending,” a new play by Sarah Treem. It’s time to downsize and simplify, the 65-year-old actress said.
“I would like to have more time to just sit and take in the view and smell the roses, instead of worrying about whether or not the crop’s going to be OK,” she said. “The grasshoppers this year nearly put me away.” Mason’s company, Resting in the River, makes skin-care products and wellness sprays from her lush, colourful fields of herbs along the Rio Chama near Abiquiu, about an hour north of Santa Fe.
The four-time Academy Award nominee, Emmy and Golden Globe winner found the former cattle ranch through a neighbouring property owner, fellow actor Shirley MacLaine. A hands-on grower and a longtime advocate of alternative therapies, Mason plans to keep the product line for now and may even try growing some of the herbs on the East Coast. She’s been eyeing property in the Hudson Valley. She’ll also keep a home in New Mexico, probably closer to Santa Fe, where she plans to stay active in creative and community endeavours.
Much of her work in recent years has been in the East, including “Steel Magnolias” on Broadway in 2005, and “Wintertime” off-Broadway in 2004. Last year, she had the title role in “Hecuba” at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. “A Feminine Ending,” directed by Tony Award winner Blair Brown, runs Oct. 4 through Nov. 11 at Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theatre.
“I love that it’s a new play, and it’s a very bright, smart writer,” said Mason, who was intrigued by the theme, the “can-you-have-it-all” dilemma facing today’s young women.
Treem, a 2005 graduate of the Yale School of Drama, describes the play as a “bittersweet comedy” about an aspiring composer who is trying to decide whether to marry her rocker boyfriend just as her parents are divorcing. Mason plays the mother.
“I never thought I’d get a chance to work with her,” said Treem, who has long admired Mason’s film work. “She’s an actress that sort of understands comedy in her bones, and her comic timing is just impeccable. So it’s thrilling as a writer to get to work with somebody who just gets it, without anybody having to say anything,” Treem said.
Brown, who has acted in more than 50 plays and done extensive film and TV work, particularly on “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd,” said it’s a treat to work with a peer.
“There’s a kind of shorthand that’s very different. We’ve all had these experiences in show business, we’ve had these experiences as women. There’s a lot to draw on,” Brown said. Mason, she said, is daring, inventive “and will try anything.” “She has such depth of feeling she can call on at any time. She has such intelligence. And then, you know, she’s a great comedian. It’s very rare to find all of that in someone.”
Mason said while she has made a few films in recent years, the stage offers a greater variety of roles and the opportunity “to broaden people’s perceptions of what you’re capable of doing.” Women tend to get more typecast in movies and television, she said. And for older women, “the parts aren’t there. They’re just not there.”
Mason recalls how she was pigeonholed as the prostitute-with-the-heart-of-gold after 1973’s “Cinderella Liberty” — for which she got a best actress Oscar nomination — and then as the muse of playwright Neil Simon, her husband at the time, with whom she collaborated on five films. Her other Oscar nods were for three films with Simon scripts, “The Goodbye Girl” in 1977, “Chapter Two” in 1979 and “Only When I Laugh” in 1981. The couple divorced in 1983.
“I wound up in New Mexico by just saying, ‘I can’t deal with L.A. any more,’” Mason recalled in a recent interview of her 1993 move. “I really just threw the pieces of my life up in the air and wondered where they would come down.”