A More Considered Malaprop
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Afew seasons ago, perpetually saucy playwright Nicky Silver attended the opening of a new show at the Atlantic Theater Company. Planted at the auditorium door like an unofficial usher, he watched as actress Dana Ivey took a seat. “Oh, look,” he chirped, shrill enough for all to hear. “It’s Dana Ivey. This must be an opening night.”
Ms. Ivey uttered not a word, but set her brow and shot Mr. Silver a withering glance from her improbably large brown eyes. It was a classic Ivey take, recognizable to at least two generations of New York theatergoers. The Atlanta-born Ivey – a presence in the theater as substantial and solid as Georgia clay – indeed has been sighted at many a Broadway and Off-Broadway opening. Typically, however, it’s on the other side of the footlights.
Lately, the appearances have been “very thick on the ground,” as Ms. Ivey would say – “Major Barbara” at the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2001, and “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” the next season; “Henry IV” at Lincoln Center Theater in 2003, and now “The Rivals” at the same institution.
In “The Rivals,” Ms. Ivey plays the lexicologically challenged Mrs. Malaprop, the Richard Brinsley Sheridan creation that gave the world the word “malapropism.” It’s the sort of role with which British actresses of a certain age crown their careers, and one indication of the thoroughness of Ms. Ivey’s stage career that this is actually the second time she’s played the tongue-tangled scene-stealer.
“I played it in 1998 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival,” she told me in her spacious Lincoln Center dressing room between shows one recent Saturday. “Roger Rees directed it. At Williamstown we only had two weeks of rehearsal – that’s what that experience is up there. This time, I’ve been able to be more specific about certain things and look at it in more depth. It’s a more considered Malaprop.”
Past Broadway Malaprops have included Mary Boland and the actress known as Mrs. Fiske. Like them, Ivey is a rarity among the Gotham stage’s mature actresses: continually employed and uniformly respected. Her current career peak is perhaps her loftiest, since she burst upon the New York scene in the early 1980s with such a force as to command three Al Hirschfeld caricatures in 18 months (for “Present Laughter,” “Quartermaine’s Terms,” and “Heartbreak House”).
“I think Dana is now getting the kind of recognition she deserves,” said playwright friend and fellow Atlantan Alfred Uhry, who authored “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” two Ivey vehicles. “She’s the top of the New York tree, she and Marian Seldes. When you get to that level, who else is there?”
Periodically during her career, critics have pointed out that Ms. Ivey makes a living playing characters with whom it’s difficult to share a room. On the surface, the point is hard to argue: She has enlivened many a repressed spinster and domineering mother; lots of buns, bustles, and pursed lips. Still, within that scope, she has regularly communicated intelligence, wit, pathos, and depth.
And, significantly, however impossible she may be, one gets the feeling that there’s no one on stage the audience would more want to spend time with, crisp put-downs and all. Call it the Lady Bracknell effect: You don’t want her for your relation, but you don’t want her to leave the stage either.
“She seems to take great glee in what she is doing,” ventured playwright Christopher Durang, whose 1996 comedy “Sex and Longing” is best remembered for the actress’s riotous performance as a starchy, morally indignant senator’s wife. “These judgmental people are often very much enjoying imposing and explaining their opinions.”
Mrs. Malaprop is, of course, all about opinions, ineptly expressed. (“Men are all Bavarians” goes a typical pronouncement). And Ms. Ivey aims to master every syllable of each verdict. “She’s extremely gifted verbally,” said Mr. Durang. “When she has a speech that is 25 lines long, she just knows exactly which sentence to kind of toss off, and which one to underline.”
“Why am I saying this?” is a question Mr. Uhry got used to hearing during rehearsals of “Driving Miss Daisy.”
“And you’ve got to be able to defend it, too,” said Mr. Uhry. “She’s not going to be nice because she’s my friend.”
“We have to know why we’re saying things,” explained Ms. Ivey with a honeyed voice and a pleasant chuckle that seemed to silently scold: “But of course we have to know!” “You have to have every millisecond accounted for. To be really clean in delivery is something that is important to me. If there’s anything that you’re not really sure of, you’ve left a little hole in the thread.”
Words and theater have been in Ms. Ivey’s life since birth. Her mother, a fiercely proud, native-born Atlantan with the melodramatic name of Mary Nell Santacroce, was a speech therapist and one of the last of that dying breed, the prominent regional actress. Over a decades-long career she played dozens of roles (including, surreally enough, the lead in a post-Ivey production of “Driving Miss Daisy”). John Huston once called her “one of the three or four greatest actresses in the world.”
“She was a very dramatic lady,” remembered Ms. Ivey, “an extremely intelligent woman. She’s probably where I get my love of language. She cared inordinately about language. She directed the plays for 20 years at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I grew up seeing the plays she directed. We always had an opening party at our house.”
Did the Great Lady cook for these soirees? Ms. Ivey smiled. “Ohhhhh, no, no, no.” The party menu was Krispy Kreme donuts and coffee.
Mom and dad (physicist Hugh Ivey) divorced when Dana was 13. “It was a pretty scarring experience for me. In Atlanta, Georgia, back then – it was the ’50s -it just wasn’t done. It was hard to live with. I haven’t realized until just lately how hard to live with it was.” Mother remarried, taking architect Dante Santacroce as her husband. (No dull professions in the Ivey clan.)
The Iveys differed from their Southern neighbors in other ways as well. Grandma knew Margaret Mitchell. They were Unitarians. And the entire family, including a younger brother, were vegetarians. Ms. Ivey still is. “I’m an ovo-lacto vegetarian,” she said, meaning she eats eggs and dairy products. “It’s an ethical thing, not a health thing.”
This reporter mentioned that he knows some self-proclaimed vegetarians who eat the egg-laying chicken as well, arguing that the birds are not members of the all-important mammal family. Ivey looked skeptical. “I’m not talking about mammals, I’m talking about life,” she replied, suddenly sounding like a gentler version of a reproving Ivey character.
Her interviewer crumbled a bit. “Well, everyone has different rationales,” came the feeble response.
“Ohhhhh, no, no, no,” returned Ivey, with a grand, slow shake of her head. “You can’t call yourself a vegetarian if you eat chicken. That’s a creature. That’s a living creature.”
No one says “Oh, no, no, no” quite like Dana Ivey.
“The Rivals,” currently in previews, opens December 16 (Lincoln Center Theater, 212-239-6200).