My guest today is Kathryn Grody, an actress and writer who has been on the podcast previously as one half of the irrepressible double act she’s formed with her husband, Mandy Patinkin.
That episode is one of my favorites and one of the most popular with listeners, so when I saw that Kathryn had a new run of her latest one-woman show, The Unexpected 3rd, I wondered, What would it be like to interview Kathryn solo?
Talking to Mandy and Kathryn is a very freewheeling experience and in the episode I did with them, I only asked a handful of questions from my patented Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That list, as most of the time we were just following our curiosities … So I wanted to really dig in with Kathryn on all that other important life stuff that we didn’t quite get to previously.
My guest today is Kathryn Grody, an actress and writer who has been on the podcast previously as one half of the irrepressible double act she’s formed with her husband, Mandy Patinkin.
That episode is one of my favorites and one of the most popular with listeners, so when I saw that Kathryn had a new run of her latest one-woman show, The Unexpected 3rd, I wondered, What would it be like to interview Kathryn solo?
Talking to Mandy and Kathryn is a very freewheeling experience and in the episode I did with them, I only asked a handful of questions from my patented Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That list, as most of the time we were just following our curiosities … So I wanted to really dig in with Kathryn on all that other important life stuff that we didn’t quite get to previously.
In preparation for our chat, I read the book version of her first one-woman show, A Mom’s Life, which ran at Joe Papp’s Public Theater more than 35 years ago, and watched the version of The Unexpected 3rd that she originated last year at the New York Theatre Workshop.
The Unexpected 3rd, which Grody changes in some small way for every performance, is about time and age and family, about joy and beauty as acts of resistance, and about the necessity of continued evolution. Grody, who is about to turn 80, is a force of nature, a performer with remarkable energy and physicality, and also someone with an uncanny knack for capturing the messiness of human experience – the funny, sometimes horrific nature of family life and the world we live in ...
Grody and I spoke just hours before she was due to decamp to New Jersey to start rehearsals for this new run of the show, and in that very specific moment we spoke about: string theory and parallel universes, the joys of wandering, a very memorable biking vacation through Ireland (that Mandy all but forced to her go on!), how humor miraculously helped her father survive the Normandy D-Day landings, why she prefers Sherman Oaks to Paris, the huge impact losing her parents in her mid 20s had on her, and much more.
The Unexpected 3rd runs at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, until November 1, and for anyone not within range of there you should of course be listening to Kathryn and Mandy on their delightful podcast, Don’t Listen to Us.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and our new theme music is “Partly Cloudy Days” by Oscar Louis.
Oscar Louis’s band Nowhere Else to Be has their debut album dropping December 4 – go follow them now!
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Next week on Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, my guests are partners in life and filmmaking Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson …
