Jessica Lange on playing 'wildly emotional characters' and finding roles that still fit

Jessica Lange began her Broadway career playing Blanche DuBois in a 1992 revival of "A Streetcar Named Desire." It was a challenge the two-time Oscar winner admits she wasn't ready for.

"I was very naive," she said via Zoom from New York, where she's starring in Paula Vogel's "Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions." "It was my first Broadway play and I stepped into this colossal play and character. I don't want to shift anything, but I needed help and I didn't get it. I wish I had more guidance. Someone to explain to me what it's like to be on stage — and then the first thing you tackle is Blanche DuBois. I mean, Jesus."

Lange didn't let the "Streetcar" experience stand in the way of her theatrical ambitions. Since Blanche, she has stepped into the historic roles of two larger-than-life mothers on Broadway and in the West End: Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" and Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night." (For her portrayal of Mary in O'Neill's lacerating family drama, she won a Tony Award.)

In "Mother Play," a Second Stage world premiere at Broadway's Hayes Theater, Lange is taking on another maternal quagmire: Phyllis, an alcoholic mother raising on her own two children, whose queer identities she would like to squelch. Like "The Glass Menagerie" and "Long Day's Journey Into Night," Vogel's drama is a deeply personal play, the work of an artist unpacking those sealed boxes from the past that contain the most forbidding family secrets.

Lange's Tony nominated performance is one of the most memorable of Broadway's busy spring season. Notably, it's the first time she's originated a role