People’s Light presents Kathryn Grody’s The Unexpected 3rd

Grody’s experience in theater—she began working with Joseph Papp at New York’s Public Theater almost 50 years ago—is evident in the way she continually offers little shocks of delight. Directed by Timothy Near, Grody uses every bit of the stage, and when she rummages in a hollow of the tree trunk to see what’s there, it brings Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days to mind.

The set by Nina Ball, sound by Frederick Kennedy, and lights by Cat Tate Starmer are all so well-attuned that they go unnoticed until they offer a dollop of theater magic. There are gorgeous moments with a graffito, a drawing of a floor lamp, and most movingly, the single knell of a bell when Grody speaks of one of her brothers, senior Buddhist monk Michael Choke Yukon Grody, who died last year.

Unsentimental and smart

Grody begins her monologue with gentle humor, saying she’d decided long ago that “aging didn’t suit my personality.” However, she continues, “In the blink of an eye, clichés are frighteningly accurate now.” The 90-minute talk is an unsentimental, smart stream of consciousness about aging, life, and death that’s never smarmy, despite a Tinkerbell reference that teeters close to the edge.

Grody’s barrage of thoughts is anchored by stories of memories remarkable in their specificity, like one about her second-wave feminist response to her mother’s desire for grandchildren. A sampling of the people and ideas Grody brings up: Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Layers”; the need to believe we do not end when we die; a galactic “collective purr” scientists discovered; Albert Einstein; Philip Roth; her long marriage with Mandy Patinkin and weathering “the brutalities of intimacy”; the handprints at Chauvet-Pont d'Arc cave; Alvin Epstein, with whom she performed Beckett’s Endgame in 2005; the poem Go to the Limits of Your Longing by Rainer Maria Rilke (“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror…”); the word respair, meaning recovery from hopelessness.

A kaleidoscopic play

Grody’s previous solo plays, A Mom’s Life (1990) and Falling Apart…Together (2015) were also autobiographical. The Unexpected 3rd may refer to the latest turning points in Grody’s life, just when she thought her career was ending. She describes feeling grief, both as an actress aging out of steady work and as a parent (“the empty nest felt like quicksand”). Then she and Patinkin spent six months in Cape Town while he was filming Homeland. There, Grody found collaborative theater work that lifted her spirits. In The Unexpected 3rd, she doesn’t mention her inadvertent success with a project that was born during the pandemic, when the younger of their two sons, Gideon Grody-Patinkin, began filming and posting their daily lives.

During the play, Grody tells us that her “mind is a mess,” and that her sons say she talks and feels too much. There lies the show’s one weak spot: afterward, we feel so much about the myriad stories and references that it’s hard to choose the weightiest. The acting is perfection, but the writing could truly sing with a touch more structure. Nevertheless, if there are any tickets still to be had—the extended run (now through October 26) is selling quickly—this kaleidoscopic play is highly recommended.