DARIEN NEWS~REVIEW

NEW CANAAN NEWS~REVIEW

October 11, 2007

Skala Gets Familial With 'LiLiA! Sunday

By JOHN MORDECAI

jmordecai@bcnnews.com

For Libby Skala, performance is relative.

The former Darien resident will return to

the area to perform one of her one-woman

shows based on the lives of her family

members.

Skala will perform "LiLiA!" at the Lapham

Community Center in Waveny Park in

New Canaan Sunday.  The show is based

on her grandmother, Austrian actress

Lilia Skala.  And Lilia Skala's story is

every bit the inspiration one could imagine;

in her homeland, she reached prominence

not only as a stage actress, but also as

Austria's first female architect.                     Former Darien resident Libby Skala will perform 

                                                                "LiLiA!", a one-person play about her grandmother,

While there is no one building in Vienna        actress Lilia Skala, at the Lapham Community Center

solely designed by her, Lilia Skala                in New Canaan Sunday.

had collaborated with others to draw plans

for the renovation of a farmhouse into an orphanage in the countryside.  She also was involved with home interior design.

Though becoming an architect was hardly her first choice - she chose the profession because she didn't dare tell her parents she wanted to become an actress.

"Her parents thought actresses were the equivalent of prostitutes," Skala said.  "She never even brought it up."

"I saw how she lived through the uncertainty and

made it to the other side.  That's what inspired me."

LIBBY SKALA

ACTRESS, PLAYWRIGHT

It wasn't until after she had married in the late 1920s that she began an acting

career that made her a key player in director Max Reinhardt's theater, touring in

productions across Europe.

But that was before the Nazis invaded.  Skala and her family were faced with

having to flee the country, eventually emigrating to the U.S., and starting over. 

"At that point, people would figure, 'My life is over,' and resort to 'being an

immigrant;' like learning the language and focusing on the future generations,"

Skala said.  "But she was determined and struggled to work through that ...

and the prejudice that being over 40 [years old] is 'over the hill.'"

Her determination paid off.  To make ends meet, the once esteemed actress

and architect became a zipper factory worker in New York.  But she didn't stop

there.

It was thanks to a fellow Austrian immigrant friend who already had an acting

career and an agent that Lilia Skala became a Broadway actress two years

after arriving in the U.S.  Skala was introduced to the agent and presented a

scrapbook of her former acting career in Austria.  It was two years later that

Skala was sent a telegram informing her she was cast as a German-speaking                 Lilia Skala in 1933

maid in a production of "Letters to Lucerne" in 1941.

This led to steady work in theater, film and live television.  Her career took a big turn when she earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for best supporting actress for her role as Mother Maria in the 1963 film "Lilies of the Field."  At the time, she was working for minimum wage as a lost and found clerk at City Center theater in New York City.  Not owning a television, she didn't know what the Academy Awards were and didn't have the money to fly to Hollywood to attend the ceremony.

But once the story of a lost-and-found worker being nominated for an Oscar got into the news, things turned.  Writers for TV shows in Los Angeles offered her roles - flying her out west so she could work and attend the award show.

In "LiLiA!," Libby Skala portrays both herself and her grandmother.  The play tells the story of their relationship, based mostly on dialogue between the two of them.  These conversations are based on the many stories her grandmother told her growing up.

When she got into acting in junior high, her grandmother took her under her wing and became a mentor.  Out of this came much of Skala's influence.

"That was when she shared a lot of those stories of breaking into show business, and it was those stories that made me think it was possible," she said. "I saw how she lived through the uncertainty and made it through to the other side.  I saw that succeeding was not beyond the realm of possibility and that's what inspired me to do what I'm doing now."

The idea for the play originated in an acting workshop in the mid-1990s, when she improvised a scene of her grandmother working in the zipper factory.

"I was in an improv class where I was asked to talk for five minutes about somebody that I found interesting, compelling or fascinating, and I chose my grandmother," she said.

After realizing that her grandmother was the actress Lilia Skala, her teacher, Gary Austin, said, "You have to write a one-woman show about her."

The piece was gradually written and developed piece by piece over the years, performed in segments, as written, before audiences of classmates.

Skala said doing a one-person show suited her well.

"I found that doing a one-person show is in a way so easy because I don't have to coordinate a bunch of people or schedules, I can just show up and tell a story and do all the roles - for some reason that's fun for me," she said.  "It's very bare bones - there are no sets, no props ... it's all up to the imagination of the audience."

One of the defining characteristics of her grandmother was her strong religious beliefs.

"She was very vocal about her faith - more so than I would be comfortable with.  But because it was her, it comes out in the show," she said.  "It's not heavy-handed or preachy, but she's staunch.  That's what gave her the strength to keep going."

"Even people that are not religious would tell me they appreciate it because she's so unabashed in her convictions," she continued.  "She would go on the Merv Griffin show and talk about how God was the one she attributes all her success to." 

It's the against-all-odds optimism, faith and confidence that Libby Skala said she didn't fully inherit from her grandmother.  "One reason I love playing her is that I don't have the same confidence that she had," she said.  "it's extremely fun for me to play someone with those convictions.  And I gain strength from playing her."

Granted, Libby Skala didn't have to endure the same difficulties, namely having to escape from Nazi Europe.  "After that, nothing is impossible," Lilia Skala would say.

Libby Skala has been performing "LiLiA!" since 1999 in venues across the U.S. and Canada.  Her performance for the Winnipeg Fringe Festival won Best Show out of 118 shows by CJUM Radio.  It has also received widespread acclaim from the press in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

Skala's dramatic portrayals of family members didn't stop with her grandmother.  In July of last year, she finished "A Time to Dance," another one-woman play based on her great aunt Elizabeth (Lisl) Polk, Lilia's sister and a pioneer of American dance therapy.  Most of the information Skala obtained while interviewing her for "LiLiA!"

"I recorded about three 90-minute tapes asking her about my grandmother," she said.  "But every answer she gave seemed to be about her.  And I had these stories that were equally as compelling.  She had a certain frankness, humor and approach to life that [Grandmother] didn't."

Skala pieced the play together while on a two-week artist retreat in the Berkshires.  She transcribed the tapes and started doing scenes in front of other artists.  As it happens, most of them had worked as choreographers, and so she decided to incorporate dance into the piece.

"I was inspired by the people around me to dance her story - it's storytelling but set to movement.  It just worked," she said.

One of aunt Lisl's opinions was that Skala was wasting her time putting together a one-woman show about her grandmother, who, while known as an actress was hardly "famous" in the bigger sense of the word.

"One person shows are star vehicles.  You're wasting your time!" she told Libby.

"Little did she know that one day there would be a show about her, too," Skala said.  "It goes to show there's no hard and fast rule on what works for a one-person show.  Human behavior is so recognizable that whether someone is famous or not is irrelevant."

Skala said feedback on "A Time to Dance" was positive as well.  It won an award for Best Solo Performer at the London Fringe Festival this year.

She said she'd like to write a book about her grandmother, as well as a screenplay.

Skala recalled her grandmother assisting her with her own acting studies as a teenager.  As she continued her dramatic pursuits, Lilia would ask her granddaughter to write a part for her.

"She felt Hollywood writers didn't know what to do with older women with accents," she said.

Now Skala gets to present that very role herself.

Libby Skala will perform "LiLiA!" at the Lapham Community Center in Waveny Park Sunday at 1:30 p.m.  Visit www.laphamcenter.org or call 594-3620 for more information.

For more on Libby and Lilia Skala and Lisl Polk, visit www.libbyskala.com.

COPYRIGHT © 2007 LIBBY SKALA

Last Updated: 3/4/2009

LIBBY

SKALA

Performer Writer