Libby Skala - Herald News Interview

HERALDNEWS

Sunday, August 14, 2005

A relationship comes to life in play about Lilia Skala

By ED BEESON

HERALD NEWS

Most memoirs sit on shelves and collect dust. Libby

Skala's comes to life on a spotlighted and sparsely

decorated stage.

Skala, an Englewood native, is the writer, director

and star of "Lilia!," a critically acclaimed one-woman

play based on her memories of her grandmother,

the late, Academy Award-nominated actress Lilia

Skala.

While most people imagine memoirs as books,

"Lilia!," which Skala developed nearly a decade ago,

certainly fits the description. It is, on one hand, a

granddaughter's glowing tribute to the willful woman

who escaped Nazi rule to become a revered star of

the American stage and screen for nearly 50 years.

On the other hand, "Lilia" examines how that same

woman, a towering presence by any estimation,

related to her young granddaughter - Skala herself -

as though she was a reed to be bent.

Most audiences might remember Lilia Skala for her

Oscar-nominated work in "Lilies of the Field," the

1963 movie in which she played the indomitable

Mother Superior Maria, alongside Sidney Poitier.

She was featured in dozens of other films, television

series, Broadway plays and musicals, including Special to the Herald News

"House of Games," playwright David Mamet's film Libby Skala is pictured as a child with her

directorial debut, Lorraine Hansberry's "Les Blancs" grandmother, the famous actress Lilia Skala

and "Flashdance."

Her acting career began under unusual circumstances, as "Lilia!" reveals. After becoming Austria's first female architect, Lilia Skala dropped everything to become an actor, her lifelong dream. Somehow, she managed to become a star of the East European stage before Hitler swept through the region.

Skala relates this history on stage by adopting the voice and mannerism of her grandmother. She melts into the role and mimics with uncanny ease her grandmother's tight Viennese accent, her idiomatic grammar and proud utterances.

"Everything she said, you remembered, because it

had such depth to it, such life experience," says

Skala, who now lives on New York's Upper West

Side. "She's such an inspiration to people - she

doesn't take old age lying down. She always wanted

to be at the top of her game."

The play's second half is its strongest. Here, Skala

introduces herself as a character, and she flips

effortlessly between the voice of her grandmother

and her own girlish chirp, which matures as the play

reaches its finale, a farewell phone conversation

between Skala and her grandmother. Lilia Skala

died in December 1994 at age 98.

The play shows Lilia Skala as a nurturing figure to

her granddaughter, but never a tender one. "She had

a fierce love. It was 'I Love You!' " Skala says. "She

was also very tough. ... She was not a cuddly

person."

Skala says if she cried over a stubbed thumb, her

grandmother would scream, "How can you cry at a

thing like that! Did you know what we went through

when we came to this country?"

Photos special to the Herald News

In the play, a teenage Skala rehearses a sonnet Libby Skala in her one-woman memoir/play

from Shakespeare's "12th Night" with her grand- "Lilia!" Below, a poster for the show, in

mother. At that point, she had decided she wanted which she has toured extensively.

her grandmother's footsteps and become an actor.

It was a tough mountain to climb.

The young Skala delivers the sonnet without

passion. Lilia Skala quickly recommends her

granddaughter become a sculptor instead.

She browbeat her granddaughter and re-read the

lines to her, as she thought they should be read,

with all the subtle wordplays expressed. It is both a

lesson and an intimidation.

"I definitely run up against the standards that my

grandmother lived by," Skala says. Once Lilia

Skala got a script, she dropped everything -

including body weight - to learn it inside out. "She

wouldn't eat. She wouldn't go to the grocery store.

She would lose pound after pound, learning every

word."

She would wake in the middle of the night and recite

her lines while half-asleep. She would study each

word as if it were a diamond. "She would say,

'That's the only way you can do it,' " Skala says,

her voice rising, "and I don't have that level of

concentration. And I would feel guilty for not being

able to do that."

Others, like Skala's sister and friends, would feel

that way, too. They quickly abandoned their acting

careers and changed their ambitions. Skala, however, did not.

In 1995, she was taking an acting class when her teacher asked her to improvise a scene as a person she found fascinating.

She dipped into her memory bank and brought out the voice of an older woman. It was the voice of her grandmother, of course, and with it she recalled the humiliation her grandmother felt when she came to New York City an empty-handed refugee. Circumstance forced her to take a job in a zipper factory, a low status for a European actress. Lilia Skala was reduced to an ordinary woman.

The audience applauded and Skala's teacher encouraged her to develop a play about her grandmother's life, a daunting task at first. "How do you encapsulate 98 years in an hour and a half on stage?" Skala asks.

Her teacher replied, "Just write down every dialogue

you can remember."

Memories compelled her. Skala transformed these

into three-page scripts, which she would perform

before her class. "The writing happened on my feet,

in a way," Skala says. The audience's response

gave her not just a barometer of the play, but the

courage to continue. "I think if I had been cloistered

in a room somewhere, I don't think I would trust

myself that this (play) would be compelling," she

says.

It took several years to complete the play, which