Mary Testa readily acknowledges that she doesn’t look like at all like Barbara Bush. Her eyes are too large, her face is not as angular, and her nose not as sharp-beaked. But at every performance of “First Daughter Suite,” the acclaimed chamber musical by Michael John LaChiusa at the Public Theater, the veteran actor, who plays the former First Lady, says, “I try to look out from my own eyes as if Barbara Bush’s face were mine, to see what it’s like to look at the world through her eyes.”As imagined by LaChiusa, Barbara Bush’s world view is foreboding, “cold and mean” like the ocean just outside the family home in Kennebunkport, Maine. That’s the setting for the concluding vignette of this meditation on the role of mothers and daughters who’ve occupied the White House. Included in the quirky, at times surreal, musical are Pat Nixon refereeing her bickering daughters, Julie and Tricia, on the day of latter’s White House wedding; Betty and Susan Ford and Rosalynn and Amy Carter in an unsettling fantasia that involves a hostage rescue; and Nancy Reagan trying to reconcile with rebellious daughter Patti, poolside at the home of Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale.In the final act — titled “In the Deep Bosom of the Ocean Buried” — “Bar” is communing with the ghost of her daughter, Robin, who died, at age three, of leukemia. It is the 50th anniversary of this painful episode and her quiet time is constantly being interrupted by Laura Bush’s entreaties to pack in order to depart for an election event on behalf of Barbara’s son, George W. Bush.“Would you please go away?” Bar says with an icy stare. And Testa, even though she has an Italian background far from the precincts of the WASP elite, beautifully captures the privilege and steely authority.The actor recently spoke with ARTINFO about the contradictions and complexities of a woman who is the wife of one President, the mother of another, and is waiting in the wings to see if yet another son is going have a chance to double-down on the troubled family legacy.How do you separate the real Barbara Bush from the character that LaChiusa has created? I don’t think you have to separate it. There’s no way of getting away from the fact that she’s recognizable. What most people are not aware of is the death of her daughter Robin and the loss that this woman went through — the loss of a child that she loved and the disappointment of a son who turned out to be, as she says, mediocre and unpopular. Does your disagreement with her politics interfere?That’s not difficult. I’m playing a human being. As a matter of fact, I started reading a biography and ten pages in, I thought, “I don’t like this woman.” I don’t want to read any more. I’m afraid it would bias me in a way I didn’t want to be. I did watch quite a few interviews to get a semblance of the voice and her style.What did you like about her?She’s withstood a lot of things with a stiff upper lip. She’s created this incredible family and is the driving force behind it. Whether or not you like the politics, it’s a family to be reckoned with. I love the journey that Michael John has created for her, allowing all that loss and pain to bubble up and then to have to push it back down.What does that repression of feelings do to person? You can’t bury stuff like that and expect it to go away. It will morph into cruelty, losing one’s temper. I’m just speaking generally, but you can’t sit on stuff like this. It will come out.How does it come out with her? She’s supremely annoyed that they want her to come back on the campaign trail. She’s really pissed off at her son and blaming him for everything. It’s magnified in her mind because of the day.She’s a haunted woman? Yeah. And there’s this woman, Laura Bush, who just won’t give up. “I’m going to sit with you.” And you sense a crack [in the façade]. There are several interviews in which Barbara Bush is just terrible and dismissive of Laura Bush. And there are stories of how much she makes fun of George W. and how dumb he is. That must be a crazy family. And now, “Jeb!”Do think there’s any camaraderie between Barbara Bush and Laura Bush because they are both First Ladies? A moment of sisterhood? There’s a glimmer of that. But I don’t think she approaches Laura as an equal. Maybe when you’re so hurt over something, it helps to have someone to express it to. And she’s not really comfortable expressing any emotion to anybody. “My husband almost came apart. But I didn’t let him.” No tears! That’s very telling as well.What are the similarities between you and Barbara Bush that you could draw on to create her? She seems a very independent woman even though she created this dynasty. I’m independent and strong and can be just as foreboding and frightening as Barbara Bush. [laughs]. We’ve all experienced disappointment and loss in our life and we all dealt with it in our own way.Can you sympathize with her need to cut herself off emotionally to cope with the public pressures? Sure. I know people who are huge stars and there are people coming at them all the time. There’s an arms-length separation, even with people they know and love.What’s the character’s fatal flaw?I would say in this piece, not being able to see the bigger picture. She treated her son [George W.] terribly. She couldn’t see the person, just the son who didn’t measure up.As an Italian-American, what was key to unlocking the WASP character? Sitting on everything. We as Italians don’t sit on a damn thing! When something pisses me off, or makes me upset or hurts me, I explode and then it goes away. I know several WASP families and they don’t show emotion, that’s not how they’re raised. The mother of a friend of mine was very formidable like Barbara Bush. I was inside her house once and she said, “I smell garlic. Is Mary Testa here?” Can you sense what Barbara Bush wanted out of life? Basically, she wanted an extraordinary family and she got one. But one that’s a huge disappointment to her, and to face that she’s just had to soldier on.
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