Interview: Sally Struthers, Regional Theater Icon, on the New Play Written Just for Her

Sally Struthers credits her role in the new play An Old-Fashioned Family Murder to one unforgettable performance in which she “got knockered and swung from a chandelier,” winning over playwright Joe DiPietro on the spot.

After catching her comedic turn in a regional production of his musical, Nice Work if You Can Get It, Tony Award winner DiPietro wrote Murder with Struthers in mind. The new play comes to George Street Playhouse (through November 2) after a sold out run at Kansas’s New Theatre, where two-time Emmy winner Struthers began perfecting her take on Shirley Peck, the comedic mystery’s sharply humble matriarch.

Struthers spoke with TheaterMania about her illustrious career as a performer that you know from All in the Family and Gilmore Girls, and what keeps her on stage at the age of 78.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What makes the character perfect for you?
Shirley Peck takes the cake. She’s unassuming, smart, and hilarious. Joe has constructed the play in a way where the audience sees what’s coming. It’s delicious to play. Audiences loved it at the New Theatre, so now we bringing it to George Street, Joe’s favorite place to debut his latest pieces.

Doing it here feels completely new to me. The audience is much closer to our faces because it’s a smaller theater. Every little twitch can be seen and that makes me nervous. This has been a challenge. I’m 78 years old and the file cabinet that is my brain is pretty full and doesn’t hold a bunch of new information!

Yet you continue to excel at work in shows that require so much physicality and memorization, like Hello, Dolly!, Nice Work if You Can Get It, and Crazy For You.
There are two reasons for coming back to the stage. One is that I need to work, or I can’t pay my bills. The other is, I truly believe that after losing my mother to Alzheimer’s following a nine-year journey, keeping the brain stupefied, scared, active, and constantly grasping for things, is keeping it awake. I’m always scared out of my mind that I’m going to be a deer in the headlights on the stage.

I would be done with it now if it weren’t for the fact that I literally don’t know how to do anything else. I never even took typing in high school. The job of being an actor has been quite a ride—exciting, while at times embarrassing, painful, and thrilling. When you’re pushing 80 years old, you sometimes think it would be nice to hang up your skates, but I realize I really can’t, and I think that’s a gift from the universe telling me I have to keep going. If you rest, you rust.

Are you able to relate to any of the familial chaos in An Old-Fashioned Family Murder?
I can relate to the two sisters in the play. They have a difficult relationship. I think whether you have two siblings in the family, or there are seven children, there’s always problems between siblings. I have always been such an out-in-front human being, so I cannot completely relate to someone holding herself back, like Mrs. Peck. When I was in kindergarten, Mrs. McDonald wrote a note to my mother on my report card saying, “I appreciate Sally’s joy, but please tell her she doesn’t need to get on her desk and entertain the class when I leave the classroom.” I didn’t know that I could parlay that into a career as a performer.

Which of your many stage roles have been most impactful?
The first time I got to play Dolly Levi I felt a certain triumph in stepping into the shoes of legendary women that came before me. I was so proud of myself the first time I did it in Minnesota, because by opening night I had memorized some of her herculean soliloquies. Another one that sticks with me was Golde in Fiddler on the Roof. I really took that seriously because that is a beloved musical about some of my favorite people on earth: people of the Jewish faith.

At the end of the first day rehearsing Fiddler, the director asked, “Why are you talking so fast playing Golde?” It bothered me that he found a problem with the way I was speaking. I thought about it all night and realized I was doing it because I had been doing Gilmore Girls for several years, and Amy Sherman-Palladino had asked us all to talk fast so she wouldn’t have to cut anything in her scripts. I went back to the director and said, “I promise, I will slow down.”

When you look back on your career, what are you most proud of and what would you do differently?
I am most proud of the longevity of my career. I’m not quite sure how it has happened that in a business that does not need or respect women when they pass 40, I have continued to work consistently. I believe a lot of it is literally sheer luck. I would change the way I silenced myself in uncomfortable or unhappy situations as a performer when I didn’t speak up but I should have. I look back and say, “I should have told someone.”