Beth Grant: From Stage to Screen
The way that elite film critics are used to stories being told is different from the way rural audiences are used to hearing them, and vice versa. Maybe that’s part of the reason some critics haven’t warmed yet to Blues for Willadean, the new Del Shores film starring Octavia Spencer, Dale Dickey, and Beth Grant. But the misunderstanding is mutual, says Grant. “I love that term ‘blind spot’ because I think that a lot of film critics have them. But I guarantee you that half of my Georgia relatives, if you took them in to see a mumblecore movie, they would say, ‘What the hell is that?’ Even a brilliant thing like Tiny Furniture—‘What? That’s the worse movie I’ve ever seen.’”
The subject matter of Blues is challenging enough; the film deals with a battered wife struggling to stand up for herself. But the setting itself—a Texas trailer park—is equally difficult for many. Certain filmgoers tend to like their Southerners either buffoonish or evilly racist. “People do not like rednecks,” says Grant. “My experience is they like them really to be down and out and rough and dirty. They don’t see us as multi-dimensional. They don’t see us as complex as we are. It’s a generalization, and I’m embarrassed to make generalizations. But I think it’s kind of true.”
Not that the critics frowning on the film makes much of a dent in Grant’s optimism. She’s been here before with the same director. “Sordid Lives [her first Shores film] didn’t get good reviews either, and it ran for two years in theaters all across the country. I mean, that’s got to be a record. Del is very theatrical. He’s a playwright. I mean, he’s directed a few films, but he’s a playwright. Film critics are geared towards more cinematic approaches. Film is generally supposed to be a story told in pictures. I mean, Hitchcock said, ‘After a screenplay is written, the dialogue is added.’ And so, when you have a unique voice like Del Shores… there’s just nobody like him. He’s going to do it his way. And anything he does is going to be theatrical, it’s going to have music in it. It’s going to have dark humor, it’s going to be a little big vulgar, it’s going to be a little off color and shocking. It’s just the way he is. And so when you go see a Del Shores film, then that’s what you’ve come to expect.”
When Shores approached her about playing a battered wife in the stage play version of Blues for Willadean that preceded the film, she was taken aback: “Anyone who knows me knows that the last thing in the world I am is a victim,” she says with a laugh. But he eventually convinced her to find the strength in Willadean’s character. That was a difficult process. “In this journey of doing the play, I just about had a nervous breakdown developing this part because I try to be very truthful and honest in my work and I try to make it personal, you know. I’m Stanislavski-trained and I believe in making it personal. So I had to find the victim in me. And it was painful. I had to remember—well gosh Beth, what if you’d been in high school and a quarterback or whoever had fallen in love with you and picked you out, the cutest boy in school that everybody wanted. Think you could have been strong? So it became real for me. I got it. I understood it.”
That work didn’t get any easier on Opening Night. “We opened,” she remembers, “and I really wasn’t—I didn’t feel ready to open. In a Del Shores piece, you’ve got this damned dark laughter. So here I am navigating these waters on stage, with these huge laughs. Yet as soon as the laugh’s over, I’ve got to bring them back to the reality of this woman’s situation, that she’s dying. That she’s fighting for breath, for life. I was terrified. I was thinking, I made a mistake, I made a mistake, I shouldn’t have done this. And I remember that first big laugh coming in and you know, they’re applauding our entrances. It was such a relief!”