Mare Winningham On The Dysfunctional Holiday Drama of ‘Cult of Love’
The scrim that drapes the stage when you enter the Hayes Theater has a frosty effect—you don’t have to consult your Playbill to know the setting is Christmas Eve. Scenic designer John Lee Beatty has presented his favorite battlefield—the great American living room—and lighting designer Heather Gilbert has cheered the place up with colored lights decorating various nooks, crannies and borders about the house, as well as the Christmas tree. You almost want to break into “Silent Night.”
The 100-minute one-act that follows, Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love (running through February 2nd), is no silent night. A bombastic outburst of grudges and resentments that have been accumulating all year long and are now ripe for unloading. The stockings have indeed been hung by the chimney with care, but they’re for children who are now grown and couldn’t care less.
Four siblings have dutifully returned—as in years past—to the scene of last year’s anguish: their parents’ Connecticut farmhouse. The head of the household, Bill Dahl (David Rasche) has pretty much checked out, treating outbursts of genuine hatred with love hugs. Wife Ginny (Mare Winningham) is conspicuously in the driver’s seat and flooring it.
At her very first reading, Winningham realized she was the nightmare before Christmas—and loved it! “I thought, ‘This is going to be fun,’” she tells Observer. “My first response to the play was that this playwright is really getting a lot of laughter out of serious dysfunction problems. I thought, ‘Well, it’s called Cult of Love, so there has to be a leader—and it seems to be me.’”
This little cult leader makes things difficult for everyone in the play, using what Winningham calls “the tool kit of a narcissist” to accomplish her goals. “Anyone looking for unconditional love will recognize how conditional Ginny’s version of it is. It’s about her. Every parent should want their child to go off and get free and be themselves and find their way. Ginny is trying to keep them close and keep them attached, under the guise of love—and it’s not, I think, a healthy love.”
She pulls her “four babies” back every year for an annual photograph, and she is not above legislating their behavior, calling a loudmouth to help her in the kitchen when the conversation heads in the wrong direction. “That’s one of the tools of a cult leader to control,” says Winningham. “Another is infantilizing—keeping them babies—using anger and an overemotional response to things.”
Inevitably, it’s a home of broken Dahls. The oldest, Mark (Zachary Quinto), can’t find his niche in this world, failing first as a priest, then as a lawyer; his wife blames their miscarriages on his false starts. Evie (Rebecca Henderson), child number two, brings her pregnant lesbian wife home and resents the homophobic vibes she gets from her sister, Diana (Shailene Woodley), and her Episcopal priest husband; she has caught too much of his religion and has short-circuited on it, fancying herself a prophet, talking in tongues, getting them both kicked out of the church. That’s another unemployment.
While all this sound and fury are being displayed, Ginny brings out a punchbowl of Manhattans for additional fuel and urges everyone to drink up—before Johnny (Christopher Sears), the youngest, arrives. “He’s the one who got away,” Winningham says. “But look at the cost: he tried to kill himself, he did heroin. Now, he’s recovering and knows enough to have parameters, enough to stay away.” When the chronically late Johnny does arrive, he’s with a girl he found in recovery and is sponsoring. Then, the musical merriment and verbal mayhem resume like new.
That mayhem presented its challenges. “It’s a difficult play to memorize,” Winningham admits. “Lots of dialogue overlaps. You can’t really settle into acting because you’re also listening to another conversation that has your cue. You’re having a conversation, but you’re not really dealing with your scene partner. They told us at the beginning, ‘You’re going to find this very tricky. You wonder how you’ll ever get comfortable, but it’s almost like playing in the orchestra. You learn your part. You hear the other parts, and, at some point, it will jell. You’ll become part of a beautiful symphony.’”
Winningham has never been shy about accepting difficult or different roles. Her first Tony-nominated performance was for playing the lone female among male transvestites in Harvey Fierstein’s 2014 Casa Valentina, the supportive wife of a cross-dressing Patrick Page. She gave her second Tony-nominated performance in 2020, in Conor McPherson’s dramatic setting of Bob Dylan songs, Girl from the North Country. She was wife to the proprietor of a dreary guesthouse in Duluth, MN, suffering from a form of dementia which propels her from catatonic detachment to uninhibited outbursts that were difficult to maintain. “We worked on this thing for four years,” she says, “but I loved every minute of it and was sad when it ended.”
Film-wise, she was one of the Georgetown grads in 1985’s St. Elmo’s Fire, a film that launched a galaxy of stars still with us (Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, et al). A New York Magazine cover story identified those actors as The Brat Pack. The label stuck and stymied them.
“I never felt the sting of that,” Winningham claims, “but I know it did affect their lives and careers. They talk about it in Andrew McCarthy’s book.” (That would beMcCarthy’s memoir, Brat: An ‘80s Story, which he turned into a documentary you may have seen on Hulu this summer.) “They felt it damaged their reputations. They had every right to feel upset about that article. It painted a picture of them that wasn’t true—that they were some entitled bratty people, and they weren’t. They really cared about their work. I escaped all that. I was in a different world. I was a little older and had children.”
She also had a TV career. In 1980, she won a Best Supporting Actress Emmy for the Amber Waves TV movie and three years later was part of the epic miniseries The Thorn Birds. She collected another Best Supporting Actress Emmy in 1998 for the biopic George Wallace (beating out Angelina Jolie, also nominated for her part in the same TV movie).
At the end of 2021, she struck up a romance with a friend of 35 years, fellow actor Anthony Edwards—and that led to the altar during the pandemic. “Tony always likes to say that we got married between ‘the insurrection and the inauguration,’” Winningham says.
A happy consequence of this union is what Winningham calls “a beautiful blending of families. Tony’s four children are in their late 20’s-early 30’s. My four are in their late ‘30’s-early 40’s.” All are expected over for Christmas—plus spouses and friends. That’s twice the number onstage for Cut of Love, though doubtless with a more happy outcome.