The healing power of humor is not just for us normal folks. As it turns out, it can even help celebrities deal with their problems too! (heavy sarcasm) Speaking of her new role in the musical Nunsense, actress Salley Struthers speaks to how humor has helped her get through the tough times in her life.
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By Dan Craft
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Three months into her 60th year, Archie Bunker’s “little girl” has never forsaken the comedy habit — the essential one that, she says, saved her at a time when all she wanted to do was weep. | Craft: ‘Nunsense’ owes it all to Bloomington-Normal
From “All in the Family’s” Gloria Stivic to “The Gilmore Girls’” Babette Dell, laughter has been the best medicine for Sally Struthers.
Without it, who knows what her ultimate prognosis might have been back in the days of sadness?
“All I know is, I couldn’t stop crying,” Struthers says of the turning point in her life that led her from despair to joy.
It makes perfect sense, then, that the actress’ career-long comedy habit has been externalized via the costume she wears in her current endeavor: playing dizzy, habit-clad Reverend Mother Regina, the ex-circus performer who lords it over, so to speak, the Little Sisters of Hoboken.
Mother and Sisters are, of course, the beloved denizens of “Nunsense,” the touring version of which is poised to offer a couple hours of comedy communion Friday night at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts.
As fans of “Nunsense” well know, Hoboken’s Little Sisters need lording over from Mother Regina, since 52 of their number have succumbed to food poisoning … and since there are only sufficient funds to bury 48 … and since the unlucky four are still down in the deep-freeze, turning blue while awaiting the benefits of a fund-raising variety show.
All because the Little Sisters had to splurge on that new high-def plasma TV!
Struthers’ interview with GO! begins almost like a vignette straight out of “Nunsense”:
She’s on a bus leaving Toledo, Ohio.
The bus is loaded down with around a half-dozen more actresses playing nuns.
The cell phone purchased at a local grocery store for interviews has konked out.
They’re using the cheap phone, notes Struthers, so the actresses don’t have to waste the personal minutes on their own phones yakking about dead nuns in the freezer.
The tour manager has had to make an emergency purchase of spare minutes to ensure that the interview show goes on.
“These are hard economic times for everybody, even for everyone on this bus,” Struthers offers matter-of-factly as the freshly purchased minutes kick in. “None of us working as much as we’d like to, so here we sit on the bus doing one-night-stands.”
But — and it’s a big but: “Then we get off the bus and do the show and we see and hear audiences laughing every night, and we realize everyone is looking for some escape that doesn’t take a high I.Q. It’s just a simple funny plot with singing and dancing nuns. And all of us drain every ounce of humor out of it.”
Ah, that laughter-as-medicine thing again.
Thanks to the Dan Goggin play’s loose structure, Struthers assures her fans the script has been tweaked in her direction, with several references to “All in the Family.” “They do that for every star who does the play,” she adds.
Does breaking the fourth wall like that disrupt the nunsense?
“It doesn’t matter,” Struthers says. “This isn’t Chekhov. Everyone knows it’s Sally Struthers up there.”
In fact, everyone knows it’s Sally Struthers wherever she goes, whatever she does.
“I’m well aware that whenever I’m in the theater and audiences are looking at me, that they feel close to me, as if they really know who I am. That’s because I’ve been in their homes and their living rooms and bedrooms and kitchens, and that makes me a member of their family.”
Still, anyone who hasn’t seen one of the actress’ first credits — a nude bedroom romp with Jack Nicholson and another actress in the 1970 classic, “Five Easy Pieces” — might be a little startled at how Archie Bunker’s “little girl” got her start.
“I was horrified,” she insists. “It took a lot of persuasion from the director to talk me into doing that — I mean I’m the one who, when it’s time to go into the dressing room with the other women in ‘Nunsense,’ has to go into the bathroom just to put her habit on.”
Still, she’s immensely proud of “Five Easy Pieces,” as she is with most everything she’s done over the nearly 40 years since, including her work with the Christian Children’s Fund and its crusade on behalf of kids in developing countries.
It all began straight out of the womb: “As my mom says, however grammatically incorrect, I was born ‘with funny.’”
An urge to entertain “with funny” followed her to school (“I got a report card saying ‘tell Miss Struthers it’s not her job to entertain the students when I leave the classroom’”).
And it thrived at home, too: “We had one of those TVs in a big cabinet and when it went on the fritz, the TV repairmen came and took the screen out,” she recalls. “All that was left was cabinet.”
Guess who climbed into the cabinet and entertained the family with some live TV? “It was an idiosyncratic and insane need to make people laugh,” she says.
Even so, by high school, Struthers decided she was going to be doctor because, she says, she was one of daddy’s two little girls and felt a compulsion to please him accordingly.
“At the end of high school, I had an emotional breakdown, and I couldn’t stop crying,” Struthers says. “I would get a shot to put me to sleep for 12 hours, and then I would wake up and cry the next 12 hours. I was distraught, grabbing at straws to find something that would make me stop crying.”
In retrospect, she realizes her attempts to please her father came at the expense of her own mental well-being. It was her mother, she says, “who made me realize I could do something instead of trying to make father proud of me because he never had a son.”
At her mom’s urging, Struthers gave up her medical dreams (“I finally realized I couldn’t work on cadavers; I had enough troubles with frogs in biology class”) and signed up for acting school.
Not too many years later, there she was at an audition for the role of Archie Bunker’s “little girl” on “All in the Family,” with Rob Reiner cast as her husband, Mike.
Among the four finalists for the role was Reiner’s live-in mate at the time, Penny Marshall, “who looked like Jean Stapleton’s (Edith Bunker) daughter.” Because of all that, Struthers was certain Marshall would land the role.
“I felt defeated already, but I went in and did it — and I got it” — much to her everlasting shock. “I waited a year later to ask (producer) Norman (Lear) if I got the part because I was the best. He said, ‘actually, we decided we wanted to make Gloria daddy’s little girl and you have the round face and eyes like Archie.’”
Daddy’s little girl to the end — but this time there were no tears. Just laughter that began nearly 40 years ago, with no end, she promises, in sight.
“I’m truly grateful for that fearlessness, that overwhelming desire to hear people laugh,” says Sally Struthers as she boards the bus for another night of pure “Nunsense.”
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