Jane Lowry
Jane Lowry was an American actress primarily known for her theater work on Broadway and regional theater, as well as her singular leading role in Alfred Sole's horror film Alice, Sweet Alice.
Early life
Lowry was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on February 11, 1937, and raised in Wayzata. She graduated with a degree in theater from Northwestern University, studying under Alvina Krause. While at Northwestern, she appeared in a production of Cherry Orchard, directed by Krause.Career
1960sAlthough Lowry made her Broadway debut early on, the bulk of her career and her most interesting roles wound up being on smaller stages both in New York and in regional theaters around the country. As a young actress, she had lamented not fitting the mold for traditional ingénue roles, but her versatility and range allowed her to excel at character parts that became her signature as a performer.
In 1961 Lowry found an unofficial residency in the unlikely setting of a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. Located at 31 Cornelia Street, the Caffe Cino was founded by Joe Cino, a former dancer who initially envisioned a traditional bohemian venue with poetry readings and art exhibitions. However, its reputation wound up being built on the presentation of plays a bold and unconventional move for a coffeehouse, and one that is widely credited with inaugurating the off-off-Broadway theater movement.
Doric Wilson was one of the earliest playwrights to have his work presented at the Caffe Cino. The first was called And He Made a Her, a one-act satire about Adam and Eve that opened in March 1961. Wilson later admitted to recalling little about opening night: "Mostly I remember Lowry's entrance as Eve a vision sheathed in apple green, sensually, elegantly toc toc toc'ing her way ".
Lowry was featured in two more Doric Wilson plays that year: Babel, Babel, Little Tower and Now She Dances! Recalling their collaboration, the author referred fondly to her as "Lady Jane" and "one of Joe Cino's most beloved actresses ". The two would remain friends until Wilson's death in 2011.
1961 also marked Lowry's first mention in the New York Times, for her role in the off-Broadway production The Only Sense is Nonsense. The program consisted of two one-act comedies by the English writer N.F. Simpson; Lowry's half was called The Hole, and critic Louis Calta noted that "Muriel Dooley and Jane Lowry are humorous as the housewives cogitating the clashing natures of their husbands".
Lowry's next role was arguably her biggest stretch so far playing a woman twice her age in This Side of Paradise, based on a 1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and directed by acclaimed acting coach Herbert Berghof. She was cast as the mother of the main character, even though actor Paul Roebling was actually just three years older than Lowry in real life.
Wary of being typecast, Lowry resisted additional offers to play older characters. "If you get just one older part in a season, that's fine, and that's fair", she explained. "But a whole season of parts 60 to 70 years of age and over would not be fair to me. They are nice exercises, but you have to think of the future."
1964 was a milestone year: Lowry made her Broadway debut in Poor Bitos, by the French playwright Jean Anouilh. A bitter political allegory comparing the turmoil of post-WW2 France to the French Revolution, the show had dicey commercial prospects, but producer Harold Prince had admired the London production and imported it to the U.S. Things got off to a promising start with two weeks of sold-out previews, culminating in a thrilling opening night on November 14, 1964. "We couldn't get into our dressing room for 30 minutes because there were so many incredible bouquets of flowers", Lowry recalled.
Disappointingly, the critical response was lukewarm although the Associated Press complimented the "uniformly excellent" ensemble that included "two White Way newcomers, Jane Lowry and Nancy Reardon". Even so, Poor Bitos closed after just 17 official performances.
Lowry returned to Broadway as understudy to Marian Seldes in Edward Albee's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Delicate Balance in 1966–1967. A year later, Lowry had the opportunity to play the same part in the Pittsburgh Playhouse's 1968 production; a local critic noted that "Jane Lowry as the daughter displays waspish conceit in an accomplished way."
Meanwhile, she continued to work in summer stock and repertory theater throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. At the Clinton Playhouse in Summer 1964, a local critic hailed her portrayal of Hannah Jelkes in Night of the Iguana as "one of the best performances of the young season". Two years later, with the Barter Resident Acting Company in Abingdon, Virginia, Lowry's turn as Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible inspired a reviewer to remark that she "brought to the role a perfect combination of tenderness and quiet strength". Lowry was also part of the inaugural company of the Wayside Theatre in Middletown, Virginia in Summer 1963; the 1967 winter season of the Loretto-Hilton Center Repertory Theatre near St. Louis, Missouri; the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis; and summer stock at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in 1974.
1970s
In 1970, Lowry appeared in the first two productions of the brand-new Circle Repertory Company, which had been co-founded by her former Northwestern classmate Marshall W. Mason. The premiere was David Starkweather's A Practical Ritual to Exorcise Frustration After Five Days of Rain; Lowry later admitted that the actors "didn't really believe in this play. We had no idea what it was, although we liked David." The second production was Chekhov's Three Sisters directed by Mason, eleven years after he and Lowry appeared onstage together in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at Northwestern.
In 1973, Lowry scored a personal success in Lanford Wilson's The Hot l Baltimore, another Circle Repertory Company production. As the prostitute Suzy, Lowry was a replacement in the New York cast and then originated the role in the Baltimore production later that year. "Suzy is played by Jane Lowry and she is the best thing in the show", declared Richard Lebherz in the Frederick News-Post. "There is a sincerity in her performance that comes through. As a hooker she probably is a flop because she is hunting for love instead of security and for a hooker that is bad news."
The Baltimore Sun's R.H. Gardner wrote that "the two performances that most won my heart were those turned in by Eunice Anderson, as Millie, and Jane Lowry, as Suzy ... their appeal is compounded by the on-the-nose performances of the Misses Anderson and Lowry, the latter of whom at one point is obliged to appear stark naked a first for Center Stage."
Over the years, critics commented on Lowry's resemblance to another, more famous actress. In reviewing the 1976 off-Broadway play Cracks, Emory Lewis in the New Jersey Record observed that Lowry at age 39 looked "startlingly like a young Eve Arden". Eight years later, Lawrence DeVine in the Detroit Free Press observed that "Miss Lowry is probably weary of hearing how much she reminds one of Eve Arden, but she does and that's a compliment."
Lowry made two movies. She had a small part in Speed is of the Essence, a Michael Sarrazin/Jacqueline Bisset vehicle. By the time the movie was released in 1971, however, significant edits had been made and Lowry's scenes had been excised.
Lowry found a whole new audience with her next movie and her only foray into the horror genre: Alice, Sweet Alice, the story of a masked killer terrorizing a Catholic community in 1961 New Jersey. Backing up her claim that she was "terrific in neurotics", Lowry delivered a full-throttle performance as the bullying Aunt Annie a thoroughly enjoyable "mean" character who ends up on the wrong side of the assailant's knife.
Under its original title Communion, the movie premiered in 1976 at the Chicago International Film Festival. Local critic Roger Ebert called the film "shocking", with "a nice touch for the macabre" and "some splendidly chilling scenes". However, even with Ebert's support and the awarding of a silver plaque at the Chicago festival, the movie seemed destined for obscurity until one of the supporting cast members, who had been ten years old at the time of filming began to attract attention for portraying a child prostitute in the 1978 period drama Pretty Baby. Brooke Shields' fame kept Alice, Sweet Alice alive and allowed it to find an audience.
Lowry's final appearance on a New York stage came in 1979, when she appeared in the New York premiere of Tennessee Williams' A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur at the Hudson Guild Theatre. A four-woman drama with Shirley Knight leading the cast, Lowry played Miss Gluck, a German-speaking woman reeling from the loss of her mother. Richard Eder in the New York Times commented on Lowry's "picture of incomprehensible grief", while The Nation
TV audiences saw Lowry in a variety of guest spots, including the soap operas Ryan's Hope and Love of Life, and the police drama McCloud. She also appeared in the 1976 mini-series The Adams Chronicles; an unaired TV movie called Run, Valerie, Run; and a 1981 children's after-school special called My Mother Was Never a Kid.
1980s
From 1980 on, Lowry performed almost exclusively on regional stages and mostly at Meadow Brook Theatre, a Detroit-area venue where Lowry appeared in at least eleven productions between 1980 and 1991. Neil Simon's Chapter Two, Arthur Miller's All My Sons, Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic, and Noël Coward's Present Laughter and Hay Fever were among the plays that featured Lowry at Meadow Brook. Most of the productions were directed by Terry Kilburn, Meadow Brook's erstwhile Artistic Director and Lowry's longtime friend.
Between 1980 and 1988, Lowry also appeared in three different productions of A Summer Remembered, by Charles Nolte, who coincidentally spent most of his childhood in Lowry's hometown of Wayzata. A "gently sentimental memoir", the play told the story of an extended family that gathers, possibly for the last time, at a summer home in northern Minnesota.
Lowry's last role was A.R. Gurney's What I Did Last Summer, performed at Meadow Brook in January 1991.
Retirement
After retiring from acting in her early 50s, Lowry found another creative outlet in writing. She was a longtime member of the Advanced Poetry Workshop at The New School, under the tutelage of Elaine Equi and Patricia Carlin; and in 2015, she published a collection of poems titled Who Are We?, where she shared observations about nature and memories of people and places from her early life in Minnesota.She also enjoyed traveling, and just weeks before her death had visited friends in Palm Springs, California.
While Lowry never forgot her midwestern roots, she considered herself a New Yorker and she loved New York City her home for 60 years. She was especially fond of Greenwich Village, and from 1978 until the end of her life she lived on West 10th Street just minutes away from Cornelia Street and the site of the long-gone Caffe Cino, where her career had begun so many years before.
Lowry's name is featured on the Tony Award's "In Memoriam 2020" list.