Melissa Gilbert is an actress who has at least tried to go through life acting her age. She debuted at two, doing Alpo dog food commercials with Lorne Greene, and landed her first TV series at nine, playing the subteen-and-beyond Laura Ingalls Wilder, the little Minnesota farm girl who grew up in your living room from 1974 to 1984 on NBC’s Little House on the Prairie.
That’s the role that made an indelible impression on the minds of most people, and it’s the one with the strongest staying-power, hardest to shake. It’s with her still in Still, Lia Romeo’s domestic drama which begins its Off-Broadway run Feb. 5 at The Sheen Center.
But Little Laura from long ago is now 60, and not only that, in Still she’s passing for 65. “One of the things that drew me to this play,” Glibert tells Observer, “is the idea of having a romance at this age. Just because we’ve gotten older doesn’t mean we don’t fall in love and have passionate, physical relationships. I think older people have more value. They have lived more and experienced more, they’re wiser, they are the ones you should look to.”
The play is, basically, a marital battle to communicate—a taut two-hander. Her co-star is Mark Moses, a veteran campaigner from Desperate Housewives and Mad Men. “Working with him is a real joy,” Gilbert says before she starts rattling off his virtues: “A wonderful actor, an incredible creative partner, just a real gentleman and a hilariously human person.”
That’s quite the opposite kind of person he plays in this funny but heart-wrenching dramedy. There is a lot of political head-butting in this play, and it causes an engaged couple to disengage for three decades. Still single and despairing of dating apps, they decide to give it another go.
But the old problem is still there, and they hope that love can overcome it and they can survive as marrieds, for better or for worse. Playwright Romeo found herself in just such a relationship. “I wondered what to do when you love someone, but you hate some of the things that person believes,” she tells Observer. “So I wrote the play to figure it out. I didn’t figure it out—but I did realize it’s a question that resonates with a lot of people. Instead of responding with contempt when we disagree, why can’t we engage? Conversation is the only way to change minds.”
It wasn’t a stretch for Melissa to represent her side of the political fence in this play. In 2015, she was the presumptive Democratic nominee to the US House of Representatives for Michigan’s 8th congressional district, but bowed out because of a spinal injury that she discovered she had at the end of a lengthy play tour.
Melissa’s own method of picking spouses was, initially, simple. She only wedded actors that she had co-starred with, but this didn’t get her beyond the B’s: Bo Brinkman (1988-1992) and Bruce Boxleitner (1995-2001); the latter produced a son, who subsequently produced her first grandson, named Michael after the late Michael Landon, who played her dad on Little House on the Prairie.
At least her third and current husband, also an actor—a redheaded, Emmy-winning Thirtysomething named Timothy Busfield—broke the alliteration curse for her. “We work together as much as possible, and we really love it,” she says. “We are constantly creating.” And they’ve created from Hollywood to Michigan to (for the past eight years) New York.
But the L.A. gal is very much with her now, grieving about the wildfires that ravaged that area.
“It’s my hometown,” she laments. “The things that burned are all places where I grew up. My favorite restaurants in Malibu are all gone. Every day I hear from a friend who has lost absolutely everything. It’s horrific.”
When you’ve been in show business for 58 years, you look like the girl who’s had everything. She did two terms as President of the Screen Actors Guild, and, though decidedly unpresidential, she has also been Dancing with the Stars. She voiced Batgirl in Batman: The Animated Series. She’s written a cookbook (My Prairie Cookbook: Memories and Frontier Food), a children’s book (Daisy and Josephine) and Prairie Tale: A Memoir. Her years on Little House on the Prairie got her into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
The one thing these 58 years haven’t brought her is Broadway. She came closest in 200 when she was elevated to the role of her own mother, Caroline “Ma” Ingalls, in a musical rendering of Little House on the Prairie. They workshopped the show in 2007 in New York with Patrick Swayze, but by early 2008 he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (the same malady that claimed Landon) and was replaced by Steve Blanchard. Instead of Broadway, the show opened at the Guthrie in Minneapolis and went on that aforementioned lengthy tour. But the dream remains.
“I haven’t auditioned for a Broadway musical for quite a while,” Gilbert says. “But I would love to do one. Right now, there’s nothing out there that anybody is chomping at the bit for me to do, but, at some point, I would love to do a Broadway show. It is still my favorite dream.”
Buy Tickets Here
