At Liberty

Elaine Stritch walks on stage wearing only an oversized white shirt and black tights, pulls up a single chair, and delivers a blunt post-mortem of a fifty-year showbiz career. She does not seek pity for her mistakes, nor does she ask for applause for surviving them; she simply recounts her life with the dry, gravelly pragmatism of someone who has seen the bottom of too many glasses. Constructed with writer John Lahr and director George C. Wolfe, the performance is part cabaret, part stand-up, and part confessional. Filmed at London’s Old Vic Theatre by documentarians D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, and Nick Doob, the 2004 HBO broadcast captures Stritch at a career peak following her 2002 Tony Award for the Broadway run. She spends much of the evening sharing career missteps, from dropping actor Ben Gazzara the second Rock Hudson showed interest in her, to her disastrous audition for the role of Dorothy on The Golden Girls, which she blew by nervously dropping an expletive in front of creator Susan Harris. She also repeats a backstage remark from Richard Burton, who once told her that her performance almost gave him an orgasm, leaving her to ponder what he could possibly mean by ‘almost’. Between these showbiz anecdotes, she sings cabaret standards, culminating in a performance of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘I’m Still Here’ that serves as the thesis for her entire career.