CHARACTERS OF THE VILLAGE
Meet Margaret Ladd and Lyle Kessler – Actress/Playwright Team
By Joy and Brian Pape
Margaret and Lyle Kessler at a favorite Village coffee house. Credit: Lyle Kessler
Village View reporters met Margaret Ladd and Lyle Kessler at their lovely Greenwich Village co-op apartment, filled with family art and keepsakes. For a couple in the entertainment world, they have managed to find a home for themselves, and they tell us about their journey here, and how they are giving back to the community.
Margaret and Lyle met at the Actors Studio in NYC 50 years ago, performing in a play together. Lyle had just had his first full length play produced on Broadway and Margaret had appeared opposite Geraldine Page in her Broadway debut. She lived in the Village and Lyle lived uptown.
Lyle: Margaret was from Rhode Island and I from Philadelphia. We lived together on the Upper West Side for many years until we left for L.A. to pursue acting and screenwriting. I had written the first act of my play Orphans in N.Y. but was having much difficulty writing the second act. Margaret was cast in Falcon Crest playing Jane Wyman’s troubled daughter Emma. The series was a huge success and ran for nine years. When Margaret gave birth to our twin children, Katharine and Michael, I gave birth to the second act of Orphans. The play has had a phenomenal success, produced in almost every country internationally. Next year it will run in Turkey, Shanghai, South Korea and others. It has been playing in Japan for 35 years. The play has attracted many stars, such as Albert Finney, Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin and Jesse Eisenberg. When my film The Saint of Fort Washington was filmed in New York with Danny Glover and Matt Dylan, we realized how much we missed the city and were determined to return.
WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO THE VILLAGE?
Lyle: Margaret missed the Village and I had always dreamed of living here ever since I was a 15 year old teenager and traveled by bus to NYC and Greenwich Village so I could hang out in Washington Square and the coffee shops along MacDougal hoping to bump into Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, but unfortunately they were long gone. It was a bygone era. My play was to have a revival on Broadway so we picked up stakes and moved to the Village, West 4th and Barrow; a dream come true.
WHAT DOES THE VILLAGE MEAN TO YOU?
Lyle: The people, the street life, the history. It is the heart and soul of New York. Imagine Manhattan without it. On our rooftop we can see the whole of the Village, all the way over to the Hudson and New Jersey. Margaret and I sit here and work with the whole of the Village below us.
WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE RESTAURANTS IN THE VILLAGE?
Lyle: We walk over to Bleecker Street and the Italian restaurant, Trattoria Pesce Pasta. And of course the many coffee houses in our neighborhood — Joe’s, Saint Jardim and Caffe Reggio where we can sit and read and write and dream.
HOW DID THE PANDEMIC AFFECT YOU?
Lyle: It was hard on me in one sense, as live theater was not happening. But it gave me the time to finish a number of new plays I had been working on. Margaret was able to work on readings of new plays remotely via Zoom. She also worked on her beautiful memoir of her life as an actress in N.Y.
TELL US ABOUT YOUR PASSIONS.
Lyle: I am the director of the Actors Studio Playwright/Directors Unit where a new play is read each Wednesday. I have brought in many notable playwrights, John Patric Shanley, Jose Rivera and Michael Weller who moderate the plays along with myself. It is also an opportunity to hear our own new plays. I also teach a Master Class in acting Monday evenings. Margaret read a scene from a play of mine with Malcolm McDowell who was in town and realized she would be perfect for his wife in the series Mozart in the Jungle. She was cast in the role, and Woody Allen saw her and cast her in his series, Crisis in Six Scenes.
Margaret’s passion is the Imagination Workshop, a program she began at Mount Sinai Hospital, bringing actors in to work with hospitalized psychiatric patients in a Crisis Intervention Unit. When the patients played characters far removed from themselves they were able to step away from their diagnosis to the amazement of the psychiatrists. Margaret and I developed the program together as it expanded to other hospitals. It is still running in L.A. where the actors and writers work with veterans suffering from PTSD, and other traumas. The vets write an original play each year and perform it at the Veterans Administration. The Imagination Workshop is the longest running Arts and Mental Health Program in the world.
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