By Christopher Wallenberg
22 Dec 2011

	Griffiths in Other Desert Cities.
	photo by Joan Marcus

Before finding that last piece of the puzzle, Griffiths was having doubts about whether Brooke should publish her tell-all memoir at all. "I'm like, 'Well, you shouldn't write this book. It's gonna destroy the family. Because I am now the mother. I am now the lioness that protects the family. I have that in me now.' So I had to kind of cast myself back to a younger woman who brutally enforced honesty upon others — before other convenient compromises. And that was the missing thing. She couldn't write or argue her case the way she does if she had children."

Putting all of that together as an actress, Griffiths says, is an intellectual proposition. "You just have to remember the vehemence and the certainty and the inability to compromise artistic stakes that I had when I was a younger actor. Whereas, now, I'm like, 'The TV director hired a friend who can't act and put him in the show? Well, I guess that's television,'" she says with a shrug and a smile. "You know, whereas a younger actor would be like, 'Who hired this guy? He sucks. Why did he get the job?' And you're like, 'Shhh, it's the director's best friend.'"

To get in the mindset of a writer, each night before she heads out on stage, Griffiths listens to the audio book of Joan Didion reading from her new memoir "Blue Nights." "I listen to her for 10 minutes talking about her daughter [Quintana]. There's a certain kind of detachment in the way she wrote 'Blue Nights' that's very helpful."

To further rev herself up for the show, Griffiths says that she blares David Bowie's "Space Oddity" (the "Major Tom" song) inside her dressing room, straps on her "space helmet," and acts out the song doing "bad Aboriginal dancing," she says, with a wry smile. Is she kidding? Apparently not. "You should come up for one of my 'Major Tom' performances," she insists.

	Griffiths and Thomas Sadoski in Other Desert Cities.
	photo by Joan Marcus

When Griffiths first saw Marvel play the part Off-Broadway, she was surprised at how much the audience's allegiance can shift between supporting Brooke's wish to have her parents' blessing to publish her memoir and then completely opposing her decision, or even her right, to publish the book.

"That you can be so with her, and then in the next act you're so sure she should not do it. She should just go back to therapy and work it out. Or she should just put it in the drawer and publish it after they're gone," she says. "But then you're like, 'Oh hell no. These people have spent their career shaping a false narrative. You should blow the f---ing thing up. Why should they own this narrative — which is entirely invented anyway?'"

Griffiths says that Marvel's performance helped point the way for her about certain things she would need to do and shifts that would have to happen with her character.

"Having said that, I'm a different actor, and I bring a whole bunch of different textures And then as you're doing it, you can only do it as yourself — especially with only two weeks of rehearsal. I just had to make it as close to myself as I could, which I did. And then I had Robbie and Joe telling me what I wasn't getting, which was the writer [aspect]."

Griffiths mentions a few specific aspects of character she's playing a little bit differently from Marvel, different territory that she's been charting.

"There were certain relationships I wanted to explore in a different way, particularly between me and Lyman. The kind of father-daughter thing — the all-American princess. In American culture, I find that really interesting. So the wistfulness of that I thought could be affective."

Dressed casually in jeans, a light blue hoodie, and black Chuck Taylors, Griffiths is speaking between bites of a gooey chocolate and coconut Australian treat called a Lamington. (A friend of her dresser, Ryan Rossetto, made a delicious tray of them for Griffiths, her co-stars, and crew members.) Her hair is long and straight, light brown with blondish highlights, and she has a pretty, sharp and angular face.

Slipping back and forth between her native Aussie accent and the Americanized inflection of her character, Griffiths evinces a cool, questioning demeanor. There's a take-no-bullshit aspect to her presence. She has a wry perspective on the world but doesn't try to be funny or toss off perfectly biting quips. Her husband, Andrew Taylor, is a painter who's having his first New York show this month. She's a mother to three young children (two boys and a girl) — all under the age of seven.

 Continued...