Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross, co-stars of the 1980s sitcom Family Ties, perform in a 2023 New Mexico Actors Lab staging of The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Photo Lynn Roylance
Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross, co-stars of the 1980s sitcom Family Ties, perform in a 2023 New Mexico Actors Lab staging of The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Photo Lynn Roylance
When actors Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter take the stage for the New Mexico Actors Lab’s production of Talley’s Folly, many attendees will recognize them as the well-meaning parental duo Steven and Elyse Keaton from the 1980s sitcom Family Ties.
It would be easy to imagine that the septuagenarians are reuniting for a one-off decades after their hit show’s run. The reality is more touching: Baxter and Gross became close on the Family Ties set and have remained friends in the 35 years since it went off the air. New Mexico Actors Lab founder Robert “Beny” Benedetti taught Gross, who now lives part time in Santa Fe, at Yale University in 1970.
This is the third year the pair has performed a two-person reading to open the lab’s season. While the trip is a mini-tradition for Baxter now, their Santa Fe reading of A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters for Valentine’s Day in 2022 marked her first visit to New Mexico. Like that show, Talley’s Folly is a staged reading.
“We formed a pretty good, solid friendship for those seven years on Family Ties, so it didn’t end in 1989 when the show ended,” Gross tells Pasatiempo via phone from California. “If anything, we’ve become closer with age. We’ve done a number of things together at little theaters around the country.”
After making plans with Benedetti to appear in a New Mexico Actors Lab benefit, Gross approached Baxter about teaming up. They are working for the love of their craft, not money, which allows them to present only works that resonate with them. Talley’s Folly fits that bill; the one-act, one-set play won Lanford Wilson a 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Once they’ve latched on to a production, Gross says, it’s his and Baxter’s job to convey the passions it stirs within them to the audience.
“It’s basically a story about a man who’s trying to convince a woman that she’s the one for him, and he’s the one for her,” he says of Matt Friedman and Sally Talley, the characters in Talley’s Folly. “And there are obstacles to this for both of them. Both have secrets they don’t particularly want to tell that have stood in the way of their ever being together with anyone. He’s 42 and has never been married. She’s 31 and has never been married. And the question you ask of anyone that age is, ‘Why haven’t you met somebody?’”
Talley’s Folly takes place in 1944 and is the second in a trilogy; the others are Talley & Son and Fifth of July. It first appeared off Broadway in 1979 and on Broadway in 1980, both co-starring Judd Hirsch as Friedman and Trish Hawkins as Talley.
Baxter and Gross live about two hours apart in Southern California and were rehearsing in the weeks leading up to the performance. It’s work, but to hear Baxter tell it, there was plenty of joy.
“The constant with Michael was, he always made me laugh,” she says, also via phone from California. “We would be rehearsing scenes in Family Ties and he would just say stuff to throw me off and make me laugh. So we’d have to start again, particularly if there was an audience, and no one ever really minded, because the audience laughed and we always laughed. The problem was, I would get the giggles and then I couldn’t stop. And then everything we did was funny, and I was crying, I was laughing so hard. And that’s not good for makeup. It’s distracting. But that was my joy, and Michael did that to me all the time.”
As much as he loves the stage, Gross says he’s in his element in rehearsals, partly for the reasons Baxter mentions. “At some point, you have to set a performance,” he says. “But rehearsals are great ways to say, ‘No, let’s try this goofy idea and see what happens.’”
The pair had neither a director nor an audience during the rehearsals. In fact, the reading has no billed director. “We sort of direct each other,” Gross says. “I mean, we just have this relationship now, to be able to call each other and say, ‘Have you thought of trying this?’ We can speak very frankly to each other.”
Baxter says she isn’t recognized as often now that it has been 30 years since her most high-profile role. Gross, who’s more recognizable as a local, might actually become more Keaton-esque; he’s growing a beard for Talley’s Folly.
Baxter will stay at Gross’s home during the performance. The lab will pay for her transportation, but she and Gross otherwise are doing the show for free. It is, after all, a benefit.
Baxter has positive memories from her recent visits to the Land of Enchantment, including for last year’s performances of Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve. “I was staying with him and [his wife] for a couple of weeks,” she says of Gross. “Every morning, we’d go down to a coffee place where they go, and he has a bunch of standard friends who are always there with their dogs, and they sit outside in the cold and talk. I’m not good at meeting people, but they made me feel so comfortable I became downright chatty.”
