Editor's Note: “Local Treasures” is an occasional series that celebrates our city’s senior celebrities, people whose impact over the decades has helped make Memphis a better place.
Cloud9 Memphis creator Glenda Mace produces two shows a year and credits yoga with helping her keep fit.
Photographs by Jane Schneider.
What does it take to launch a theater company when you’re in your mid-seventies? Determination? Vision? Moxy? All of the above, I discover when I sit down with Glenda Mace, founder of Cloud9 Memphis theater company. Cloud9 stages its latest production, Four Places, at Theatreworks in Overton Square between June 7th and June 23rd.
Dressed in black leggings and an oversized sweater, Mace doesn’t sit so much as perch on her living-room sofa, her legs alternately criss-crossed or pulled tightly to her chin, giving her an elfin appearance. Her lithe stature wouldn’t be that noteworthy were she, say, 40. But Mace just recently turned 80. And with that revelation, she smiles, a broad, girlish grin that sparks quickly, like a burst of sunlight.
The limberness she displays is a testament to her yoga practice, she tells me. Mace started in her early sixties, studying with Sarla Nichols, the founder of Midtown Yoga. At the time, she had just returned to Memphis after a 20-year absence. She quickly became hooked and studied to become a yogini herself. For 15 years now, a devout group of practitioners between the ages of 60 and 87 gathers weekly to attend the class she leads on Monday mornings at TheatreWorks.
On this particular day, Mace has just returned from Nolensville, Tennessee, a three-and-a-half- hour trip east she routinely makes alone so she can spend time with her five grandchildren. The drive is not so much a pain as a bother. “My biggest strength is not having enough information to be afraid,” she admits with a laugh.
This off-handed comment may well explain why she left Memphis in her early forties to pursue an acting career in New York. It’s certainly not what you’d expect from someone who’d settled into the prescribed domesticity the women of her generation were expected to embrace. Back then, she was a Germantown housewife and mother whose husband ran a successful business. And yet, she was drowning.
Our conversation meanders through her life on a rainy early-spring Sunday afternoon. I had just attended the production of Tru, a riveting one-man show featuring Memphian Mark Chambers (a former college classmate) as Truman Capote. The show was mounted by Cloud9 Memphis, the theater company that Mace launched at age 75, because she felt there was a community need for a platform telling compelling stories about the lives of people over 55. “Our shows give a perspective on older individuals that may not be present other places,” she says. “We’re not just talking about Alzheimer’s but other subjects, too.”
She tapped friend and fellow actor Gordon Ginsberg to serve as the company’s associate producer of Cloud9, a resident company of TheatreWorks/Evergreen Theater. Together, the pair produce two shows a year. This month, Cloud9 presents the dark comedy, Four Places, written by Joel Drake Johnson and directed by Irene Crist. Four Places explores family dynamics as two adult children, concerned their mother has been abusing their father, take her to lunch to tell her she’ll no longer be his caregiver. “We choose material that’s challenging and show different aspects of people over 55, and I think that’s important,” she says.
In her North Memphis bungalow, Mace surrounds herself with paintings and books, family photographs, and curios. She’s in the midst of reading Sally Field’s memoir, In Pieces, and on the dining room table are strewn the financial reports and budgets regarding Tru.
“It’s finding the time,” she says, scolding herself. Though an octogenarian, she refuses to rest — on her laurels or anything else for that matter. She still keeps the books for New Ballet Ensemble and Raspberry CRE, a real estate company, and participates as a judge for the Ostrander Awards, Memphis’ annual theater awards.
Students gather weekly to take yoga from Glenda Mace at the TheatreWorks complex in Midtown.
Mace married early and at age 22 moved to Germantown with her husband, who ran his own roofi ng company. She balanced the books while her son and daughter attended private school. It was everything a young woman raised in the 1950s could have dreamed of, yet Mace found the role suffocating.
“At age 39, I felt older than I’d ever been before. I really felt at a dead-end. My two kids were grown, and my husband was busy with [his business] opening offices in other states.” She paid all the bills, but he made all the decisions. It took three years of therapy for her to summon the courage finally to break free. “When I walked out that door, even if I had known a train was coming,” she confesses, “I would have walked onto that track.”
And so, Mace shed her former life like a snake sheds its skin — neatly, completely. At age 40, she accepted an academic scholarship to then-Memphis State University. During her coursework, an English professor required that the class attend a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. She’d only seen live theater once or twice before. The experience lit a spark. “I was mesmerized,” Mace says. “I thought it was the most magical thing in the world.”
Though often the only 40-something student in her classes, Mace was undeterred. She explored writing and theater. She took speech therapy to overcome a girlish lisp. And she began to act. For the next three years, she found herself continually performing or rehearsing for the stage.
“The experience whetted my appetite,” she says. “It was magic to me. I had to be in a play to feel fully alive.” She began forming new friendships, too, with Jackie Nichols and Gene Katz at Playhouse on the Square, director Marler Stone, and fellow actor Mark Chambers, whom she met while taking tap dance at MSU.
But it was a fleeting comment she heard while attending auditions at the Southeast Theatre Conference in Silver Springs, Maryland, that set her dream in motion. “Actor Dustin Hoff man was opening Death of a Salesman there and during a talk he said, ‘If you are really interested in stage acting, you go to New York City, because that’s where the teachers are.’” A month later, she landed a job with New York Air and a new chapter in her life began.
In Manhattan, acting took center stage. Mace still juggled a variety of jobs to stay afloat financially, living for a time on a dancer’s diet of rice cakes and peanut butter. Despite the hardship, “I fell in love with New York. I got there and felt like I’d lived there all of my life,” she says. “I had an incredible affinity for the city.”
Eventually, her bookkeeping skills led to an accounting job for a real estate company. After hours, she’d ride the subway from her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen to Greenwich Village to attend acting classes at HB Studio, where she studied with the legendary drama coaches Stella Adler and Uta Hagen. She eventually counted actress Sandy Dennis and playwright Austin Pendleton as mentors.
Auditions led to roles and eventually, a contract with a theater company in Kentucky. Over the next five years, she earned her living as an actress, doing live theater in New York and Kentucky before helping to launch Green Valley Theatre, a production company in Lewisburg, West Virginia, which grew to be well-regarded. Returning to Memphis in 2000, she served as TheatreWorks’s facility manager for almost a decade before launching Cloud9.
Now in its fourth season, Cloud9 prepares for Four Places, confident that it will find an audience eager to glimpse the nuanced challenges present in these late-life tales. As Mace’s life demonstrates, every chapter holds the promise of transformation.
