At 91, local actress is hardly tilting at windmills

Actor Devin Klos, who plays Currasco in the Hudson Guild’s production of “Don Quixote,” rehearses with 91-year-old co-star Molly Kanner earlier this week.

By Vivienne Leheny

When the curtain rises this Friday night on the Hudson Guild Theatre Company’s production of “Don Quixote,” Molly Kanner will realize a life-long dream. And a very long-held one, at that. The 91-year-old thespian is finally performing her first role onstage as “Sancho’s Wife,” the indignant bride of Don Quixote’s loyal squire, Sancho Panza.
“Sancho’s wife is the voice of reason, protesting Quixote’s and Sancho’s mad, impractical ideas,” says the play’s director, Jim Furlong.

Molly might argue she’s harbored a few “mad, impractical ideas” herself, given her fierce conviction as a grade schooler that she was destined to be an actress—this, despite a childhood of economic and emotional deprivation and an adult life defined by family responsibility.

“I grew up in Coney Island, near Sea Gate. My parents were both off the boat: Russian Jews who’d immigrated to America with not a cent in their pockets. They got here and had the six of us kids. Oh, we were poor as church mice!” laughed Molly, who is disarmingly youthful in appearance, at a dress rehearsal earlier this week for “Don Quixote.” Tall and lean, with a smart salt-and-pepper hairstyle, she has the kind of sure posture and easy elegance that women half her age strive to achieve. She’s also quick with a story and frames her life in theatrical terms, suggesting a measure of self-observation that many actors exhibit even as kids.

Molly’s father, in Quixote-like fashion, set out to find his dream job in California when Molly was 10. He’d worked as a factory foreman in New York City and expected to find a similar job on the gold coast, with the promise of a better climate and easier living. Before Molly, her mother and the others could join him, however, they needed to earn their train passage west.

“There were swim lockers in the little backyard of our tiny house in Coney Island. My mother would send my older brother Mac and me to the Stillwell train station to meet people coming to the beach and offer to rent them a locker. They could also rent a bed for the night and breakfast was an additional charge,” said Molly. “I was 10 and Mac was 12—can you imagine? And if people stayed the night, my mother would give them our beds and we’d sleep on pushed-together chairs at the foot of the beds.”

They slowly cobbled together their train fare, and Molly’s enterprising mom managed to save some money by having Mac hide in the train restroom every time the conductor came through to check tickets during the five-day ride to California.

The family lasted a year in Los Angeles. Molly’s dad couldn’t find work and Molly’s letters of appeal to major film studios to enlist her as a child star went unanswered. The family was forced to return to a slum building on the New York City’s Lower East Side, broken and poverty-stricken.

“It was terrible. I was very lonely. We never stayed in one place for long,” remembered Molly. “The custom was to move every year. This way you got a paint job and three months concession on rent.” Molly acting aspirations grew distant. (“It was just expected that I would get a job and be married after high school.”) But when Molly did marry, at the age of 21, she managed to up-end those expectations by choosing a husband with an unconventional lifestyle.

Arthur Kanner was a musician who toured with big bands in the 1930s and early ’40s. Several years into their marriage, Molly took a leave from her job at a domestic relations court—“in my sphere, that job was ‘making it big’”—and went out on the road with Artie and his band for a year. Aside from the ill-fated California adventure, it was her first time traveling and Molly loved it. “New Orleans, Dallas, Denver, Chicago—we’d all go out to eat after the shows at 2 or 3 a.m. All these crazy, happy kids in our 20s.” In 1941, back in New York from their travels, Molly found out she was pregnant. “Pretty courageous of us, since we didn’t have a steady income,” she wryly notes.

But even while raising their two young daughters, Vicki and Joan, Molly still had the itch to be creative. Artie would play in local theaters on many evenings, but he agreed they could find a way to cover the girls’ care at night if Molly could find something of interest for herself. She placed an ad in the local newspaper, The Brooklyn Eagle: “Young woman would like position from 6:30 to 10 p.m. Doctor’s office, or other offers considered.” (Molly interrupts herself to add “I was 28 going on 4; what did I know?”) The resulting flood of disturbing offers from men who probably were not doctors had Artie apoplectic for a week.

Flash forward through “two wonderful daughters and sons-in-law,” five grandchildren and eight great grandchildren, as well as the slow and excruciating loss of Artie to Parkinson’s Disease, which he suffered for 28 years, and Molly’s life appeared to be in its final draft.

But then, an unexpected surprise in her third act: a profoundly rewarding, two-decade relationship with a man whom Molly clearly adores. The relationship recently came to a sad end when the gentleman moved to Colorado to be near his children.

“That’s when Jim approached me about taking a role in ‘Don Quixote,’” said Molly. “I told him, ‘You couldn’t have caught me at a better time.’”
Furlong met Molly in 1996 when she participated in a poetry reading he’d put together at the Hudson Guild. As part of its

mission to serve the whole Chelsea community through progressive program offerings, the Guild provides an impressive array of senior services, including “Lively Arts,” a weekly course led by Furlong to support and encourage seniors in appreciation of opera, film, dance, visual arts and music. Molly has attended the program religiously, and is a huge fan of Furlong. “He’s a talented, creative man who loves what he does. He’s so passionate about it all.”

In a classic bit of understatement, Furlong says that over the years, Molly “indicated she might be interested in performing” in one of the Hudson Theatre Guild’s productions. “Don Quixote” seemed like a good fit, according to Furlong, and when he approached Molly with the offer to go onstage, she bit. “I’d love to” she declared, adding, “Only, give me a part with not too many lines.”

Molly’s 22-year-old co-star, Devin Klos, suggests she needn’t have worried about memorizing lines. “She has more energy than I do, half the time.” Klos plays Carasco, Quixote’s nephew and ally to Sancho’s Wife as they strenuously object to the old men’s gallivanting adventures. “I’m in awe of Molly, and so happy to be onstage with her.”

Daisy Guevara, the ebullient 16-year-old at the other end of the cast’s age-divide, is also delighted to be working with Molly. “We walk home together every night,” Guevara explains. Molly has lived in Chelsea’s Penn South for almost three decades and Guevara lives nearby. “She said she didn’t realize how much time and effort this acting thing took.” Do you think Molly regrets the work? “No!” Guevara hoots, struck by the absurdity of the question: “She loves it!” Compared to Molly, Guevara is an old pro, having performed in various Hudson Guild productions since the seasoned age of 7. “Molly’s real cool. She’s like my mother. I love her to death.”

Opening night of “Don Quixote” is June 22, and a passel of Molly admirers, who also love her to death, will be in the audience: Almost 25 members of her family, some traveling from as far as Florida and Washington, D.C., are coming to see Molly finally live out her impossible dream of being an actress.

No tilting at windmills for her. Molly Kanner does the errant knight one better, and reaches her unreachable star.

The Hudson Guild Theatre Company’s production of Don Quixote opens on Friday, June 22 at 8 p.m. and runs Saturday, June 23 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., Sunday June 24 at 3p.m., Thursday, June 28 at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, June 29 at 8 p.m. and June 30 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Tickets are available by calling 212-760-9817. There is a suggested donation of $10, but admission is “pay as you wish.” The Hudson Guild Theatre is located at 441 West 26th Street (between 9th and 10th Aves).