Playrights Horizon (NYC) - 1996

In this hilarious story from the mind of Nicky Silver, Arloc Simpson is a rich and single man who believes his last chance at love is a young stranger he invites up for a drink. Meanwhile, Arloc's hard-drinking mother, Nessa -- who has been financially and emotionally dependent on him for most of his life -- shows up at his door. Now Nessa may have to learn some motherly concern because a handsome stranger who claims he’s an Angel is being restrained in Arloc’s apartment.

Jean played the verbal, flamboyant and self-dramatizing Nessa.

"She's also a lunatic," laughs Smart, "which I'll take as a compliment. When they offered it to me, I was flattered and insulted. Nessa's 46! Not even close! But she looks good from so many nips and tucks."

Smart feels her scenery-chewing Ellie on High Society, a hard-drinking, hard-living, best-selling author, helped her get the part. "I said, 'It's Ellie ten years later with a grown son (who just happens to be gay and a multimillionaire)!"

"And then there is Jean Smart, in a performance so astonishing that any description would spoil it, and no description, however detailed, could possibly match it." -- Michael Feingold, Village Voice

"The surprise is Smart as Nessa. She is wondrous as a clown with a load of guilt...suggest[ing] that seriousness which Silver doubtless wanted yet couldn't fully integrate into his text." -- Clive Barnes, New York Post

"Only Ms. Smart, in a beautifully timed performance that gives equal weight to her character's frivolity and to its gnawing moral conscience, is able A in a fully integrated performance." -- Ben Brantley, New York Times

"Jean Smart does a virtuoso job with Nessa." -- Howard Kissel, Daily News

"There are some exceptionally funny lines in Fit to Be Tied, most of them spoken with panache by Jean Smart as Nessa." -- Vincent Canby, New York Times

"Each of Silver's plays seems to have one character who steals the show from the lead, and in Fit the honor goes to Smart's Nessa. Given most of the play's abundance of funny lines, Smart displays a wonderful verve and comic timing. Her delivery even finds the laugh in the mother's insistence to her son, 'I have been there for you. At times.' David Warren skillfully guides his cast through the paces: Smart, in particular, is required to jump from comically selfish egotist to caring mother, sometimes in the span of a line or two." -- Greg Evans, Variety

"And special mention must be made of Jean Smart as Nessa. Eradicate everything you know of her teevee persona, if you know her from teevee at all: this is an edgy, manic, needy side of her you've never seen. Her performance is so sharp, so perfectly nuanced, so impeccably timed--and, on top of all its technical accomplishments, so above all human, when caricature (in less skilled hands) would be but a hair's breadth away--that it may well herald a major career shift. (Not that she hasn't achieved her well-earned fame; but this is the kind of eye-opening performance that can, if promoted correctly, turn a teevee star into an all-media star, and a very hot one at that. I'm not being hyperbolic. The performance is that striking.)" -- AisleSay.com