Becoming “Joan”

“(SCR Casting Director) Joanne DeNaut sent me an email asking me to come in for a table reading. I didn’t know what it was when she sent it,” Tessa Auberjonois said. “When I saw what it was about, I was shocked to see I would be playing Joan Rivers.”

That email did not carry any indication of the vocal demands, dialect, the character research or the life demands that playing the role would require. Nor that Auberjonois would triumph in it.

The journey would take Auberjonois to becoming Joan Rivers in Joan. Written by Daniel Goldstein and directed by David Ivers, Joan is enjoying a successful run on the Julianne Argyros Stage in its final week of performances.

And thus began a more than two-year journey that brought Auberjonois back to the SCR stage in one of her most incandescent roles—playing pioneering comedian Joan Rivers along with Rivers’ mother, Mrs. Molinsky.

Auberjonois is no stranger to SCR stages, having made her debut in Everett Beekin (2000) and most recently, appearing in Appropriate and The Little Foxes, SCR’s Voices of America rotating rep in 2023. But those productions and others like Hold Please, Crimes of the Heart and Absurd Person Singular, didn’t bring the all-encompassing demands of Joan, which requires Auberjonois channel a force of nature on stage each performance.

As Auberjonois sent one of her kids to Bennington College in Vermont, as she played a character in Monsters—the Netflix drama about the Menendez brothers—even as she worked on other projects, Joan was never far away. Auberjonois spent the better part of two-plus years harnessing what it meant to be Joan Rivers.

There were also four Joan workshops, and a December 2022 NewSCRipts reading at SCR. Every time, Auberjonois would delve deeper into new elements of Rivers’ voice and personality.

“I spent about two years living with Joan and gestating Joan, birthing my version of her,” she said.

 The process started with capturing Rivers’ voice.

“When I started out to get a sense of her voice, I sort of realized her voice changed over the years,” she said. “I started watching her in her younger days. There was a documentary with her in her late 70s and I was able to work on that part of her voice. Then, I started looking at her voice when she was younger. As we got closer to production, I started really looking at her sense of fashion and the way she dealt with certain things, watching the way she handled the stand-up, which changed over the course of time.

“I felt like she made acting choices as she progressed. She prepared her stand-up so it looked spontaneous, but she really practiced it--understanding the way her delivery of the lines and the timing and the phrasing of the way she delivered the jokes. When I studied that, I discovered it changed over the course of her life.”

Auberjonois’ research uncovered other elements about Rivers’ personality that were essential to capturing the role. Watching Rivers interviewed by Larry King and others revealed to Auberjonois that when Rivers discussed her personal life, a different character revealed itself. The heartbreak came out.

“I studied the way she talked about that and got a sense of how she talked about it and so much more in terms of what drives her,” Auberjonois said. “As an actor, you want to know what drives a character and what they want more than anything in their world. Being able to connect what’s in Joan’s heart and take that into my heart was helped along with (playwright Daniel Goldstein’s) device that this is a family business.

“She was beautifully loving and gracious to everyone in her life, especially her family and we see that in the play with her parents and (husband) Edgar and (daughter) Melissa and eventually (her grandson) Cooper. I do think that family was really important to her and the play speaks to that.”

Auberjonois’ research naturally led her to pick the brain of Melissa Rivers, who gave Auberjonois two key elements to unlock the “Inner Joan.” The first was to avoid playing Joan Rivers as a drag queen. Auberjonois said the Melissa Rivers told her that her mother was educated and sophisticated and that the drag-queen stereotype needed to die. Yesterday.

“She hadn’t heard me open my mouth yet and we were at a workshop. When we started around the table, I saw her lean over to Danny and say, ‘She’s good.’ I was able to do what she was looking for there,” Auberjonois said.

The second: to capture the inner rage Joan Rivers expressed during the tragedies and pitfalls that befell her.

“Melissa said her mother was really angry and that gave me permission to show that rage and not be afraid to show that side of things, while feeling like I wasn’t disrespecting Joan … if I played that aspect of things,” Auberjonois said. “That was incredibly helpful coming from Melissa.”

Auberjonois’ likens playing Joan Rivers each night to a marathon: mentally physically and vocally. She never leaves the stage throughout the 100-plus minute performance and is talking for vast swaths of it. The demands on her voice led Auberjonois to go on a very strict diet that leaves out tomatoes, dairy and alcohol—anything that could cause reflux. She steams her voice daily and has steroids on stand-by, in case she is in danger of losing her voice.

Her journey led to a critically acclaimed destination. Auberjonois is wowing audiences and the critics, who are enraptured by how she captured every element of the entertainment pioneer/mother.

Culture OC’s Eric Marchese wrote, “Auberjonois delivers a tour de force as the Joan Rivers the world came to know.” Charles McNulty of the Los Angeles Times wrote “(Tessa) Auberjonois captures the breathless ambition along with the insecurity that fueled Rivers’ drive… Audiences are happy to spend time in the company of a celebrity.” And Michael Quintos of Broadway World described Joan as “Absorbing and hilarious… the play has found its incredible voice via (Tessa) Auberjonois’ remarkable performance, which by itself is reason enough to see the production.”

“The best part of it was the night before opening was Halloween,” Auberjonois said. “I came home and was steaming my voice with a towel over my head. In this cocoon, I really truly felt like Joan came and visited me and gave me her blessing. It was Halloween, the night of the spirits and she was around. She came and gave us her blessing. I felt like she’s with me; that we’re doing this together.”