Tracy Letts is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a Tony Award-winning actor. He is set to appear in Greta Gerwig's eagerly anticipated Little Women, which is in theaters on December 25, 2019.
My mom had a lot in common with Jo March. She was scrappy like Jo. When she was a little girl, Mom beat up a boy who threw rocks at her dog, and when she was 68, she was arrested and jailed for protesting Dick Cheney. Like Jo, Mom also came from a low-income working-class family. Like Jo, Mom also had dreams of becoming a writer. Like Jo—and Louisa May Alcott—a lot of doors were closed to Mom because she was a woman.
My parents were English teachers and they taught me that literature’s gatekeepers kept everyone who didn’t look like them or come from their same background in categories separate and unequal: Henry James and John Cheever both belonged to the same class, of course, Capital A Authors, but Mark Twain and William Faulkner were classified as Southern Literature, and Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes were Black Authors, and Louisa May Alcott was Women’s Lit. And my folks taught me it was unfair. It was unfair then. It’s unfair now.
Jo March, like my mom, was a badass. She pursued her dream in spite of the hardship she faced, in spite of the deck being stacked, and she did it with spirit and grit and good humor. She is a hero, to both men and women... just like my mom, who published her first novel, a bestseller, at the age of fifty-eight, is a hero to me.
I’m so goddamn proud to be one of the men who support the women who made this movie. Little boys like shootouts and car chases, but real men like Little Women.
As the decade comes to a close, Kyle McGovern presents a ranking of the films that defined a tumultuous time for the Academy.
