SATURDAY RUBRICS: 5/12/25

Bibb, Monaghan, & Coon is not a law firm being extorted by a regime

STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS: Carrie Coon. Photograph by Justin Bettman

In this week’s RECIPES & REVIEWS, I wrote about The White Lotus finale last weekend in that column’s section reserved for our paid subscriber community. Part of that essay focused on Carrie Coon. I’ll leave most of my thoughts about the finale there behind the paywall, but here is what I wrote about Coon earlier this week and her surprisingly moving monologue at that table with her character’s two close friends:

“There was much made of another monologue on The White Lotus this season, the one that Sam Rockwell’s character cauterized onto the series giving it a sexy scar with the slow-burn, low-flame matter-of-factness with which he delivered it, one of those brilliant choices by an actor that goes against the grain of the text and throws us off-balance as he so shockingly keeps his while he’s saying the words we’re not quite sure we’re hearing but he is deeply certain he’s saying. So much was made of that monologue before I saw it myself - I caught up by bingeing the series this past week upon my arrival in Porto since I couldn’t get Max in London - that it couldn’t, even though calmly brilliant, quite live up to my anticipation of it.

“I had no anticipation of the one delivered by Carrie Coon’s character so when I watched it I was both deeply moved and surprised by being so. I think of [the show’s creator] Mike White as clever and facile and funny and cynical and lucky and talented. I’ve never thought of him as either moving or wise. But this monologue will stay with me for a very long time unlike the heightened knowing silliness of so much in the three seasons of this series that just gives me most of the time monkey brain, as the Buddhists call it, all chatter and chum, the bait for social media banter, the argumentative back-and-forth that doesn’t matter as any online discussion doesn’t these days when disagreeing about any fucking television series when the world is facing America’s turning toward fascism with the alacrity and ease that White, no doubt, got Season Four green-lighted by Max.

“But back to Carrie Coon. I first saw her as Honey in 2012 in the Broadway revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? directed by Pam MacKinnon which starred Amy Morton as Martha and Coon’s husband, Tracy Letts, as George. Morton had starred in Letts’s play, August: Osage County for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. I saw Coon a few years later in Mary Jane off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop and met her backstage. That was the night I first felt in awe of her. Her work in The Gilded Age, another Max series about to have its third season, has that matter-of-factness that Rockwell employed in his monologue. She is slightly miscast in the role in that show but finds a way to make it work. Indeed, I think she’s always slightly miscast and it is that grit-in-the-gears that gives her that growl of greatness beneath the steady hum of her talent that motors smoothly on no matter what.”

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She and Letts fell in love during their time in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but each was in a different relationship from which they had to extract themselves.

Here is an excerpt from a 2017 profile on Coon written by E. Alex Jung at Vulture.com from which I found the photo above.

Jung writes:

Carrie Coon grew up in Akron, Ohio, a town where her family has roots that stretch back to the 1800s. Her great-great-grandfather was one of the city’s first police chiefs, and her parents grew up down the street from one another. Their relationship was a dramatic affair at the time: Her father was off at Catholic seminary and her mother was dating someone else who wanted to marry her. But her parents would still write letters to each other, and during one of her father’s visits home, they had dinner and were “basically engaged.” “It was all this drama,” says Coon. “They were trying to talk my dad out of it. But my grandma knew, my grandma always knew.”

Coon is the second of five children and did her fair share of babysitting growing up. Her mother works as an ER nurse and her father ran the family auto parts store in Copley Circle; he now works as a janitor in an art museum. “We lived very simply,” Coon explains. “My parents are just really down-to-earth, earnest, hardworking people that don’t want for anything. I think that really served me because when you put more value on experience than things, then you’re going to go out and have experiences.”

It’s this disinterest in the material aspects of celebrity that has given her the backbone to choose projects rather than chase fame. She didn’t start pursuing acting seriously until she went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school. (She did do a production of Our Town in high school.) “When I was in grad school, I was making $9,000 a year as a TA, but I can live off of $9,000 a year,” Coon says. “So for some people, that would be a struggle, for me it was just, ‘Make chili every Sunday and freeze it.’” …

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? marked a momentous shift both in her career and personal life — it’s where she met her future husband, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and actor Tracy Letts, on her first callback audition. He played George, one of the two leads, and the two would end up working together over the next few years as the play moved from Chicago to D.C. and eventually to Broadway, where they would both get Tony nominations. (He won.) Their courtship unfolded in the moments when they were offstage together. “He would always come to my dressing room for eight minutes and talk to me, and that was kind of the way our relationship built, around this tiny, tiny chunk of time,” she recalls. Much like her parents’ getting together, it was complicated: Both she and Letts were in relationships at the time. “It was a little bit messy,” Coon says. “Ultimately it was one of those things where we pretty quickly realized that that was something we were going to have to give a go. And so by the time we got to the Broadway run, certainly, we were very much in a relationship.”

They got married in 2013, in a bit of a rush. In Illinois, you have to get married within 60 days of registering; they had planned to go to the courthouse on the last day, but Letts suddenly had severe stomach pain. So at 1 a.m., they went to the ER at Northwestern Hospital in Chicago. “I was having a gallbladder attack and I was in terrible pain,” Letts recalls. “The next morning I had it removed, and then in recovery the day after, Carrie found the chaplain at Northwestern Hospital and she married the two of us. I was a little drugged up, so I don’t remember it all that well! But it was perfect.”

Coon describes Letts as a partner who can satisfy her intellectual curiosity and hone her taste. “Tracy and I are really snobby about writing because he’s a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, and he’s not going to let me do a bunch of crap,” says Coon. “If something isn’t challenging to me or intellectually stimulating or portraying a woman that is a human being, I’m not going to do it.” It’s clear the respect is mutual. Letts remembers a moment in rehearsal during Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where George and Martha start fighting, and Honey jumps up on the couch and starts cheering them on, screaming, “Violence! Violence!” “Going from this timid person she’s been at the beginning of the play to unleashing something in her — it’s a very tricky part,” Letts explains. “That character can be played very superficially, but there are great depths to be found, and she found them all.”

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Also, in that Jung profile, Coon admits to being a voracious reader and during the Broadway run of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? she kept a copy of Mary Oliver’s poetry collection, Thirst, in her dressing room. “I rely on poetry or literature to keep me centered before I go onstage because it reminds me to be present,” she said. “Literature has always been the greatest fuel for my imagination.”

Here is a poem by Oliver from that collection.

MESSENGER

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

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