We went to see the Broadway show Grey Gardens last Wednesday night. The house was packed. The audience gave the leading lady, Christine Ebersole, a standing ovation when it was all over. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, including Ms. Ebersole’s.

The show, which is a musical, is based on events that happened in the summer of 1973 in East Hampton, at a large summer mansion near the ocean where there lived two very dysfunctional ladies and 29 cats. The place was a mess and it stank from cat urine. In late June of that year, a delivery boy from the Newtown Market, delivering groceries to the house, was so upset by what he saw that he called the police who called the Health Department who came down there and issued the two ladies summonses. Either clean up or get out. You can’t live here like this.

The fact that these two ladies, an elderly mother and her 58 year old daughter, were part of East Hampton’s upper crust and were respectively the aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who was gallivanting around Europe aboard her husband’s yacht followed by herds of paparazzi, attracted the attention of the media and then two young documentary filmmakers, Albert and David Maysles, who were brothers. They came with cameras in hand, made their way through the vines and trash on the lawn, knocked on the front door, and were greeted by the daughter, who invited them in and who concluded that their cameras might be her ticket out of this dump, into fame and fortune in show business. The mother thought no good could come from this, but, as she was bedridden, could do little to prevent them from coming in.

The Maysles’ documentary, Grey Gardens, which appeared in 1975, won all sorts of awards as it lifted the lid to give the public a peek at the strange, mutually dependent relationship between these two bickering women. And then, a generation later, in 2004, it spawned an off-Broadway musical called Grey Gardens, which has now moved onto Broadway to glowing reviews, with its star, Christine Ebersole, winning an Obie Award, a Drama Desk Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Special Citation from NY Drama Critics and the Drama League Award for Performance of the Year. Ms. Ebersole, at various times plays both the mother and the daughter, both of whom are named Edith Beale, and who were known as “Big Edie” and “Little Edie.” Ms. Ebersole never plays them both together, however.

One wonders if “Little Edie” would have opened that door more than just a crack if she knew that all this was going to happen.

On the other hand, I suppose she would. At the time, we all wondered — and as editor of this newspaper I was never able to find out — why these two women, who clearly hated one another, yet seemed locked in each other’s embrace, would stay together, why they were so poor, and why neither Ms. Onassis or any of her other relatives ever came to their aid, at least financially, to help clean the place up.

The authors of this Broadway show took it upon themselves to find answers to these questions by watching the documentary, interviewing those who knew the Beales, studying the family history — they have both passed away — reading whatever they could about them and then writing a script that was a musical.

I might note, as a quick diversion from this story, that when I first heard of this project, I instinctively put the word “comedy” in after the word “musical” and tried to imagine Edie Beale tap dancing her way across the stage while singing the WASP equivalent of “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” from Fiddler on the Roof. This will never work, is what I thought. But of course, there is no musical comedy in this musical. It is more like La Bohéme.

You will hear songs titled “The Girl Who Has Everything,” “Another Winter in a Summer Town,” and “Two Peas in a Pod,” which is not about the two Edies, but Little Edie and Joe Kennedy, the man who, years before, she hoped to marry.

In any case, the basic answers to the questions about what happened at Grey Gardens way back then, according to these Broadway people are this: Big Edie spent her life alternately terrorizing and complimenting her daughter so as to keep her around and keep her from having a life of her own. Toward the end, when the other Bouviers tried to come to the aid of the two ladies, Big Edie told them to get lost. And so, as they got old, locked together in squalor with their cats, living in this great falling down mansion because Big Edie truly believed that her husband, this man who fled from her because he couldn’t stand her either, would some day come back.

Having said all of this, and whether it is right or wrong, I have to say what a brilliant show this is, with a masterful performance. You owe it to yourself to go pay the $112 a ticket and see it at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 48th Street and Broadway.

There are basically three acts. The first act takes place in 1973 in the squalid conditions, lasts about two minutes, and kind of gives you the picture. During this act and the third and final act, the conversation that is spoken by these two combatants very closely parallels their actual words as recorded in the documentary.

The second act, which takes place 32 years earlier, is another story. It is 1941, we are in the same house, and it is in full glittering splendor, just an hour away from the huge party at which all the socialites of East Hampton will attend the celebration of the engagement of Little Edie to Joe Kennedy, the older brother of Jack Kennedy. Jackie Bouvier, dressed in riding togs, is running happily around. She is ten years old. And accompanying her is her little sister Lee, who is 5.

And Little Edie, who is ecstatic with joy at what is about to take place, is played by Erin Davie. The whole thing is about class, money and aristocracy, perhaps best told in a wonderful song sung by the father of Big Edie, who sings “Marrying Well” to his three granddaughters. The plot line features Big Edie sabotaging the relationship between her daughter and Joe Kennedy, Joe Kennedy stalking off, and the party taking place anyway, without either Joe or Little Edie who, heartbroken, has also run off, but in a different direction. Big Edie, now the center of attention and loving it, wittily entertains her guests.

No documentary was ever made of this party, and so we don’t know what anybody said to anybody else, or even if this exact party took place, but it is deduced from what is said by the two women in the other acts, and is probably aided by interviews, letters and some historical records. It should be noted that when Lee Radziwill, who is portrayed as the 5 year old niece, came to watch this play in rehearsal, she walked out in the middle. But she did come again after the play was mounted and this time she stayed. She’s the only one from among all these people who are portrayed here, who is still alive. She’s never commented on what she saw.

Christine Ebersole plays “Big Edie” in this second act and is wonderful, and she plays “Little Edie” in the final act, which is back again in 1973, but after the place is cleaned up enough by workmen (paid for by Jackie) to pass muster, when Little Edie is about the age that Big Edie was in the second act and she is wonderful at that. Who ever played a love hate relationship like this, from both sides, before?

Other cast members who stand out are Erin Davie as “Little Edie” in the second act, Mary Louise Wilson who is “Big Edie” in the third act, and Kelsey Fowler, who plays the grandfather, Lee Bouvier, and sings “Marry Well.”

You come out of this theatre, after this three-hour performance, shaken by the melodrama of the play, happy with the music, understanding of the rigid WASP code that was in full flower in the 1940s, and thinking Yup, that’s probably what happened.

Grey Gardens

From High Society to Filth to a Documentary to a Broadway Musical