Tending Grey Gardens: in Broadway's performance of the year, Tony winner Christine Ebersole resurrects "Little" Edie Beale.

In the back of New York's Walter Kerr Theatre, above the wine bar and candy kiosk, T-shirts for sale hang high proclaiming, "LITTLE" EDIE BEALE LIVES! That's no overstatement. Christine Ebersole's nuanced performance in the Broadway musical Grey Gardens brings "Little" Edie to life so completely, it's like seeing a ghost.

"I think in a way Edie was an earth angel who came down from heaven to heal the world," says Ebersole in her crimson-carpeted dressing room underneath 48th Street. "[Her story] is about the disenfranchised, the people pushed to the outside."

That's one reason gay audiences have been enraptured with "Little" Edie and her mother, Edith Bouvier Beale, since the women were profiled in the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens. The film covered six weeks in the life of the eccentric mother and daughter, close relatives of Jackie O. and once East Coast aristocracy, who by the 1970s were whiling away their days in and around a crumbling, flea-infested mansion in East Hampton, N.Y. The gay devotion also has something to do with the tragic heroines the Beales were--faded but still beautiful, defeated yet invincible.

Ebersole plays both the 1940s "Big" Edie and the '70s "Little" Edie in Grey Gardens the musical. Her ability to so truly capture the Beales' complexities has had critics bowing in praise ever since she originated the roles off-Broadway early in 2006. Tony talk says her portrayal of "Little" Edie guarantees Ebersole her second award, after taking home the Best Actress in a Musical honor in 2001 for 42nd Street.

"Certain roles come along in one's lifetime," Ebersole says. "Edie is a role that's going to get attention because of the depth of this person who actually lived."

"Little" Edie and "Big" Edie, with their aspirations to dance and sing, would probably see Ebersole's career as the embodiment of their show business desires. A few years after the Grey Gardens film hit art houses, Ebersole was touring with Richard Burton in Camelot. She segued to comedy with a stint on Saturday Night Live in the early '80s and has been a main-stay of television, film, and Broadway ever since. But now, at 53, Ebersole is hitting a new stride.

"It's very satisfying because just when they told you it was over..." she says, trailing off with a blissful smile. "It's an illusion that creativity is finite. It only gets better when you get older because you're informing everything with your experience."

A greener actress than Ebersole couldn't give the Beales such perfectly balanced pathos and joy. The performance leaves you melancholy but also comforted because you realize how universal are the issues of aging, family, and dashed dreams. And the intimacy of the stage and the strength of her voice make Ebersole's portrayal that much more astonishing.

"There's a power of transformation that no other medium can match," she says. "That's what's so unique about the American musical; the music has the ability to get into your soul like nothing else."