One Nightstand With Ana Gasteyer

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

For Ana Gasteyer, her first Tony Award nomination — for Best Featured Actress in a Musical on account of her work in Schmigadoon! — has been a long time coming. "I'm doing a job that synthesizes all the things I love, which is comedy and musical theater and staying home in New York," she says. "I love the discipline. I love the rigor. I've been doing this for 25 years, [so] it's just a cool little moment of saying, 'Oh yeah, guess what, I was on the right path.'"

The ceremony, which takes place at Radio City Music Hall in New York this Sunday, draws the curtain on a surreal period for the 59-year-old actor and singer. "Usually when you're doing film and television, you do the project and then you plug the project and there's sort of press mode and regular mode," says Gasteyer, who is imprinted in the brain of countless millennials for her role as the mother of Lindsay Lohan's Cady in Mean Girls. "But when you're in theater, you're sort of talking about what you're doing all day and then you go and do it every night. So it is sort of like having two days in a day."

The latter part of that day — on stage at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre playing Mildred, the resident sourpuss of the jolliest town in America — puts Gasteyer's vocal chops front-and-center. It's a path she could have ended up on exclusively, had a discovery during her undergraduate years at Northwestern University not taken her in a different direction. "I sang my way in," she says of her admission to the school, which is known for its selective music and theater programs. "I was a proper voice major. I got rejected everywhere else — it was the hardest school I applied to, and I got in — but I dropped out of music within a year because I met the comedy people, and it changed my life."

Since then, Gasteyer has built the kind of career many graduates can only dream of. Upon graduation, she joined The Groundlings in Los Angeles, from which she was cast on Saturday Night Live. During her time on the show, she appeared in countless iconic sketches and delivered uncanny impressions of Martha Stewart and Celine Dion. For its 50th anniversary celebration in 2025, she joined Will Ferrell on stage to resurrect one of her most beloved recurring characters, Bobbi, of the duo Bobbi and Marty.

"It was such a joy machine because the characters are so fun to write," she says. "Paula Pell is one of my favorite comedians on earth, and to work with her and to write with her is nothing short of a gift from the universe. I just went up to her place upstate, and we hung around and drank wine and wrote for a couple of days. We didn't know what it was going to evolve into, because all things SNL evolve as they're happening. But then the fact that it was Bobbi and Marty in Radio City was making me and Will so happy — we were, first of all, dressed as them backstage with Chris Martin, which was ridiculous. It was like the hippest people, Nirvana were reuniting, and we're dressed as these middle-school music teachers."

Gasteyer remained on SNL for six years, leaving when she was pregnant with her daughter, Frances, whom she describes as a "voracious reader."

"She's a writer and a playwright in her own right, and her consumption of books has influenced mine considerably,” she says. “She has great taste.”

A love for reading runs in the family. “My mother's a ceramic artist — she's in her 80s and is a big Audible consumer,” adds Gasteyer. “So we have a Libby account and an Audible account, and we're all sort of connected through books."

Keep reading to discover four of Gasteyer's favorite books.

Her first pick is Shy, the memoirs of the late composer and writer Mary Rodgers and co-written by Jesse Green. Gasteyer read the book during her stint as the evil Queen Aggravain in the 2024 Broadway revival of Once Upon a Mattress. “I love the way it's constructed because Jesse Green, who was the longtime theater critic at The New York Times, was clearly a lover of all of the tradition of American theater, fabulous women, and this incredible dynasty of musical theater talent,” she says.

Gasteyer, an admirer of the late ’50s aesthetic who says she was “born in the wrong era,” has hopes of adapting Shy for television. “I want to live in the Russian Tea Room. I think that every time I go to The Carlyle or Carnegie Hall. There's a lot of that life, that Mrs. Maisel vibe that would be so fun to live in, but also she's just an amazing person.”

Mary, daughter of Richard Rodgers (of the legendary Rodgers and Hammerstein duo), was known for creating the music for Once Upon a Mattress and writing the novel Freaky Friday, which was later adapted into the famous film, and wrote at length about growing up in the shadow of her father’s career. Gasteyer’s 24-year-old daughter, Frances, is also a theater hopeful as a playwright, but her mother isn’t worried about “nepo baby” accusations.

“I can't give her her career. She has to get things if she wants them,” she says. “The internet will probably come from me, but you don't get mad at somebody whose dad is a dermatologist who wants to be a dermatologist. I understand that the advantage is frustrating if you've had to make your own way, but no matter what, you've got to get called back.”

Gasteyer’s next selection is Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a family saga set 40 years after a traumatic event. “She manages to capture the sort of hilarity and lunacy of an era, and it’s very American,” she says. “It captures the idea of being a scion but also the pressures of that, and everyone's perspective on the isolation of being a Jewish American family, but also being a super successful family and an immigrant family.”

Gasteyer’s third pick is The Forgotten Girls, a memoir by journalist Monica Potts about the harsh realities for young women living in rural Arkansas. “The really secret, divisive, and difficult part is the role that really intense fundamental Christianity plays in telling girls what they are supposed to be capable of,” she says.

The book also helped her put faces and names to statistics. “It's so easy to sort of go, ‘Oh, look at those hicks,’ and be dismissive,” she says. “I've read a number of books about the opioid crisis that I'm sure you've read, that everybody's read. But I really hadn't thought about the real obstacles facing some of those young women, and it moved me in a very profound way.”

Her final selection is Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Adapted from Everyman, a 15th-century morality play, the story follows a character named Everybody as they appeal to friends, family, and other allegorical figures to accompany them on their journey into death. (Most recently, Jacobs-Jenkins won the 2025 Pulitzer for his play Purpose.)

“I think Jacobs-Jenkins is a wonderful writer and I think he manages to talk about American societal issues, but also family dynamics all in one. It gives me chills even just saying it,” she says.

As a contemporary theater actor, Gasteyer often finds herself drawn to adaptations of the classics. “I'm fascinated by the Greeks and as much as I found those things stultifyingly boring when I was having to read them… the fact that for thousands of centuries, human beings have essentially battled with the same issues and same family dynamics and same sadnesses and greed… there's something so human and connected about adaptations.”

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