At 69, Maureen McCormick could have stayed home. Instead, she's on stage in New York, acting opposite Sharon Lawrence in Pen Pals, an off-Broadway play about two women whose lives unfold through decades of letters.
It's been over 50 years since she played Marcia Brady on The Brady Bunch — a role that made her a household name in the 1970s and ran for five seasons across 117 episodes. She could have rested on that legacy. But when her agent sent her the script, something clicked.
"I related to both characters, actually, a lot," McCormick told Forbes. "When I read it, I was just like, 'Yes, yes, yes.'" The play explores how friendship can hold contradictions — how women can believe differently, yet still find commonality, love, and respect. For McCormick, that resonated deeply with her own life.
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Start Your News DetoxShe's kept written correspondence for decades: cards from her daughter, notes her husband Michael leaves on the coffee machine ("in the funniest places," she laughed), letters from her late mother. There's something irreplaceable about handwriting. "To see her handwriting is so comforting to me," McCormick said of her mother's letters.
Pen Pals isn't a comeback story or a farewell tour. It's simply a working actor choosing a role because the story mattered to her. The play is currently running at DR2 Theatre in New York City, and McCormick's presence in it suggests that at this stage of her career, she's not chasing roles — she's choosing the ones that feel true.
