When Christine Lahti was offered the role of Gloria Steinem in the Off-Broadway play “Gloria: A Life,” she knew it would resonate on many levels. After all, she has known Steinem for over 40 years — first as a feminist leader and political activist in the 1970s, and then later as a friend. But Lahti’s connection to the content of the play is even more personal. It delves into Steinem’s history with her own mother, whom she characterizes as having suffered under the patriarchy. Lahti believes that her own mother felt the same way and that the play is now helping both herself and Steinem live the “unlived lives” of their mothers.

Written by Tony-nominee Emily Mann, directed by Tony-winner Diane Paulus, and produced by Daryl Roth, “Gloria: A Life” is presented in two acts. The first explores Steinem’s life as a journalist, feminist, and activist, and the second offers a “talking circle” for the audience to carry the play’s themes into a present-day conversation. The production has a nearly all-female creative team, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Lahti is stepping into this role with a long list of credits behind her. Her stage work includes “God of Carnage,” “The Heidi Chronicles,” “Present Laughter,” and “Fucking A,” among many others. Films include “Swing Shift,” for which she was nominated for an Oscar, “Running on Empty,” and “Leaving Normal,” while her TV appearances include “Chicago Hope,” “Grace and Frankie,” “The Good Fight,” and “Law & Order: SVU.” She won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for “Lieberman in Love,” her directorial debut.

We talked to Lahti about playing an icon, her own journey as a feminist, and the lessons she hopes the play teaches audience members.

“Gloria: A Life” is playing at the Daryl Roth Theatre. Lahti is set to appear through the end of January.

W&H: What’s it like being a woman in both Hollywood and on the New York stage today?

CL: It’s very exciting. It’s also very distressing. But the amount of activism amongst women, particularly young women, is so heartening. To be doing this play now has been unbelievably fulfilling because it feels so cathartic for both women and men. The response is very moving and it has been a really extraordinary experience for me as a feminist, activist, and actress.

Of course, women find it extraordinarily inspiring but after the show [during the “talking circle”], some men are just weeping about the fact that they are feminists. One 80-year-old man said, “I’m crying because this play touched me so much. I’ve always struggled with this masculine role that I’m not supposed to cry.” Hearing that was really beautiful.

W&H: What did it feel like when you were offered this role?

CL: I had been lobbying for it. Gloria had been a friend for a long time. At the time, I knew she was doing it, but I didn’t know if I was right for the part. I had never read the script and I didn’t know if I was the right age.

So, I threw my hat in the ring just to be considered. Then the role came to me and it has been extraordinary. The rehearsal process has been the greatest creative collaboration of my entire career. It has just been so collaborative. No egos in the room — male or female. The best idea wins. As an actress, I don’t get to participate in the writing of the play, but all my ideas are welcome, and many of these ideas have been incorporated into the play itself.

W&H: Can you please expand on your collaboration with Diane Paulus, Emily Mann, and Daryl Roth?

CL: It’s truly a dream team. Working with them has been magical. They are all so extraordinary. Daryl is a visionary and feminist. She made sure that the entire crew is female. We have one man who’s a sound guy and that’s it. Diane and Emily listened to everybody in the ensemble’s ideas. It has been a beautiful collaboration, and of course, Gloria has contributed so much. Every time I would ask her a painful or personal question because I wanted to go as deep and as vulnerable as I could, she’d say, “I want this to be honest because if it isn’t honest, it’s not helpful.”

W&H: What is it like stepping into Steinem’s shoes every day?

CL: It’s interesting because I work from the inside out. The last thing I was thinking about was copying anything about her externally. For weeks and weeks in rehearsal, I was focusing on her emotional journey and charting that out and personalizing it. We have so much common in terms of our relationships with our mothers. We both feel that we are living the unlived lives of our mothers. I felt the patriarchy crush my mother’s spirit in a certain way, but not as dramatically as [it did] Gloria’s mother. My mom went on to become a professional painter and actually a pilot. She only flew a couple of times, but still, she soloed, she was up there flying a small airplane by herself. She ended up having an amazing last chapter of her life, and I’d also like to think that her daughter, a radical feminist at the time, had something to do with it.

W&H: When did you decide you were a feminist?

CL: When I went to college, I had no clue about feminism and that women were just second-class. I thought that maybe it was biological. I had never seen a woman work. Not one mother of one of my friends growing up had a job. This was an all-white, suburban, patriarchy-on-steroids life that I grew up in.

I went to the University of Michigan, and it wasn’t until two years later in 1970 that I discovered women’s consciousness-raising meetings, feminism, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan [a key radical feminist member of the American Women’s Movement, and a leader in the international feminist movement], and Betty Friedan [a leading figure in the women’s movement in the U.S. and author of “The Feminine Mystique”]. It was a complete shock to me — like a life jacket was thrown to me, enabling me to navigate through a world I was beginning to suspect did not like or respect women very much. It was an option that, oh, maybe I get to have a full life and be a full being.

That was a really extraordinary time in my life. I went on and never looked back once I got wind of feminism. I was like, shit, this is what I’ve been looking for.

W&H: What an achievement for you to play the leader of a movement that literally changed your life.

CL: Again, a fuel that I feel has been my reason for every part I play, all my activism and feminism, is my mother’s unlived life, and Gloria shares that. Obviously, the fuel motivated her to spend her life making sure that all women mattered because she didn’t feel that her mother mattered. To a huge extent, it’s a similar fuel for me in terms of my career and activism. Of course, sometimes I had to take parts just to pay the rent, and totally sold out, so it’s not like I’m not a pure artiste, but it’s been the driving force of my life. It’s been my mother’s inability to fulfill her potential.

W&H: What do you think about the play’s impact in light of the political climate we are living in?

CL: This play really touches people on such a deep level. I think that because we tell a story of an imperfect, flawed, unwoke icon, which is the underbelly of this woman that we all think is perfect and was born a feminist and an activist, that it inspires other people to tell true, honest stories. They are inspired to think that if she [Steinem] could do it, so can they.

So many people don’t know who Gloria is or they have the wrong idea of who she is. They may think that she is some kind of white feminist. But if it is white feminism, it’s not feminism for Gloria. Gloria has always been about intersectionality and inclusion. Feminism is about all people — men and women of all colors. Every human being can benefit from feminism because it just means being a whole human being.

W&H: What is your favorite part, line, or moment in the play?

CL: I love the sequence about her mother. It’s very vulnerable and something we don’t expect. We don’t expect to see her low self-esteem. I think that’s something that was surprising to me and a lot of people. At age 50, Gloria’s self-esteem was in the gutter and it’s easy to just assume she’s the most confident, woke person ever. She suffered from such low self-esteem given her upbringing and her relationship with her mother. I also love the line, “It’s not just that we live in the patriarchy, the patriarchy lives in us.” That line really resonates with me.

W&H: A recent New York Times article focused on the black women Gloria Steinem worked with in the 1970s, and the play makes reference to black feminists and their deep influence on her work. This was a heavy moment for me.

CL: I’d heard vaguely about Dorothy Pitman Hughes [an African American activist and co-founder of Ms. Magazine] because of the iconic photo with her fist up. But I had no idea that Gloria credits black women with everything she learned about feminism. They were the leaders that brought her along.

W&H: The play not only mentions “talking circles” but it features one every night in “Act Two” as a way for women to get together, talk, and strategize. Women and Hollywood’s own Melissa Silverstein has led one. Who else has led these and what have these been like for you?

CL: It’s been extraordinary. Again, I’ve done a lot of plays in my 40-plus-year career and this is the first time I get to see how the play I’ve just been in has affected and touched people. Normally, I go home, go to bed. I mean you get a sense if an audience likes it or not, but you don’t get these really personal responses to the story you just told or helped tell. The talking circle was something Gloria insisted on. She said, “If you’re going to do the first act about me, then the second act has to be about the audience. The only reason to tell my story is to inspire others to tell theirs.” That’s Gloria. She’s the least narcissistic person on the planet. She just wants to inspire others to tell their story.

It’s been remarkable. The nights when Gloria runs the circle, honestly, it’s usually a little less personal. People are weeping out of gratitude for her and don’t talk about their personal stories as much because it’s so much weighted towards “I just have to thank Gloria for saving my life.”

The kinds of people who have led them – Marlo Thomas, Kathy Najimy, someone from Time’s Up, Annie Leibovitz, Women Take the Lead, Equality Now, ERA Coalition, Christiane Amanpour, Lena Dunham, Letty Cottin Pogrebin (co-founder of Ms. Magazine). Dorothy Pitman Hughes led one of the first ones when we were in previews. What is most moving to me are these young people of color who are sponsored by the initiative Hope-aholics. The program allows people to sponsor and pay for a group of young people to come from public schools in the area to come to see our play. I have heard these young people say things like, “I didn’t know who Gloria Steinem was,” or, “I didn’t know that I could be a part of this movement,” or, “I didn’t know that I had a voice that could matter.”

W&H: I read that your daughter is an activist.

CL: She’s a self-proclaimed, radical, intersectional feminist who has taught me so much about the intersectionality these young women have that is so incredibly vital and important.

W&H: She must be very moved by your involvement in this play.

CL: Yes, she has been very moved by the play. She was a Gender Studies major at NYU’s Gallatin School, but they don’t teach many of the things that this play talks about in terms of Gloria’s personal story, her inclusivity and, most importantly, her intersectionality, which she always focused on. She said that it was called “double jeopardy” back then.

Gloria has said that black women were so far ahead of the game, way ahead of the game. They never had a choice about being unwoke. White women can at least get some goodies out of the privilege of being white. Black women have always been feminists. They have had to be.

W&H: What are your hopes with this play?

CL: My hope is that this play will travel and that high schools and colleges will do it. I would love it to be filmed for PBS or another network. That would be a way for young people to see it. It’s really important for young people to have a sense of what came before us and not take for granted how much has been accomplished in order to inspire young women to keep up the fight. There is so much more work to do. We become who we are by standing on the shoulders of other women.

I think about how my daughter is standing on my own shoulders, even though she sometimes doesn’t want to admit it. The view is different from up there, and that’s the good news, but it should be different. Things have progressed. Last night an older woman was crying after the show and said, “I just feel like we’re on the brink of disaster. We’ve lost so much ground. We keep fighting for the same thing and it feels so hopeless.” And a young woman, a high schooler, responded by saying, “I want to tell you that I have hope. My friends and I are activating in a way I’ve never seen.”

W&H: How amazing it must be to be standing in a circle of optimism night after night.

CL: I have told everyone that what we owe our younger generation, millennials and younger, is optimism. We have to be hopeful. We can’t hand them a world that is doomed. We have got to have hope that we are going to change the course of life for women and really battle this horrific backlash that is in the White House right now. Yes, we can cry and despair, but as Gloria would say, we can’t spend too much time alone. Have talking circles in your life. Meet with women and men who love women and tell your stories to each other and stand up for what you believe in. We can’t leave our younger generation full of hopelessness.

I am seeing a lot of anger every night, but this rage weighs heavily on optimism. Even this young woman last night who said, “I’m 16 and I can’t vote yet. Everything I do feels like nothing changes. I can write my Senators, I can call my Congressman, go to marches. Nothing feels like it’s having an impact.” We talked about how if she sees injustice in her school, she can speak up. If she sees harassment, she can speak up. If she feels teachers are treating girls unfairly or in a different way to the boys, she can speak up. She can start a feminist club.

You can be an activist in small ways. You don’t have to change the laws when you’re 16. I think she felt very heartened by that. A lot of people spoke to her. That’s this activating, organizing thing you get from the talking circle.