Tag Archives: Waiting for Godot

twi-ny talk: AUSTIN PENDLETON / ORSON’S SHADOW

Austin Pendleton is revisiting Orson’s Shadow for its twenty-fifth anniversary (photo by Jonathan Slaff)

ORSON’S SHADOW
Theater for the New City
155 First Ave. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through March 31, pay-what-you-can – $25
212-254-1109
www.theaterforthenewcity.net

In 1960, Orson Welles directed the first English-language adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s fascist parable, Rhinoceros, with a cast that included Laurence Olivier and his soon-to-be third wife, Joan Plowright, as Olivier’s marriage to Vivien Leigh fell apart. It was a scandal-ridden, problematic production that would be Welles’s theatrical swan song.

In 2000, writer, director, actor, and teacher Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow opened at Steppenwolf in Chicago, a fictionalized behind-the-scenes foray into the making of that show, with actors portraying Olivier, Plowright, Leigh, Welles, critic Kenneth Tynan, and a stagehand named Sean. The play was directed by up-and-comer David Cromer.

Pendleton is revisiting Orson’s Shadow for its twenty-fifth anniversary, codirecting a slightly tweaked version at Theater for the New City, presented in association with Oberon Theatre Ensemble and Strindberg Rep. Pendleton’s play focuses on ego and legacy, the stage and the silver screen, things that the Tony winner is eminently familiar with; he has more than 160 television and film credits (My Cousin Vinnie, Homicide, Oz, Law and Order, Finding Nemo, The Muppet Movie, Catch-22) and nearly five dozen theater credits for acting and directing (Fiddler on the Roof, The Little Foxes, The Diary of Anne Frank, Between Riverside and Crazy, Life Sucks.). In 2007, he received a Special Drama Desk Award as “Renaissance Man of the American Theatre,” and his continuing legacy was celebrated in the 2016 documentary Starring Austin Pendleton.

During a wide-ranging Zoom talk that was scheduled for fifteen to thirty minutes but lasted an hour and a half, Pendleton, a true New York City raconteur who was born in Warren, Ohio, and turns eighty-four this week, discussed his superstar-filled life and career sans ego as he shared stories about working with Welles, Jerome Robbins, Lynn Redgrave, Mike Nichols, Tracy Letts, Victor Mature, and Frank Langella, among countless others. And this is only the first part of the interview; look for twi-ny’s Substack post later this week, in which Pendleton does a deeper dive into Fiddler on the Roof and Tennessee Williams.

twi-ny: In the documentary Starring Austin Pendleton, Ethan Hawke says the following about you: “If this guy didn’t look the way he looks — he’s got a stutter, he’s five-whatever-he-is, he’s a funny-looking guy, and his hair’s all screwy — he’d be Marlon Brando.” What do you think of that description?

austin pendleton: Well, anything Ethan says, I take to heart, yeah. I’ve known him for years and years.

twi-ny: You have more than two hundred television, film, and theater credits. You’ve been teaching at HB Studio since 1968, and you’ll be turning eighty-four next week.

ap: That’s right.

twi-ny: Were you born with this energy? Have you ever slowed down in your entire life?

ap: No, I never have.

twi-ny: How come? What gave you that drive?

ap: Well, let’s see. I was born into a household where my mom had been a professional actress. And then she decided to give up the profession. And you know why? Well, in the mid-1930s, she got offered a very flashy part of one of the young girls in Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour. You know that play, right?

twi-ny: Yes.

ap: And all the students in there, some of them are, you know, those are flashy parts. And she got one of them for the national tour. My dad had already proposed to her once, but she wanted to pursue a professional career, because things were looking up.

That tour of The Children’s Hour was canceled when a lot of the cities realized that the play contained a compassionate portrait of a lesbian. They wouldn’t allow it in their cities.

And then my dad proposed again, and she thought, You know, what the hell? I mean, this is no way to spend one’s life. So they got married in 1938. I was born in 1940. My younger brother was born exactly a year and a half later; my birthday is March 27, his is August 27. And then after the war, my sister was born. She lives up on a farm in the Boston area, a town called Lincoln, Mass. I go up and spend a week at her farm a few times a year.

twi-ny: You’re still very close.

ap: Oh, yeah, we’re very close. Yeah. And so then, two or three years after the war, some of the people in town — the town was Warren, Ohio — came to my mom and said they wanted to start a community theater.

The county that Warren is in in Ohio is Trumbull County, so they were calling it Trumbull New Theatre. In other words, TNT. And so the first few plays were rehearsed in our living room at night after dinner.

My brother and I after dinner would set up all the furniture in the living room to conform to the needs of the play. And then we would sneak down once the rehearsal began — we were supposed to be in bed — and watch those evening rehearsals. I was just smitten.

And that’s how I got obsessed with theater. Around that time, when I was about eight or nine years old, I developed a stutter. It got a lot worse in my teenage years. But I found that when I was acting, it didn’t happen. It was fascinating. Or it happened way less and less, how shall I say, significantly. So I was free of it pretty much a lot of the time, all through my teenage years and into my twenties.

I acted in big parts in college and all that. Then, as fate would have it, the first professional job I had when I got to New York was a play called Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad [A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition], in which the character has a stutter.

The guy who auditioned me for it was the director Jerome Robbins.

Austin Pendleton played Jonathan Rosepettle in Arthur Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (photo courtesy of Arthur Kopit Papers, Fales Library, NYU)

twi-ny: I’ve heard of him.

ap: Yes, right. I read, and I auditioned for it fluently. The character speaks where he’s beginning sentences over and over again, but Jerry, who had never heard of me, of course, was impressed with the audition.

Afterward he said, Do you stutter? And I said, Well, yeah, but I’ve been in college shows and I’m fine. And he said, No, I was just curious. I’m wondering, how did he pick up that I actually stuttered?

I played it for a year. Some nights would be fine. Some nights it was okay. Some nights I would have a real problem with the stutter. And sometimes I’d have a severe problem with the stutter, and it was driving me crazy. So when that started to happen, I went to Jerry’s apartment, which is two blocks south from where I am right now. He was on East Seventy-Fourth between Lex and Third. The first audition I did was great.

Then I did a callback and the callback was just awful, not in terms of the stutter, just in terms of acting. When I auditioned for plays in college, they didn’t have callbacks. And, of course, in a callback the part is yours to lose.

I did a terrible callback. And so Jerry called me back the next day and said, What happened? And I decided to go for the truth. And I said, I didn’t know what I was doing anymore.

He said, Fine, I’ll just keep auditioning you. So six auditions, and I was beginning to give up. They improved, but they didn’t come anywhere near that first audition.

twi-ny: If they’re giving you six auditions, they’re obviously interested.

ap: Well, Jerry was famous for this. In fact, there’s an equity rule that was established later, unofficially known as the Jerry Robbins rule, in which after a certain number of auditions, the actor has to be paid to audition, because he would he would audition people a lot of times.

But also he kept auditioning me for this, because he wanted to see if I could get back to the excitement of the first audition. So I went home for Christmas finally. There was an agency that had set me up for the part, an agency I got with a friend who I’d made at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where I’d been an apprentice.

The agency called me the day after Christmas and said, He wants to see you again. And I said, Oh, what’s the point? I don’t know how to get back to when it was really good. I just think I’d like to stay through January, here in Warren, Ohio, and chill with my friends. The lady from the Deborah Coleman agency said, So I’m to let Jerome Robbins know that you would rather chill with your friends in Warren, Ohio.

I said, Okay, you win. I flew back the next morning to New York. At that point, I roomed with about eight people on the Upper West Side, who I knew either from Warren or from college.

I went to audition, and there to read the first big scene between the boy and the girl, if you know the play, was Barbara Harris.

It soared, and we both got the parts that day. This was only a little over two weeks before rehearsals began. The mother was cast during that time, Jo Van Fleet.

twi-ny: That’s quite an auspicious beginning.

ap: Yeah, I mean, Jo Van Fleet and Barbara Harris, they were two of the best things in town.

twi-ny: Did the trouble you had over those six auditions have anything to do with your trying to control the stutter?

ap: No, it was just bad acting.

twi-ny: But then you’re with Barbara Harris and you shined.

ap: Well, I must say, anybody who couldn’t shine with Barbara Harris should have reexamined their career. So we got the parts two weeks before rehearsals. We were going to begin rehearsals on a Monday. On the Saturday night before the Monday, Barbara was staying in an apartment that some friends of hers had, because she didn’t know whether she’d be going back to Chicago or not.

She invited me to come over, and we worked on the two long scenes the boy and the girl have. My first really great acting lesson was with her that evening. Still, every time I pass the building, I kiss my hand and put it on the wall. It was on East Seventy-Fourth Street between Second and First. I did two shows there, each of which ran a long time. Oh Dad, Poor Dad, and then a musical by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford called The Last Sweet Days of Isaac.

twi-ny: Right.

ap: That was there for about a year and a half. So I spent a long time at that theater, but it was torn down years ago.

twi-ny: You’re still in that neighborhood.

ap: Yeah. I still wander over there hoping the theater has somehow reappeared.

The other thing that happened was that every year during the mid-1940s, in the late 1940s, there would be a new touring company of Oklahoma! And my parents would take me, even though they were all evening shows and I was quite young.

twi-ny: Would it just be you or would your brother and sister go too?

ap: No, no, just me. And I was entranced by Oklahoma! I still am. There’s a route between Cleveland and Warren called Route 422. I remember you pass a lot of farms. I remember the moon shining down on one farm, at around midnight. On the way back from Cleveland, I remember making a vow then that I was going to be an actor.

twi-ny: Did you see the Oklahoma! that Daniel Fish did a few years ago?

ap: Oh, I loved that.

twi-ny: So did I. I wrote extremely favorably about it. The only negative comment I got online was from Oscar Hammerstein III. He was not happy with the whole production.

Barbara Blier, Barbara Maier Gustern, and Austin Pendleton performed cabaret together (photo by Maryann Lopinto)

ap: Oh, I thought it was brilliant. I think Hammerstein himself would have loved it, because he was extremely innovative. The woman who was the musical director, the musical coach for the singers, a couple of years ago, almost right now, got murdered.

twi-ny: I remember that.

ap: Barbara Maier Gustern.

twi-ny: In February 2020, my wife and I attended her eighty-fifth birthday party, a beautiful tribute to her held at Joe’s Pub. [ed. note: If Music Be the Food of Love, with Justin Vivian Bond, Taylor Mac, Diamanda Galas, Debbie Harry, Penny Arcade, John Kelly, and many others.

ap: I’m involved with a cabaret that we do three or four times a year, almost always down at Pangea on lower Second Avenue, and we had just had a rehearsal at Barbara’s apartment on West Twenty-Eighth, and she was performing in the cabaret as well. She was so excited that night. She went out to the street to hail a cab to get to Joe’s Pub, where one of her students was singing, and this terrible woman who was in a bad mood saw her across the street and pushed her hard down on the ground.

And the other Barbara, Barbara Bleier, who’s also in the cabaret, we were sitting in the outer lobby of her building. Happily a young man came along and found her and picked her up.

We were waiting for a car for Barbara Bleier to go home, and in walks Barbara Maier Gustern, her face covered in blood. We called an ambulance and the police came.

twi-ny: It was just a horrible, horrible thing.

ap: It was just this young woman who was in a bad mood, who comes from wealth. She just had an argument with her fiancé, who now of course is her ex-fiancé, and she was in a bad mood and she saw this woman across the street. She just crossed the street; they’d been in a little park on the block that Barbara Maier Gustern lived on, and the park had to be closed at 8:30, and our rehearsal ended at about 8:30. This woman got mad at the cop and so she was walking and she saw a lady walking across the street.

twi-ny: It was so random.

ap: It was terrible. I still haven’t gotten over it. The woman has been sentenced to eight or nine years.

twi-ny: You’ve been teaching at HB Studio now since 1968. With all the changes in theaters and technology and TV and streaming, are the students the same as they’ve always been or are they very different in their approach to theater these days?

ap: No. I basically teach what I learned from Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghof and Bobby Lewis. I was in a thing called the Lincoln Center Training Program, 1962–63. A whole lot of people auditioned and they picked thirty of us. The first day in September the producer, Bob White, had told us that at the end of the eight months, fifteen of us would be picked to go into the company, which was going to begin the following fall with Elia Kazan.

For a lot of the students, those eight months, which were for free, were very tense. I find I didn’t really care. I just was so happy to have the free training. When they picked the fifteen, one person they did not include was Frank Langella. I mean, I couldn’t follow the pattern of who they took and who they didn’t take. But it was a great eight months and Bobby Lewis was a great teacher, a great, great teacher. And the movement teacher was no less than Anna Sokolow.

twi-ny: Okay, so you have this history of working with amazing actors, directors, and teachers. Let’s talk about Orson’s Shadow, a play about theater, with Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Joan Plowright, and Kenneth Tynan. You were asked to write the play by Judith Mihalyi, René Auberjonois’s wife.

ap: That’s right.

twi-ny: Then he decided he didn’t want to do it.

ap: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. What happened was that he was all set to do it, and then I got an offer from the company I’m a member of in Chicago, Steppenwolf, to do it. It needed to be in a small theater. The play always needs to be done in a small theater. And they had a small theater available. They had a policy that it had to be performed by ensemble members, but they were willing to forego that. They said that we could do it in the small theater with René and with Alfred Molina, who was to play Orson.

But then René and Alfred were not available. So we went ahead. The artistic director at Steppenwolf at the time was a woman by the name of Martha Lavey. She got for me the director David Cromer. She said, Can I show him the script? And if he likes it, can you talk to him? He read it and liked it. I got on the phone with him and I liked him immediately. I said to Cromer, You cast it in Chicago with any actors you want.

As it happened, they weren’t any from Steppenwolf, but they were good Chicago actors. We did it there, and it was a big success. Ben Brantley, who was then the New York Times critic, came out for a round-up of Chicago theater, and he wrote a great deal in that round-up about Orson’s Shadow.

Then all kinds of New York producers got interested, but none of them particularly wanted Cromer as the director. It happened that at the time we did the show at Steppenwolf, my friend Cherry Jones was in a show that was on the way to New York. We would have breakfast a lot, and she said when she read the reviews, Look, they’re going to try to change the personnel. Don’t let them do it. She said, I’ve been involved with shows like that out of town. They’re a big success. And then when the New York production is being considered, they want to go with big names.

I held out for Cromer for four years. All these producers, they had other things in mind. After four years, I went one night to see a play by Tracy Letts at the Barrow Street Theatre, Bug. The producer who had a lease at the theater, Scott Morfee, was there when I was picking up my tickets; he came out from the box office, which was sort of his office.

He came into to the lobby and said, Tracy tells me you have a play. I said, Yeah. He said, Can I read it? So he read it. The run of the bug play had just begun, toward the beginning of 2004. He said, Well, I think this play of Tracy’s is going to run at least till the end of the year. Can you wait? I said, Yes, I can certainly wait. He said, Now, are you serious about this Cromer thing?

I said, Well, let me put it this way. If you don’t hire David Cromer to direct this play, I will sulk. He said, Oh, that scares the shit out of me. OK, Cromer it is. I said, I’d love to have the Chicago cast too, because among the perceptive things that Ben Brantley said is that it should be played by actors who are not known to the audience. It shouldn’t be stars playing stars. And it should be in a small theater, have an informal feeling. The only actor who was not able to come in from Chicago was the actor playing Kenneth Tynan, the critic. So Tracy took over that part. And Tracy, of course, he’s a rock star. It did us no harm that an actor that charismatic was playing a critic. It was quite well received. It opened very early in 2005 and closed on New Year’s Eve.

twi-ny: And now, of course, everybody’s clamoring to have David Cromer direct their show.

ap: Yeah. He often thanks me for this. And I said, Cromer, thank you for thanking me, but it wasn’t a great gesture I was making. It was raw self-interest. I mean, you were the director for the show.

twi-ny: He’s been doing shows at Barrow Street ever since.

ap: He did that for quite a few years. But then Scott, after a while, lost his lease. But by that point, Cromer was directing all over town. And of course, he directed The Band’s Visit.

twi-ny: And you were recently on Broadway with Tracy in The Minutes.

ap: Yeah, right. So I owe a great deal to Tracy Letts.

twi-ny: We all do.

ap: Exactly. He’s an amazing actor, an amazing playwright, an amazing guy.

twi-ny: And his wife is amazing as well.

ap: Oh, Carrie [Coon]. Yeah, absolutely.

twi-ny: So here you are now, bringing Orson’s Shadow back to New York for its twenty-fifth anniversary, and this is the first time in your career that you’re directing your own play.

ap: I decided as the rehearsal time approached that I didn’t want to be the only director of it. I wanted somebody else there too. I have a friend named David Schweizer, who directed the New York premiere of one of my other plays, Booth, about the Booth family. He directed the original New York production of that play with Frank Langella. He’s a terrific director, and he’s become a good friend over the years. So I asked Oberon, I said, Okay, I have a codirector, David Schweizer, and actually he’s the director. I sit around, I throw out the odd note to the actors and all that. And I have conversations with them. But in terms of what a director ordinarily does, it’s David Schweizer.

twi-ny: Why have you never directed any of your plays before?

ap: I like to see another director’s perspective.

twi-ny: That makes sense.

ap: And I don’t fully trust myself.

twi-ny: I’m always so impressed by the projects you take on, as actor or director. You take a lot of chances, you go to tiny theaters, in experimental works, famous works.

Austin Pendleton and Lynn Redgrave starred in Cy Howard’s 1972 comedy Every Little Crook and Nanny

ap: Let me tell you a story about Lynn Redgrave. I did a movie with her, a comedy, just after I made What’s Up, Doc? I had never met her before. It was called Every Little Crook and Nanny, with Lynn and me and Victor Mature and Paul Sand. So three comic actors, but the one who had the most sure grasp of comedy in the movie, and we all agreed on this, was Victor Mature, who was also a wonderful person.

twi-ny: He’s not known for his comic chops.

ap: No. I think the last two films he made employed him as a comedian. And you suddenly realize, the industry realized, Wait, we’ve been missing out on something. I mean, he gave a lot of wonderful performances. But anyway, he was a great guy, and so that’s how I knew Lynn.

A few years later, I directed her in a Chicago production of Misalliance, the Shaw play, with Lynn and Irene Worth and Bill Atherton and Donald Moffat. It was a huge hit in Chicago and there was thought of moving it to New York, among other people by Ted Mann at Circle in the Square. So one afternoon Lynn Redgrave and I had a meeting with Ted Mann about the possibility of that production coming to his theater.

That was the day, the afternoon of which we had this meeting, when I got what I hope will remain the worst review as an actor from the New York Times that I’ll ever have. It was a production of Waiting for Godot, which was particularly difficult because I had played the same part twenty years before when I was an undergraduate at Yale, and it was so successful. That’s what impelled me to come to New York and pursue this career.

It was directed by the assistant to Beckett, who had assisted Beckett in the German production, a very sweet guy by the name of Walter Asmus. He directed the way that Beckett apparently always directed actors, down to every little detail, and I totally froze up in those rehearsals. Walter Asmus was the soul of patience, but I opened catastrophically in it.

The day after it opened the review came out in the morning in the Times, which I heard was a disaster. I didn’t read it for a year but it was horrible and it was accurate.

[ed. note: The show ran at BAM in 1978 and starred Sam Waterston as Vladimir, Pendleton as Estragon, Michael Egan as Pozzo, and Milo O’Shea as Lucky.]

ap: So I had that meeting that afternoon with Lynn and Ted Mann, and after she said, Come to the Russian Tea Room, we have time before you have to go to Brooklyn. Let me buy you a bowl of soup.

My agent has me writing a memoir and it begins with this story.

We went to the Russian Tea Room and we ordered. She said, I read the review, and I thought, Oh. She said, You’re not going to be offered a professionally significant acting job for seven years. She was correct down to the number of years. But what you have to do in the meantime is go anywhere to act. So when you do get another opportunity, seven years from now . . .

I just started acting everywhere, in showcases, in attics. My good friend, who then ran the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Nikos Psacharopoulos, would have me up there and put me in plays. I just kept acting continually for seven years and then I finally got a part in a play on Broadway by the name of Doubles about four guys [Pendleton, John Cullum, Ron Leibman, and Tony Roberts] who meet every week or a month or something to play tennis.

twi-ny: I remember when my parents saw that. They came home and gave me the signed Playbill and said that they’d just seen naked men onstage.

ap: That’s right. Yeah. Lynn Redgrave came to the opening night party. She couldn’t see the show — she was in something else — but she came to the party just to make sure everything was all right.

She had said, In England, people like my father [Sir Michael Redgrave] or John [Gielgud] or Ralph [Richardson] would get reviews as bad as the one you got this morning.

In fact, I looked up some of those reviews in a book, a collection of reviews by Kenneth Tynan. And they were pretty awful. Lynn said, in London, those reviews are forgiven. It’s always assumed the actors will be on the London stage again the following fall. But New York doesn’t forgive a review like this. So it’ll be seven years.

twi-ny: So you’re keeping yourself busy, taking all the jobs you can.

ap: Yeah, right. So in 1969, I was in the movie Catch-22, and all my scenes were with Orson Welles.

twi-ny: You played his son-in-law.

ap: Yeah.

twi-ny: He was the brigadier general, and you were the sycophantic lt. col. who he yelled at all the time.

ap: That’s right. He was fascinating and delightful on the set, but he was also a son of a bitch. He was really trying to undercut the director, Mike Nichols; he went in front of the cast, and he would instruct Mike Nichols about comedy. I mean, what can I say?

twi-ny: Nichols and May.

ap: I had worked with Mike Nichols by this point twice, once in a stage production of The Little Foxes that he directed and once under his direction of Catch-22.

twi-ny: Essentially, Orson is in charge.

ap: He just took over all our scenes. We would rehearse them, and when we were about to shoot them Orson would announce to everyone in the scene, in front of Mike, that Mike didn’t understand comedy. He wanted to play it a different way. And Mike would say, Well, if we could just try it once or twice the way I asked. Orson would do that, but he would blow lines so the takes couldn’t be used.

twi-ny: Wow.

ap: So he murdered that movie because those scenes were the comic high points of the screenplay. The screenplay was by Buck Henry, so those scenes were really funny.

twi-ny: And Buck was in the movie as well.

ap: Yes, he was in those scenes.

twi-ny: So they were all ruined.

ap: Yeah. The movie was being shot in Mexico, kind of out in the desert. The press all came down, because it was really the most anticipated movie adapted from a novel [by Joseph Heller] since Gone with the Wind. And I made a few snide remarks.

Then, after the two weeks I was there shooting, I came back to New York. The talk on Orson had always been that he made Citizen Kane, and all the movies after that were a decline. Well, it was the days of the revival houses in New York, so I began to see some of those movies that came after Kane.

And I felt really bad because I thought, These are magnificent movies, like every single one of them.

twi-ny: One after another. The Lady from Shanghai. Touch of Evil.

ap: The Magnificent Ambersons. All the Shakespeare films. And they’re compromised, you know. So I felt bad. Then, almost thirty years after we were making Catch-22, I was shooting a film in LA, and Judith Auberjonois asked me over to the house for breakfast, and she said, In 1960, Orson Welles directed Laurence Olivier in a production of Rhinoceros by Ionesco, and by the time the play opened, Orson was no longer the director; write a play about it. It was clear that she wanted me to write the role of Olivier for her husband.

I thought, I can’t do this. But the night before, I was at Schweizer’s house in LA. He had been given two copies of the biography of Orson by Simon Callow, and he gave me one of them. That happened the night before I was called over to Judith and René’s.

A couple of days later, we went upstate. I was making another Jonathan Lynn film, Trial and Error. We were up in some small town, sitting in those big chairs outside. I looked down in the dust and there was a copy of Olivier’s autobiography. This is approaching karma here. It took me three years to figure out how to structure it. But once I figured it out, I wrote it real fast, and I sent it to Steppenwolf.

I once met Vivien Leigh. That was quite a haunting meeting we had.

twi-ny: What were the circumstances?

ap: Well, it was toward the end of the year I was in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, and I had already decided to leave. But Jerry Robbins would not let me leave. He said, No, if you leave the show, the word will get out why, and you won’t ever act again, and I want you to act for the rest of your life.

twi-ny: He didn’t often say a lot of nice things to people.

Austin Pendleton originated the role of the tailor Motel Kamzoil in Fiddler on the Roof

ap: No, and sometimes he didn’t say a lot of nice things to me. But he cast me again in Fiddler on the Roof, and then he cast me in two shows that he withdrew from before rehearsals began, a thing that he frequently did, and when he left them, I left them too. He cast me four times. He came to see almost everything that I acted in for years, and he would always comment, You’re hardly stuttering at all anymore. You’re not stuttering at all. I was reading his biography by Amanda Vaill, reading about his early years, and he stuttered.

twi-ny: Oh, isn’t that interesting. That must be part of why he wanted you to succeed.

ap: Yes, exactly. The psychology of stuttering is so interesting. As soon as Jerry found his capacities as a dancer and then almost immediately after that as a choreographer, it completely went away. They’re still trying to figure out the psychology of stuttering.

twi-ny: I mean, just think how a guy could actually deliver a State of the Union address, can make it an hour-plus on his feet giving a speech.

ap: Yes, Joe and I have a lot in common.

twi-ny: Here’s my last question.

ap: You can talk as long as you want.

twi-ny: Oh, well, okay, then I have a couple of other things that I will bring up. How do you imagine Orson, if he were alive, would react to your play?

ap: Well, I think the play treats him very sympathetically. I mean, who knows what Orson would think about it? I think he might like it. He was so impossible the two weeks [on Catch-22], but then, right at the end of the two weeks — among other things, by the way, he was incredibly superstitious. One of the superstitions is on a film, you don’t start a new scene on a Tuesday. There was a scene that Mike had to begin on a Tuesday; Orson spent the whole afternoon completely blowing his lines so none of the takes could be used. He was wildly superstitious.

But he came up to me at the end of the two weeks, as we were about to depart, and he was very kind, very, very nice.

twi-ny: Part of the inspiration in writing the play was that you felt bad about the snide remarks you had made about him on that press day.

ap: That’s right.

twi-ny: So you weren’t looking to take him down a notch.

ap: Not at all.

twi-ny: It wasn’t vindictive. It was really celebratory of him and what he had done, except for maybe blowing his lines on purpose and taking over for Mike Nichols.

ap: He wanted to have directed the film. He came out and said so.

twi-ny: The characters in Orson’s Shadow are well known, and most of them had been married multiple times and had had various affairs, including one going on during Rhinoceros. Meanwhile, you have been married to the same woman, Katina Cummings, since 1970. What’s the secret to being married for fifty-plus years in this business?

ap: The secret is about 89% of the time we get along fine, and the other 11% we fight.

twi-ny: It’s a good balance.

ap: Yeah, and that keeps the blood flowing.

twi-ny: That’s great. And I see that you now have the biggest smile you’ve had during this talk, when I mentioned your wife. So the two of you are still madly in love.

ap: Yeah, yeah, we get along fine. Her sister lives just a few blocks up the road, and I love her too.

twi-ny: Life is good.

ap: Our daughter is a surgeon, and her husband’s a doctor also. They have two little kids, each of whom has taken charge of the whole situation.

twi-ny: Going back to what Ethan Hawke said about you, I don’t think Marlon Brando ever had that.

ap: I’m not sure he ever wanted it.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

WAITING FOR GODOT

Close friends Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks star in TFANA adaptation of Waiting for Godot (photo by Hollis King)

WAITING FOR GODOT
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 23, $97-$132
866-811-4111
www.tfana.org

On the 1985 Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere,” David Byrne sings, “Well, we know where we’re goin’ / But we don’t know where we’ve been / And we know what we’re knowin’ / But we can’t say what we’ve seen / And we’re not little children / And we know what we want / And the future is certain / Give us time to work it out.”

I was thinking about that song while watching Arin Arbus’s spirited adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Waiting for Godot at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. Riccardo Hernandez’s set is a long, narrow, dusty platform that bisects the seating from the back of the theater all the way to where the proscenium stage would have been, which now leads into a dark void. Two yellow traffic lines run down the middle, making the set a postapocalyptic road to nowhere.

The orchestra features three rows of seats on either side of the abandoned thoroughfare, while the mezzanine and balcony have chairs on three sides. As the crowd enters, Estragon, aka Gogo (Michael Shannon), is sitting on a rock, deep in thought, or as deep in thought as he can get. Opposite him is a bare tree. After several minutes, he tries to take off one of his boots, with no success. “Nothing to be done,” he says as Vladimir, aka Didi (Paul Sparks), joins him.

Through nearly the entire 145-minute show (including intermission), Didi doesn’t step on the yellow lines, nimbly leaping over them or walking or standing right next to them. Sparks is a marvel to watch as he avoids the lines often without looking down at them, as if via muscle memory or like they are emitting some kind of negative energy. Meanwhile, Gogo doesn’t even seem to notice the lines, dragging his feet, either bare or in wretched shoes (go-go boots?), striding on them as if they’re not there.

The yellow lines, and the two protagonists’ different interaction with them, amplify the duality inherent in the play in a way that I have to admit has never stood out to me before, offering fascinating nuance to a work I have now experienced five times in the last nine years, on and off Broadway and online, by Irish, English, American, and Yiddish companies.

Two yellow lines run down the center of the stage at TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center (photo by Hollis King)

Waiting for Godot unfurls in an unidentified time and place. A pair of disheveled men discuss food, feet, and suicide while waiting for a mysterious figure they’ve never met to arrive, as if he will bring meaning to their lives. “Time has stopped,” Didi says when Pozzo listens to his pocket watch. Pontificating on their situation, Didi says, “We wait. We are bored. [He throws up his hand.] No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let’s go to work! In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!”

In each act a carnivalesque man named Pozzo (Ajay Naidu) and his servant, Lucky (Jeff Biehl), pass through, the former snapping his whip, the latter carrying a suitcase and a picnic basket and tied to a rope like a horse. In addition, a young boy (Toussaint Francois Battiste) shows up with important information at the end of each act.

There are two of nearly everything in the play: Vladimir’s and Estragon’s nicknames are doubled: Didi and Gogo. There are two yellow lines down the road, dividing it into two geographic sections. There are two acts over two days, with no past and no future. Didi and Gogo are two friends who seem to be unable to exist without each other, no matter how hard they might try. Pozzo and Lucky are physically connected by the rope. Lighting his second pipe, Pozzo enthuses, “The second is never so sweet . . . as the first I mean. But it’s sweet just the same.”

There are only two props, the rock and the tree. After intermission, there are two green leaves on the tree. The boy, who is solo, speaks of his abused brother, as if his sibling might be a doppelganger.

Even actors Shannon and Sparks are like their own duo; they are close personal friends who brought the show to TFANA as a unit. They have previously performed together onstage — including in The Killer at the Polonsky — and in movies and on television.

Didi (Paul Sparks) and Gogo (Michael Shannon) juggle hats in Waiting for Godot (photo by Hollis King)

Fortunately, Arbus (Des Moines and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, both with Shannon) does not get bogged down by the doubling. This Godot (accent on the first syllable) is loud and aggressive, with less of the kind of vaudeville shtick that many productions revel in. The characters don’t wear the traditional bowlers; when Didi and Gogo swap their hats and Lucky’s, it is not merely a funny skit but refers to the interchangeability of people, as Didi suggests that he can take over for Pozzo and Gogo can be Lucky. In addition, just as the boy does not get beaten but his brother does, Gogo gets roughed up every night but Didi wakes up unharmed.

The dichotomy also relates to the two thieves who are crucified with Jesus; Didi points out how only one of the four evangelists wrote that one thief was saved, evoking Didi and Gogo’s potential fate while they wait for Godot. Perhaps the double yellow lines are a kind of cross, which could explain in part why Didi avoids touching it out of fear of damnation.

“The road is free to all,” Pozzo says. Didi responds, “That’s how we looked at it,” to which Pozzo replies, “It’s a disgrace. But there you are.” Gogo concludes, “Nothing we can do about it.”

Shannon’s (Grace, Long Day’s Journey into Night) Gogo is bleak and downtrodden, shoulders hunched, while Sparks’s (Grey House, Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo) Didi is mischievous and hopeful. Whenever Didi is asked what they’re doing, Sparks spits out “Waiting for Godot” like the words don’t matter. At one point they even sit together in the audience, fully enjoying themselves.

Naidu (The Master and Margarita, The Kid Stays in the Picture) is boisterous as Pozzo, while Biehl (The Merchant of Venice, Life Sucks.) beautifully morphs from his stiff, silent servant to deliver Lucky’s long, complex monologue about tennis, quaquaquaqua, the divine, and nothingness. Battiste (A Raisin in the Sun) does a fine job as the boy, who offers a promise that might never come to fruition.

Susan Hilferty’s costumes turn the raggedy Didi and Gogo into hobos, although there is no boxcar to come and whisk them away. Chris Akerlind’s lighting takes the scenes from night to day with a nearly blinding, heavenly blast, while Palmer Hefferan’s sound maintains the feeling of being lost. The choreography, primarily Lucky’s dance, is by Byron Easley. Beckett expert Bill Irwin, who has portrayed Didi and Lucky, serves as creative consultant.

“That passed the time,” Didi says at one point. Gogo quickly replies, “It would have passed in any case.” Didi responds, “Yes, but not so rapidly.”

And so goes another Godot, a lovely way to pass the time while asking, but never answering, two of life’s biggest questions: Who are we, and what are we waiting for?

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

TWI-NY TALK: HAL LINDEN AND BERNIE KOPELL / TWO JEWS, TALKING

Hal Linden and Bernie Kopell star in Two Jews, Talking at Theatre at St. Clement’s (photo by Russ Rowland)

TWO JEWS, TALKING
Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West Forty-Sixth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Friday – Sunday through October 23, $88-$127.50
www.twojewstalking.com

There’s something special happening at the Theater at St. Clement’s right now: Television icons Hal Linden and Bernie Kopell are starring in the two-act comedy Two Jews, Talking. For an hour and a half, the ninety-one-year-old Linden, a Tony and three-time Emmy winner best known for playing the titular New York City police captain in Barney Miller, and the eighty-nine-year-old Kopell, who portrayed the evil KAOS agent Siegfried on Get Smart and charming ship’s doctor Adam Bricker on The Love Boat, argue and complain about life, love, and religion.

In the first act, Kopell is Bud and Linden is Lou — a nod to the classic duo Abbott and Costello — two Jews taking a break as the Israelites are making their way through the desert, having escaped from their Egyptian taskmasters. They discuss the Ten Commandments, the rules of kashrut, and the debauched celebration with the Golden Calf.

“What a night that was,” Lou says. “Our cares, like our robes, thrown to the wind. Then Moses comes down from his mountain and ruins everything.” Bud asks, “What did you expect? He was angry. He turns his back for a minute and all hell breaks loose.” Lou responds, “Four hundred years we were slaves — finally we’re free and we can’t throw a party?”

In the second act, Phil (Kopell) and Marty (Linden) are sitting on a park bench, griping about the state of the world and the pitfalls of aging. “In a million years, you’ll never guess where I was this morning,” Marty says. “Probably not,” Phil answers. “Mount Sinai,” Marty tells him. “The hospital?” Phil asks. “No, the place where Moses handed down the Ten Commandments. Of course the hospital,” Marty says. “You don’t look sick,” Phil adds.

The play was written by seventy-seven-year-old Emmy and Peabody winner Ed. Weinberger, who wrote and cocreated such television classics as Taxi and The Cosby Show, and is directed by Obie winner Dan Wackerman (Ten Chimneys, Morning’s at Seven).

Last week I sat down with Linden and Kopell in one of their dressing rooms at the theater — I had brought rugelach, and Linden immediately partook — and we kibbitzed about the play, Judaism, and their long and distinguished careers in show business, including naming their favorites as well as their not-so-favorites. It all began with me fumbling with my iPhone recorder.

twi-ny: Sorry about this; I’ve only had a phone for about a year.

hal linden: So you never had a phone.

Stage manager Catrina Honadle, pointing at Kopell: That’s him too.

twi-ny: Never had a phone. I always carried around dimes, then quarters.

hl: They don’t have pay phones anymore.

twi-ny: There are actually a few left.

hl: Back in the day, we had answering services, and you had to constantly stay in touch with them. They would get angry at you if you didn’t keep calling in. “You didn’t call in; you missed your appointment!”

bernie kopell: Harvey Korman, we’d call him up and ask, “Anything for Harvey Korman today?” “No, sorry.”

twi-ny: Another funny man.

hl: Another funny man.

bk: I spoke at his memorial. A lovely human.

hl: Yeah. I think was there.

bk: Mel [Brooks] was there.

hl: I think I was there. I’m trying to remember where it was.

bk: Carol Burnett was there.

twi-ny: Do you remember any of what you said about him?

bk: He was a dear friend. We would play ferocious ping-pong, drink vodka, and listen to Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man again and again. And it was always funny.

twi-ny: It’s funny that you bring that up, because I see your show as a kind of Waiting for Godot meets The 2000 Year Old Man.

[Kopell and Linden both laugh.]

twi-ny: I mean, you’ve got the set with the tree, the boots, two guys waiting to go to the holy land. And, for the most part, Bernie is the straight man and Hal is the one who’s kvetching.

hl: Kvetching.

bk: Kvetching.

twi-ny: I saw the show on the first Saturday night preview. So it was very early, but I wanted to see it before speaking with you both.

hl: That was a little touch and go, that one.

twi-ny: You know what, I had a blast. It was a lot of fun. Okay, so we’re Hal from the Bronx, Bernie from Brooklyn, Mark from Brooklyn — Flatbush — and we’re three New York Jews sitting, talking in a church.

hl: I always thought that was a wonderful irony. Two Jews talking in a church.

bk: Another irony just before I left California, I played a Catholic priest on Grey’s Anatomy. The check cleared; it was wonderful.

twi-ny: Bernie, like you, my father graduated from Erasmus Hall also. He went to Brooklyn College.

hl: Do you know how far Brooklyn was from where I grew up?

twi-ny: It was like a different country, wasn’t it?

hl: I was a Brooklyn Dodger fan. In the Bronx.

twi-ny: Oh, wow.

hl: Yes. Only because I hated the Yankees ’cause they won all the time and it was, you know, Brooklyn was Dem Bums. I only saw one game in Ebbets Field in my life. Do you know how far it would be to go? I was a musician as a young boy, actually; my whole social life was I would be playing in the band and trying to pick up some beautiful girl, and she was interested, but she lived in Brooklyn. We called it GU —

hl & bk: Geographically undesirable.

hl: I couldn’t go out to Brooklyn; it would take me another two and a half hours to get home.

twi-ny: Today, I have friends who go to the theater, go out all the time. And they’ve never been to Brooklyn, even from Manhattan, which is kind of absurd.

hl: There are five planets here.

twi-ny: My parents, when they were dating, could walk to Ebbets Field. They’d also go to Coney Island.

bk: Nathan’s hot dogs.

twi-ny: My wife and I ate at Nathan’s last week. We go to Coney Island every year.

hl: The one thing I had to give up was hot dogs — hot dogs, sausage.

twi-ny: But rugelach is still on the menu.

hl: Rugelach — I’m gonna have to check to see if I can have another one.

Hal Linden, Max Gail, and Ron Glass get real on Barney Miller

twi-ny: So I want to thank you guys for keeping me personally entertained over the course of the pandemic. I watched every single episode of Barney Miller. I watched a whole bunch of Love Boats. Then, all of a sudden I’m watching B Positive and there’s Bernie. I’m watching Better Things and there’s Bernie. Popping up all over the place.

bk: I keep saying, If you don’t fuck up too badly, they let you continue.

twi-ny: So you’ve been busy with lots and lots of appearances like that.

bk: Yes, I have. I’m very grateful.

twi-ny: And Hal, I also saw you in Off Broadway, the virtual play that you did. Where you come in at the end.

hl: Yes. I shot that on my terrace in California. You never saw anybody else. We had to really do it on the fly because I was the only one who was not sitting in front of a computer. That was my suggestion because I didn’t have a computer that I could get out on the balcony. So I said, Why don’t I just do it handheld and put the camera down on the chair. So it was kind of weird. It was interesting. I never did see the whole thing.

twi-ny: What kept you entertained over the last two plus years?

hl: Sports. I’m still a Dodger fan.

twi-ny: So you stuck with them when they moved.

hl: Yeah. I am a Dodger fan from when Red Barber did games out of town on ticker tape. That’s how long. I remember sitting around; my father had a Stromberg Carlson radio — it was this high, that big — and sitting around listening to the World Series with Mickey Owen’s passed ball. It was 1941, I think. So I’ve been a Dodger fan since I was a little boy listening on my little radio next to my bed.

twi-ny: And now the Dodgers and the Mets are playing this week at Citi Field.

hl: I know. I’m trying to go to the game tomorrow.

bk: I’m dittoing the Dodgers, because my kid [Adam, named after Kopell’s character on The Love Boat], he just turned twenty, is a great Dodger fan, and he’s a charming kid. The publicity people have kind of adopted him. He goes to games for free. We watch the games sometimes at home and he’s cheering for the Dodgers. He has a picture with Sandy Koufax, he has a picture with Tommy Lasorda, these great, great people.

twi-ny: I come from one of the families where, if I wanted to do something on Yom Kippur, my parents said, Sandy Koufax wouldn’t pitch on Yom Kippur, so you can’t do that.

hl: That’s right.

twi-ny: And in my father’s office at home, there was only one thing on the wall, a picture of the ’55 Dodgers. But a few years after the Dodgers left, he came over to the Mets.

hl: I went to the Mets for a few years, but then when I went back to LA, I went back to the Dodgers.

twi-ny: Bernie, have you worked at all over Zoom over these two years or online in any way?

bk: I wouldn’t know if it was Zoom or what.

twi-ny: So you didn’t have to even rehearse on Zoom, like when you were preparing for this show?

hl: We lived in California. So we got together and worked on it.

bk: We rehearsed at his place, sometimes we rehearsed at my place.

twi-ny: Avoid that whole computer thing.

hl: Yes.

bk: Can I just throw this in?

twi-ny: Yes, of course. This is just three Jews, talking.

bk: I’ve worked with Maurice Schwartz, the great Yiddish tragedian. The chairman of the drama department at NYU, professor Randolph Somerville, said, If you get a chance, work with Maurice Schwartz. So I’m in the Navy, and finally I catch up with Maurice Schwartz at the Ivar Theater in California. And James Drury, who is a co-student of mine, we zoom over to the Ivar Theater and say, Let’s bring up Somerville and he’ll cast us. So we brought up Somerville and he cast us. The problem was, he was at the end of his mental power, tragically. He was so mean to the actors and actresses. And there was an actor by the name of Philip Cary Jones, who was a little cockeyed.

So he was supposed to say, [in a Yiddish accent] “As a fleeing Jew, the sun is down, the ship, I suppose, will also go down.” It was called A Lonely Ship. So Schwartz didn’t like his reading, says, “Do it this way: The sun is down, the ship, I suppose, will also go down.” He tried it the same way: “The sun is down, the ship, I suppose, will also go down.” Schwartz said, “Mr. Philip Cary Jones, you may have worked with Katharine Cornell, but I’ll tell you the truth. You’re setting the theater back a thousand years.” Oh, this is how he was, at that time in his life.

twi-ny: Well, you know, Yiddish theater is making a comeback over the last ten years or so. There’s the New Yiddish Rep and the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene.

hl: They did Fiddler.

twi-ny: Right, and it’s coming back in October.

hl: In Hebrew?

twi-ny: They do it in Yiddish with Russian and English surtitles.

hl: I’m on the album. They made an album of that [Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish: 2018 Cast Recording], but they added songs cut from the original. Sheldon Harnick did one. I did one [“Get Thee Out,” with Richard Kind, Tam Mutu, Shaina Taub, and Matthew Sklar].

twi-ny: Well, you know, you need to see it because in Yiddish, “If I Were a Rich Man,” do you know what it translates as?

hl: “If I Were a Rothschild.”

twi-ny: And there’s the Tony that you won, for The Rothschilds.

bk: I saw the film recently and I thought it was brilliant.

twi-ny: And there’s a new documentary about Norman Jewison and the making of the movie [Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen]. He tells the story where he admits to the studio, You know, you’re hiring a goy.

bk: They assumed that Jewison is Jewish.

hl: I was not a fan of Topol.

twi-ny: As an actor or as a person?

hl: No, I didn’t like his interpretation after I saw Zero do it.

twi-ny: My parents saw Herschel Bernardi.

hl: I saw Herschel Bernardi.

bk: Norman Jewison directed the first film I ever did, which Carl Reiner wrote, The Thrill of It All.

twi-ny: Well, this is a good time to turn our attention back to Two Jews, Talking. When you guys began working together, did you automatically know who was gonna play which role or did you work that out over time?

hl: It was interesting. I was on it before Bernie and there was a question because it was originally written with Ed Asner in mind.

twi-ny: And Jamie Farr.

hl: That was the original. And when I read it for the first time, it was with Jamie; Ed had died. Ed had been immobile, so he played the two parts where you don’t move. So Ed played Bernie’s part in the second act but my part in the first act. But once I read it, I said, If we’re gonna make a play out of it, you gotta have some continuity, some relationship so that we can enunciate the themes, that I’m the one who’s cynical and skeptical. And the other part is the believer. That was right off the bat. I switched to that part, but then again, I became semi-immobile [laughs] because I just had a hip operation.

bk: Let me throw this in about Ed Asner. One of the sweetest human beings. I guested one time on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He comes over and says, “Bern, come with me.” He leads me into the prop room and he says, “Whenever you get hungry, we got nuts here, we got cookies. You’ll have a little bite.” I said, “That is so sweet.” But that’s how he was.

twi-ny: He was a mensch.

bk: A mensch.

hl: A mensch, I agree. Yeah. Ed was a poker player. We had a regular poker game.

twi-ny: Can I ask who else was at the game?

bk: Jason Alexander . . . It was a showbiz game, which was about 30% poker and about 70% bullshit. It was just wonderful. Unfortunately, I don’t know if it’s ever gonna be again.

twi-ny: Did you have a usual, big winner?

hl: No, there’s no big winners; you bet for a dollar or two, you couldn’t be a big winner, you couldn’t be a big loser.

bk: I don’t play cards. My father convinced me that as a Jew, I’m the only Jew who can’t count.

twi-ny: Bernie, when I saw the show on that first Saturday night, you said a word that immediately made my heart soar. And then when I read the new script, it’s out.

bk: What did I say?

twi-ny: You said the word “chaos.” It was in the original script, and I remember you saying it.

bk: It reminded me of my organization [KAOS, in Get Smart].

Bernie Kopell starred as devious KAOS agent Siegfried in Get Smart

twi-ny: Right. But I’d never heard you say it without Siegfried’s accent before.

hl: I didn’t even notice it was in or out.

bk: “Without structure there would be anarchy and chaos.”

twi-ny: That’s the line! My heart actually did a flip.

hl: [laughs]

twi-ny: As Hal noted before, Bernie, your characters are the ones that are more faithful — you have faith in Moses, you have faith in God — but Hal, your characters are —

hl: Skeptical. I won’t say cynical. I’ll say skeptical.

twi-ny: Do your personal relationships with Judaism relate at all to your characters’ relationships?

bk: Okay. I have to be truthful here. My father was very rough. He didn’t know that I had dyslexia. So in synagogue, I wasn’t keeping up fast enough in the cheder. He dug his nails into my forearm, just like that motherfucking Danny Kaye did. Danny Kaye was awful. I made a horrible mistake on The Danny Kaye Show: I got a laugh. He was way too rough. And he ended badly. There was some possibility that he might have done his Italian Giovanni character on Love Boat. So all the Love Boat people are at the Beverly Wilshire. And I see Danny there. And by this time he had done [the 1970 Broadway musical] Two by Two, which did not go well.

hl: No, it did not go well.

bk: And he’s having a big argument with our producer. So I go across the room to see my pal Pat Harrington, and as I’m coming back, Kaye is out of control, screaming at our producer, “You’re full of shit!” Not too great.

hl: In answer to your question, I’m a secular Jew. I do not attend synagogue. I am a tribal Jew. I’m the celebrity spokesman for the Jewish National Fund. I’ve been there for twenty-some-odd years, doing appearances for them and things like that. But that’s on the tribal level.

Phil (Bernie Kopell) and Marty (Hal Linden) discuss life and death in Two Jews, Talking (photo by Russ Rowland)

twi-ny: So Bernie, you and your characters are not the same.

bk: No. Vastly different.

hl: I have a lot of skepticism.

twi-ny: It’s hard not to these days, right?

hl: Yeah.

twi-ny: When you deliver certain jokes in the play, can you tell if it’s a more Jewish audience?

hl: We did this as a reading in North Carolina. In Mark Meadows’s district. I mean, western North Carolina.

twi-ny: That’s gotta be a tough audience.

hl: There wasn’t a Jew in miles, and they got a lot of the jokes. A few of the jokes they didn’t understand.

bk: I think part of it was they’re happy to see us, who’d been on television.

hl: But there was way more response than I expected.

bk: Me too.

twi-ny: Well, I know Bill Maher, who was raised Roman Catholic but whose mother was Jewish, talks about taking his political comedy nationwide, and he goes to red states and they laugh sometimes harder than the blue states.

bk: Bill Maher is a genius in my humble opinion. He’s brilliant.

twi-ny: So Hal, you said that you came into the project first. Have you been friends a long time?

hl: We were not that close. We’ve appeared in celebrity events together and things like that. We never worked together.

twi-ny: The only time I could find you guys on a stage at the same time was a 1980 ABC promo where you both danced in white tuxedos, with other stars from the upcoming season.

hl: I don’t remember doing that.

bk: I don’t either. But then again, at our age, what do we remember?

hl: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen things, particularly now with YouTube.

twi-ny: Well, that’s where you’ll find this, on YouTube.

twi-ny: Another interesting thing that I discovered was that Hal was on the first Love Boat pilot episode, which Bernie was not in. Dick Van Patten played the ship’s doctor.

bk: Dick was under contract to ABC. So when Eight Is Enough came about, they pulled him out, opening it up for other people. So I tested with a number of other guys.

twi-ny: You know who else was on that pilot episode?

hl: Harvey Korman.

twi-ny: Yes! And Don Adams.

hl: I only interacted with Karen Valentine. Maybe a couple of the regulars, I don’t recall.

bk: Well, let me throw this in. In the first pilot, the captain was an amazingly handsome Australian [Ted Hamilton]. He was gorgeous. But ABC said, No, he’s gorgeous, but he doesn’t have the authority. He doesn’t have the humor. He doesn’t have the kindness. So now we go to the second guy, the second guy worked on soaps. He wrote soaps. He acted in soaps. Quinn Redeker, I think his name was. And they said no. So now ABC is really getting pissed off because it’s so much money they’re putting into it and it’s not happening. So Gavin MacLeod had just come off of McHale’s Navy. And I had met him on McHale’s Navy. He was depressed because he’d done Operation Petticoat with Cary Grant, and he’d done The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

twi-ny: He was in the fabulous Kelly’s Heroes.

bk: Yes. So it opened it up for Gavin, and they were very happy. He had all the qualities they wanted and he became a great friend. A great friend. This was Gavin: There was some kind of a fakakta tradition in film and television that the director will perceive who is the weakest one in the cast.

hl: That’s the story of every play.

bk: And pick on them so that they can assert their authority.

hl: Jerry Robbins was notorious. He would always pick on the weakest link and destroy him.

bk: So Gavin says, Bern, let’s have a little chat with [director] Jack Arnold. Jack, come on over here. And we say in harmony, Jack, you may not behave that way on our set. Is that clear? Okay. Hey. All right. Fine. No problem. So he was a pussycat the rest of the way.

twi-ny: Getting back to Barney Miller, one of the things I noticed was how many of the regular cast members and guest stars I’ve seen recently onstage — Barbara Barrie, Linda Lavin, Kenneth Tigar, James Cromwell, Bob Dishy, Christopher Lloyd, David Paymer.

hl: The thing about Barney Miller, if you watched every episode, I’m sure you noticed this: Danny didn’t give a shit about repeaters.

twi-ny: What struck me is all these repeat actors, it gave it a theatrical feel, and it felt like the way the episodes were shot was very theatrical.

hl: Barney started out like a traditional sitcom. Three days of rehearsal, one day of blocking. And you do two shows on Friday night. Danny Arnold was a perfectionist. He was the head producer, the creator. The scripts were coming out later and later and later and later.

twi-ny: Five minutes before showtime, here you go, new pages.

hl: Yeah. Finally at about, I don’t know, I think it was about the fifth week or so, he didn’t have the last scene and we had to cancel the audience because we didn’t have a full script to do. What are you gonna do? He was still working on it. That’s a sin. People would come from all over the world to see the show — give them an ending. So the question was, Are you gonna have an audience next week? You gotta tell us now. And he wasn’t sure, so we never had an audience again.

twi-ny: Did you miss not having an audience?

hl: Believe it or not, when I was offered Barney Miller, I was offered three pilots. There were two hour shows and Barney Miller, which was a sitcom. I thought since I had spent so much time on Broadway, working to an audience would be easier for me. So that’s why I chose Barney out of the three — good choice, because the other two died. Anyway, the point is I quickly learned that the audiences are really a distraction, that you must close them off and work to the camera. If I’m talking to you, the camera’s over there; onstage, I would talk to you like this because the audience is out here. You know what I mean? The cameraman finally said to me, Hey, over here, because I kept crossing the line, working to the audience. So I quickly was dissuaded from that.

My point is that from then on, it was done actually like a movie. We’d start in the beginning, stage the first scene, work on it, shoot it; we’d only have two days of rehearsal, because that’s all the script we had. And on the third day we’d start shooting the show scene by scene, and because it was an independent production, we’d just do it until we figured it was right. The only people on the set were from the network to make sure we didn’t say anything wrong.

twi-ny: I also noticed how many of the episodes dealt with important issues. I hadn’t remembered it being so political.

hl: I was not a part of the writing of it, but a lot of it, the writers all came in and read the morning newspaper and found things. The atomic bomb, marital rape, racism, police violence. Danny Arnold was the genius behind it. Let me tell you a story. One of the episodes, do you remember the episode where Wojo falls for a hooker? [“Wojo’s Girl”] He keeps arresting everybody in the house to stop her from plying her trade. He finally goes and asks her for a date and she says, Sure, like everybody else, fifty bucks. At the end of the show, we have this kind of father-son-related talk as we’re about to go home. And just as he goes out the door, he turns back to me and says, Uh, Barney, can you lend me fifty bucks to payday?

The network says, You can’t say that. Danny says, Why not? They say, That means he’s going with the girl. Danny says, Very astute, you figured that out. So we’re shooting the show on the soundstage. He’s up in the office arguing with standards and practices. It’s the last line of the show, basically. We shot everything up to there. This was only about the third year; we weren’t a hit. We were still on the borderline. Eventually the director [Noam Pitlick] calls up and says, Okay, we’re about to shoot the last scene. What do we do? And Danny says, Shoot it the way it’s written, and hangs up. He says to the network, I’m shooting the show the way it’s written. If you don’t put it on the air, I’m not gonna make anymore. The network put it on the air: X-rated. Did you ever hear of an X-rated sitcom? It made the show. The ratings went way up and from there on in, they didn’t even come to the set.

bk: Can I do a Danny mishegas?

twi-ny: Absolutely.

bk: Before Barney, he worked with us on The Marlo Thomas Show. And he got very frustrated with lunch. For one hour, everybody zoomed out and they went to some restaurant and it was a big waste of time. He says, No, we’re not gonna do that anymore. So one day he ordered sandwiches and coffee and tea for everybody. But everybody zoomed out because he didn’t tell anybody that he had done this. So all this food is sitting here and Danny ate about half of it himself.

The crew of The Love Boat eavesdrop on the latest superstar guest

twi-ny: So Hal is working with a lot of theater actors while on The Love Boat, Bernie is working with —

bk: Academy Award winners.

twi-ny: Superstars from around the world.

bk: Some were lovely. One in particular was a gigantic pain in the ass.

twi-ny: And you’re gonna tell us.

bk: Yes. No, not mentioning any names. Shelley Winters.

hl: Oh, well, Shelley was a pain in the ass everywhere.

bk: But Ernie Borgnine, he worked with her on The Poseidon Adventure. So he knew her mishegas very intimately. So she’s on the show, and you know, it was so difficult to be on the ship — you gotta get on a little boat, bring all the equipment and all the people to Capri, for example, and then get on a truck. Everybody goes to location. Well, she didn’t like her hair, and she says, These lines are terrible. They don’t really suit me. She was just awful. Awful. Ernie Borgnine ripped into her with every Italian curse. And I think she was looking forward to that. She finally behaved.

twi-ny: New superstars every week.

bk: Eva Marie Saint, this is her personality. Shelley Winters, dreadful human being, couldn’t help it. So I’m outside in the parking lot. Eva Marie Saint comes by. Bernie, what are you doing? Oh, I’m studying. Would you like me to cue you? I said, I couldn’t possibly, you know, you being who you are. She said, I do it for all my friends. She said, Please, I’d love to do it. And she did it. What a mensch.

twi-ny: So there are some sweethearts in the business.

hl: We have two old actors who have worked with —

bk: Everybody.

hl: Everybody. I could tell you, some were magnificent. Judy Holliday was the most generous actress to work with. And some were . . . Ethel Merman. Ugh.

bk: I still have an earache from working with Ethel Merman.

Bernie Kopell and Hal Linden have been in show business a combined 127 years (photo by Russ Rowland)

twi-ny: And now, for the first time, you’re working with each other. What’s that been like?

hl: I put up with it.

bk: [laughs]

twi-ny: You sound like an old married couple.

bk: I’m so great.

hl: Yeah. You should be great.

bk: I am.

twi-ny: It does look like you’re having fun doing it.

bk: It’s fun.

hl: You know, this is not Arthur Miller. This is just two Jews talking and the more laughs, the better. And that’s the way we approached it.

bk: We haven’t said one word yet about our director.

twi-ny: I am a fan of Dan Wackerman’s. I like his shows a lot.

hl: You know, as I said, we did the show only once in North Carolina, that was a reading. And there was only Ed. Weinberger; there’s no staging. So it was hardly directed. We were kind of on our own . . .

bk: Sitting in chairs.

hl: And Dan took it and tried to break it down and put it back together, you know, with some sense of where we’re going. He really turned it from just a conversation into a sketch. Let’s put it that way.

bk: Our director just keeps at us until we continue to improve, to get it right.

hl: It’s been two old guys who get to try again —

twi-ny: And succeed. Standing ovations, right? Selling out?

hl: Ovations aside, our critics are ourselves. “We did it.” “We didn’t do it.” “We gotta work on this.” And the more you do that, the longer you hang around.

twi-ny: Well, thank you for hanging around with me here. I hope the show runs as long as you want it to.

hl: It’s a limited run. He’s already got the next gig.

bk: And so do you.

hl: And I got the next gig.

twi-ny: Can you talk about it yet?

hl: In Kansas City, I’m going to do Come Blow Your Horn, the Lou Jacobi part [Mr. Baker].

bk: We have a cruise honoring Gavin MacLeod, who passed away a few months ago, on the Princess ship, going down to Mexico. That’s where we started: Mexico, Mexico, Mexico. Somebody whispered in Aaron Spelling’s ear, Schmuck, we’re a hit, we can go other places. So we went to the Caribbean, we went to the Mediterranean, we went everywhere in the world.

hl: And I got stuck on one set.

———————————————————————–

[For a behind-the-scenes look at the interview, go here.]

WAITING FOR GODOT / NO MAN’S LAND

Didi (Patrick Stewart) and Gogo (Ian McKellen) joke around while waiting for Godot in Samuel Beckett masterpiece (photo by Joan Marcus)

Cort Theatre
138 West 48th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Extended through March 30, $40 – $147
www.twoplaysinrep.com

For the past five months, British thespians Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen have been having a blast in New York, as they perform two existential masterpieces in repertory on Broadway and travel all over the city in their bowler hats, posting fabulous pictures on their twitter sites. Sir Ian and Sir Pat are now entering the last week of two marvelous productions, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, running at the Cort Theatre through March 30. The two men, who have previously starred opposite each other as frenemies in the X-Men movies, first teamed up for Godot in London in 2009; they had such a good time, they decided to bring it to Broadway. It was director Sean Mathias’s idea to add Pinter’s 1975 drawing-room romp, and the two plays work extremely well together, like a pair of old friends enjoying each other’s company. In Waiting for Godot — the last word of which you will forever pronounce with the accent on the second syllable after seeing this show — McKellen is Estragon (Gogo) and Stewart is Vladimir (Didi), two homeless men who are expecting a man named Godot to arrive. In between Gogo’s concern for his boots and Didi’s frequent trips to relieve himself, the drifters engage in such surreal dialogue as E: “He should be here.” V: “He didn’t say for sure he’d come.” E: “And if he doesn’t come?” V: “We’ll come back tomorrow.” E: “And then the day after tomorrow.” V: “Possibly.” E: “And so on.” V: “The point is —” E: “Until he comes.” V: “You’re merciless.” E: “We came here yesterday.” V: “Ah no, there you’re mistaken.” E: “What did we do yesterday?” V: “What did we do yesterday?” E: “Yes.” V: “Why . . . Nothing is certain when you’re about.” Indeed, nothing is certain in the two-and-a-half-hour, two-act play, even when the pompous Pozzo (Shuler Hensley) arrives, led by his apparent human slave, Lucky (Billy Crudup). What’s it all about? That’s something that theatergoers and critics have been contemplating and arguing about for some fifty years, getting little help from Beckett himself. The beauty of Godot is that it is about everything and nothing, perhaps the most entertaining and perplexing Rorschach test ever conceived. It’s really about whatever you want it to be, including, very simply, exceptional theater.

Spooner (Ian McKellen) and Hirst (Patrick Stewart) rehash the past in Harold Pinter classic (photo by Joan Marcus)

Much is left up to the audience to figure out in the absurdist black comedy No Man’s Land as well. After meeting in a pub, the wealthy, impeccably dressed Hirst (Stewart, wearing a wonderful pair of bright blue socks and a fashionable toupee) brings home the somewhat less erudite but scholarly Spooner (McKellen) for further conversation and top-shelf liquor. The two men discuss life and love, aging and infidelity, poetry and memory, occasionally joined by Foster (Crudup) and Briggs (Hensley), who may or may not be Hirst’s sons or servants. (The four characters are named after great cricketers — not that that lends insight into who they are or what they actually represent, other than that Pinter is playing yet more games with his story.) Stewart and McKellen, in roles originated by a pair of other sirs, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, respectively, are utterly delightful as the two gents. Are they old college friends? Romantic competitors? Two halves of the same person? As in Waiting for Godot, the significantly more acerbic No Man’s Land is open for vast interpretation as well, although it provides far more clues. Both plays are splendidly directed by Mathias (Bent), who honors the spirit of each play without getting overly fancy or dramatic, and feature exemplary sets and costumes designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis that evoke heaven, hell, and the way station in between. Over the past dozen years or so, McKellen (King Lear, Dance of Death) and Stewart (A Christmas Carol, Macbeth) have appeared on the New York stage separately, but there’s nothing quite like seeing them together on Broadway, in a pair of stellar productions that allow them to have just as much fun as the audience.

BROADWAY WEEK 2014

Multiple venues
January 21 – February 6, buy one ticket, get one free
www.nycgo.com/broadwayweek

Tickets are now on sale for the winter edition of Broadway Week, which runs January 21 through February 6 and offers theater lovers a chance to see new and long-running shows for half-price, as well as have an opportunity to pay a $20-$30 fee to upgrade to better seats. More than two dozen shows are participating, but they’re selling out fast, with the most popular selections being Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and Kinky Boots. But you can still get either regular two-for-one tickets or upgrades to such newer productions as A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Matilda the Musical, After Midnight, The Glass Menagerie, The Bridges of Madison County, Bronx Bombers, Machinal, Outside Mullingar, No Man’s Land, Twelfth Night, and Waiting for Godot as well as such older favorites as Chicago, Jersey Boys, The Lion King, The Phantom of the Opera, Once, Pippin, Wicked, and Mamma Mia! Nope, sorry, but The Book of Mormon is not on the list.

TWI-NY TALK: TONY LO BIANCO

Tony Lo Bianco has exemplified grace and class during his long career

THE LITTLE FLOWER
Dicapo Opera Theatre
184 East 76th St. between Lexington & Third Aves.
March 11-29, $50
www.tonylobianco.com

They don’t come much cooler and classier than Tony Lo Bianco. The longtime star of stage and screen has appeared in such films as the cult classic The Honeymoon Killers with Shirley Stoler, the Academy Award-winning The French Connection with Gene Hackman, and The Juror with Alec Baldwin and Demi Moore in addition to such Broadway shows as A View from the Bridge and The Goodbye People as well as off-Broadway productions of Waiting for Godot, The Threepenny Opera, and Yanks 3 Detroit 0 Top of the Seventh, which earned the Brooklyn native an Emmy. Since 1984, Lo Bianco has been portraying former congressman and three-term New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia in an evolving series of shows that have included Fiorello! The Musical, Lo Bianco’s La Guardia, and Hizzoner! His latest one-man presentation, The Little Flower, runs March 11-29 at the Dicapo Opera Theatre. The show, which takes place in La Guardia’s office on his last day as mayor, recently made news when Republican mayoral candidate and Gristedes head John Catsimatidis bought up ten performances as a fundraiser; tickets are still available for March 22, 23, 27, 28, and 29. Lo Bianco, now seventy-six, spoke to us from his Central Park West home as he was preparing to leave for DC to perform The Little Flower to an invite-only crowd at the US Navy Memorial Theater on Pennsylvania Ave.

twi-ny: This is a busy time for you. How are you doing?

Tony Lo Bianco: I’m terrific. Today we’re leaving for Washington, and that’s really exciting. It’s like hitting the pinnacle, except if I had the president in front of me. [laughs]

twi-ny: You’ve performed variations of this play in New York and elsewhere. Is Washington a different kind of crowd, since it’s a more political-heavy audience?

Tony Lo Bianco: We’re gonna see, and I think you’re right. There’s going to be a lot of military there too. In New York, the people who are going to come and see La Guardia have a political background and interest as well; they’re not coming to some musical comedy that they believe is going to be “that kind of entertainment.” We’re going to talk about issues, and I’m very excited about that.

twi-ny: The show goes back to Hizzoner in 1984 and has gone through several incarnations since. How has The Little Flower changed from that original production?

Tony Lo Bianco: The original one we did in Albany in ’84 was more of a valentine to Fiorello. It was filmed by WNET, and we received five Daytime Emmys, including one for Mayor Koch, who narrated it. But it didn’t touch on what I’m touching on now. I’m addressing all the issues, and through its incarnations, I’ve changed it and tried to keep up with what La Guardia was doing and thinking at the time as a congressman and all the way past when he was mayor.

I use that mind, that Fiorello mind, and the fact that he was a fusion candidate – which is a key word in our politics today – a fusion candidate because the way we’re set up right now, we’re never going to get anything done. Nobody can agree on anything. The two parties are so far away from each other, we’ve really made a dividing line in our country. So the idea of bringing people together is to be a fusion candidate, which is what La Guardia was. He ran as a Republican because the Democrats at that time were just loaded with corruption; Tammany Hall was in power for 136 years when Fiorello finally ran against them in Congress and beat them after a second attempt. From that perspective, he was able to say things like – and if any candidate says this today, it’ll go a long way – “If I don’t live up to my campaign promises, I want you to throw me the hell out of office.”

twi-ny: You don’t hear that anymore.

Tony Lo Bianco: No, no, no, because it’s a load of “Scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” and so on and so forth. You need a maverick, like he was, a real maverick, who is not beholden to anyone except the people. And the message has to get out to the people to bypass both parties.

twi-ny: The word bipartisanship has become a joke.

Tony Lo Bianco: Yeah, it’s just foolishness. But when you show people that you hire, as La Guardia did – he said, “I’ll hire people from both sides, even if they voted against me….” I think that kind of attitude – you know, they try to scratch the surface once in a while. Like this administration right now is putting up a fake Republican in Chuck Hagel. It’s like a joke. They did it back in Clinton’s time with William Cohen for Secretary of Defense. In the play, I address many issues that are plaguing us in every which way, whether it’s inflation, whether it’s unemployment, juvenile delinquency, all kinds of corruption in government.

twi-ny: All of which is still relevant today.

Tony Lo Bianco: That’s why I’ve redone the whole show and made it very relevant to almost everything that I say. It pertains to what our faults are today and how to fix them – not just bringing them up but bringing them up in a way that is undeniably the truth. Because, and I say this from experience, when the far left or the far right comes to see my show, they both believe I’m talking to them. And that’s wonderful. I mean, I’ve had that demonstration right in front of my eyes – the far left wanting to buy a show so they can promote their point of view, and the far right has done the same thing. So I must be doing something right.

twi-ny: It also says something about the mayors of New York who have served three terms – primarily La Guardia, Koch, Bloomberg, all of whom appealed to Republicans and Democrats, who ran on both sides of the ticket or switched affiliation. The Little Flower takes place on the last day of La Guardia’s third term. Are three terms too many?

Tony Lo Bianco: You know, it depends on what kind of a great job we need. We’re so desperate for congressmen or mayors who are just terrific that if they’re indispensable, then they should stay, because we have a lack of quality people to represent us, which is just awful. It’s just remarkable how hungry and starving we are for leaders. I do think that if we find a gem, the term should be extended. However, history has proven that that’s not to be the fact – especially when they’re crooked thieves [like Tammany Hall]. That is the biggest problem. How do you regulate that?

Look what they’re doing in other countries as well. I just spoke with someone from Italy yesterday; people are beside themselves, and it’s just handwriting on the wall for us. Europe is just handwriting on the wall for us, and if we don’t pay attention, we’re going to do the same kind of – we’re doing the same kind of thing. You can’t say we’re going to. We are in the process of doing the same kind of thing as Europe. And my biggest personal thing is history is our greatest teacher. To me, if you don’t follow history, you don’t understand history, you’re going to be an idiot. You’re going to be a fool. You’re going to make the same stupid mistakes.

We should be the smartest country in the world. We have all that magnificent history behind us. There’s thousands of years there of understanding what happens to governments, what happens to empires. It’s right in front of us. We’re not inventing the wheel. Tell me, how do we get sixteen trillion, five hundred billion dollars in debt? How does that happen? You think somebody just wakes up one day and says, “Oh my God, is that the figure?” That’s the way we seem to be behaving.

twi-ny: We’re fiddling while Rome burns.

Tony Lo Bianco: That’s right. Is that not the biggest issue? That is like a meteor going to crush us one of these days. The public is concentrating on making a buck just to put food in their mouths – they can’t be thinking about sixteen trillion, five hundred billion dollars, or that their children and grandchildren are going to pay for that.

twi-ny: Do you feel that if La Guardia ran today, based on the same platforms, we would elect him to fix things?

Tony Lo Bianco: I’m fighting like a son of a gun to do something like this and try to, for want of a better word, teach this kind of understanding of sacrifice and giving and helping and doing for the public. It’s in my genes to do that; I personally love doing that, and I picked this character to shove it out to the public. But I don’t know if this public is ready for this anymore because they’re so busy with what they’re doing. They just have to realize what I’m saying and realize the reality of what is happening to them and somehow be strong enough – I say “somehow” because they’ve been led this way to thinking, “Hey, I can only think about tomorrow. “Gimme gimme gimme. What are you gonna give me? What? Oh, good. I don’t have to work. How many weeks unemployment? Ninety-nine? Weeks? Oh, wow. I think I’ll take a part-time job while I’m receiving that money – that would mean much much more money than I ever earned.”

twi-ny: You’re sounding like a conservative Republican. Are you?

Tony Lo Bianco: No, I’m trying to talk common sense. Common sense and logic. Another thing La Guardia said as a congressman was about labels. He said, “I’ve been called a pacifist, a Communist, a Socialist, a radical, a Republican, a progressive, a Democrat, a conservative, a rebel, and a demagogue. That sounds like I’m a well-rounded fella, don’t ya think?” [laughs] That’s in my play. I cover anything that anybody could say or think, but the idea of that stuff I spouted is it might sound Republican, but it’s common sense, isn’t it? Someone tell me where I’ve gone wrong in saying what I just said.

twi-ny: Well, one of the things you did say was “well-rounded,” and “well-rounded” is something you are when playing La Guardia. Here’s Tony Lo Bianco, this elegant-looking, smooth-talking guy from The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, Blood Brothers, and you’re prancing around the stage in this fat suit, telling jokes, singing. That’s something different for you.

Tony Lo Bianco: You see, I love that. That’s what I do. I mean, I love to play other human beings. The roles that I’ve portrayed – there’s a whole gallery of different characters I’ve played, different humans, different tempos, different sizes and shapes. But yes, for the general public, who see me as you just described, which is pretty much the movies and stuff, it is a revelation. When you come and see the show, please, you must come and say hello to me and see the difference of this guy who is prancing around, as you say [laughs]. And I am prancing around and doing all those things.

twi-ny: You’ve also done several sports films. You were a Golden Gloves boxer, you played Rocky Marciano – do you still follow sports?

Tony Lo Bianco: Oh yeah, I’m a big fight fan. I’m a big baseball fan.

twi-ny: You did Yanks 3 Detroit 0 Top of the Seventh, which you won an Obie for.

Tony Lo Bianco: I loved that.

twi-ny: So I gather you’re a Yankees fan?

Tony Lo Bianco: I’m a Yankees fan, but actually I’m a New York fan. I want them both to win. My ideal, of course, is for the both of them to be in the World Series.

twi-ny: That’s a tough place to be.

Tony Lo Bianco: I’m a baseball fan. I like to watch excellence and achievement and great players who respect the game, respect themselves, respect the country. Whether they’re a sports hero, or any kind of hero, whether it’s an actor, whatever, they should really understand that they are a public figure and they should be an example to the children and everybody else in the world of how to behave. They must all be tremendously grateful for having the opportunity today in earning the kind of money that these athletes earn, which is rather enormous.

twi-ny: Regarding the steroids controversy, should Mike Piazza have been elected to the Hall of Fame?

Tony Lo Bianco: There is no proof, no evidence against Piazza. That kind of stigma in this country is terrible. Even Roger Clemens – Roger Clemens has been cleared. I just saw a thing in the newspaper that labeled him a disgrace. What disgrace? He was cleared, and anybody who’s cleared is cleared. And as far as Mike Piazza, he certainly should be in the Hall of Fame. But as far as those who have used drugs and steroids, no, they should not be in the Hall of Fame.

twi-ny: Boxing isn’t the cleanest of sports either.

Tony Lo Bianco: Back in the day there were definitely things going on, when the mob was involved. I don’t know what’s going on now. You never know. You got promoters promoting both fighters. Who the heck knows what’s going on? But some of the fights are pretty vicious, so it makes you wonder, “Can this fight possibly be fixed?” It doesn’t look like it.

twi-ny: You’re a Brooklyn boy.

Tony Lo Bianco: Yes.

twi-ny: What do you think of the new Brooklyn, which has spread out to Bushwick and Red Hook, and now you’ve got the Nets playing where Branch Rickey wanted to put the Dodgers?

Tony Lo Bianco: You know, one person’s progress is another person’s disaster, and I address that also in the play, because La Guardia had to build low-cost housing, and he had to take that land from somewhere. You know, I am so thrilled to have grown up having nothing. My father was a taxicab driver, so we understand where we came from – we never forget that – and I’m grateful for all that wonderful experience. I would call it “home education” – when I say “home education,” I mean because I had uncles, and aunts, and grew up in a big family, and the headquarters was my house in Brooklyn. Every Sunday, everybody would come over to see my mother and all her brothers, and that kind of life teaches you more than any school or college can teach you. I’m so grateful for that, and it’s given me my best quality, which is certainly not my academic understanding but my human understanding, of people and conditions, and maybe, in a funny way, that’s why I relate to La Guardia, and why I picked La Guardia, because he’s a man of the people, for the people.