By Harry Haun
26 Apr 2012

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The air of fraternal familiarity that passes between Lithgow and Boyd Gaines, who plays Stewart Alsop, is totally acted. The two have never worked together before, "although," Gaines felt it was important to note, "John is the one who presented me with my first Tony." So, how is he to finally work with? "Oh, he's a complete bastard — he'll upstage you in a heartbeat," Gaines teased before answering for real: "No, he's the most generous fellow, just grand fun and very playful. He has such a great sense of joy about working that's infectious."

Gaines did his homework as well. "Stewart was a fascinating fellow, much more reserved than Joe. The younger brother — very much the younger brother— and sorta second on the bandstand with Joe in terms of writing the column, which he may have resented. He played his cards close to the vest. There's a wonderful book written by him called 'Stay of Execution' about his battle with leukemia. He prided himself on his objectivity and, unlike Joe who was a political advocate, felt a reporter's job was to tell it as he saw it, not advocate what should or shouldn't be."

Alsop opposition is, likewise, thoroughly documented — namely, The New York Times' David Halberstam. "There's so much source material you can find that you had to cherry-pick which things were going to help you with the delivering of the role and the text," admitted his impersonator, Stephen Kunken.

"I never knew until I started working on this that his book, 'The Best and the Brightest,' was ironically titled. The brightest and the best were these guys who got us into this war. They were the smartest, and they made a huge mistake."

Brian J. Smith, who displayed washboard abs in Roundabout's Come Back, Little Sheba revival, arrives shirtless as the sexy Russkie in The Columnist. "It's in my contract these days," he kidded. "I had to do a lot of hardcore stuff for other roles I've played, but for this one I just do a lot of yoga and running." The accent also came easily to him: "I worked in Bulgaria for a month on a TV movie so I had that sound in my head."

Grace Gummer brought such a breezy assurance to the role of Alsop's stepdaughter one would not suspect — save for the bandage in her barefoot scene — that she suffered a painful sprain in a subway fall and missed a performance on Friday. "It was bad. I couldn't walk, but it's getting better. I'm having such a good time, except for that. I can't wait to keep doing it and doing it. I love it. I love how I get to age from 14 to 16 to 18 to 20 and how I can play John's stepdaughter. I think that's just the best part of my job. I look forward to it every day. He's so inspiring. My mother [Meryl Streep] did her first play with him, Trelawny of the 'Wells,' back in the day."

	Margaret Colin
	Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

Even Susan Mary Alsop, whose in-name-only marriage lasted 17 years, wrote a book. "David Auburn gave it to me the first day of rehearsal," said Margaret Colin, who brings home and heart to the character — and her cello tones match the rosewood paneling of the Alsop library. "Susan Mary was quite a dynamo. She got a lot done with her life in a time when women were rarely allowed the forefront.

"If you get to play a woman who asks for what she wants and is vulnerable to ask for what she wants, then you're lucky. David gave us a really great skeleton of a wonderful play, and this company — through the amazing Dan Sullivan — is adding nuance and texture and passion and conflict to it."

So what was director Sullivan's reaction to Auburn's play on first reading? "A part of it is that we respond to a thing politically if we are in any way political so I had very much a political response to it," replied the man who was in the original cast of Hair when Alsop was at the height of his powers. "Being a progressive myself, I saw it as the making of a neo-con. We know so many brilliant journalists who through Vietnam or Israel — through whatever single issue one gets ahold of and can't let go of — become suddenly stuck in a reactionary mode. To me, it was that story writ large in that man who had even more power than any of the journalists we know today."

Sullivan sees the ensemble foundation in Lithgow's tour de force. "John, like any great actor, feeds off the other actors, and he has such extraordinary respect for all of them and knows they are what's floating him and making that such a great performance." Another example: "John was a good friend of Halberstam's, and he enjoyed Stephen so much he abstained from talking about how Halberstam was to him. He was very much respectful of the fact Stephen was creating his own guy."

The director has already started his next project — beginning, on Shakespeare's birthday this week, As You Like It with Lily Rabe as Rosalind, David Furr as Orlando and Andre Braugher as The Duke for the Delacorte.

John Lee Beatty, who did the inventive sets for The Columnist, will follow Sullivan into the park for As You Like It, and will linger for Into the Woods.

So how do you design Into the Woods for a theatre that's already into the woods (of Central Park)? "Piggybacking on the top of As You Like It — which also has some very famous woods: the forest of Arden — it's a natural fit that we do the two of them. But there are some surprises in both of them."

Less natural was his first response to The Columnist: "I must say when I read the script, and we're jumping from Moscow to Georgetown to Vietnam — I tried not to freak out. It was rather a challenge. Also, Dan Sullivan wanted it to get bigger toward the end with more air, so it was not only figuring out the skins of the onion but how at the end to surprise you with a lot of open space, which is even harder. I don't know how I did it."