By Harry Haun
05 Dec 2007
Evan Handler dropped by as well, having wrapped his role of Kristen Davis' husband in the "Sex and the City" movie. Next project: "I have a new book coming out May 1 from Riverhead — 'It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive.'" It's a follow-up, ten years later, of his "Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors," a stage monologue-turned-memoir about his surviving leukemia. Other Steppenwolf alums: Joan Allen (now a screen star but, she said, sorely tempted to return to the stage after what she had just seen), Tim Hopper and Jim Orlieb (who opened the night before in The Farnsworth Invention).
Most of the evening's star-power was concentrated at the Imperial. Few lingered on the sidewalk because of the weather, which was beyond blustery, and made their way immediately to their seats. Captain Queeg and the lawyer who wore him down on the witness stand in Broadway's last Caine Mutiny Court-Martial — Zelko Ivanek and David Schwimmer — bumped into each other, rushing inside from the cold.
The glittery herd included Pulitzer Prize-winning David Lindsay-Abaire, Eric Bogosian, Penny Fuller (who'll be re-Dividing the Estate next November when that recent Horton Foote play moves uptown to a Shubert theatre to be announced), Christine Ebersole & Billy Stritch, director Joe Mantello (in an Elmer Fudd hunting cap) and playwright Jon Robin Baitz, The (forthcoming) Flamingo Kid's Michael Mayer and Susan Birkenhead, November's Laurie Metcalf, producer Chase Mishkin, actor-playwright Bruce Norris (whose plays have premiered in Chicago under Shapiro's direction), producer Daryl Roth, David Margulies (fresh from The Price at Long Wharf), Ana Gasteyer from Broadway's last Threepenny Opera, columnist Michael Musto, A Feminine Ending's Marsha Mason (hinting she may be back on stage here "after the first of the year"), Christine Pedi, Spring Awakening's Tony-winning Duncan Sheik and Tom Hulce, Anthony Edwards, Bobby Cannavale and Alison Pill, Atlantic's Neil Pepe and Roundabout's Todd Haimes, Kathleen Marshall and Marian Seldes.
An inordinate amount of critics and columnists attended the opening, many of them fresh (if that's the right word) from a screening of Tim Burton's splashy-slasher rendering of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. Graciously putting a good face on it, the original Tony-winning Mrs. Lovett — Angela Lansbury — said at the Imperial, "It's quite a different thing."
The three sisters in August — played by Amy Morton (Sinise's Nurse Ratched in the last One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Sally Murphy (Julie Jordan in the Lincoln Center Carousel) and Mariann Mayberry — are more Lear-like than Chekhov-like, given to fisticuffs when words fail them. So it's good to have an old friend to fight with, reasoned Murphy. "We've all been in each other's lives for so long, and that comes in handy when you're playing a family. Because we are."
Shapiro said her directing job was made much easier by that familiarity factor. "You've got a really well-structured script, and then you have really wonderful actors who are very trusting and allow you to use them. It's a great combination of them trusting me to say, 'Okay, you move over here, and you move over there,' combined with their natural instincts. It means that I only have to do about 50 percent of the work."
Comedy that comes out of chaos is dangerous, but eminently desirable for Shapiro. "I'm most comfortable in that kind of situation. Anything else would be boring to me. You try to stay in your given circumstances and work on the faces of the characters. Then, as far as it goes is as far as it goes — but that's based on a individual and their given circumstances, and we trust that. That's where we work from."
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| The cast of August: Osage County takes its opening night bows.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
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