By Harry Haun
21 Nov 2008

At the party, Ashley looked about as matriarchic as your garden-variety sex kitten. Tricks of the trade, she waved away with a feminine flutter: "You put on tons of old stage makeup that you're sweating through. You hide behind feathers. I'd rather pluck a big chicken. I feel like a big chicken. I feel like a biiiig chicken."

A spring chicken perhaps, much too young to play matriarchs. She pooh-poohed the notion. "Darling, darling, I'm 69. The character is 83. All these broads are around mutilating themselves to play 20 or 30 years younger. I can play 15 years older."

Her date for the evening was her frequent producer, Jeffrey Richards, who relapsed into publicist on her behalf: "Do you realize there are very few actresses — in the '60s, '70s and '80s — who starred in the '50s? This is her sixth decade as a star on Broadway. She debuted in a play that Dore Schary wrote called The Highest Tree. It was at the Golden Theatre. She and Robert Redford played brother and sister.

"And of course it's a legendary thing that Penny Fuller followed her in Barefoot in the Park. Now they're in the same dressing room and playing mother and daughter!"

	Horton Foote, Michael Wilson, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, Marian Seldes, Andrew Leynse and Mary Bacon , Paul Rudnick, Daryl Roth and Bernard Gersten, Tony Roberts, William Finn and Andre Bishop
	photos by Aubrey Reuben

Fuller's natural sunshine wears well on a role that would, in lesser hands, be a thankless undertaking. "There are more razz-ma-tazzy parts. It's not easy to do, y'know — this decent woman who is silently holding the world together, taking care of everybody. We know those ladies. She's a really interesting woman. Her husband died, and I think her life is lived through her son and taking care of her mother, but I think that Pauline — the girl that her son is going to marry who is a teacher and a very educated woman — I think that's who Lucille would like to be, or would like to have been if she had been born a little later." She said she didn't really base her performance on Jane Craver, the sister of her Texas-born agent and friend, William Craver, "but we both realized it is her."

In addition to the character, Fuller likes the uncanny topicality of the play. "Isn't that scary how prophetic this was? And he wrote it 20 years ago. It was prophetic last year, and now this year! Unbelievable!"

The emotional immediacy that the play has gained in recent times was also apparent to Hallie Foote. "It's very topical," she contended, "I think more so a year later since we did it at Primary Stages. You feel that audience is all in on this story. Everybody has a connection. I think they get what even my character is going through."

She divided her time at the party, alternately doing interviews and playing Keeper of the Flame, looking in on her father, who also had his two sons in attendance — director Walter Foote and restaurateur Horton Foote Jr. The latter runs the popular Village eatery, Tavern on Jane — but on this particular night, without him. "It pretty well runs by itself," Jr. said confidently. "We're not there all the time. I was often told by one of the people I learned the business from that the sign of a good restaurant is not how well it runs when you're there but how well it runs when you're not there."

Author Foote also had a son-in-law in attendance — and indeed on stage: Abner, Hallie's husband who plays her first cousin in the play, the mensch-like "Son," who heroically holds the tide against his greedy elders. It's his Broadway debut as well — "12 years late," he ruefully noted. Abner was in the original cast of Foote's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Young Man From Atlanta with Ralph Waite and Carlin Glynn. "They fired the whole cast, except one person, right before Broadway," he said.

McRaney's compellingly passive performance has also benefited from a year of marinating. "We were just discussing the difference between last year at Primary Stages and here," he said. "I think the time off did us all a lot of good. We had the opportunity to digest the material a bit more. When you're working on it and you're close to it, sometimes you don't see the forest for the trees, but that time down from it gives you the opportunity to contemplate the work as a whole. What is Mr. Foote really asking here? What does this really mean? Then, of course, these economic times have dictated a different take on things than perhaps simple 1987 Texas."

A slimmed down Tony Roberts, looking like the Tony Roberts of old (just grayer), has been such an unfailing fixture at Penny Fuller openings one has to wonder if they have a blood oath going or something. "You've hit it exactly!" Roberts pounced. "We do have a blood oath, going all the way back to Northwestern University. That's where we met. We were assigned as dancing partners in the big musical event of the year at Northwestern, The Waa-mu Show. I worshipped her because she was the best actress at the school, and, after we graduated, we stayed in touch with each other, and, in a few years, we were starring in Barefoot in the Park together."

By the time Roberts entered Park, Ashley had moved on to other projects, but they did have a previous encounter: "Elizabeth was a great inspiration to me because my second job on Broadway was in Take Her, She's Mine," he recalled. "I replaced an actor, and I came into the company, and Elizabeth was so kind to me. It was such a thrill to be on stage with her. She was so real and she had such energy."

Next up for Roberts is Heroes, a three-hander which Tom Stoppard adapted from a French play by Gerald Sibleyras. He has the role that Equus' Richard Griffith played to recent acclaim in London opposite John Hurt and Ken Stott. "We will open Feb. 24 at the Clurman Theatre on 42nd Street and run until April 11, and then — if what I said to Phil Smith tonight has any effect — we'll open at the Music Box in May. John Cullum co-stars, and I don't know yet who the other actor is. It is directed by Carl Forsman, the artistic director of the Keen Company that's producing it."

Actress Mary Bacon, an official friend-of-the-court (as the wife of Primary Stages' artistic director Andrew Leynse), just returned from Yale Rep where she starred in the stateside premiere of another London hit, Lucinda Coxon's Happy Now? "I am the worst person to ask about it happening in New York," she admitted, "but it definitely should because I was amazed by the response to it — not just critically but, like, the audience loved it. I played a modern woman with two kids, trying to have a career and a life and a husband. And she starts to buckle under the stress. She meets a man [David Andrew McDonald] at a conference and he basically tells her, 'The sex is on the table any time you want.' And she laughs at him, but it starts to get to her, because she's not getting her needs met. A lot of people relate to that."

Prominent among the first-nighters were Alex Witchell and Frank Rich (both of whom have written eloquently about Foote and his work in their Paper of Record), Lincoln Center Theater's Bernard Gersten and Cora Cahan, Primary Stages' Casey Childs and Elliot Fox, producers Daryl Roth and Liz McCann, The League's Charlotte St. Martin and The Wing's Howard Sherman, director Mark Lamos, playwright Maria Eder, Marian Seldes ("I think the play is so beautiful, and it grows and grows"), David Margulies and Rick McKay with nutritionist in tow ("to keep me good").

Playwrights who have had their work done at Lincoln Center answered the opening-night roll call impressively: John Guare, John Weidman, an early-to-bed Paul Rudnick, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, William Finn and Alfred Uhry. The latter is "working on a new play for Lynne Meadow, I think," and Weidman — now that he and Stephen Sondheim have their Road Show up and at 'em at The Public — is starting an original Susan Stroman musical at Lincoln Center — as are, for that matter, Flaherty and Ahrens — and it's not the same musical, Flaherty is quick to note. "Ours is a music-theatre-dance hybrid. It's very romantic and it's set in Paris and it's about the creation of art and how dance figures into that."

The rumor that Foote is writing a new play was denied by him. "I'm resting," the nonagenarian said — but Lincoln Center's Andre Bishop hasn't noticed much resting. Bishop said, "He comes to every performance — every performance! An astounding person. We've provided him a beautiful apartment, and he comes here — obscene!"

The cast of Dividing the Estate at curtain call.
photo by Aubrey Reuben

View article on single page

Previous Page   1 | 2 Next Page