By Harry Haun
23 Mar 2009

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The lady who executes this trick likewise maintained the zipped-lip front. "I can't answer that question," said Davis. "It's very complicated, I'll say that. The main point with Yasmina is that she wanted the vomit to look very, very real. She didn't want someone just spitting something out of their mouth. She wanted a real projectile vomit so Matthew Warchus and his team of technicians figured out how to make that happen. During rehearsals, I did so much heaving that I couldn't eat my lunch anymore. I just learned to deal with it. I've kinda built up some heaving muscles."

Motherhood kept Davis off the stage for a stretch — she has a four-year-old and a two-year-old — while she devoted herself to short-range film projects. Now, she's back and in some pretty classy company. "At different times, we all got nervous. It's much trickier being on stage than on film, really. None of us had been up there in a long time, except for Jeff, so we all had to calm each other down as a group."

Davis counted herself quite lucky to have come back in such an interesting role. "I think she's hilarious," she said of her buttoned-down part. "I like how nervous she is, how she wants to try to do the right thing and she ends up just blowing her stack."

Harden is pleased with her pickings, too — and unravels like a house afire. "I love that's she's fierce, that she means well, that she's a disaster through the process."

The Oscar winner (for "Pollock") has never found much marital bliss on the New York stage. She was Tony-nominated as the wife of bisexual David Marshall Grant in Tony Kushner's Tony-winning two-parter, Angels in America, and she played Laura Bush in another Kushner piece. In between, she did Sam Shepard's 1993 Simpatico at The Public, opposite Ed Harris, who got her to play Jackson Pollock's wife.

"I don't know why it is I have bad marriages on stage," she admitted, "but in real life I married super-well." His name is Thaddaeus Scheel, and he came to her already well marked: Both Harden's father and her brother are named Thaddaeus.

Daniels, who began his Broadway career as Christopher Reeve's almost saintly partner-caretaker in Lanford Wilson's 1980 Fifth of July, swings to the other side of the pendulum here as the nasty, narcissistic lawyer on the attack. "You can be absolutely shameless in your arrogance and your ego and your smartest-one-in-the-room-till-someone-proves-otherwise-which-they-won't," he beamed with relish. He even allows his character to smile watching the other marriage come apart at the seams.

"Oh, my guy loves that kind of thing," Daniels delighted in saying. "'Oh, this is interesting. Maybe they'll come to blows. Let me get a seat so I can see it better.'"

The Marshall Brickman-Rick Elice musical he tried out last year, Turn of the Century, is still in the active file, but "they have to raise more money, and I think we have to go out of town one more time. We still have work to do on it, but it was great fun doing it."

Tommy Tune and Rachel York, the director and co-star of Turn of the Century, came out to support Daniels on his opening night, and at his table was Debra Monk, who won her Tony co-starring with him in another Lanford Wilson play, Redwood Curtain. "I'm getting ready to shoot a pilot up in Rhode Island — going up this week — called 'House Rules,'" said Monk. She had hoped to be back on the boards here in a one-woman show about a face in the crowd of early-day television, Mrs. Miller Does Her Thing, written and directed by James Lapine, but it was canceled.

Other friends at court: Jonathan Cake (who's busily growing a beard for Hampton's The Philanthropist), the recent Desdemona at The Duke, Juliet Rylance (whose dad, Mark, was just directed to a Tony for Boeing-Boeing by Warchus) and two actresses from The Spanish Play by Reza — Zoe Caldwell and Linda Emond — were in attendance, as was Mrs. Tony Soprano, Edie Falco, who was proud of her boy.

The notoriously press-shy Gandolfini skipped the interview hoopla altogether and held private court at his table, greeting pals who came over to congratulate him.

Among the first-nighters were Alan Alda, Walter Bobbie, Bobby Cannavale, Fran Drescher, America Ferrara, Jane Fonda, Maggie Grace, Colin Hanks, David Hyde-Pierce, Jeremy Irons, Hugh Jackman, David Lindsay-Abaire, Lucy Liu, Phyllida Lloyd, Eric Mabius, Jena Malone, Kathleen Marshall, Samantha Mathis, Janet McTeer, Christopher Meloni, Joey Pantoliano, Sarah Paulson, Geoffrey Rush, John Patrick Shanley, Martha Stewart, Amber Tamblyn, Harriet Walter and Barbara Walters.

The centerpiece of every table was a vaise of tulips just begging to be strewn about the premises.