By Harry Haun
29 Jan 2010

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Bogosian, who started out as a one-man show monologist, blended seamlessly into the ensemble and was later singing the praises of teamwork. "This is the most generous, hardest-working cast I've ever been around," he said. "If they got any nicer, I think they would explode. I don't know if I could handle it. I think we're going to have a nice time continuing to challenge ourselves through the run. This isn't a play that you can take for granted. You have to keep staying on your toes.

"I said to Alicia one night as we were walking off stage — I said, 'You know, I do something in this show that I have never done in any show in New York.' And she said, 'What?' — then she said, 'Oh, wait, let me guess: You smile a lot.' I said, 'That's right.' It's unusual for me to kinda relax and to be actually the way I am. He's not like me, really, in life. I get to let a lot of myself out, but I don't think I've ever called my wife 'Honey' or 'Baby' or any of those things in 30 years. Jo Bonney, my wife [the stage director], is a lot more like Laura in the play. But I love spending time with Alicia. I feel like it's a second life up there. We started out on the right foot with this thing from the beginning, and it has just been a pleasure working with her. We both understand what we're doing, who these people are. We've talked a lot about their history and who they are and why do they choose to move it along so quickly."

Silverstone is the only cast member to have made the big trip to Broadway, and her character's positioning as a creature of contrast to the downbeat personas around her still enables her to not only steal a few moments for herself but also to serve as a point of identification for the audience. "I love how truthful she is. I love how she just says it as it is at every given moment. She doesn't have that skill of censoring herself — and rightly so. Sometimes she asks really interesting questions, and sometimes she says things where you think, 'You need to take down a notch, lady.'

"The writing has changed a bit — in fact, the writing changed all the way through, until two or three days ago. It's been distracting and crafting at the same time.

"The one thing I made a conscious decision to do was to make Mandy a lot smarter from the get-go. I want you to believe she has an incredible amount to offer other than her looks. I want your perception of her to change over the course of the play."

Silverstone's surprising culinary skills certainly altered the perception of her immediate cast members and strengthened their bond. "My kitchen here is so small that I asked Laura if I could borrow her kitchen to cook up some meals for all of us."

She recently rustled up a segment on "Oprah." "I wrote a book called 'The Kind Diet,'" she said. "It came out in October and is a New York Times bestseller."

Appropriate for the two couples in the center ring, many of the first-nighters came already coupled: Jonathan Cake and Julianne Nicholson, Becky Ann Baker and God of Carnage-bound Dylan Baker, Byron Jennings and Carolyn McCormack, photographer Cindy Sherman and musician David Byrne, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, The Director (Kate Whoriskey of The Miracle Worker) and The Donkey (Daniel Breaker of Shrek), two-time Tony winner Donna Murphy and Shawn Elliott and Superior Donuts' Michael McKean and Annette O'Toole.

Playwrights A. R. Gurney Jr. and Alfred Uhry spent the intermission talking up laudatory storms about Linney and Margulies, while their wives listened. Alan Alda came with his wife and spent his 74th birthday at the opening because Linney is an old friend. Jill Clayburgh and Lily Rabe made their stylish mother-daughter splash, and Frances Sternhagen showed up to support her son, the understudy (Tom Carlin). Lynn Nottage, whose last play, MTC's Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined, covered a contemporary Congolese battlefield that would have been grist for the mill of the characters in Time Stands Still. Currently, she's writing a comedy. "I call it By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, but that title may change. It's about an African-American actress in the '30s trying to get in 'Gone With the Wind.' I think it's going very, very well. Hopefully, it will be ready next fall."

Other first-nighters included Brooke Shields, Michael Cerveris, Susan Birkenhead (whose Minsky's lyrics are currently up for L.A. honors), Vincent D'Onofrio, newly minted Hall-of-Famer and Tony-winning publicist Shirley Herz, illusionist David Blaine, Soho Rep artistic director Sarah Benson (who's directed That Face for MTC this spring), In the Heights director Thomas Kail (who just put in a new "Usnavi" on Broadway — Corbin Bleu of "High School Musical"), Amy Ryan, Tony-winning director Garry Hynes (who's directing Equivocation for MTC right now), Kieran Culkin, Martha Plimpton, "Weeds" star Guillermo Diaz, Anne Kaufman Schneider, Doubt Tony winner Adriane Lenox, Birdie-free Nolan Gerard Funk and the director-choreographer of the L.A.-bound Leap of Faith, Rob Ashford.

The reception of the audience seemed pretty much along the lines of what Margulies had hoped for when he wrote Time Stands Still: "I want audiences to be moved, to have their thoughts provoked, to look at things in life differently — and not just photographs, which the play talks about specifically, but just attitudes as well."