*

On April 28 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club officially started unfolding Donald Margulies' Collected Stories — a Pulitzer Prize also-ran in its day (1997) and one of his best — so let the head games begins. There's a lot of subliminal sword-fencing going on here, a lot of silent screaming, but rarely does any of it crack the calm, civilized surface. The setting is the comfortably cluttered Greenwich Village apartment of Ruth Steiner, a once-rising literary light who has dimmed to medium wattage and become mentor to promising writers. Enter a bright, shining, young case-in-point, Lisa Morrison, fairly bursting at the seams with hero-worship and prerequisite promise. Soon she's Ruth's assistant, then she's receiving the kind of acclaim that marked Ruth's arrival and eventually she makes her move into the big time, leaving her old teacher in the dirt crying foul.

In contrast to the cluttered physical surroundings, the real drama is the internal one raging in the smart, pristine minds of these two friends-turning-enemies. Under the direction of Lynne Meadow, MTC's artistic director, this cerebral catfight between two intelligent women slowly builds to a lady-or-the-tigress ending.

Linda Lavin's Ruth is constantly jolted by the abrupt emotional shifts of Sarah Paulson's Lisa and warily circles her would-be fan-and-friend for two hours, drawing out the words of carefully phrased questions, inching into the young girl's mind to determine the depths of her ambition. Lisa responds sharply or silently in ways that damage and jeopardize their uneasy friendship until an action of hers is read by Ruth as naked betrayal. Lisa counters it was an act of honor.

The heavy hand of Eve Harrington is never tipped here. If there is a winner, the audience is left to decide. Margulies' even-handed writing allows you that luxury.

Lead "singer" Lavin came in for particular praise from him: "She was really meant to play this role," he decreed. "I liked the utter lack of sentimentality. I love her ability to be wry and ironic one moment and then heartbreaking the next. It's in the writing I have to say, but it's so wonderful to see it brought so effortlessly to life. Linda is the right instrument for this part. I mean, I've seen a lot of extraordinary actresses play this part — Maria Tucci, Uta Hagen, Helen Mirren did it in London — and yet Linda has a kind of authenticity. Maybe it's the Jewishness where she has an innate sense of the rhythms, of the music, of the language of the play.

"I think I always write in rhythms. That's how a writer creates character — through the rhythm of the speech. If you have the right instrument for the piece, that actor or instrument can find the rhythm and become intrinsic to who that character is and intrinsic to the performance. That's what we see happening to Linda's performance."

Paulson puts up a ferocious fight for her character — more than her predecessors in the part — to convince you that she was operating with the best of intentions. In rehearsal, neither Margulies nor Meadow told her the truth about her character.

"I know what the truth is," she said, "and I played the truth — the truth that I know. I think the only way to do this is to believe 100 percent that she didn't do anything wrong.

"That's why the play speaks to people. Everyone has probably had some experience in their life where there's that dicey moment in a friendship where 'Did you step over the bounds?' or 'Were the bounds set too high?' People know what that's like."

Meadow's direction of Paulson maintains the delicate balance of the two characters as they gradually seesaw, over six scenes and six years, to opposite places from where they started. The protιgι has become the mentor; the mentor, the protιgι.

"I really wanted Sarah to go through the six-year period beginning very naively and evolving very believably into someone who comes into her own," said Meadow. "As a young person, she has a lot of confidence, but it's mixed — as we have seen with very many people — with a kind of insecurity. We wanted her to be a believable character right from the beginning — ambitious, insecure, an eager student.

"I very much identified with the character of Lisa. What we all agreed upon is that this is a story with two points of view — and what Lisa Morrison is doing in the play has a real basis in doing right. Both Lisa and Ruth do right, and they do wrong. I root for both of them, and I wanted to present both of their sides equally.

"Ruth's desire to control things — her students, whatever — is very extreme. I think you see that side of her personality so you understand how being in the presence of someone who exerts such a control might make you want to find your own way."

View the Entire Photo Gallery Sarah Paulson and Linda Lavin Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

You couldn't prove it by Ruth Steiner, but Lavin has an aversion to repeating roles: "I once did a revival of something I did, and I decided never to do it again. I didn't understand that you don't repeat something. That was years and years ago. Now, I understand it. You come to it fresh. You come to it with your memory — I mean, we do have memory, after all, and you think, 'Oh, this is the way I liked it' — but then you go 'Wait a minute,' and Lynn'd say, 'How about this?' so you try something new. And to deconstruct is what the artist is all about, isn't it? Our work is about deconstruction. It's not about repetition. That's important. I have to keep learning."

Ruth is the only other role she has repeated, but she has done it four times and seems miraculously in-the-moment. "You bring who you are, and who I am is different from the last time I did it, which was three years ago when my husband directed me in our own theatre at The Red Barn in North Carolina. I did it at the Geffen in 1999, and then in TV in 2001. Each time you do a role, the trap is to repeat something, and that can be deathly — to do a revival of your own work. 'Oh, I remember I walked a certain way, and I wore a red dress.' Well, that's not how I walk now or that's not what I look good in so let me be who I am now. Let me be a perception. And, when Lynne Meadow directs a play, she's going to bring her vision to it. Some of it is going to suit me, and some of it is not — that's where the dialogue begins.

"What I care about is that connection with the audience, that you know how I feel right now, that you take my energy and let it wash all over you and let it tell you something about me — and yourself. That's what my work is about, about doing with all that I know about myself now. Hopefully, it's a more enlightened position than it was ten years ago and it's a more understanding, compassionate play.

"I love this character. I love playing her. I have a lot of fun playing her, even in her most painful, outrageous moments, even in that last scene which is such a torturous argument about dignity, self-preservation and self-esteem. I feel very close to her." Continued...