By Harry Haun
22 Nov 2005

For "lizard school," she leaned on "my best friend, who is a modern dancer, and I went to the reptile house at the zoo and did a lot of observation." Negotiating one's way around the stage on all fours with a large and lumbering tail is, she allowed, every bit as difficult as it sounds and looks. "The hardest thing is climbing down the hill without doing a face plant. We actually do have a physical therapist on staff, who works with all four of us. The set, though it looks very bucolic like a gently rolling dune, is actually a 20 foot rake."

Sternhagen seconded that: "It's hard. It's tough work, but it's such wonderful language, such an intelligent piece. And the people are all very human—even the ones who aren't."

This is Grizzard's third Albee. He was the original Nick in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and he copped a Tony for the last Broadway go-around of A Delicate Balance, but, even so, he hardly feels he's any kind of spokesman. "Edward is so stingy with his praise that you never know where you stand," he shrugged good-naturedly. "I had a good time, but it's so tiring. Franny has bad shoulders, and I've got bad knees, and we're too old for this set, but Michael is a darling man, and he's doing a wonderful job helping us."

Director Mark Lamos limped tentatively around the Tavern's main dining room with a cane much like someone who'd worked on that set. "Oh, I'm having new hips in a week," he explained.

He was thoroughly familiar with this turf of shifting sand, having staged Seascape four years ago at Hartford Stage. "Andre Bishop and I were sorta tossing around ideas for plays that might be good for the Lincoln Center season, and we kinda ultimately just matriculated to this one. He had seen the Hartford production and liked the idea of doing the play. First, we were going to do it in the Beaumont—then The Light in the Piazza stayed on there, happily—so he decided that we would do it in a Broadway house."

How would he like this Seascape to be received by audiences? "I think Albee makes your mind explode in the most wonderful way," he proffered. "You don't necessarily need to know what the play means, but you feel that you are in the presence of something meaning-ful and, at the same time, mysterious. And I find that extremely exciting."

His next moves will be operatic—a revival of Acis and Galatea at New York City Opera, which he did three years ago, and a Carmen in San Diego. Then, he'll return to theatre Jan 7-Feb 5 to helm The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara by Alfred Uhry at the Guthrie ("It's the true story of a Jewish boy who is baptized and then kidnapped by the Pope's guards and raised a Catholic."). Come September 2006, he will be back in New York to direct A. R. Gurney Jr.'s Indian Blood at Primary Stages ("It's a kind of autobiographical memoir of a little moment in Pete [Gurney's] childhood in Buffalo.").

Yeargan, a Tony winner for his complex but lyrical suggestion of Venice in Piazza, initially thought he would have an easier time of it with Seascape, it being a single set that lasts the whole play and is essentially just a picturesque patch of sky and shore.

"I live near a beach—at Milford, Connecticut, right on the water—so it was easy to conceive," he recalled. "Then the actors saw it for the first time and said, `I can't walk on this. It's too steep.' They'd been rehearsing in a rehearsal hall with a taped line on the floor. What happened was the set actually became a great collaboration with the actors. Just in determining what they needed in terms of a playing area, we carved little stepways and pathways out of Styrofoam and then tried to camouflage it with lots of beach grass."

Another Piazza Tony winner, Catherine Zuber, also thought she had a lighter sentence. Instead of outfitting a whole cast in '50s chic, she focused primarily on two lizard suits. "We worked very closely with the actors to make sure they were comfortable," she said, as if that were possible. "Sometimes, it looked too animal-like in the facial area, and we had to pull back. The makeup was just around the circumference of the face, and only took about a half-hour to apply. Most of it was the actual costumes, including the hands and feet. Edward was very specific in his ideas. He said, `Always keep in mind they're their own species. They're not lizards. They're not humans. They are their own species.' So that's something that was always a driving force for me as I designed the costumes."

The opening-night crowd was steeped in Lincoln Center players and supporters as well as Albee addicts of long and professional standing: Marian Seldes, who appeared in his other two Pulitzer Prize plays (A Delicate Balance in 1967 and Three Tall Women in 1991) and won her Tony for the former; Bill Irwin, who just got his Tony for the last Virginia Woolf and will reprise that performance with his Tony-nominated co-stars Kathleen Turner, David Harbour and Mirelle Enos in London; William Finn, who's now casting the Spelling Bee road company which will open in San Francisco after the first of the year; Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller; costumer extraordinaire Jane Greenwood; Piazza's Patti Cohenour and Michael Berresse, Third's Charles Durning and Amy Aquino (now in sold-out extra-innings at the Mitzi Newhouse through Dec. 18); Jerome Weidman; the super-funny Veanna Cox, who'll be abruptly at liberty Nov. 27 when she and Olympia Dukakis close in A Mother, a Daughter and a Gun at Dodger Stages; Rob Befferer who is playing a singing-and-dancing Shaker brother in Ann: The Word, which Uhry and Martha Clarke are now workshopping; Uhry's original Driving Miss Daisy, Dana Ivey, now readying Mrs. Warren's Profession for the Irish Rep; Mary Rodgers; playwright Terrence McNally, prepping Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life for previews Nov. 23; Penny Fuller launching her own life-as-a-cabaret Nov. 22 at Birdland; Bob Crowley, the Tony-winning set designer turning director any day now when he starts Tarzan swinging into rehearsal; John Guare, and, kneeling besides Sternhagen's chair in rapt conversation for a good 15 minutes, David Strathairn, who has created considerable Oscar buzz for his drop-dead-perfect impersonation of Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck. Strathairn is following that with a sharp swing to the right, playing the smut-smashing Sen. Estes Kefauver in The Notorious Bettie Page. He just finished an independent feature called Sensation of Sight, and "now I'm back on the street." Read like an actor.

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