By Harry Haun
17 Feb 2006

Amanda Peet; Patrick Wilson; Penny Fuller & Tony Roberts; Jill Clayburgh & Lily Rabe; Scott Elliott; Isaac Mizrahi; David Rabe; Annabella Sciorra; Ana Gasteyer; Kathy Bates; Robyn Goodman; Peter Boyle; Molly Shannon.
photo by Aubrey Reuben

Up in Central Park, on Feb. 16, the water around The Boathouse had iced over so no caution was wildly thrown to the wind by the first-nighters celebrating the first Broadway revival (at the Cort) of Neil Simon’s funny Valentine to young love, Barefoot in the Park.

‘Twas the same season as the play’s setting, and its title is advanced as grounds for divorce by a lass (Amanda Peet) who fears she married a straight-laced stuffed-shirt (Patrick Wilson) because he won’t shuck his socks and dance in the February snow.

Few of the opening-night crowd, conservative and liberal alike, would endorse or duplicate that behavior, but it was nostalgic to see what passed for conflict in 1963. Encountering that again made a number of contented customers feel youngish and downright innocent.

Heavy-breathing honeymooners are par for the course, but here Simon sez the condition is caused by the couple’s five-flight walk-up (six, if you count the stoop—and everybody who breathlessly enters the apartment counts the stoop). Sullivan Walker, as a hapless deliveryman, goes through a three-minute bit without enough wind to form a word. “No dialogue—I just groan and breathe heavily,” admits Walker, who is allowed the carrot of understudying Tony Roberts. Not that he actually expects to go on, but he can dream, can’t he? “Tony is such a pro, such a healthy pro,” he laughs. “At least that’s his rep.”

Roberts is cast as the roué upstairs who skirt-chases the stuffed-shirt’s mother-in-law (originated on Broadway and film by the late Mildred Natwick; here played with charm concentrate by Jill Clayburgh, who turns something politically incorrect like smoking a cigarette between deftly jabbed punchlines into a class act). Previously, the womanizer was played with a foreign accent, but not here. “Kurt Kasznar played it with an accent, Jules Munshin played it with an accent. The character was always done as a European bizarro, which is the way I would have done it if not instructed differently by the director, Scott Elliott.” (Roberts adopted a grand theatricality that got the laughs.) “You can characterize it anyway you like. It isn’t necessarily how I’d do it, but if it works, it works.”

This is not his first time at the Barefoot rodeo, either. Roberts followed two other Roberts (Redford and the late Reed) into the role of the stuffed-shirt. “Déjà vu all over again—that’s the best way to describe it. I remember saying lines someone else is saying and he’s getting laughs with them.” Was he tempted to give Wilson a few helpful hints in his old role? “I was tempted, but I wouldn’t and didn’t and I think that was appreciated.”

Did he have a good time on opening night? “Honestly, not tonight,” he replies. “There was an odd energy in the air because everyone has friends and relatives in the house—they root for you. A normal audience doesn’t root for you. They just listen and respond better.”

Penny Fuller, who was Roberts’ honeymoon half during a major stretch of the play’s original run (and almost went of a real honeymoon with him—the two were engaged for a time during their run), had a similar heard-that-song-before response. “I haven’t thought about the lines in that show for many, many years,” she admits, “but I’d be watching it and I’d be involved just as a member of the audience, and, in my head, I would hear lines—not necessarily my lines but other people’s lines—that were about to be said. I kept thinking, ‘Why do I know this?” It was very dreamlike. It’s one of Neil’s best plays, and I think it’s underestimated because it’s funny. It’s incredibly precise in capsulizing that relationship.”

Currently, Fuller is filled to the brim with Chekhov—“a cycle of all four of his major plays. Olympia Dukakis and Austin Pendleton and I are doing staged readings at a Chekhov festival in West Bank, NJ. Then, I’m doing my cabaret at Birdland March 6.”

Preceding Penny Fuller in the part—in fact, originating it to the tune of a Tony nomination—was the expansively expressive Elizabeth Ashley, who took great delight into revisiting the play on opening night, exuding praise all over the place, especially for Peet. “I was cute, but I don’t think I was that cute. Amanda was just wonderful!”

However, when the subject turns to recalling some favorite moments in the original run, Ashley blanches and balks. “You must be joking!” she says. “Darling, when I did this play, it was 43 years ago. I don’t remember much of anything that happened more than two weeks ago. So I have very few memories. I remember how wonderful Doc [Neil Simon] was. I remember how wonderful Mike Nichols [who got a Tony for his direction] was. I don’t remember plays—you go on to other plays and one has to learn to erase.”

Angelica Torn, on the good writing arm of Post columnist Michael Riedel, says she and Ashley are developing a mother-daughter act, written and directed by Paul Alexander, who did the same for the Sylvia Plath one-woman show that Torn did to considerable acclaim Off-Broadway and in London. “It’s called Southern Gothic, and it’s on the fast track to Broadway,” she trills in her best Riedelese. “I play the daughter of a theatre legend.” The offspring of Geraldine Page and Rip Torn laughs at the good fit. “I think I can play that.”  Continued...

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