By Harry Haun
31 Mar 2006

Molly Shannon , in black lace, also writhed around in the chair provocatively. “I saw the play at The Public,” said she, a fierce enthusiast of the piece. “There’s so many things you can miss. The material is so rich. You can have a different experience seeing it again.”

The new material helps, too. And so does the familiarity of the turf. Because the mother’s takeover of the play is like taking a dinosaur by the tail and flipping the animal back and forth, it’s easy to miss the endless variations of Lisa’s hysterical hysteria. The second time around, it all becomes clear and clean—from Edgar Kennedy slow burn to eye-rolling bewilderment to open-mouth disbelief to you-must-excuse-my-mother to sour surrender.

Whose play is it anyway? It will be interesting to see how the two actresses fit into the Tony categories. If Kron comes up starring (true to her starring billing) and Houdyshell comes up supporting (she’s billed last, as an afterthought, with an “and”), they will probably square off against another mother-daughter donnybrook: Rabbit Hole ’s Cynthia Nixon and Tyne Daly . If they’re stars, they will probably be facing Julia Roberts .

The balance of these two actress is amusingly disproportional in Tony Walton ’s set-design scheme of things. “The apartment is probably only an eighth of the stage, and the rest of it is just sort of backstage working,” he figured. “It isn’t really cramped, but we were trying to do that because it had been such a small space downtown.” Walton’s vision looks like an overstuffed sliver of a gingerbread house, with a mass of tchotchkes adding to the chaos.

Some of his design ideas came from the actual Kron home in Lansing. “My assistant Kelly went there and took an enormous amount of photographs. Lisa had taken a number of photographs, too. All of those were very, very helpful.” His big challenge, of course, was when Lisa’s seven-eighth portion of the stage goes to rack and ruin. “The tricky thing was to make the accidents look accidental. When you think about the chandelier falling in Phantom of the Opera, you think, ‘Well, I guess I get what they mean, but it didn’t exactly do it.’ But we were keen to make it look like the set was really being wrecked.”

Walton’s next Broadway work will be a mite more majestic and massive: He’s designing A Tale of Two Cities .

Eight individuals and four companies were required to bring Lisa’s Well to Broadway. Elizabeth Ireland McCann and Scott Rudin were lead producers, and, in addition to the veteran moneybags like Terry Allen Kramer, Roger Berlind and Carole Shortenstein Hays , there were a couple of uptown newcomers: John Dias and Larry Hirschhorn .

Hirschhorn, founding artistic director of the Melting Pot Theatre Company (MPTC), found the fast track pretty exhilarating. “Why not take chances and do different things on Broadway?” he reasoned. “I think it kinda mixes it up a little.” This experience has broadened his horizons enough to go back for seconds with the same team and Liz McCann producing. “We’ll probably open in October at...one of the smaller Broadway houses with the Butley revival Nathan Lane is doing.” Lane already tested the waters, as it were, three years ago at the Huntington in Boston, diving off the high board into a deep vat of black as a literary professor who loses his wife and his male lover on the same day. The lover in that production was Benedick Bates, whose father Alan was the original, Tony-winning Butley of 1972 and who died at 69 of cancer two days short of a month after the revival had concluded its engagement.

Diaz’s life partner, Michael Cumpsty, helped glitter up the opening, having been pretty much M.I.A. since his Hamlet at CSC last year. “I’ve been teaching, directing a project for the NYU graduate students,” he explained. “I’m directing Richard II, and I might—although this is not definite—play it in the fall at CSC Rep where I did Hamlet.”

Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara made the scene—their second play-opening in a row. The previous night they were at The God Committee, which was lorded over by Meara’s pal and After-Play co-star, Larry Keith. “Tonight we’re here for Liz McCann,” she said, but they skipped both post-parties. “I don’t like missing ‘The Daily Show,’” explained Meara.

Others who caught the play and not the party included director Sidney Lumet, who just proved—at 81—he can bat over a Noo Yawk crime yarn and courtroomer better than anybody with Find Me Guilty (which he cast to the gills with New York actors); Liz Callaway (“doing a lot of traveling” and concert work); Phyllis Newman (whose recent Nothing Like a Dame benefit raised $300,000 for her Women’s Health Initiative); producer Daryl Roth (who’s having a cinematic Buschfire these days—next month a fiction feature Charles Busch wrote, directed and starred in called A Very Special Person, and this month the documentary on him The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch).

Claudia Shear came in blowing sideways with a suddenly graying NYTW head James C. Nicola (as well she should since her career got into gear at New York Theatre Workshop). Currently, Shear is writing the book to go with Mark Hollman’s songs for a stage musical remaking of My Man Godfrey, the fourth Carole Lombard movie to be musicalized for Broadway (after Twentieth Century, Nothing Sacred and They Knew What They Wanted—which became On the Twentieth Century, Hazel Flagg and The Most Happy Fella). She’s not writing it for herself (“Pa-lease, I’m married!” she offered by way of an explanation), but there’s a role in it she’d be perfect for—and she knew of what I spoke, instantly breaking into a brassy Molly the maid done by the divine Jean Dixon.

Always up for a good laugh, Paul Rudnick was mysteriously mum about his new play which will be directed, as usual, by Christopher Ashley—so it must be about to happen at Manhattan Theatre Club. The comedy updates the sex-strike situation of Lysistrata to embrace the current battle for same-sex marriage. (A gay walker of a rich matron learns her husband has headed to the White House to work on anti-gay-marriage amendments and protests by getting his walker pals to walk out on their dowagers they escort.)

No truth to the rumor that Cherry Jones, dragging a chain, wistfully roams West 48th where she was in Doubt for so long. She laughed at the illusion on her way into the Longacre directly across the street from her former “office,” now happily inhabited by Eileen Atkins. These days Jones is rehearsing Brian Friel’s Faith Healer all by her lonesome, as well she could (the play consists of four monologues in two acts). Ingrid Craigie is playing her part now in Ireland with Ralph Fiennes and Ian McDiarmid, who open here at the Booth with Jones on May 4. The lonely rehearsal is fine with Jones. “I don’t want to know what all the boys are saying. I don’t care. They have their stories, I have mine. They close this week in Dublin. [Director] Jonathan Kent, who’s the mensch of the world, has been working with me the last four days. He’s flying over to London tonight, then flies to Dublin on Saturday and he sees the closing performance, and then flies back to London on Sunday and on to New York. We rehearse on Monday.”

The forgotten man of the evening, Walter Kron, was quite conspicuous at the play and party, but content to let his wife and daughter luxuriate in the spotlight. Maybe he was happy in the knowledge he got his Lisa Kron play first. Her 1996 solo show, 2.5 Minute Ride, is about two trips they took: to Auschwitz, and to the Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, OH. “Now, my parents can argue about which one of them got the best show,” laughed the playwright who kept the fifth commandment literally and in spades.

The cast gives their opening night curtain call.
photo by Aubrey Reuben

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