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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Accent on Youth The Muddle Years
By Harry Haun
30 Apr 2009
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Accent on Youth stars David Hyde Pierce and Mary Catherine Garrison; guests Swoosie Kurtz, Jason Danieley, and Nilo Cruz with Daphne Rubin-Vega
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Meet the first-nighters of Broadway's Accent on Youth.
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Samson Raphaelson's 1934 Christmas Day present to Broadway Accent on Youth, an old-fashioned play with feelings and funny lines about a playwright's midlife crisis looked surprisingly young and accessible for a 75-year-old relic when Manhattan Theatre Club unwrapped it April 29 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
It definitely helped having David Hyde Pierce on hand, gingerly demonstrating how they used to do comedy back then. An old soul with the impeccable timing of a Swiss watch, he took the Tony last year for another slice of vintage theatrical life, Curtains, in which he played a show-savvy Boston police lieutenant getting to the bottom of a heap of corpses accumulating backstage. Here, he has been promoted across the footlights to a 53-year-old chap, writing and living a May-December romance with his secretary (Mary Catherine Garrison), a mousy little thing who blooms into a full-blown leading lady who recycles lines she'd uttered off-stage.
"I actually asked for glasses," confessed Garrison after the show at the opening-night party at Espace. [In olden days, by simply removing her glasses, a plainjane could abruptly blossom into a beauty for the male of the species.] "I said, 'Please let me have 'em.' But they said, 'Everything's in the part everything but glasses.'"
Her schizophrenic change in character is pretty wide and well marked by the play's two acts from a love-suppressed dowdy who takes dictation to a self-assured actress six months into the run and mistress of her own fate. "I get to do everything in one night every night," she trilled. "It's such a dream. It's a dream part for me.
"I think she's really smart. She has no family so she's finding her way in the world. She's willing to look inside herself and grow and change. She's weirdly brave."
A short, sexy blonde who could have been brought up on charges of scene-swiping from a supporting position many times (but particularly in Rabbit Hole, Assassins and Top Girls), Garrison is the star being born here. "This is my first lead, and I can thank Dan Sullivan and Lynne Meadow and Barry Grove for that," she said, citing her director and MTC's twin rulers. "They were very generous. We did a reading of it about a year ago. It was one of those readings where, as readings sometimes are, it was just magical, and they put it in the next season. It's been an absolute joy to work on from the very first minute we started. It's a lovely group of people. David Hyde Pierce there's nobody more generous or more kind, as a person or on stage."
Director Sullivan remembered that reading well. "She and David really hit it off I could just see that they were a great match together," said the man with The Eye. "I think anybody in the theatre will notice what she has done in the past, but she certainly hasn't done starring roles. Part of what's great about this character is that she's someone who's in the background and then emerges and takes over the play."
The scene where she does that is Sullivan's favorite: "I love the end of the first act when Mary Catherine tells him that she's in love with him and breaks down. That's a gorgeous piece of writing so heartbreaking and hilariously funny at the same time."
The play goes down so well for contemporary theatregoers that it seems tweaked for a modern sensibility. "Did we change the text?" repeated Sullivan, making certain that he heard the question right. "Not really. We did just a couple of things. At the very ending of the play, we changed a line. Joel Raphaelson, Samson's son, helped us out a bit. It wasn't treated as sacred text, but basically it's the original text."
Pierce knows only too well the elusiveness of the play. "It's been really difficult to catch this play because it's so many different things," he admitted. "It's not slapstick, it's not screwball comedy, it's got all these serious elements. Finding the pace, finding how to get the emotional stuff in, hasn't been the easiest thing in the world."
He credited director Sullivan with waving him aboard this project. "I'd never heard of the play. I'd never heard of the playwright. And one of the things I'm so grateful for is, in the course of working on the play, I got to know who Samson Raphaelson was in the sense of his work. I watched several of his movies. 'Trouble in Paradise' is one of the great movies of all time. I'd never seen it, and no one has ever heard of it."
He admitted he admired Sullivan's velvet-glove approach to actors. (The director was one, once upon a time.) "He directs the show in a way where you don't feel directed, and so the show continues to grow and change and live after he steps away after we've finished previews and gone into opening. He has put together a company of actors who are able to do that. We can play with each other on stage, and, if things start to happen differently, we go with it. It has been cast perfectly."
Pierce also enjoys Raphaelson's deliberate, but delicate, mix of theatre life and real theatre life. The funniest line occurs when the male ingιnue (David Furr) feels himself slipping under Garrison's spell and bolts out of the business for a simple ranch life in Wyoming. "Well, Dickie," says Pierce on getting the news, "I'm sorry you're going to leave the show, but I'm glad you found yourself before you became a character actor." On another occasion, Pierce walks in on the young lovers kissing and announces that he came back for his cane, post-scripting poignantly as he moves for the door, "You may not know it, but that was a curtain line." Fade to black and curtain. Ultimately, he winds up writing the dear boy's proposal, a la Cyrano. "Raphaelson does that a lot in the play these back-and-forth lines that are theatrical but also fit the situation like, telling the young boy, 'The stage is yours.'"
The inestimable Charles Kimbrough appears to be in his "Frasier" phase these days from playing Pickering to Kelsey Grammer's Higgins for the New York Philharmonic My Fair Lady to butlering for Pierce which is hardly enough time on this coast for a character comedian this funny. He met his wife, Beth Howland, doing Company, and they have been keeping company ever since but on the West Coast where TV has claimed them. "I keep telling Beth that I really want us to be New Yorkers," he relayed wistfully. "We've always been New Yorkers, mentally, but we found ourselves in L.A. Both of us did shows hers ["Alice"] for nine years, mine ["Murphy Brown"] for ten years and it's hard to uproot yourself after that long."
So why come east to butler for Niles Crane? "There are bad butler parts, and there are good butler parts, and this is a great butler part," he noted in italics. "The only thing that I know about him is that he had been in service, and his father and grandfather had been in service in England. In the '30s well, it started with the '20s, the big boon with the money. What became a very posh thing for people with money to do was to hire English manservants. Then, they began to appear in movies. He's an Englishman transplanted very easily to New York, and he's found in his employer someone that he has an intuitive understanding of and feeling for and they're kind of an odd couple. In a sense, they're a bit telepathic with each other. They know each other that well. And there are interesting things in his past like, he wanted to be a boxer as a young man. There are a lot of unexpected corners.
"I don't think there's a play quite like it. It's not a typical '30s comedy, by any means. There's a vein of sadness that runs through it because of his solitariness, really. He separates himself as a playwright. He says it himself. He says, 'That's what I do. I write plays.' And it kind of isolates him from even his closest relationships because he's always writing a play about them even when he's playing a scene with them." Continued...
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