Loose Lips

CHERRY PICKER
Not every TV star would fly to New York on his own dime to audition, especially not for a role that he isn’t physically right for. But that’s exactly what Scott Foley did upon reading playwright Tom Donaghy‘s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, now being presented by the Atlantic Theater.

While Foley had never done any of the Russian playwright’s work, he was immediately taken with the part of the “professional student” Trofimov. “I came in and read for Tom, our director Scott Zigler, and Neil Pepe (the artistic director of the Atlantic),” says Foley. “I thought it went very well but I heard from my manager that they just couldn’t picture me as this character, since it mentions over and over in the script how he’s really lost his looks. Then, about a month later, I got a call asking if I could be in New York in four days. So I packed my dogs in my car and drove cross-country.”

That’s when the hard work really began: making the physical and emotional transformation to Trofimov. Says Foley: “I’ve shaved part of my head to give myself a receding hairline, done a lot of growing and trimming of my beard, made my cheeks look sallow, and learned to walk differently. I’m 6-foot-1 and I try to work out as much as I can, so this part took a lot of physical development.” The actor credits Donaghy’s contemporary language for making the play easier to perform — and easier to watch: “It’s great that I can say something in one line that usually takes seven, and I think it will make the play more accessible. A lot of people, myself included, are intimidated to see a Chekhov play. No one I know says, ‘Hey, let’s go see The Seagull‘.”

The cast includes such great veteran actors as Larry Bryggman, Alvin Epstein, and Peter Maloney, but the main attraction for many theatergoers is the return to the stage of Brooke Adams in the role of Lyubov Ranevskaya. “I actually met her last year when I was directing an episode of Monk [which stars her husband Tony Shaloub] and she came to the set,” Foley tells me. “I have to say that she surprises me every day. Ranevskaya has to have this love of life and love of the cherry orchard yet also this overwhelming sense of loss, and I am so impressed she can pull that off night after night.”

Right after the show closes next month, Foley will pack up and return to Los Angeles to begin filming the new CBS series The Unit, set to begin airing mid-season, about a group of Delta Force agents; that show’s creator and executive producer is David Mamet, the founder of the Atlantic. “I was terrified to meet him before going in for the pilot,” says Foley, “so I read some of his plays that I hadn’t read and his book on acting. I prepared myself for a combative discussion on whatever subject he chose, but he is a sweet and sincere man — although he is opinionated. We got along very well and I can’t wait to start filming.”

A MAN OF GREAT IMPORTANCE
Terrence McNally will be everywhere this season. First up is the Paper Mill Playhouse production of Ragtime, for which the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright wrote the book. McNally would love New Yorkers to cross the river to see this stripped-down version. “I worked with the director, Stafford Arima, when we first did this production in London,” he says. “We found the piece is strong enough and the story is so powerful that audiences can use their imagination [to visualize some of the set pieces].” McNally is also delighted that Rachel York is playing Mother: “I’m just thrilled to have her in the cast, and the fact that she’s coming to us right out of Dessa Rose means she really has Stephen Flaherty‘s music in her.”

Up next on McNally’s very busy plate is a reworked version of Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams, which will debut at Primary Stages in late July with a cast headed by Marian Seldes, Michael Countryman, Peter Frechette, and Patricia Kalember. (The show debuted last summer at Williamstown.) While some theatergoers may think that the role of the elderly, eccentric theater owner was written for Seldes, that’s not the case. “I don’t usually write parts with a specific actor in mind,” says McNally, “but now I can’t imagine anyone else doing it. She’s magnificent, and I’ve told her that the part is hers wherever she wants to do it.”

Once that play is off the ground, McNally will concentrate on the script for Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, which will finally debut this fall at the Old Globe; Crucifixion, a new play about a television producer murdered by a Jesuit priest, set to open in October at the New Conservatory Theater in San Francisco; and Some Men, a history of gay life in America that will bow at the Philadelphia Theatre Company in May 2006. “That’s a lot of shows to keep in development,” McNally understates.

WOMEN OF THE MONTH
The lovely Rebecca Luker will read Ezra Keats‘ children book The Trip just prior to the June 8 matinee of Captain Louie, the Stephen Schwartz musical that’s based on the story. Kristen Johnson and Cynthia Nixon will co-host The New Group benefit 10 Years Off-Broadway on June 13. Set designer Heidi Ettinger will receive The League of Professional Theatre Women’s Ruth Morley Designing Woman Award at the organization’s annual spring luncheon on June 14.

Barbara Cook, Kate Clinton, Lea DeLaria, Cyndi Lauper, and Lillias White will take part in Lincoln Center Celebrates Gay Pride 2005, June 21-June 23. Lynn Redgrave will perform her one-woman show Nightingale as part of the Food For Thought series on June 23. And one of my favorite singers, Ann Hampton Callaway, will give a benefit concert for the Classic Stage Company on June 28.

THE RIGHT STUFF
A man of strong political convictions, Stephen Spinella was very pleased to receive the script for Stuff Happens, David Hare‘s highly charged play about the Iraq War, which is now having its American premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. And he is especially pleased to be playing the role of former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin (as well as the smaller part of Jonathan Powell, British Prime Minister Tony Blair‘s chief of staff). “I read the script just to see what it was about, and I immediately saw that de Villepin was the only part I was really right for,” Spinella says. “I’m obviously not going to be cast as George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld, and I’m definitely not going to be Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell.”

One reason that the actor, who won two Tony Awards for his work in Angels in America, relates to de Villepin is that he understands the French people’s anti-war sentiments. “I think the French believed that the Americans were going to go to war no matter what, and that the only way for the war to end was if Powell was willing to expend some political capital to stop it or resign,” he says. “Personally, I think David wrote an incredibly even-handed play. I would love it to be even harsher [in its indictment of the Bush administration], but I guess ‘harsh’ depends on your point of view.”

Spinella is joined on stage by Keith Carradine, Julian Sands, Tyrees Allen, John Michael Higgins, Lorainne Toussaint, and Dakin Matthews. “David spent a week with us at the beginning of rehearsals, going through every scene and discussing the politics,” he says. Director Gordon Davidson has made sure that the play doesn’t devolve into some cheesy Saturday Night Live skit. “The whole point is that no one in the cast is doing an impersonation,” Spinella remarks. “We’re all actors playing these people as characters.”

Having earned great attention in its London premiere, many would have expected Stuff Happens to have its American debut on Broadway. But Spinella says, “I’m only half-surprised that we haven’t seen it in New York already. I don’t think producers are worried about the political content — after all, Manhattan is the bluest of the blue places — but it scares the bejesus out of most of them to do a play with 22 actors. David told us that when the play was in London, he wondered if it was impossible for some reason for artistic directors from New York to get a plane flight over to see it!”