Loose Lips

LIVES OF THE PARTY
At times, the cocktail reception for the Lucille Lortel Award nominees that was held Monday at Ruth’s Chris seemed like a giant high school reunion — that is, if truly amazing steak was served at your reunion and if your class was filled with incredible actors like Swoosie Kurtz, Richard Thomas, Lisa Emery, and Jayne Houdyshell.

This class looked mighty spiffy. Tony Award favorite Tonya Pinkins was all glammed up — a drastic change from the drab Caroline, or Change maid uniform she would put on later that night for a special Monday performance. “We’re on a different schedule this week, with no Sunday performance, because we record our cast album on Monday the 26th,” Pinkins told me; she added that preview audiences have been responding extremely well to the musical at its new home, the Eugene O’Neill.

Caroline librettist Tony Kushner made a brief appearance but his mind was already flashing forward to the beginning of rehearsals for his Homebody/Kabul, a revised version of which will play at BAM May 11-30 in a new production starring OBIE winner Linda Emond and Maggie Gyllenhaal. The equally celebrated playwright Paula Vogel was also looking ahead…to her upcoming season at the Signature Theatre Company, which will kick off with The Oldest Profession. “I just finished the play, 24 years after I started writing it,” Vogel told me. “The first time around, I thought death was sad and sex was funny. Now I think they’re both funny.”

The Frozen folks were out in almost-full force. MCC head Robert LuPone admitted that the company was nervous about co-financing the show’s Broadway transfer but had nothing but praise for director Doug Hughes: “I think Doug is one of the three greatest directors we have now, along with Bartlett Sher and Joe Mantello, and he hasn’t even hit his stride.” When I asked the production’s elegant co-star Laila Robins if she had gone to Iceland to research her character, Agnetha, she replied, “No, but my parents are Latvians and it’s basically the same shtick.”

Iceland and Latvia are two of the few places that the extraordinary Jefferson Mays won’t be hitting once I Am My Own Wife goes on tour in January. “We’re starting in Chicago, which is something of a homecoming,” Mays said. He’s particularly excited about hitting Australia, the homeland of his wife, actress Susan Lyons: “We got married in October and this will be my first chance to meet her family. Of course, I’ll be doing it in a dress.”

The party featured a number of two-star couples. Despite being exhausted from an all-night shoot of the film The Interpreter (starring Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman), David Zayas was thrilled to accompany his nominated wife, Liza Colon-Zayas. “This is where we had dinner the night we got married,” he told me. “Yes, I remember hopping down the street from our hotel because I was so excited,” added Liza, who was taking the news that her name had been mistakenly listed among the Outer Critics Circle award nominees in gracious stride.

Nominated composer Martin Silvestri brought his prettier half, Christine Andreas, who boasted, “I’ve become a Johnny Guitar groupie; I’ve seen it eight or 10 times.” Silvestri then reminded her how often he’d sat through her star turn in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Should Johnny Guitar still be running in late May, Andreas will have to miss a few performances: She’ll be performing her acclaimed “Carlyle Set” show at Catalina, a jazz club in Los Angeles.

Speaking of La La Land, David Warren — on hand to support partner Peter Frechette, who was nominated for his brilliant turn in Paul Rudnick‘s Valhalla) — was thrilled with L.A.’s reception of Matt and Ben. “I think they liked it there even more than New York,” said Warren, who directed the show. “You never know how they’re going to react out there.” For the moment, Warren is back home in NYC; he’s busy casting the Roundabout’s Off-Broadway production of Stephen Dietz‘s three-hander Fiction, which will open in July.

And then there’s La La Wood, the upcoming movie starring Big Bill leading man John Michael Higgins, who accompanied wife/co-star Margaret Welsh to the Ruth’s Chris party. “It’s a murder mystery starring Martin Short as Jiminy Glick and it’s set at the Toronto Film Festival,” said Higgins. “The movie was all improvised, and you know what? Elizabeth Perkins turned out to be an amazing improviser. And I’ve worked with the best!”

HERE COMES THE JUDGE
A hit television series (Judging Amy) and a young daughter (Charlotte, now three years old) have kept Amy Brenneman away from the New York stage since 1997, when she appeared in Craig Lucas‘s God’s Heart at Lincoln Center. This Monday night, however, Brenneman will participate in The Public Theater’s “New York Now” series as the co-writer (with Sabina Peck) and star of one of the five plays that comprise The Antigone Project. Her involvement in this unusual piece — which will also feature contributions from Lynn Nottage and Chiori Miyagawa based on the famed Greek myth about social protest — is a true melding of the personal and the political.

“I met Sabina my freshman year at Harvard, when she was a choreographer and I was a dancer, and we are always so happy if we can find something to do together,” says Brenneman. “She invited me to hear some of these pieces at a fundraiser last year, so I know this is going to be an amazing evening. Each of these plays is so strong in its own identity. We’re going to be using actual texts from The Patriot Act in our piece. My jaw-dropping moment was when I realized that, because of the act, you could be called into a secret interrogation just because you’ve checked certain books out of the library. This administration has gone way too far in its mishandling of civil rights.”

As it happens, Brenneman is no stranger to politics; her parents’ names were read on the radio during the McCarthy era, and she has done PSAs (along with co-star Tyne Daly) for the group Artists United to Win Without War. She’s also no stranger to Greek tragedy: “I actually played Clytemenestra when I was 23. I like the fact that the Greeks lack subtlety, that each character is really this brilliant flame with its own strong color.”

Judging Amy will begin its sixth season in September. Had it not been such a success, Brenneman might have returned to the stage sooner. Last year, Peck wanted her to do a piece called The Trials of Monica Lewinsky, using actual texts from the transcripts. “I had also gotten to read the script of Hannah and Martin,” Brenneman tells me. “Kate Fodor, the author, sent it to me and I would have loved to have done that play. My one thought about the script was that it could have been sexier, but then I thought maybe I’ve just been in L.A. too long.”

Shortly after returning to Los Angeles next week, she will participate in a private reading of Neil LaBute‘s new work, Some Girls (Who I Fucked Over). “I laughed when I saw the title; I thought, ‘Oh yes, he’s come really far,'” says Brenneman, who starred in LaBute’s film Your Friends & Neighbors. “I love working with Neil. He’s delightful, although sometimes you want to slap him upside the head because of his material. But his language is so seductive and so much fun.”

HOPKINS’ CHOICE
Okay kids, don’t try this at home: For the entire months of February and March, Kaitlin Hopkins was spending her days rehearsing the new musical bare — which recently opened at the American Theatre of Actors on West 54th Street — while spending her nights in Nicky Silver‘s controversial Beautiful Child at the Vineyard. “I am the world’s hugest Nicky Silver fan,” explains the actress, who played both a tough-talking, possibly imaginary psychiatrist and the mother of a young boy who has been molested by his teacher in the Silver piece. “And to work with George Grizzard and Penny Fuller — what could be better? I told every one of my acting students to come and see the show just to learn how to do such invested character work, even though I knew they all wouldn’t like the play.”

Hopkins is also aware that not everyone will like bare, which follows the lives of a group of very troubled Catholic high school students. She plays Claire, a single mother who doesn’t want to deal with the fact that her son Peter (the remarkable Michael Arden) is gay. “I have a lot of compassion for Claire,” says Hopkins. “She’s a woman whose life is all about her son, who has tried to do everything right, and for whom it will be ultimately very painful when the word ‘gay’ is said out loud. But I think it’s her struggle that makes her human.”

Hopkins owes the chance to play Claire to both the show’s producers, The Dodgers — who allowed her to miss the first few previews while she finished the run of Beautiful Child — and to her best friend, Beth Thompson, who filled in as Claire during her absence. In fact, Hopkins got to see Thompson perform the night before taking over the part for good. “It was such an amazing opportunity to see the show as an audience member,” she tells me, “and I made some definite decisions that night about how to play the part that I would never have been able to if I hadn’t seen Beth do it.”

UPDATES
Here are updates on two readings that we mentioned last week: Betty Fussell and Dorothy Lyman (My Kitchen Wars) will be appearing Monday night at the Barnes & Noble at 82nd Street and Broadway; and the 92nd Street Y has canceled its panel discussion of Sixteen Wounded in light of the show’s scheduled closing this coming weekend.