LUCKINBILL: ON THE ROAD WITH ‘SOCIAL SECURITY’

Walking into the rented house that Laurence Luckinbill and his wife (and co-star), Lucie Arnaz, occupy with their three youngest children in Beverly Hills, a visitor will immediately notice a huge metal trunk sitting like a fat mushroom in the middle of the marble floor. The words “LUCKINBILL” and “SOCIAL SECURITY NATIONAL TOUR” are plastered all over it.

Luckinbill and family have been following the trunk around the country for eight weeks. The current run of Andrew Bergman’s comedy, “Social Security,” at the Ahmanson is, by comparison, almost a residency.

“Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Dallas--they didn’t like the talk about sex in Dallas--St. Louis, here and San Francisco,” the actor said, reeling off the show’s route like a train announcer. “In Palm Beach, we had to keep the audience back with a whip and chair. They were that enthusiastic. Some crowds are slower, so we had to alter the rhythms and pace of Andrew’s dialogue.”

Isn’t that a problem, though, on such a whirlwind tour?

“The biggest difficulty, in some ways, is Andrew’s whirlwind language,” Luckinbill said of Bergman, a veteran screenwriter but a first-time playwright with “Social Security.”

“If he has a flaw, it’s that he’s too funny too fast. The stage requires that you give a little air so that when you give out the line, it can go to the back of the house, and come back to you. But he goes for the jugular in every line. Unlike Neil (Simon), there are no preambles in his work.

“It’s tough,” the slightly graying actor said with a sigh, “it’s tough to do right, but I think we’re getting it. The first preview audience at the Ahmanson was, bar none, the sharpest of the whole eight weeks. We felt so much in control of the material that we let go a bit and went off the tracks. Sort of like a jazz player riffing.”

Luckinbill has been on the boards for 30 years, so he’s used to less-than-kind reviews. But he seems to genuinely bridle at comments that “Social Security” is a sitcom.

“I don’t like to be in the position of defending a writer’s work,” he said, “but because I believe in the show, I guess I can’t avoid it. To call this a sitcom is unfair; it’s really painfully accurate, and so are the characters. It’s written, I think, out of pain.”

Luckinbill and Arnaz play an art dealer couple, David and Barbara, who become the unsuspecting repository of Barbara’s elderly mother. Barbara’s sister, in the throes of a crisis with her daughter, can’t cope with Mom anymore.

“Barbara, much to David’s surprise,” said Luckinbill, “insists that her senile mother not be hidden in the closet when their star-studded guests come to dinner or discuss art dealing. Without giving much away, we find that what appears to be senility isn’t that at all.”

Life sometimes finds its way into an actor’s art, and Luckinbill said that “a new light shined in on David” when he, Luckinbill, became concerned recently about his own mother.

“She’s 83, and living alone, and one night on the phone she was repeating herself and not making any sense. All I could do at the time,” he said, seeming to lament one of the downsides of touring, “was have a doctor look at her.

“I found later that she hadn’t been eating. She just needed contact, a friend. So I call her up every single day to talk and see how she’s doing. It’s her lifeline.

“That’s had a deepening effect on my performance,” Luckinbill said. “David’s sort of dour, like Andrew himself. And this caring for my own mother has made me pry more into what he’s feeling, rather than just ride on a wave of comic effect, which is very easy in this kind of show.”

Joe, his 4-year-old, interrupted the conversation with a pint-sized crisis: his broken toy truck. Luckinbill crouched over it like an intent clock maker, spending many minutes trying to put it back together. He had mentioned earlier that his 11-year-old, Ben, thought that he was “the smartest person on earth,” but even he couldn’t fix the truck.

“I’ve come to realize that this thing called family is just about all there is. I used to be,” he reflected, “an angry young man.”