Kathy & Mo Avoid Vertigo Despite Quick Rise to Heights

San Diegans Kathy Najimy and Maureen (Mo) Gaffney just survived critics’ night at their first open-ended Off-Broadway show.

In New York theater circles, this is the night when the Gods of Ink decide whether a show should close or go on indefinitely.

Did this make the Kathy & Mo tag team nervous?

Naah.

These same women, who weren’t considered big enough to even be reviewed by San Diego newspapers four years ago, are now calm and “what-can-we-do-for-you?” cool in Big Apple interviews.

Chalk up some of the nonchalance to familiarity. The pair have been crafting this self-penned comedy revue for years now, parading their dozen or so characters most recently at the Old Globe Theatre, in October, 1987, and last spring at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

“Sometimes you get tired of it,” Gaffney allowed, with an ironic smile. “Still, it’s better than some of the alternatives--like selling shoes.”

And chalk up some of it to the success that isn’t dependent on the reviews. They’re already paired with co-producer Home Box Office, which will tape the show for an airing before the end of the year. They’re also fielding three offers to write for or appear in television shows.

Still, on a recent night when this interview was over, and they left their dressing rooms to cross the stage, strolling toward the front-door exit, they couldn’t resist bursting into that hymn to show business fortune, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” They pointed to the posters of themselves and shouted: “Look at that! We’re on 43rd Street!”

“We set two goals for ourselves: to get the show on film and to get it Off-Broadway,” Najimy said. “If I ever get disgusted with the state of the world, this proves to me you can do anything. I really believe that.”

That doesn’t sound strange now, but one of the secrets to the team’s success is that Najimy believed she could do anything even when everyone else was telling her she was crazy.

Najimy and Gaffney were acquaintances who became friends after Gaffney’s apartment burned down and she needed a place to sleep. They spent that first night discovering that two feminist comics such as themselves had found the best audience possible: each other.

Some of the characters born in that all-night marathon were presented in the first Kathy & Mo Show at the Theatre in Old Town in 1984.

Indeed, some of those characters have made it all the way to their gig here in Manhattan, at the Westside Arts Theatre on 43rd Street, near Times Square.

Two of the best of these are old friends Maddie and Syvvie, older women who expect to find a women’s studies class a cinch because, “after all, we’ve been women all our lives.”

Instead of macrame and needlepoint, however, they’re astonished to find themselves taking field trips to a feminist vegetarian bookstore, listening to poets recite quirky verse.

Maddie (Najimy) and Syvvie (Gaffney) are troopers though; firmly rooted in the Old World, they travel gracefully, albeit comically, to the new, as when Maddie’s favorite nephew confides he is in love with his roommate--Philip.

At first she doesn’t understand.

“Everybody loves Philip,” she says. “He’s such a good cook. And so polite!”

But when it dawns on her--slowly--the expression on her face changes poignantly to shock. Hers is a sadness of dreams that are not to be, giving way to acceptance and, finally, happiness over a loved one’s joy in requited romance.

Their gay characters--along with cowboys, San Diego State University frat boys and sorority girls--derive from a Southern California experience. The current show is dedicated to a gay San Diegan who died of AIDS two years ago.

In 1986, a year after their San Diego debut, Najimy, then 28, applied for and obtained a transfer to New York to continue her job as a long-distance operator with American Telephone & Telegraph; she quit a few months later. Gaffney, then 26, packed up all $400 of her savings and flew to the Big Apple to join Najimy.

Once there, they worked odd jobs and on getting their first booking at a cabaret called Don’t Tell Mama, in 1986. They called every reviewer and agent listed in the book.

“They could have said, ‘You’re out of your mind, you’re from San Diego, and you don’t look like Meryl Streep,’ ” said the dark-eyed, heavyset Najimy, a study in contrasts to her slender, blue-eyed partner.

“But I think you can do anything you want to do, and this is what I wanted to do,” she said. “I felt the universe was on my side.”

The reviewers came and saw and laughed, and Kathy & Mo were blessedly on their way. New York raves led to a limited run at Off-Broadway’s Second Stage, which led to the pair being signed by super-agent Sam Cohn, their shot at the Old Globe and their gig at LATC, where they thrilled producers-to-be Ellen M. Krass and Kenneth F. Martel.

Cohn connected them with director Paul Benedict, who guided last year’s smash, Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.”

Benedict now finds himself in the unique role of directing two shows in the same building: “Frankie and Johnny” upstairs, “Kathy & Mo” downstairs.”

At a cafe after the show, Benedict broke away from a nightcap with McNally and “Frankie and Johnny” star Kathy Bates to chat about “Kathy & Mo.”

“I told them I had to see how funny you are before I would agree to do it,” Benedict recalled telling the team. “I asked them to do three to four minutes.”

He was impressed not only by the humor, but by the depth and resonance of the characters, which have been compared to the work of Lily Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg.

“They are truly character actors,” Benedict said. “When they go deep into the material, it’s really like doing 12 teeny little plays.”

Benedict worked with Gaffney and Najimy on trimming the writing and sharpening the presentation. The result is a glossy polish that makes the otherwise enjoyable Old Globe performance seem raw.

Under Benedict’s influence, set designer David Jenkins left behind the starkness of Kathy & Mo’s bare stage in favor of cozy brick walls, softly lit by Frances Aronson, with a starry sky above for when they play angels trying to decide how to divvy up procreation between the sexes. (They decide to compensate men for not giving birth by making childbirth painful and giving men big egos. After a few millennia, they roll their eyes at how well the strategy turned out.)

A ruby slipper lights up over the wall when a gay male bartender (Gaffney) talks about getting tested for AIDS. A neon Budweiser pops up in the bar scene where a soused married man--Najimy in a cowboy hat, with cigarette dangling in an impossible vertical from her upper lip--makes the nightly moves on a single mother of two (Gaffney), only to have the woman, to his horror, accept his proposal.

The material, like the softened setting, is subtle; the endings are more clearly defined without being dogmatic. Teen-age Annette no longer drops her friend Gina when Junior calls. The sisters who have nothing in common don’t suddenly discover a bond after agreeing not to expect each other to exchange guilt over unsent Christmas cards and unattended recitals.

Gaffney still does a silent routine about the exhaustion of plucking, tweezing, putting on makeup and dressing, but to a piece by Bizet instead of Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.”

The routines may change, but the wellspring of their comedy has not. They may poke fun at the dreamers and seducers and lost souls, but Kathy & Mo clearly like the people they play.

“We have compassion for them,” Gaffney said of their stable. “A lot of people are judgmental, and we can be judgmental, too. But the way I like to do characters is that I’ll see people, and I say to myself, they went to elementary school just like me.

“So much stand-up comedy is cruel. It is making fun of people and pointing out their pimples and stuff. Our characters are funny, but we don’t make fun of them. They’re human beings.”