Hal Landon Tackles ‘Talley’s Folly’ Without Even a Hint of Judd Hirsch

On a recent afternoon, Hal Landon Jr. was admiring the set of “Talley’s Folly,” currently on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. The set, a weathered boathouse overgrown with weeds, has an ornate, gazebo-style skeleton, rotting floorboards and a rowboat sitting by the river bank.

It also has such an evocative charm that even in daylight, one easily could imagine the production’s twilight sounds: crickets chirping, the croaking of the frogs, a night owl hooting when dusk has deepened, the faint music of a July 4 celebration wafting across the river from the other bank.

What the rural boathouse setting did not have, though, was far more pleasing to Landon, who sat in the empty theater in a checked green shirt and jeans, looking more like a stagehand than the star of Lanford Wilson’s prize-winning play. It did not have Judd Hirsch. Not even the daunting ghost of Judd Hirsch.

Landon knows that his role as Matt Friedman--a Jewish accountant from St. Louis who has come to court Missouri shiksa Sally Talley--was written for Hirsch. He knows Hirsch played it a decade ago in the original off-Broadway production. He knows, as director Lee Shallat says, that “half the population of Southern California” saw Hirsch do it at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

“That’s a little bit intimidating,” said Landon, fingering the beard he recently grew for the role. “So I thought about it--and forgot about it.”

Minus the accent, the hairpiece, the wire-rim glasses and the custom-tailored, double-breasted suit that he wears in “Talley’s Folly,” the bald 47-year-old actor bore only a slight resemblance to the romantic bachelor who kibitzes with the audience each night--as the script requires--before getting down to his soulful waltz with Sally (played by Anni Long).

“Matt is a great role because it says a lot about staying open,” said Landon, one of SCR’s six founding members. “It shows how important it is not to be afraid of being vulnerable. It’s all about giving up some of yourself for a relationship you believe in.”

Not counting Scrooge in SCR’s annual production of “A Christmas Carol,” Matt is the largest role that Landon has had at the theater since playing Teach in David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” 9 years ago on the Second Stage.

“I don’t know if a two-character play is the hardest thing for a playwright to do,” Landon said, “but it’s probably the hardest for an actor--just starting from the basic thing of learning the lines. Matt can’t just say something in one sentence. He has to go in, out, around and through. And he starts off with a three-page monologue. This is a short play, but there’s a huge load to assimilate.”

The role is also considerably more demanding artistically than his most recent role, as Mr. Ampersand Qwerty/Oscar Rang in Eric Overmyer’s “In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe,” a non-realistic play mounted earlier this season on the Second Stage.

“Matt has an oblique approach to everything,” Landon explained. “His words are essential, but what he is feeling is just as important. In ‘Perpetuity’ the characters were right there on the surface. They said what they were thinking. Their feelings were secondary. That is not true here. Matt will start off on a tack with Sally and seem to drop it, but he hasn’t. He has three or four layers going at once.”

Playing the surface situation in “Talley’s Folly,” which unfolds on Independence Day, 1944, could result in grim melodrama instead of the poignant romance that Wilson intended, said director Shallat.

“You would get two very bitter, cynical, unpleasant characters with no reason to court each other,” she said in a telephone interview. “These are two people who want romance desperately, but they are afraid they won’t get it. And they pretend they won’t get it.

“There is no specific subtext to Matt that I could point to and say, ‘This is it.’ But one key thing we did to explore the real spine of his character was ask: ‘What does Matt yearn for?’ It wasn’t the intellectual question: ‘What does he want?’ We know what he wants. It’s what everybody wants. He wants to be loved. Who doesn’t?”

Matt’s yearnings are more complex than that, Shallat contended. They are rooted in his wandering childhood in Europe, where he discovered that national allegiances have capriciously tragic consequences. This has profoundly altered what he longs for. Coincidentally, it also will persuade him that he and Sally are destined for each other, despite their outward differences.

No play in Wilson’s prolific output of about two dozen has proven more popular than “Talley’s Folly,” according to the 51-year-old playwright’s longtime collaborator Marshall W. Mason, who has directed the original production of every Wilson work since “Balm in Gilead” in 1965.

Mason first staged “Talley’s Folly” in 1979 at New York’s Circle Repertory Co. where he was artistic director for 2 decades until 1987. He brought the play to the Taper in 1979 with the original cast--Hirsch and Trish Hawkins (as Sally)--and re-staged it with them on Broadway the following year. The play earned critical raves and a Pulitzer Prize.

Since then, Mason said, this sweet Missouri valentine has been mounted more often than even “The Hot l Baltimore,” which made Wilson famous in 1972, and “The 5th of July,” which cemented his popularity in 1977 (despite an unsuccessful Broadway outing).

Mason recounted that “Talley’s Folly” might never have been written if an actress in “The 5th of July” hadn’t asked Wilson for a prompt to help flesh out her role as Aunt Sally. That play, a screwball comedy with serious overtones, unfolds during the post-Vietnam war era when Sally Talley, in her 60s, returns to the family home near Lebanon, Mo., with the ashes of her late husband Matt.

“She wanted an image for the ashes she was carrying around in this candy box,” Mason recalled. “So she asked Lanford, ‘Can you help me? What was Matt like?’ And Lanford said, ‘Think Judd,’ because she and Judd Hirsch had been in ‘Hot l’ together. Having said that, Lanford began to imagine how Sally and Matt met in the boathouse years before. And, of course, he had Judd in mind as he wrote.”

Thus, “Talley’s Folly” became a “prequel” to “The 5th of July,” launching Wilson on a projected five-play cycle about the Talley family called “The Wars in Lebanon.” He wrote a third play in the cycle in 1981, “A Tale Told,” later revised as “Talley and Son,” which takes place on the same evening as “Talley’s Folly” but at the family house on the hill.

Mason said Wilson has sketched out a fourth play about Sally’s great uncle Whistler Talley, who built the boathouse. It would take place during the period of World War I. The last play, conceived as a “kind of minstrel show,” would unfold during the American Civil War, when the Talley mansion was built.

“Whether Lanford will actually write these, I don’t know,” Mason said. “He has them in mind but he felt creatively drained by ‘Talley and Son.’ The critics said that was a well-made play but that it didn’t really come from the heart as the other two did.

“That’s why he turned to ‘Burn This,’ which was written very much from Lanford’s passion. Now he’s hesitant about going back to the Talley cycle. He doesn’t want to unless he feels a deep need to write it.”

In the meantime, Wilson is about to combine “Talley’s Folly” and “Talley and Son” into a Hollywood screenplay. “The rights to both plays have just been bought, and we’re now in the process of developing them into a single motion picture,” said Mason, who will direct.

And who will star? None other. Judd Hirsch not only wants to do the movie, said Mason, but “Lanford wouldn’t do it without him.”

“Talley’s Folly” by Lanford Wilson continues through Feb. 26 at the South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $20 to $25. Information: (714) 957-4033.