Ex-Spouses Pair Up for ‘The Eighties’

Audra Lindley and James Whitmore are living proof that divorce shouldn’t break up a good theater team. Two years ago the former marrieds won raves as a dissident nun and a by-the-books judge in William Gibson’s two-hander “Handy Dandy” at the Pasadena Playhouse. Now they’re paired up again, playing longtime spouses in Tom Cole’s “The Eighties,” opening Monday at the Westwood Playhouse.

“When we work together we fight--a lot,” Lindley said ruefully. “It’s always a struggle. We work in different directions, different rhythms, different paces. He wants to get the character first. I like to get the technical stuff out of the way. We show up at first rehearsal and he has all his lines learned; I’m holding a script. So we’re in conflict all the time. But it’s what happens on stage that counts. And we’ve gotten over the hurdles before. We know what to expect.”

Lindley (formerly of TV’s “Three’s Company”) wryly describes her character as “a prototypical woman, a housewife who works all day and would surely go to hell if she enjoyed herself. She spends her life serving (her husband), cooking for him, bringing him all his meals. Then she rebels a little bit. The piece itself is about old age, coping with the end of life, the possibility of losing your mate, and having nothing to fill the time. It’s a comedy--though it’s also serious, as all good comedies are.”

Whitmore views the couple (referred to as “He” and “She”) as an Adam and Eve in their 80s.

“The wonder of the play,” he said, “is that Tom Cole expresses so many truths about aging, living with another human being--the stuff we go through every day. But it’s not an ordinary expository play, and not stream-of-consciousness like O’Neill or Joyce. It’s almost a distillation of the tapes we play with friends and people we’ve lived with a long time. You push a button and there’s an expected response. Then one day, it changes.”

Introduced to the piece by Pasadena Playhouse producing director Susan Dietz, Whitmore had to fight hard to get “The Eighties” going.

“Audra’s initial response was not positive,” he said dryly. Ditto the first two directors he approached--as well as current director Lamont Johnson. “It’s a strange play,” the actor acknowledged. Undeterred, “I suggested we read it for a group of older friends; they thought it was extraordinary. Then we did it at Tony Bill’s (72 West Market St. restaurant) last summer. Then we read it to our grandchildren during spring vacation in Puerto Vallarta--and they were shocked at the sex scenes.”

A subsequent run last February at New Brunswick’s George St. Playhouse (where Lindley and Whitmore will return next year to reprise “Handy Dandy”) has almost worked out all the kinks. The actor--whose solo credits include “Will Rogers USA,” Harry Truman in “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry” and Teddy Roosevelt in “Bully”--agrees that no theater collaboration is easy. “That’s why I did all those one-man shows,” he chuckled. “No one would work with me.”

THEATER BUZZ: Five actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company will present “The Winter’s Tale” and “Stoppard This Evening” at Santa Monica College Thursday through Saturday. Admission is free; seating is first-come, first-served. . . . Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is celebrated Monday at the downtown Los Angeles Theatre Center with a gala reception, Mexican buffet, performance by LATC’s Latino Lab and a stage show featuring Latino comedians and comedy troupes.

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: Artificial Intelligence’s environmental theater piece, “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding,” recently made its West Coast debut at the Mid-Wilshire Park Plaza Hotel.

Said Dan Sullivan in The Times: “ ‘Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding’ is so brilliant a piece of site-specific theater that it can move its site 3,000 miles without significant damage. It’s as much fun (here) as it was in Washington Square.”

Said the Daily News’ Daryl H. Miller: “It’s great fun, but it isn’t always great theater. Most frustrating are the long periods of dead time that occur while waiting in the reception line or waiting for photos to be taken. These lulls occur at real weddings of course.”

From Tim Gray in Daily Variety: “The high-spirited goofiness is contagious, and some of the guests get so exuberant and friendly it’s hard to tell if they’re performers or real guests. . . . Whatever Artificial Intelligence is selling here, it’s hard to resist.”