Bobby Morse’s ‘Tru’ Grit : Musical comedy veteran succeeds in serious drama by really trying

“I’m a decorator’s despair,” wails Robert Morse as Truman Capote, striding around his apartment in Jay Presson Allen’s one-man play, “Tru.”

“However, good taste is the death of art.”

Spoken like a true blow-hard. Although, one might argue--and Morse, who embodies Capote, emphatically does--that Allen’s script is the epitome of good taste.

It is a remarkable script, more for what it leaves untold than what it tells. Don’t look for sensationalism here. Allen deserves plenty of credit for a lot of the choices she made both as director and writer, none greater than choosing Morse--little Bobby Morse, the musical comedy elf most readily identified with “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”--to carry this touching and taciturn drama solo.

“I have always aspired to do things that have depth and meaning,” said the still boyish-looking Morse in the quiet emptiness of the American Repertory Theatre’s Loeb Theatre, a few blocks away from Harvard’s creaky Hasty Pudding, where “Tru” was playing.

“Not that I’m negative. Not that I was giving up. But sometimes you feel it’s just not going to happen. You say to yourself, ‘I’m 58 years old, I’ll keep in shape, take my classes, dance, keep my instrument ready. But the chances of my going to Broadway or doing a major motion picture, getting back in the swing of things, are kinda slim.”

“You think, ‘Dammit, I wanna do it! But I have to wait by the phone.’ ”

In “Tru,” the central characterization depends on the vulnerability of this literary scandal-monger. And the show--it will open on Broadway as soon as the appropriate theater becomes available--was, to everyone’s amazement, a seamless marriage of performer and play.

Besides which, it was all a great bit of timing. For the last half dozen years or so, Morse had been marking time, sharing a one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with his actress daughter Hilary and doing whatever came his way: a little television, a film or two, a musical revival, but, as he put it, nothing of “substance.”

“Well, the genesis of this show was always having that ambition, the desire to show more colors . . . but whoever would have thought I would be in a one-man play that is like having 20 other characters around the stage? Where there are dark corners, a little dancing . . . whoever would have thought it?”

Certainly not Morse. When his agent called with the news that Allen was considering him for just such a piece, he panicked. When he overcame his fears and decided to meet with her, he had convinced himself that he would not get the part. In fact, she told him he was not her first choice, but after she heard him read from the script, simulating Capote’s nasal high register, Allen didn’t hesitate. Morse did.

“He was a lot more anxious than I was,” Allen said on the phone from the Berkshires, where she was vacationing after the Boston run. “I checked with (director) Marty Charnin who had done a show with Bobby last year and Marty said, ‘Nonsense. Don’t listen to him. He just talks that way. He’ll deliver.’ I told Bobby about it and I said, ‘If you’ll do it, I’ll do it. Let’s risk it.’ ”

Her answer to why she picked Robert Morse is “Why not? I believe that people who can do comedy skillfully can act. Comedy is very difficult.”

Morse, who describes Allen as “a bright, witty, sensitive 60-ish woman who is quick, aware and gets right to the point,” admires her for trusting him.

“How she picked me or I picked her,” Morse said, “is not important. Maybe we needed each other. But she immediately gave me the ball. There’s something about getting that ball once in a while in life . . . .

“Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, they get the ball in the last minutes of a game and they’re the ones who are looked at to win it. If they miss, that’s OK. Life goes on.

“Jay many times has said, ‘Listen, there are far more failures in life than successes. You have to accept that. But you’ve got the ball because I have some intuitive feeling about you--that there’s something there, more sensitivity and depth than people have given you credit for.’ And I looked at her thinking, ‘Oh, really? . . . ‘ Because you know, when you’re five-foot four and gap-toothed, you don’t get the kind of notices Vanessa Redgrave or Jason Ro bards get.

“So I said OK, pulled down the shades in my apartment, and for the next four weeks lived, breathed and memorized that script from midnight to midnight, walking around the block absolutely obsessed.” In four weeks, Morse had learned every line, but by the time he traveled to Vassar where they were to rehearse, as he put it, “All of it went!”

“I got frightened,” he admitted. “Of the piece. Of everything. Jay was mother, father, psychiatrist, friend. I have no vanity. I put myself under a pedestal, as Woody Allen said. Jay would break rehearsal and take me out on the lawn and say, ‘Bobby, you’re too hard on yourself. This is a drama. You’re used to musicals. Not only that, this is a one-person piece. I work with you four hours a day. It’s that pressure all the time. And it’s normal for you to go through certain feelings. You’re talking about alcoholism,” something Morse himself struggled with some 15 years ago, “about . . . Oh, so much: love, rejection, feelings that are bound to touch you and sometimes get in your way. So you feel you don’t know the piece, but you do. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

Allen turned out to be right. When they opened at Vassar July 29, they received a rave review. When they opened in Boston some three weeks later, they received 40 rave reviews. To Morse, a local boy who was born in the Boston suburb of Newton and who gives a stunning portrayal, this is still a quasi-miracle.

Makeup artist Kevin Haney, working from photographs of Capote and a head cast of Morse, has devised a makeup scheme so uncanny that it exactly duplicates a description of Capote about 10 years before his death as given by his biographer Gerald Clarke: “With cascading jowls and a stomach that threatened to burst the buttons of his gray vest, he appeared funny and sinister at the same time, like a giant frog preparing to pounce on his prey.”

If you hadn’t read his name in the program, you would never have guessed that the actor on stage was Morse. (There is at least one “Tru” story about a woman wanting her money back because, she insisted, the producers had put in an understudy without notifying the public.) But Morse’s portrayal is more than latex deep. The piece places Capote in 1975, after the publication in Esquire magazine of that infamous chapter from his unfinished roman a clef , “Answered Prayers,” about the ultra-rich. It sent shock waves through the international jet set that had befriended and confided in him, and that now felt knifed in the back.

How Capote could have so severely underestimated the consternation his lampooning would provoke among the rich and famous, or how he could have believed that uncharitably high society would forgive his actions, is bewildering. It is this overgrown, astonished child we experience on stage, as Morse/Capote pads around his apartment in United Nations Plaza, perplexed by the social freeze-out on this melancholy Christmas Eve.

Yet what we feel is not revulsion at a social gadfly who went too far and got his comeuppance, but deep sorrow at how a man already painfully attuned to ridicule and rejection, could have set up the very circumstances guaranteed to bring his most radical abandonment. It is Greek tragedy played out in sad and petty and even grotesque terms.

“Jay was adamant about not doing Capote in the last 10 years of his life, when he had become a parody of himself and very ill,” Morse said. (Earlier, Allen had insisted, “I wanted the piece to be poignant, not tragic; I wanted people to feel good when they left the theater.”)

“I remember the first time I put the makeup on at Vassar,” Morse continued. “It was in the middle of rehearsal, trying to see if we all meshed. I’d been to Haney’s makeup office in Van Nuys somewhere, previous to going to Poughkeepsie. With prosthetics, building a false chin and jowls, he made me plumper. We also had a wig man (Paul Huntley, for a balding pate). They arrived and put this on me. I looked at everyone, everyone looked at me . . . aghast. I said, ‘What?’ They said, ‘Look in the mirror!’

“It’s the only time that I can see what they’re talking about, when I look in the mirror. Otherwise, I don’t feel as if I’m wearing anything. It’s like a bit of a mud cap, but more pliable. It moves with my face.” Morse’s gap-teeth are capped. “That,” he said, “is the only thing that’s uncomfortable.”

Uncomfortable, too, is talking about his earlier difficulties with substance abuse. Although it has been 15 years since he’s taken a drink, Morse doesn’t like to discuss it, not from a lack of candor, but from a reluctance to sound self-aggrandizing.

“My symptom was alcohol,” he said simply, “but my dis- ease was a lot more profound. And with the help of good people around me, I did what was in front of me: accepted life on life’s terms. I take things in perspective, don’t get too high or too low. ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’--KISS. That’s how I live my life, or try to.”

As to why he drank, “I could line the wall with excuses,” he said, “but the bottom line is I bent my elbow and wrist and ingested alcohol. And alcohol took away a lot of the pain or problems of life and made me feel wonderful for about an hour. I would love to be able to name (a cause), but it was more diffuse than that. It came from a feeling of being less-than, a feeling that I wasn’t enough. Nothing I could see, but just that I didn’t fit in. A certain feeling of isolation.

“All these are unperceptive deep thoughts,” he said wryly, “that didn’t manifest themselves exactly as I’m stating them now, but I believe they all went together. I wanted the dance of life to be perfect and when it wasn’t, I drank.”

Morse won’t directly blame his drinking for his divorce after a marriage of 14 years and three daughters he adores (he’s been single for about a decade), but he concedes that it was probably a factor.

“The life of the actor also had a lot to do with it,” he said. “Travel. And the things people tell you, such as, ‘Well, why aren’t you doing this, why don’t you call up that person or go to that party or show up over here or why don’t you develop your own project?’ Oh, the frustration and pain of it all,” he said wanly. “I don’t have that ambition, that desire, that drive. Some people do and are talentless!

“I’ve been on Broadway since ‘The Matchmaker’ (1955). There was also ‘Say Darling’ (1958), ‘Take Me Along’ (1959), working with Jackie Gleason, with Gower Champion, ‘Sugar’ (1972), St. Louis Municipal Operas, dinner theaters--years and years of being on stage.”

When Morse went to Los Angeles six years ago, he thought he was ready for something different. “The kids were sort of grown up and I thought I’m gonna stand at the top of the Magic Hotel in Hollywood and look west,” he said with a light laugh. “ ‘Here I am everybody. Look at me--again--please, in a different light.’ So what happened? I immediately went to the Old Vic to do ‘Light Up the Sky.’ I also did it later at the Ahmanson, but really--I hate to say that-- nothing happened. I was thought of as a musical comedy performer, a How-to-Succeed, sing-a-song, gap-toothed leprechaun, likeable, fun to have at parties sober, but not an actor.”

Six months before the call came from his agent about doing “Tru,” Morse did “Babes in Toyland” for the California Music Theatre in Pasadena and had begun to believe that the slow-down in his career was a concomitant of being 58 “and looking 35.” He confessed that as he watched the Tonys on television last year, “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be doing a show on Broadway ever again.” To go back to New York with “Tru” after all this, he said, “is kinda kicky.”

Uppermost on his list of people to thank for the support they offered are his daughters Hilary, Andrea and Robyn (“They’re a great family”) and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Cosby Roberts, who, after she read the script for “Tru,” threatened never to see him again if he didn’t pick up its challenge.

“I needed that,” Morse said, still visibly moved. “I needed that from people. Elizabeth said, ‘This is a wonderful piece, a wonderful thing for you to be doing. You do it, Robert Morse, or don’t call me.’ When you have someone on your side like that, you just do it.”

Morse is resting up in Los Angeles waiting for the show’s move to Broadway. A biographical note in the program for “Tru” states that Allen’s scripts are “well known for providing female roles that win awards.” With “Tru,” she has switched the gender, not the potential.