From the Heights to the Depths : Calendar follows Peter Coyote in his roller-coaster experience of acting in a Neil Simon play that didn’t make it to Broadway

Peter Coyote is lying on his living room sofa recounting a dream he just had. It is three weeks after Neil Simon’s new show, “Jake’s Women,” opened at the Old Globe Theatre to terrible reviews. Coyote, who plays Jake, swears the dream really happened.

“The scene is some kind of game show. There’s a big screen in the background and an announcer is telling three befuddled contestants, ‘You’ve all heard about the recent debacle of Neil Simon’s new show. Now for $25,000, who is to blame?’ Three choices appear on the screen: (A) The world-famous, award-winning playwright Neil Simon; (B) the award-winning director Ron Link, or (C) the Jew with the animal name--actor Peter Coyote.”

Twilight Zone theme music, please.

Just a few weeks later, on April 5, Simon pulled the plug on his play, saying it had grown from 25% of its potential on opening night to only 75%. It was the first time that a Broadway-bound Simon play had been scuttled before landing in New York.

While this is a story about Peter Coyote and the art of acting, it also parallels the story of a play and how it progressed from start to finish. In this case, an unexpected finish. When the show closes today in San Diego, instead of heading for Broadway with “Jake’s Women” as planned, Coyote is out of work.

“I guess it’s fair to say that everyone is shocked and disappointed at the closing of what we felt would be a wonderful play,” Coyote said when he learned the news. He was also, he admitted, “feeling a little hurt and resentful.”

But, while the end was not pleasant, it is something that actors like Coyote expect. Failure can come in any of the three performance worlds in which he lives--film, TV and stage. He may have been featured in such movies as “E.T.,” “The Jagged Edge” and “Outrageous Fortune,” but he and other actors are, in his own words, just migrant workers, going from job to job.

For Coyote, it has been a long, arduous journey from his audition at Simon’s house last August to tonight’s final curtain. Calendar followed the actor through that odyssey, chronicling the creative process of acting and Coyote’s own emotional roller-coaster ride from rehearsals in Los Angeles in February to the show’s last

performances.

Valentine’s Day. It is just over two weeks since rehearsals started for “Jake’s Women” at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Hollywood. Unlike the other dressing rooms with their makeup, juice, ashtrays, shoes, tape recorders, newspapers and magazines, dressing room 3 is totally unlived in. All that clutters this room are six empty hangers, an empty yellow trash can, a spotless sink.

As Jake, Coyote simply doesn’t have the time to provide clutter.

He is in every scene and on stage for all but a few minutes of the entire play. While the other actors rehearse a few hours a day, he is on his feet, with five-minute hourly breaks, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Jake is the fulcrum upon whom all the action balances.

Coyote’s involvement in “Jake’s Women” started last summer, the actor explains during his lunch break. He was set to leave his Northern California home in three days for Brazil to do a film when the Simon script arrived in the mail.

After reading the script, he was very interested. It was the tale of a middle-aged writer’s difficult relationships, most of them filtered through his imagination. Coyote, 48, hadn’t been on stage in 10 years, and, after more than 20 feature films and a great deal of television work, he is not yet a bankable star. “Jake’s Women” offered the chance to show his stuff on Broadway in material from one of the best writers in the business.

He agreed to stop in Los Angeles en route to Brazil to audition last August for Simon and director Link. It was essentially a cold reading, he says now, because he had had the script for only a short time. But he got the part.

His film work finished, he turned in December to Simon’s script, re-reading it several times to gauge what he and his character had in common. He asked himself, “In what ways am I like this guy? Jake was roughly my age. He was in a kind of personal crisis, and he’s having trouble with the dynamics of a daily relationship. Not so foreign. This is not a guy from Mars.”

Then came what Coyote pegs as “the primary experience of being an actor: the terror of being called upon to act, and not knowing what to do.”

“When you get into a play, you’re given these words to say. But you don’t know what the emotional underpinning is. You weren’t privy to the movie in the author’s imagination. So there’s this terror as you see yourself behaving dishonestly and both speaking and responding inappropriately. You find yourself flattening jokes and killing comic timing. Or saying things and realizing you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. And you’re going to keep doing it until you deepen and understand the internal life of your character.”

Even this early in the rehearsals, Coyote is taking on Jake’s persona. When Marilyn, his wife of 14 years, came to visit, he says, “She kept saying to me, ‘You’re Jake-- your accent is a little different, your thought processes and speeds are a little different.’ I heard her laughing about it with her girlfriend on the telephone, saying, ‘This is life with an actor. I’m living with a different guy.’ ”

The metamorphosis persisted. His wife had brought him his cowboy boots and leather car coat, two things he’d forgotten, which he eagerly wore to rehearsal. But “when I put them on, they changed the way my body hung in my clothes. I couldn’t exactly be Jake. It was subtle, but I was sort of treading through Jell-O all day. I couldn’t act.”

He went back to corduroys, loose sweaters and leather moccasins, clothes that were “appropriate for Jake and comfortable to me.” And he removed his skull ring and matching earring, about the only vestiges left of his counterculture existence in the ‘70s, when he wore his hair in a pony tail, lived on the fringe of society and changed his name from Cohon to Coyote after what he calls “a transcendental experience.”

“I always find that the posture of the character, or his dialect or some adjustment that changes the way my body feels, functions like a mask,” says Coyote, a veteran of commedia dell’arte with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. “It gives me a much bigger field to run around in.”

That field has possible land mines, however, as he tries to find “thoughts and feelings in the moment. People think that actors have it all mapped out and follow the same route night after night. But when you begin a speech, you don’t really know what you’re going to feel like in the next sentence. Or the next sentence. So, for instance, if you’re doing a speech in the middle of which you’re suddenly overcome by tears, you don’t begin the speech by advertising that you’re just about to get overcome by tears. A speech has to be fresh every night.”

One week later.

Coyote has been referred to in print as “the thinking woman’s sex symbol,” but he doesn’t look sexy now. Nearly a month into rehearsals, he looks wiped. His gaunt face looks even more gaunt, his eyes are less shiny, his body language more weary.

At the end of a lunch break, he takes from his pocket an ugly brown pellet. The pills and some herbs came in the mail from Dr. Tang, his acupuncturist, in response to a letter from Coyote about his exhaustion. His last day off he was so tired that after breakfast, he told his wife and son that he had to go back to bed. And when he got up about 1:30, he says, he was so tired that when his son wanted to play with him, he started to cry: “I finally crawled upstairs, laid in the sun, and at about 9:30 at night, I started to feel all right.”

Instead of his isolated house in Marin County, where he gets up at 5:30 in the morning and sits za-zen for half an hour, meditating, he uses his Zafu pillow to meditate in a West Hollywood hotel suite. And instead of building a fire, reading and taking his son to school, he works out, jumps rope for a while, and takes his clothes to the laundry.

He must also adjust to a rapidly changing script. Choosing his words carefully, Coyote speaks of “a very complicated ballet that goes on between the author, the director and the actors, all of whom are blaming themselves when something doesn’t work. So, after we’ve tried everything we know to make a moment work--the director has changed the blocking, the actors have changed their intentions--Neil may decide that the problem is his. Then he’ll rewrite.”

But the actor, he explains, is also rewriting: “Something pops up in your mind and instead of commiting it to print, you commit it to action. Then you look at it and if you don’t like it, you cross it out and do it again. But when (Simon) looks at it . . . he doesn’t realize that you’re no more attached to it than he is to a sentence that doesn’t work. He thinks you’re committing that as your final performance and he panics.”

How do you know he panics?, Coyote is asked.

The actor says with a smile, “Because he tells you.”

Coyote, who has done other plays with living authors--including the world premiere of Sam Shepard’s “True West”--senses Simon’s deep attachment to this play. With something like Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys,” says Coyote, “all you have to do is show up and read the lines and it’s funny. This play is much more complicated. I’m sure it’s much closer to the bone.”

Then, on March 2, Ron Link was abruptly replaced as director with Jack O’Brien, the Old Globe’s artistic director. Until then, Coyote said later, “I had suffered for a long time, knowing Simon and Link were alternately happy and unhappy with my Jake. . . . I would do a performance that everyone would seem to like, then do one very akin to it and people wouldn’t like it, and it was very confusing. Maybe Link was under pressure from Neil. Maybe I was getting the spill from arguments they were having.”

Opening night, March 8.

Coyote seems anything but relaxed on stage, particularly in the first act. Coyote admits it himself on the way to his car after the show, more quiet than exhilarated as he heads for the opening-night party. At the Fifth & Hawthorne restaurant in San Diego he doesn’t circulate much, huddling with Simon and O’Brien at the bar, drinking a beer or two, leaving before midnight with his wife.

Then come the reviews. San Diego Union theater critic Welton Jones calls the play “too long, too confusing in structure, too prone to tangents, too sentimental and far too personal,” but says Coyote “has the commanding presence and interesting vulnerability needed for Jake.” Variety, however, refers to Coyote’s “tentativeness,” and the Orange County Register’s Thomas O’Connor feels Coyote “confuses mugging with wry bemusement.” Besides recommending that the play not go to Broadway but rather “descend peacefully into a drawer,” The Times’ Sylvie Drake refers to Coyote’s “charmless Jake.”

Calendar phones Coyote in San Diego a few days later to ask what he thought of the reviews. While he feels that Simon “was the target,” the actor concedes that being called “charmless” did “sting a little bit. . . . I took a little respite in syntax. What can I say? I didn’t charm Sylvie Drake. Even though the Jake in the first act is a self-indulgent, whiny, deceptive guy, my job is to make you care about him. So when I hear a word like charmless, it’s just enough of a flag that I would check it out against other people I consider reliable, just to make sure I haven’t introduced too dark a picture.”

Coyote and O’Brien seem to have the same impulses, the actor adds. “I do a performance I think is good and he thinks is good. Night after night, I get more confident.”

Given the reviews, Coyote is asked if the play is still going to Broadway. The actor roars with laughter. “Of course it is.”

Three weeks later.

Coyote seems less confident. He tells, for instance, of a recent “trauma” when someone connected with the show expressed concern that he had taken out a long-term lease on a New York apartment. “He was right--you never know if a show gets legs. But coming in the midst of all this uncertainty, it had the ring of an omen and also made me feel perhaps my replacement was en route.”

Could that happen? “There’s always the chance. They fired the director a week before opening. I think I’m too fabulous to fire, but I could be a minority of one. You never know when the panic sets in.”

Simon, meanwhile, is churning out pages and pages of rewrites--the final count will be 72 new pages added to the 98-page script at one point or another--and the cast is rehearsing in the afternoon, then performing each evening. “Your concentration is very shaky,” Coyote concedes. “You’re always wondering will you or your partner drop a line and if so, what play will you all wind up in.”

There’s also the added worry, he admits, that Simon really could decide to close the play here in San Diego. “Neil drops in once a week, and that’s a high stress period for everyone. Last night we had a down night--the show was a little off, the audience was a little off and the actors were trying a little too hard to reach them. Neil came backstage and pronounced it a disaster. We’d just had five hot shows in a row that he didn’t see. The cast knew it was off. It’s not Neil’s fault that he’s disappointed. It’s our fault to be affected by it and not protect ourselves from feeling disappointed.”

It is more difficult, however, to protect themselves from being afraid. “If the show doesn’t work, some people may say, ‘Oh, it’s the script.’ But usually it rests with the actors. When I did (the film) ‘A Man in Love’ and it closed in a week, I didn’t do a feature film for two years. John Travolta was the hottest property in Hollywood, and after he did “Moment by Moment” he didn’t work for three years.

“But that’s the fear you deal with all the time. If you didn’t also have some faith that you were up to it, that you had the stuff, you wouldn’t go on the stage and you couldn’t be an actor.”

Six hours later, Coyote is on stage. He and the other actors appear far more comfortable with their characters than they did on opening night, and Simon’s muse is apparent. Well over 50% of the script is new material--including both the beginning and end--and there are many more laughs. The audience interrupts the show with applause four times.

At a post-performance discussion with the audience that night, Coyote looks both at ease and poised, tilting back in his bridge chair, even tossing off an occasional one-liner. Asked if the cast and set would travel together to New York, he replies, “Yes, but in separate trucks.”

But the pressures are taking their toll. “I feel like a lab rat,” Coyote says just a few days later. “You take a laboratory rat, you teach him how to run through a maze to avoid a painful shock and to get a biscuit. If you change the routine often enough, the rat starts to go crazy. We only played the same show two consecutive nights since we’ve come to the Old Globe.”

April 5.

Word leaks to the press that Simon has decided to close the show in San Diego--a loss Simon pegs at $600,000, most of it his own money. Simon, who has worked on the play for three years, speaks of its closing as he would the death of a family member or friend.

“A play can run its entire course at a regional theater, but walk a tightrope in the commercial theater,” says the show’s producer, Emanuel Azenberg, by phone from New York. “People connected with shows like ‘Annie 2’ and ‘Jake’s Women’ that don’t get to New York should get Purple Hearts.

“When you close a show, the amount of work that has to be done to bury it is endless. It’s like arranging a funeral: Theater parties have to be rerouted, thousands of people who have paid their money have to be sent to other plays, and perhaps 90 people are out of work--ushers, box office staff, the backstage doormen, the ticket takers, the engineer, the air conditioning guy.”

For Coyote, too, there are practical concerns. He’s worked for nearly four months at a salary he estimates at 2.5% of his usual fee, and he considered himself unavailable for any work that required his showing up before next November, when his Broadway contract would have expired.

The timing was particularly ironic, in fact, because the very day he learned that the show would end in San Diego, his wife and son were on their way to New York. He had rented another actor’s apartment within walking distance of the theater on a month-to-month basis while they looked for a larger place, and, Coyote says, “It’s just by the grace of God that I canceled a six-month lease on the Upper East Side or I would have been obligated to that.”

The Coyote family has to be out of the New York apartment by May 1, but Coyote considers himself lucky: “One actress shipped her stuff to New York and sublet her apartment in Los Angeles. The tenants will not let her move back in, so she’s homeless.”

The actor says his immediate plans are to squeeze in a vacation before he starts hustling new work. But he also says the publicity generated by the show’s closing let people know he was available again. His agent, he says “has received numerous calls, which boosted my ego considerably.”

He, meanwhile, has two films being released this year: the Brazilian film “High Art,” directed by Walter Salles, in which he stars as a photographer who gets embroiled in an adventure involving a multinational arms deal, and “The Man Inside,” directed by Bobby Roth, who directed him in “Heartbreakers” and in which Coyote takes on the role of “a cynical bisexual newspaper reporter.” He’s also writing what he calls “an imaginative autobiography” for North Point Press about the ‘60s and ‘70s.

But a return to the theater had clearly loomed large for Coyote. Among other things, he missed the control a stage actor has over his own work. “Once the curtain goes up, no one can yell ‘cut’ and you have the power and responsibility to shape a two-hour performance.

“Film is a director’s medium. The director takes which of your multiple takes best suits his purpose and he assembles the shape of your performance. And unless you’re someone like De Niro who gets scripts a long time in advance, you never have the time to really think deeply about it and to rehearse over and over, hunting nuances and colors and receiving impulses from your co-actors.

“It’s the difference between white water rafting and crossing the ocean in a small boat. The raft trip is an adrenaline rush. Crossing the ocean is finally a test of everything you’re got.”