Getting Over a Lost ‘Love’ : Allen’s Broadway Play Folded Quickly but Her ‘Tru’ Is a Hit and Other Projects Await

It is spring in New York, the Park Avenue apartment is warm with the afternoon sun, and Jay Presson Allen is annoyed. She is nursing a cold--and a grudge.

Her cold has been aggravated by fumes left by carpet cleaners, which forced her retreat to a neighbor’s home. Her mood has been aggravated by a powerful critic’s disfavor, which, she believes, prompted her retreat from Broadway. The apartment “smells like Kuwait,” the critic “is a plague.”

She does annoyance very well.

Allen has shown in a lifetime’s success as a playwright, director, novelist and screenwriter that she does many things well, though easy acceptance of defeat may not be one of them. She is still accommodating herself to the untimely demise of “The Big Love,” which she directed and wrote with her daughter, Brooke, after just a seven-week run. The one-woman comedy, about the self-deluding mother of Errol Flynn’s last mistress, a teen-ager, held the elements, Allen thought, of broad appeal--an interesting character and Tracey Ullman in the role.

“I’m enormously proud of ‘The Big Love,’ ” Allen says, her deep voice taking on a steely tone. “It’s as good as any work I’ve ever done.”

When disappointing reviews were followed by disappointing box office, she thought she might save the show by buying more time for word-of-mouth to spread. But the prospect of attracting new investors dimmed with Ullman expecting a baby in the fall. The show closed earlier this month but may yet go on the road.

“The Big Love” was one of a series of one-character productions that has been flooding the American popular stage--what Allen calls “a virus of one-person plays.” It is a virus that she helped to spread when she wrote and directed “Tru,” the one-man show about writer Truman Capote that won commercial success and a Tony for actor Robert Morse (who can be seen in “Tru” through May 5 in Los Angeles at the Henry Fonda Theatre).

Never had she experienced such a perfect fit of substance and form as she had on “Tru,” Allen says. “That play wrote itself. He was the most documented mouth of 20th-Century American letters. There was an embarrassment of riches there. Everything about that was easy.”

Even the decision to make her directorial debut with “Tru” came naturally. “Doing a one-man show like that I didn’t think I’d be able to enlist the very best directorial help,” says Allen, “and I thought I could do as well as the second-best.”

Allen may still get riled over failure, but that long and varied career--encompassing “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” screenplays for “Cabaret” and “Marnie,” creation of the TV series “Family”--has brought a certain perspective. In her 60s, meticulously dressed in a high-necked plaid dress and her silver hair styled short, she is able to talk about writing the way a craftsman might name his tools--with care, but not loftily.

Dialogue, for example, is easy--”I write dialogue with great facility.” On the other hand, “sentences and paragraphs are something else again.” Prose is not her metier, but characterization is. “I am convinced that the most effective quality that you can show in a theatrical character is gallantry, somebody who in spite of everything in the world being against him manages to keep the chin up,” says Allen. “It can be wildly funny, but it is always touching. Both Truman and Florence Aadland (Ullman’s character in “The Big Love”) are quintessential outsiders. They put on a show, and if you let the audience see both the show and what’s underneath it, the audience finds them irresistible.”

That Allen became a writer at all was a matter of chance, an accidental conveyance to solvency when her first love, acting, didn’t work out. She’d left Texas for the New York stage, but “to my astonishment, after I became an actress I found I didn’t like it,” she says. “Standing there with egg on my face.”

Getting right to the point, Allen describes the next interlude in her life in comic staccato: “Turned to marriage. Got married quickly. Turned to writing to finance a divorce.”

Allen started with a few television scripts and a play, which, although never produced, proved to be perhaps her most important effort. The play was about a child, and thinking that it might appeal to the producer of a similarly themed drama, Carson McCullers’ hit “A Member of the Wedding,” Allen sent it to producer Robert Whitehead. The manuscript was returned in short order, rejected. Allen brooded for awhile, then brazenly acted on a hunch that her play had never actually gotten to Whitehead himself.

“This time, I got a call from (Whitehead) right away and he optioned the play. Somebody else had read it the first time,” Allen says, laughing as she recounts the tale. “But this other person had gone off to Mexico with a girl, and he was out of the way. When he returned, I punished him.”

How?

“I married him.”

And so began her long marriage to Broadway and movie producer Lewis Allen (“Annie,” “I’m Not Rappaport”), while her short-lived writing career seemed at an end. Allen didn’t write again for seven years, until 1962, while daughter Brooke was young. “Bob Whitehead kept needling me to work, pushing me, pushing, pushing, pushing.

“Finally I read this book, and I thought it was quite wonderful,” Allen recalls. “I said I thought I could make a play out of it, and Bob didn’t much like it, but he was very generous and went along with the gag and encouraged me.”

Allen’s instincts proved more astute. Her stage adaptation--and subsequent screen version--of Muriel Spark’s “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” went on to become critical and commercial hits, not to mention boons for actresses: Zoe Caldwell won a Tony in the title role, Vanessa Redgrave the British equivalent for the London production, and Maggie Smith an Oscar.

The play also earned her entree into Hollywood: Before it was produced, Alfred Hitchcock read it and hired Allen to write “Marnie,” the first of several screenplays that include “Funny Lady,” the adaptation of her own novel “Just Tell Me What You Want,” “Prince of the City” and “Travels With My Aunt.”

After “Tru” and “The Big Love,” Allen has finished with a genre that she is acknowledged to have mastered as well as any. No more one-person plays. “I’ve done that now,” she says.

What she wants to do now, of all things, is more television. One of her most satisfying ventures was a difficult and exhausting TV show that failed; it was called “Hothouse,” starring Michael Learned and Alexis Smith, and was about a small, family-run psychiatric hospital. “Family” was done in Hollywood, so she hadn’t been involved in its daily production travails, but she was intimately involved with “Hothouse.”

“To my astonishment, I liked it better than anything I’ve ever done; I mean I really loved the work,” Allen says. “It’s kind of one nostril above the waves. . . . In the middle of ‘Hothouse,’ I was whining that I’m 15 years too old to do this. The man I was saying it to said, ‘Don’t you understand, everyone is 15 years too old in this type of television.’ ”

“It was damn good,” Allen says of the show, again steely. “The network changed its mind midway, and suddenly decided it wanted a kind of funny soap about the staff. . . . But we didn’t do it. We just went ahead and made the ones we committed to, and then aborted it.”

For now, she and Lorimar are just talking. And Allen is finishing a rewrite on a screenplay. And, in her 60s, she’s thinking about just getting away. “We bought a house in Italy, we’re going to be moving there,” Allen says. “I think I might put my feet up after the TV show, if we do the TV show. Heaven. . . .”