‘Laundry’ on the Line : Where Is the Pedigreed Play Heading? Film? Broadway?

With the official opening of “Brooklyn Laundry” at the Coronet Theatre in West Hollywood tonight, an uncommon production hangs out on the line.

This is the first full-length play by a virtually unknown writer--32-year-old Lisa-Maria Radano--staged in a cozy 272-seat house down the street from the Beverly Center. Patrons are reportedly paying more than five times the top ticket price ($22) and paparazzi patrolling La Cienega Boulevard looking to capture the audience celebrities as well as those on the marquee.

The cast itself has people doing a double take: Glenn Close, Laura Dern (daughter of Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern) and Woody Harrelson, best known as the bartender in the TV series “Cheers.” Carrie Hamilton, daughter of Carol Burnett and producer Joe Hamilton, plays an offstage character; Close’s understudy is Brenda Vaccaro.

The play also marks a major crossover debut for director James L. Brooks, 50, who achieved fame in television (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Rhoda” and “Lou Grant” with partner Allen Burns), moved to movies--he wrote, directed and co-produced the Oscar-winning “Terms of Endearment”--and now is fulfilling a longtime ambition of directing for the stage.

The peripatetic writer-producer-director, who has a reputation for keeping mum about his works in progress, also is executive producer of “The Simpsons,” writer/creator of “The Tracey Ullman Show,” co-executive producer of “Taxi” and writer-director of “Broadcast News.”

“I was very excited to work with Jim,” Close said Monday. “We’re doing it for the work, and the chance to work together.”

Brooks himself is not talking, at least until the play opens, other than to issue a brief statement through his publicist: “Lisa-Maria Radano has been writing for five years, and I feel she is a legitimate new voice that deserves to be heard.”

Except for the actors, a shroud of secrecy has enveloped this production, which sold out after the show’s second ad appeared. It opened in previews April 21 and ends its run May 19, extended by a week because of audience demand. A publicist for PMK, the high-profile public-relations firm that handles Brooks’ production company, Gracie Films, likened the play to a “closed (movie) set.”

What further sets the production apart is its major-studio funding and the kind of celebrity that populates the front row at Lakers games. Jack Nicholson, who won a best-supporting actor Oscar for his role as the astronaut in “Terms of Endearment,” was there Friday night. So was Demi Moore, Winona Ryder and Danny DeVito. On Saturday night, director Peter Bogdanovich (former husband of co-producer Polly Platt) and actress Marsha Mason showed up.

Columbia Pictures Entertainment is bankrolling the project as part of its deal with Gracie Films--a deal estimated by media analysts to be worth about $100 million. Its estimated budget, at least before the play was extended, was $165,000. The actors are said to be working for Equity scale.

Whether the reticence can be attributed to perfectionism or to sheer nerves, whether there have been problems with the production or whether playing it close to the vest was a ploy to elicit even more interest, Brooks was not available to discuss the production. Nor was Radano. Nor was producer/designer Polly Platt, a movie production designer long associated with Brooks (“Broadcast News,” “War of the Roses,” “Terms of Endearment”). Nor was producer Laurence Mark, now a producer in the Hollywood Pictures wing of Disney and a former production executive at Paramount and 20th Century Fox. He was closely involved with “Terms of Endearment” and “Broadcast News.”

“Please understand that Jim, with the best of intentions, is not ready,” the PMK publicist said a week before the play went into previews. “(Perhaps) in a week. They (producers and playwright) aren’t comfortable stopping and talking. . . .”

The following week, the publicist advised that Radano, Platt and Mark would be available, perhaps even Brooks, and then 40 minutes later she pulled back. “He (Brooks) changed his mind again. He’s just not ready. He’s a first-time director” and won’t talk “until we open. . . . Everybody’s really nervous,” she apologized. “It’s just nerves.”

A source close to the production insisted: “We’re just doing our little thing on La Cienega. . . . We’re a quiet bunch.”

“Brooklyn Laundry,” billed as a comedy-drama, is the story of a tough, self-sufficient Brooklyn landlady of Italian descent (Close) who is still a virgin in her 40s; her niece, Philamena (Dern); and Henry, a rock-band manager (Harrelson) who comes into the building as a boarder and changes their lives. Hamilton plays the tenant in apartment 4C.

“Who would think of me in a role like this?” asks Close, lightly answering the question of what attracted her to the role. “A huge challenge.” A theater veteran before she made a name for herself in movies and TV, Close won a Tony for Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” on Broadway. She last appeared on Broadway five years ago.

In “Brooklyn Laundry” which went into rehearsal on March 18, Close plays Maria/Birdie who has a terminal illness--which explains her scalp-cropped hair at the Oscars March 25. Shades of “Terms of Endearment”?

Dern, who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and appeared in productions of “Hamlet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” there, agrees: “It’s different from anything I ever played--a tough Brooklyn girl,” noted Dern, whose movie career includes “Mask,” “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart.” “And (Philamena’s) someone who takes a journey from the first act to the second. We look at a girl who becomes a completely different person--emotionally. Glenn and I aren’t the obvious choice for an aunt and niece in Brooklyn. The two WASPs are having a good time.”

Harrelson, whose theatrical credits include Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues” and his own original one-act “Two on Two,” which Brooks saw, noted on a break from the set of the movie “Doc Hollywood” that the “hardest challenge is to really try to be who I am. I’m kind of philosophical, like that character (but) I was having problems with my character (trying to find) the real balance between sexuality and heart. Something I’ve been facing a lot in my life.”

As for Brooks, Harrelson said, the play is “like a picture for him, a visible montage. He does it in a way like he does film. Most of the time (directors go) from the general to the specific, and he goes from the specific outward.”

Brooklyn seems to be a common thread between playwright Radano and Brooks.

The 32-year-old playwright lives in Brooklyn and her previous play “The Secret Sits in the Middle” was also set in Brooklyn. Staged at the Third Street Theatre in Los Angeles last year, it received nice notices.

The concept of a Brooklyn laundry might also be metaphor for Brooks.

The director was born in Brooklyn but grew up in New Jersey, the second of two children. When his father found out his mother was pregnant with their second child, according to a 1984 profile of Brooks, his father left home--after picking up his shirts at the laundry.

Brooks’ father returned when his son was a year old--he had sent a postcard saying “If it’s a boy, name him Jim.” (In “Brooklyn Laundry” the matter of a naming a son also crops up.) Brooks’ father kept leaving and returning until Brooks was 12. Then, on his daughter’s wedding day, he left permanently. His mother, was “so ashamed her husband had left that for six months she gave the laundry his shirts to pretend he was still at home,” according to the profile.

“Laundry” originated when Radano, who was writing for “The Tracey Ullman Show” was asked by Platt to write a screenplay. It turned into a play instead, which Brooks then decided to direct himself.

Meanwhile, Brooks has been getting a lot of unofficial help. Among those reportedly giving advice have been director Mel Brooks and TV producer-writer Ed. Weinberger. On Saturday night after the performance ended, Marsha Mason was seen in the Coronet lobby talking with Brooks, Platt and Radano, who was sitting cross-legged at Brooks’ feet.

Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum and Ahmanson, attended last Thursday night; he was not asked for advice. Karen S. Wood, an administrator at the Taper, is general manager on “Laundry.”

“It’s really a treat when the playwright is in town for the whole process,” Wood noted. Every single day she runs home to her computer and rewrites.”

“Brooklyn Laundry,” which runs a little more than two hours, is in two acts. The first is set in a basement laundry room in Brooklyn late in the afternoon. The second act takes place a year and a half later on the Brooklyn Promenade.

And “Laundry’s” future? It’s anyone’s guess. On to movies? Television? Another stage production? Broadway?

Glenn Close talks about London. “We all kind of fantasize about taking it to London, which is the dream if we could maneuver it.” But Harrelson says that with his “Cheers” commitment, that would have to wait until next spring.

Would the company wait that long?

“Oh, I think so,” enthused Close. “I don’t think any of us would want to do it without anybody else.”