STAGE : Laureate and Hardy : Playwright Mayo Simon and director-actor Alan Mandell are taking their banter and their latest work to the prestigious Humana Festival

A passer-by might assume they’re auditioning for Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys.” Indeed, they behave like a veteran comic team reunited for a charity fund-raiser.

Their talk, as polished as vaudeville patter, could reflect decades of rehearsed teamwork. While posing for a photographer, their gestures unconsciously mirror one another’s. They cross the same leg at the same time, lean their faces simultaneously into identical poses. They finish each other’s sentences, anticipate the other’s thoughts.

For instance, the taller of the pair is saying, “What attracted me to the play are its three wonderfully distinct characters. I love and understand these women.”

“Because they’re old,” chimes in his stocky, bearded partner.

“Not because they’re old!”

“And because we’re old.” He strokes his beard, delighted with the punch line.

“Well. . . . “ The taller sidekick allows the sentence to expire into a silence fit for a Samuel Beckett actor--precisely who he is.

These two guys are not retired comedians on the verge of a comeback. They’re Alan Mandell and Mayo Simon, among the most serious, tough-minded, influential and respected elder statesmen in Los Angeles theater.

And they’re about to take their act on the road.

Reunited again in a professional stage relationship that arcs over four decades, the director-actor and playwright will soon embark for the Actors Theatre of Louisville. There, Simon’s latest play, “The Old Lady’s Guide to Survival,” is to be directed by Mandell for the prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays--the fourth time Mandell has guided a Simon work.

Mandell, once the consulting director for Los Angeles Theatre Center (he resigned months before its demise), earned critical plaudits last summer for his Shylock portrayal in “The Merchant of Venice” at the Grove Shakespeare Festival. His numerous directing credits include a film adaptation of Beckett’s “Endgame,” re-creating the version that he acted in under the late Nobel Laureate’s direction. His close friendship with Beckett emerged from Mandell’s co-founding of the legendary San Quentin Drama Workshop in the 1950s. Although he went on to become general manager of the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop and of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York, here Mandell is primarily known as a rigorous director and gifted stage actor.

Simon’s plays have been produced Off-Broadway, in Philadelphia, London and Los Angeles. His two most successful, “These Men” and “Elaine’s Daughter,” are frequently performed in regional theaters. His career began in the so-called 1950s “Golden Age of Television,” when he developed his craft scripting live dramas. His writing pedigree includes the Oscar-winning documentary “Why Man Creates” (1968), and lucrative Hollywood screenplays such as “Futureworld” (1976). But too often, his scripts were developed then never produced. In 1990, after several years of frustration, he decided to write plays full time, sold his 11-room French country chateau in Pacific Palisades and turned his back on Hollywood.

Like Mandell (who frequently rejects television and film roles), Simon’s primary commitment is to the theater. That “fabulous invalid” is the topic of these two longtime friends’ conversation as they lounge in Mandell’s Brentwood home before departing for Louisville.

Specifically, the topic is “The Old Lady’s Guide to Survival.” Simon’s drama profiles a widow in her 80s who is going blind, and her only friend, suffering from Alzheimer’s. Netty, the one without sight, is guided by Shprintzy, the one without memory.

Grim material that Beckett might pen?

Not according to Simon, who happily declares that “Guide” is a comedy about growing old. Besides, he adds, it’s based on his 86-year-old mother, retired in San Diego, who has cataracts and a degenerative condition that causes bleeding behind the retina.

Seizing his opportunity, Mandell dryly quotes Beckett’s “Endgame”: “There is nothing funnier than unhappiness, I’ll grant you that.”

Unfazed, Simon sails on. “There’s a new breed of old people who are not feeble or helpless. I call them the vigorous elderly. They’re bright, intelligent old people who know what they want.”

Contrary to popular media belief, Simon insists that the older we get, the better it gets. Take, for example, Mandell, 64, and Simon, 63, whose careers began to soar once they passed the mid-century mark.

“In the studios, if you’re over 40 it’s over,” he admits. “Not true in theater. But. . . . “ A comedian’s twinkle suddenly appears in Simon’s eyes, “I looked at the program in Louisville and everybody at the theater is 25 years old!”

“But that’s all right,” Mandell assures him. “Same thing as in the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco when I started in the 1950s. (Artistic directors) Jules Irving and Herbert Blau were under 30, but I was the kid.”

Simon is not about to let a good routine die. “I used to be the youngest one in the building,” he laments. “I was the youngest Playhouse 90 writer, I was the youngest Studio One writer, I was the youngest screenwriter on the lot, and suddenly . . . . “

Simon’s words erupt into giggles. Mandell provides the Beckett gaze: long-suffering, bemused, skeptical.

Hidden behind their playful repartee is the way they work: profoundly serious, painstakingly meticulous, uncompromisingly perfectionist.

Mandell’s standards were dramatically illustrated while directing the film of “Endgame” last fall in Washington, D.C.

In “Endgame,” produced by the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Institution, Mandell’s goal was to reproduce as faithfully as possible the 1980 version he’d acted in as Nag under Beckett’s supervision. He believed Beckett wanted it filmed in black-and-white. When the producers argued that viewers would watch only a color version, Mandell responded: “In that case, remove my name from the credits.” It remained black-and-white.

Simon is equally uncompromising. He usually spends over a year writing and rewriting a text, often conducting extensive research, before allowing it to be read by a select few.

“The Old Lady’s Guide to Survival” originated from more than 80 hours of audiotapes his mother dictated at Simon’s request about her marriage to his deceased father. Simon had planned a play on his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, but then his mother developed glaucoma. That reminded him of a book title he’d suggested to his free-lance journalist daughter Francesca. (She is the Mark Taper Forum’s play scout in London.)

Simon shelved the anniversary play and instead concentrated on his mother’s heroic struggles. He finished it in four months--”the fastest playwriting I’d ever done.” Among the few to read the initial draft last fall was Mandell--often Simon’s first reader, but sometimes not his first choice as director.

“After a year or two working on a play, you have to decide which guy would be right to direct. Alan hated ‘Elaine’s Daughter,’ ” said Simon, referring to the show that was a hit at the 1987 Humana Festival under Jules Aaron’s direction. “I could have spent a year rewriting it and Alan still wouldn’t like that play. That happens sometimes.”

But for “Guide,” Simon wanted a director who had an elderly Jewish mother.

“It’s not a world you can explain to somebody,” Simon elaborates. “Alan knows this world, knows these people. And I write a very precise play like Beckett and Pinter--which is Alan’s forte.”

The Actors Theatre of Louisville contacted Simon and requested his latest play. He remembers the literary manager asking a playwright’s favorite question: “What have you got for us?”

When Simon submitted “Old Lady’s Guide,” he was prepared to lobby for Mandell to direct it at the festival--if it was chosen.

“When Mayo told me he hadn’t heard from Louisville yet,” Mandell recalls, “I said, ‘There is no question in my mind they will do it, but if they don’t for any reason, then we will do it here in L.A. I will find a place to have it done.’ That’s how strongly I felt. This was the play that had to be done. It has commercial possibilities. But that isn’t the reason to do it.”

Simon darts Mandell a perplexed glance.

Mandell takes the cue: “It’s also not the reason not to do it.”

Pause. Now the urbane, cosmopolitan Mandell turns to Simon with an expression of gloom and doom: “Kentucky? What am I going to do in Louisville?”

Simon, who knows Louisville intimately from the season of his “Elaine’s Daughter” premiere, praises the Ohio river city’s many virtues to a poker-faced Mandell. He mentions the festival’s lineup, which includes a world premiere by Tony winner David Henry Hwang, directed by the Mark Taper Forum’s Oskar Eustis, both friends of Mandell’s. All will be rehearsing in the same theater.

Mandell interrupts. “I want you to know that I’ve booked two separate return flights to L.A., dependent on how we get along. In the event we are not talking to one another after the opening, I intend to take a later flight than yours.”

This delights Simon. “We have a history!” he exclaims.

They first met in 1967 when Mandell was the general manager of Lincoln Center’s theatrical wing. Simon had just written his first play, “Walking to Waldheim.” Mandell was instrumental in its choice as the inaugural work to open the center’s new Forum Theater (now the Mitzi Newhouse). But in those days Simon knew nothing about the theater and allowed his play to be miscast. After all, in Hollywood the writer gets ignored. Simon’s stage debut was a disaster and he returned to screenwriting.

Mandell and Simon did not meet again until 1981.

Mandell meanwhile suffered through a different kind of disaster: the collapse of his transplanted San Francisco Actors Workshop at Lincoln Center. He finally closed the doors on that enterprise in 1974 and moved to Los Angeles a few years later.

By then Simon had established himself both as a screenwriter and playwright. Between film and television assignments, Simon turned to the stage. His “L.A. Under Siege” was produced by the Mark Taper Forum in 1970. “These Men,” a controversial examination of the real effects of feminism on women’s lives, had a brief run Off-Broadway and became a hit in England.

In 1981, during tea at John Lahr’s London home, Mandell heard Joe Orton’s biographer praise “These Men.” Upon returning to Los Angeles, he phoned Simon, reintroduced himself, and asked to read Simon’s latest. Los Angeles Actor’s Theatre, the small company in Hollywood where he’d begun working, was looking for new plays.

“Alan very skillfully got ‘These Men’ sold to LAAT,” Simon points out. “Bill Bushnell directed it and I got the best reviews of my life.”

Mandell mentions that “These Men” opened LAAT’s second stage, and Simon again uses him as his straight man: “At Lincoln Center my play opened a 299-seat theater, and I worked my way up after 20 years to opening a 39-seat theater.”

Mandell chuckles, then describes the first Simon work he directed, a one-act titled “Live Performance,” followed by a revival of “Walking to Waldheim” in 1984, both at LAAT.

“I had to wait for 17 years to see a good production of that play,” Simon says, noting that the second time around “Walking to Waldheim” became a critical success, thanks to Mandell’s direction.

When LAAT evolved into the Los Angeles Theatre Center, Mandell again christened a new space with a Simon play. In LATC’s first season and in his first opportunity to direct there, Mandell chose “A Rich Full Life.” Simon’s 1985 updating of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” to contemporary California lifestyles provoked outraged controversy among feminists.

Although Mandell and Simon kept close professional ties and family relationships (Simon’s wife, Sondra, is a close friend of Mandell’s wife, Elizabeth), they did not work together on another play until ‘The Old Lady’s Guide to Survival.’

Part of the explanation for the six years between collaborations is that Simon’s next plays, “Elaine’s Daughter” and “Angel,” did not match Mandell’s temperament. However, Mandell remained an eager reader and supporter of Simon’s work. Known in theatrical circles for his shrewd counseling of playwrights (he was crucial to the development of Reza Abdoh, Jon Robin Baitz and Paul Hidalgo-Durand, among others), Mandell continued to help Simon secure actors, theaters and readings.

Simon returned the favors by attending dress rehearsals and preview performances of plays that Mandell directed or acted in. Afterward, Mandell would read Simon’s copious notes, sometimes incorporating his suggestions, sometimes ignoring them.

Finally, Simon asked Mandell to look at his latest effort.

“I read it the day it arrived,” Mandell remembers, “and I called him up and said, ‘Now you’ve done it! This play I really like!’ He asked me if I’d like to direct it and I said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

Mandell’s acting ambition has been to portray Shakespeare’s aged heroes King Lear and Prospero. (The latter role comes his way at the Grove Shakespeare Festival this summer when Jules Aaron directs Mandell in “The Tempest.”) Research on “The Old Lady’s Guide to Survival,” Mandell sensed, might provide insights into the Bard’s mysterious creations.

But Mandell primarily felt compelled by Simon’s characters because of his own exposure to the world of the elderly. His visits to the increasingly frail Beckett in Paris had not exposed bleak tragedy but had unveiled fertile creativity and abundant humor. Life’s endgame, Mandell was discovering, can provide growth instead of decay. Certainly Beckett’s later works transformed the aging process into brilliant theater.

To help Mandell conceive the key character, Simon brought his 86-year-old mother to Mandell’s home for a visit.

“As I looked at her,” Mandell says of Simon’s mother, “I realized she is not exactly how I see the lead character. But I thought the way she was dressed was very interesting. His mother was extremely tastefully dressed.”

Mandell pauses. Then he mysteriously announces: “There’s another important character trait I cannot share because I don’t want him to know. It’s something that has given me more insight into his lead character than his mother.”

“Oh, oh,” Simon groans. He thinks hard. Then: “Not me?”

“Yes. You. Many things that are in you are in that character. So I don’t have to see his mother. I’ve known Mayo for so long I can see all of these little traits. This play is a lot of Mayo.”

Simon, speechless, gradually smiles. He allows Mandell the last laugh.