STAGE : The Marshall Plan : Garry Marshall, a whopping success in TV and movies, is staging a play he’s co-written and talking of opening a small theater

Garry Marshall is nervous. In his bungalow office suite on a quiet street in Toluca Lake, just enough away from the madding crowd of Hollywood, this writer, director and producer of television, movies and now theater has been talking somewhat elliptically about his latest labor of love--and fighting conflicting emotions.

You can see Marshall enjoys elaborating on the improbably titled “Wrong Turn at Lungfish,” the play he co-wrote with screenwriter Lowell Ganz and is now directing. But as he spoons some miso soup and takes a fast bite of crackers, having just returned from a rehearsal, he also holds back, not wanting to “give away surprises” of dramatic plot, or have lines or situations that are funny on stage go dead in print. So you can’t read the play, he begs off, “I’d like you to see it.” And seeing a rehearsal is out--”I’m still working.”

Featuring an all-star cast--the venerable George C. Scott, Laurie Metcalf (who plays the cop-sister Jackie on “Roseanne”) and Tony Danza (“Who’s the Boss?”) in his first theatrical role--”Lungfish” opens at the Coronet Theatre on Thursday for a six-week run. Coincidentally, it’s the same house that last year accommodated the high-profile premiere of “Brooklyn Laundry,” directed by James L. Brooks (“Terms of Endearment”) and featuring Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson and Laura Dern. There was talk of London but the play was not revived.

“I guess when I do my seventh play or my 10th play I won’t be so skittish,” Marshall allows, “but I’m very nervous. This is so important to us.”

He’s nervous? There’s barely space on Marshall’s walls for all the photos and plaques chronicling 30 years in Hollyood--from posters in the reception area of “Pretty Woman,” and “Frankie & Johnny”--the sixth and seventh movies he’s directed--to the more personal, on-location shots of Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, Al Pacino and Michele Pfeiffer in back. And that’s not counting television. Marshall created 14 TV series, including “Happy Days,” “Laverne & Shirley,” “Mork and Mindy.” At one point in 1979, they were the three top-rated shows in the nation.

“Look at this,” the foggy-voiced director says, pointing to piles on the floor. “I got 400 movie scripts. Up to here I got scripts. Nobody cares if I ever do a play in my whole life because I can’t make ‘em money.”

But Marshall cares. He’s succeeded on TV, he’s made it in movies, and now with another play waiting in the wings to be written, he’s talking about opening up a small theater in the San Fernando Valley. “These scripts--I didn’t read half this. . . . Got to do the play. “

The play is set in a hospital room in the Bronx--”away from the glamour of New York City,” notes the 57-year-old Marshall, who grew up the Bronx. It principally tells of Peter Ravenswaal (Scott), a caustic and bitter former professor of literature and dean who has gone blind and is dying and Anita Merendino (Metcalf), who seals red caps on Sparkletts water bottles and volunteers to read to him.

“In a sound bite,” notes Marshall, “he teaches her how to live, and she teaches him how to deal with death gracefully.”

Other characters are Anita’s fiance Dominic De Caesar (Danza), a small-time hood, and a student nurse (Kelli Williams).

The play premiered in June, 1990, at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company and has undergone some substantial revisions. According to lead producer James Freydberg, the Los Angeles production is costing $200,000 to mount, and even if it’s a sellout crowd it will lose half that. The investment is “the future.” Perhaps Broadway.

Co-writer Ganz--”Splash,” “Parenthood” and “City Slickers,” with partner Babaloo Mandel--got his first job on TV’s “Odd Couple” from Marshall and followed him onto “Happy Days” and “Laverne & Shirley.” Ganz and Mandel’s screenplay “A League of Their Own” opens in July. It’s directed by Penny Marshall (“Big,” “Awakenings”), Garry’s younger sister, who had played Laverne.

The professor, who is onstage throughout the two-hour play, and the young woman are yin-yang foils for each other. He tends to intellectualize, she to respond instinctively. He has put his faith in science; she, a Catholic, in religion. On her visits, they begin to discuss everything from Darwin to sex.

The play, says Marshall, who tends to emphasize its drama, “deals with how to live your life today, how to have a relationship, and is life worth living? What is it all about? Not that we answer it. . . . When you’re very young, you pooh-pooh religion and science is the answer. As you get older suddenly science don’t look so good.

“To the person who is in the streets, like in Vermont and Western and those places, they don’t care whether it’s religion or intellectual,” Marshall continues. “They got no time for that because they’re not eating and they’re running and they’re trying to find a place to live. So we have the juxtaposition of the two main characters: One worrying about the purpose of his life, the meaning of his existence, and the other worrying, ‘Where am I going to eat tomorrow?’ ”

Not that the pair are mirror images of each other. As Ganz, 43, who emphasizes the play’s comedy, explains in a separate interview at Imagine Films Entertainment in Century City: “You hope that the characters are not so without surprises that by Page 11-- ‘Oh, she’s an optimist, he’s a pessimist, let’s get a drink.’ They’ll twist and turn as people are wont to do.”

The title “Wrong Turn at Lungfish” comes from a talk about Darwin and natural selection. “Mr. Ravenswaal worries a great deal about ethics and behavior of societies,” notes Ganz, “and raises the question: Is there any sort of spiritual connection between the human race and some greater power, or is the human race just a ‘wrong turn at lungfish . . . an evolutionary blunder?’

“That proverb--’Give me the strength to change what can be changed, the patience to not (worry about what can’t) and the wisdom to know the difference.’ He wants to change everything (and) she can endure all. Neither one of them has the wisdom to know the difference.

“At one point when she keeps proudly talking about herself as a survivor, he says, ‘There is a life that does not survive, but seeks.’ He is seeking truth, he is seeking beauty, he is seeking the best in people, and he is often, and almost thoroughly, disappointed.”

Marshall seems to empathize more with Anita. “She never had much going for her, and judges her entire life based on men--how she’s doing with her boyfriend, and that’s not a good idea. He (Ravenswaal) says, ‘Be something,’ and she says, ‘What do you think I am, one of your college students? You think I got a choice between becoming a judge and owning my own magazine?’ ”

“Lungfish” evolved out of a movie called “Cookies,” which Marshall and Ganz began in 1980. Years later, while editing “Pretty Woman,” Marshall was changing agents. “I was doing pretty well so all the agencies came (to Disney), we chatted. These three fellas took me to lunch. I said, ‘I also like theater, I have a play.’ So each one said, ‘Great, we’re good with plays.’ And one guy, (New York theater super-agent) Sam Cohn, wasn’t saying much, he was kind of dozing off, he said, ‘You got a play . . . where is it?’ . . . He flew home (with the script) and that night he called me. . . . In less than two weeks we were booked.”

“Lungfish” had a lot of midwives. Penny Marshall held readings even before Chicago. So did John Cassavetes and his wife, Gena Rowlands; Marshall treasures a letter from the late actor-director, urging the playwrights not to give up. “ ‘You must finish, you must go on with it.’ ”

Studio executives Sherry Lansing and Stanley Jaffe flew to Chicago and gave notes. So did playwright Terrence McNally (“It’s Only a Play”), who was writing “Frankie & Johnny.”

In January Gordon Davidson, artistic director/producer of the Center Theatre Group, went to a reading. “He gave us a wonderful note: He said some of it is just too easy. You got to make it a little harder for the characters to get where they’re going,” enthuses Marshall, who is on the Music Center’s board of governors; wife Barbara is on the CTG board.

How do you sustain interest where the only set is a hospital room--a bed that cranks up, plastic end table, phone, radio and tape deck, and intravenous pole?

“Acting!” says Marshall, an occasional actor himself, arms raised almost in supplication. It is a rainy afternoon, two weeks before preview, at Vitello’s, an Italian restaurant in Studio City, long a hangout of Marshall’s and apparently from the signed photos on the walls downstairs, of a lot of other entertainers as well.

Upstairs in the banquet room, which has been the rehearsal site since April 20, the actors are preparing for a photo shoot--a reluctant chore at best. Rehearsal for the day is done, and now there’s a prop problem. “Garry, they’re screwing around here. . . .”

The voice belongs, unmistakably, to 64-year-old George C. Scott--linchpin for the Los Angeles production, who figures he’s done “counting all the (summer) stock when I was a kid maybe 200 plays--Broadway about 20.” From Shakespeare to Arthur Miller to Neil Simon. More recently, Scott has turned to directing as well.

So what attracted him to this play? “It’s a wonderful character,” notes Scott, sitting for a quick interview, “and it (the play) has a richness, it has language, it has a lot of humor and it’s very poignant in many ways.”

He first heard of “Lungfish” on the set of “Finding the Way Home” for ABC about 18 months ago. “I was in Texas with a pal of mine, Hector Elizondo (the hotel manager in “Pretty Woman”). He said he’s got a script (of Marshall’s) ‘and I’m going to give it to you because I think you’d be terrific.’ I read it and said, ‘I like it very much.’ That was the upshot.”

In thumbnail sketch, Scott describes his character as “a bit of a cynic, a bit of an acerbic tooth, he spins a phrase well--and he has a soft side but he tries to hide it.”

As for the relationship with Anita: “I think what he’s trying to do is give her some tools, some weapons to broaden her perspective and enrich her own life as a kind of gift from him. . . . He begins to like her very much, yes . . . The relationship deepens and they become almost like father and daughter.”

Asked how he’s preparing, Scott reminds one of his signature role in the movie “Patton.” He puffs out his chest and intones: “I bring 40 years of experience. That’s the main thing. The rest sort of happens osmotically.” And with an aide in his wake, he stands up and announces his departure.

Once Scott was signed, Metcalf, who played Anita at Steppenwolf, and Danza fell into place. The actors are being paid Equity scale. Williams, 21, who had a role in an episode of “Sisters,” was cast four days before rehearsals. She initially met Marshall through her mother, Shannon Wilcox, who played the prostitute who seduces Pacino in “Frankie & Johnny.”

Metcalf will return to “Roseanne”--whatever the play’s future. “Garry was 90% of the reason why I did the play again. You’d think he’d be very protective of it. But he’s very open to anybody’s suggestions. There’s a lot of tinkering which Garry and Lowell do themselves, but also cast members suggest.”

Danza who had read the role of Dominic at Penny Marshall’s and the reading Davidson attended--”When Garry calls, most actors run over”--says he feels “a little bit awed” by his acting partners. “After the first week of rehearsal I felt pretty good. And then they got so much better. Like they made a quantum leap; I was a little bit shook up.”

Though Danza has a series pilot at ABC--a “reality show” he narrates called “Gettin’ Over” telling of “the successes and some of the failures of inner-city school-age kids” across the country-- he insists that if “Lungfish” has a future he wants to be part of it. “If this play goes to Broadway, I will be on the plane.”

“Wrong Turn at Lungfish” is Marshall’s third play. “When you are writing a play, you have time to write it, and make it pretty and poetic.”

The first, “Shelves,” about a woman born a generation before the liberation movement, played four weeks in 1973 at Pheasant Run Playhouse in St. Charles, Ill. “The Roast,” his second play in 1980, about comedians--directed by Carl Reiner, starring Rob Reiner and co-written with Jerry Belson--lasted four nights on Broadway.

Directing appeals as well: “In movies, it’s ‘hurry up . . . we got to have a summer release . . . the sun is going down,’ you’re rushing, rushing. Theater, they’re not rushing. Nobody pesters us, nobody’s saying, ‘What are you doing?’ ”

And there’s the challenge. “With a camera I make you look where I want you to look. ‘I want you now to look at Julia Roberts, now to Richard Gere.’ I can’t make you look where I want you to look in theater unless I’m very careful.”

But when asked if he’s at all intimidated directing someone like Scott, Marshall replies easily: “Not really. I asked about his background. He loves the Detroit Tigers. So in my early communications with him, I signed all my letters with names of old Detroit Tiger ballplayers. . . . It’s important that you be able to lose the battles and win the war. . . . I have no ax to grind, no power trips. I just like to make a nice product.”