Nathan’s Famous (Almost) : Nathan Lane won fame playing an opera queen and then Damon Runyon’s Nathan Detroit. Now he reprises a ‘painful role’ in Terrence McNally’s ‘Lips Together, Teeth Apart.’ (<i> Psssst</i> ! Hollywood.)

Nathan Lane could blame his fame on “Claptrap.”

It was 1987 when the depressed actor stumbled from yet another frustrating performance in the Manhattan Theatre Club’s dying farce. Why couldn’t “Claptrap,” he asked the theatrical gods, be as funny as the theater’s other comedy?

A man passing through the lobby paused, disturbed by Lane’s forlorn face. “Hi,” he said, extending a hand, “I’m Terrence McNally. You seem a little down, but you’re very good in ‘Claptrap,’ and you shouldn’t worry. Your career won’t suffer as long as the work is good.”

“So why don’t you write a play for me?” thought the actor, as playwright McNally continued into the theater to observe his own hit, “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.”

But McNally, the writer of that season’s most popular Off Broadway comedy, had resurrected the actor’s spirits. Two years later, McNally rocketed Lane’s career by casting him as the opera queen in “The Lisbon Traviata.” Today, Lane is proud to be known as “a McNally actor,” working in a role the playwright did write specifically for him--a role that earned Lane the 1992 Obie for sustained excellence.

“Every once in a while they rediscover you,” Lane says while seated outside the Mark Taper Forum. The actor stares at the theater where he opens on Thursday in McNally’s “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” reprising “the most painful role” of his career. “So I thought it would be good to do it again out here where they have very short memories and need to be reminded what it is you can do.”

Of course, the “they” he is referring to work in Hollywood and may or may not remember Lane’s previous appearance at the Taper in 1990. Then, during a box-office record-breaking run of “The Lisbon Traviata,” Lane achieved cult celebrity as McNally’s Mendy, the flamboyant, petulant Maria Callas fanatic. That role made Lane a local party diva and led to lucrative cameos in films like the forthcoming “Addams Family Values” and to dialogue work in Disney’s next animated feature, “The Lion King.”

This time he’s Mendy’s polar opposite: Sam Truman, a troubled New Jersey construction company owner. Described by critics as “Chekhov on the beach,” “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” portrays two married couples on a brief Fourth of July vacation at a Fire Island beach house. Lane’s character is a middle-class New Jersey suburbanite, terrified of fatherhood and fearful of intimacy.

“I am a grown man with my own business, two mortgages and a hernia operation next month,” Lane’s character confesses. “I hate waves. I hate the beach. I hate nature. I like New Jersey.”

Sam’s pervasive anxiety makes him grind his teeth at night--hence the title, from a dentist’s suggestion to sleep with his “lips together, teeth apart.”

One reason Sam grinds his teeth might be homosexual panic--a condition exacerbated by gay holiday parties surrounding the beach house. His sister complains that Sam is the opposite of a femme fatale --an homme fatale .

Could any character be more the opposite from Mendy? Lane’s fans no doubt assume that in reality, his personality is much more like Mendy’s than Sam’s. But McNally shaped the construction worker, not the queen, around Lane’s personality.

“Certainly getting to play that role in ‘Lisbon’ changed my life,” Lane says. “Every once in a while you’re lucky enough to have that kind of larger-than-life, tour-de-force part. But Sam really comes out of my background.

“Terry had met my older brother, Dan, at an opening night,” Lane continues, explaining his role’s genesis. “My brother got in an argument with a friend of Terrence, and that’s the basis of Sam’s character. I think Sam’s a little bit of my brother and whatever I told Terrence about my New Jersey history.”

“I wrote ‘Lips’ with Nathan in mind,” McNally agrees. “Nathan is an example of an actor who really hears the way I write. He also has the same attitude toward life that I do. A good actor in your play is one who thinks the same things are funny and the same things are sad, just like you. They get the joke. We’ve never had a discussion about what a line means. What do we talk about? We talk about what movie we saw, where we’re going to have dinner, how crowded the subway was. We never talk about the play. They just get it. It’s an unspoken kinship.”

McNally refers to Lane’s “pathos,” then adds, “It’s like having Jimmy Coco back in my life,” referring to the late comic actor who starred in several McNally plays.

During most of Lane’s early career, critics compared him to Jackie Gleason and Lou Costello. It wasn’t simply the bulk, now fallen from his diminutive 5-foot, 6-inch frame, that journalists noticed--it was the ironic, deadpan double takes that marked Lane as heir apparent to those classic comedians.

“Being funny was a defense mechanism,” Lane remembers. “I was overweight as a kid. Before they make fun of you, you make the jokes.”

The actor, born Joseph Lane, comes from a long line of eccentrics, but his family life in Jersey City resembled “bad Eugene O’Neill.” His second-generation Irish father, a truck driver, was also an amateur operatic tenor. His father died when Joseph was 11, an event Lane is reluctant to discuss. First exposed to the stage by his older brother, he endured adolescence until he graduated from St. Peter’s Prep and was old enough to escape New Jersey through show business.

His professional debut came during the bicentennial in “Jerz,” a musical about the history of his native state. After knocking around New York acting workshops and “Off Off Off Off Broadway” theaters, paying dues in summer stock, dinner theaters and church basement shows, Lane came west in 1980 with his friend Patrick Stack. Based in Los Angeles, they formed the comedy team of Stack and Lane, once opening for country star Eddie Rabbitt in Petaluma. Lane also appeared in the 1981 TV movie remake of “Valley of the Dolls,” which may have prepared him for the roles of the ghost with a rock in its head in “Ironweed” (1987) and the Polynesian chief in “Joe Versus the Volcano” (1990).

Lane recalls a comedy appearance on “The Merv Griffin Show.” “We followed Elke Sommer, who was discussing her artwork. That really didn’t warm up the audience for us.”

Such West Coast exposure dissolved the comedy duo and chased Lane back to New York in 1982. When it came time to get his Actors Equity card, he discovered there was already a Joe Lane in Equity. Since he had recently portrayed Nathan Detroit in Damon Runyon’s “Guys and Dolls” at the Meadowbrook Dinner Theater in Cedar Grove, N.J., “Nathan Lane, the professional actor” was born--an ironic choice considering his Tony-nominated performance last season as Nathan Detroit in Broadway’s heralded revival of the classic musical.

But he remains bemused by appearances in “some of the most unsuccessful musicals in the American theater.” There was a supporting role as Prince Fergus opposite magician Doug Henning and an ark of live animals in the 1982-83 Broadway musical “Merlin.” There was another Broadway musical role, that of the Toad in “The Wind in the Willows”--a legendary bomb that ran for only four days in 1985.

His brief fling with network television occurred opposite Mickey Rooney in 1982 on NBC’s “One of the Boys”--gone after 13 episodes.

Lane’s first “big career break” came courtesy of George C. Scott, who took a chance on the relatively unknown actor by casting him in a 1982 revival of Noel Coward’s “Present Laughter.” Now Lane refers to Scott as “my theatrical dad.”

More serious leading roles began to trickle in. Lane found himself back in Los Angeles, this time at the Matrix as the Kenneth Tynan character in Simon Gray’s “The Common Pursuit.” His heralded performance earned several local awards. When Gray moved the production to Off Broadway, Lane reprised his character to excellent notices.

Of course, there was also “Claptrap” to keep him humble.

The lead role in the New York premiere of Jon Robin Baitz’s “The Film Society” in 1988 not only met with critical acclaim, but it also led back to Terrence McNally.

Director John Tillinger, who had guided Lane through the complex part of an evasive South African schoolteacher addicted to movies, was struggling to find a new Mendy for a revised “Lisbon Traviata.” Even though Lane was much younger than the originally conceived character--Lane remains “thirtysomething,” he insists--Tillinger decided to audition him.

McNally remembers the moment: “Nathan read one line, and I said, ‘That’s it. Get him.’ I’d seen him in plays. I didn’t know him. But just because you like someone in a play, they still may not be right until you hear them read your lines. Literally, he read one sentence about a phone call, and we looked and we knew. We let him read the rest of the scene, but he had the job after one line.”

Lane too marvels over that audition: “It was just an immediate sort of response. I don’t know exactly why. I just hear the music. Some people do and some people don’t.”

McNally the wordsmith is still somewhat at a loss for words: “It’s something you can’t put your finger on. You just know. It’s like falling in love. Why do I love that person? I don’t know why. I do. You can think he’s funny, he looks right for the role, he has black hair, which looks good, whatever. But it’s still undefinable too. There’s that extra, I don’t know what makes it work--chemistry . . . chemistry . . . it’s all chemistry.”

Whatever the explanation, McNally had his Mendy.

And Lane had fame.

Even the notoriously cynical drama critic John Simon wrote a review resembling a love letter: “One of the great theatrical turns; if years from now you feel infuriatingly left out during some hilarious evocation of it at a party, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

In the midst of the wildly successful New York run, McNally casually mentioned over dinner to Lane that “I’d like to write a play for you,” as well as for three other “McNally actors”--Christine Baranski, Anthony Heald and Kathy Bates. He told Lane to expect a draft in about a year--sometime after Lane’s appearance in the 1989 revival of McNally’s “Bad Habits.”

“I think he wanted to write something diametrically opposed to the opera queen in ‘Lisbon,’ ” Lane says. And in Sam, McNally created the exact opposite.

However, during rehearsals of the play that resulted, “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” Lane discovered that portraying a construction worker was much more difficult than playing an opera collector.

“That was like getting into a big Rolls-Royce and driving off into a wonderful countryside, up and down hills,” Lane says of “Lisbon.” “This is a real workout. It’s like running an obstacle course. The emotions in this play come out of nowhere. It’s very difficult. It’s not like it builds in a logical way. For me, I think it’s the best work I’ve done as an actor. But it’s actually a very painful play to do. I find it very draining.”

Lane also found himself in another celebrated McNally role. “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” moved from the Off Broadway Manhattan Theatre Club to the Lucille Lortel Theatre, also Off Broadway, but not even standing-room-only houses helped ease the pain. After five months, Lane had to leave the show.

“It was a rash decision,” Lane now acknowledges. “I was sort of running away from the play. Emotionally, it’s just a very hard play to do. You’re very exposed. I wasn’t in the mood to take a shower in front of 400 people eight times a week. It was not a great time in my life. I didn’t want to go through that night after night. It tends to make you want a drink.”

Besides, a more cheerful role was being offered. His “theatrical dad,” George C. Scott, wanted Lane to play Death in the 1930s melodrama by Paul Osborne “On Borrowed Time.”

“I thought Scott was making a big mistake,” Lane remembers. “A chestnut about trapping Death in an apple tree in the back yard? I wouldn’t have done it for anyone other than George. But you owe people sometimes. I think of him very fondly because he gave me the biggest break in my career.”

Scott proved Lane wrong: The revival became another success story as Lane made audiences laugh at Death.

Next, Lane returned to his theatrical namesake, Nathan Detroit, in “Guys and Dolls.” For more than a year, Lane experienced what he calls “an amazing phenomena”: “I’d never had anything that received that kind of national attention. We were on ‘Good Morning America,’ ‘The Tonight Show,’ and it was way out of control.”

But when McNally approached him about resurrecting Sam Truman in the Los Angeles premiere of “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” Lane had to answer yes.

“I’d be lying if I said it’s my all-time favorite role,” Lane says of his decision. “It’s my best work, but I don’t love the character the way I love Mendy or Nathan Detroit. I can’t hide behind this character. It’s not a laugh riot. Even here, I’m glad I’m not doing it for a long time. (Lane leaves the show on Aug. 29 because of prior contractual agreements.) But it meant a lot to Terrence for me to do the play again.”

Even so, Lane remains eager to take on other roles conceived by McNally, who wrote a part specifically for him in the film version of “Frankie and Johnny.” They’ve joked about sequels to “Lisbon,” such as “Mendy Goes Hawaiian” and “Mendy Goes to Prison,” until the day McNally suggested the title “Mendy in Love.”

“I said there’s a play there,” Lane recalls. “People are really drawn to Mendy. He’s certainly eccentric and lives slightly vicariously through the opera, but I also saw him as a real survivor and someone who revels in being gay. I didn’t find him a lonely, bitter old queen.”

But such a project is years away. Besides, his next work will be in Neil Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” about the comedy writers for “Your Show of Shows.” When it opens on Broadway in November, Lane will play Sid Caesar.

And fame? Well, for this theater vagabond, survival still depends on more lucrative ventures, such as a beer commercial opposite a professional wrestler named Jesse Ventura, whom Lane claims is “the Noel Coward of wrestlers.”

Lane also appears in the occasional movie, although he acknowledges that “I don’t see a Nathan Lane film retrospective happening anytime too soon, my last venture being ‘Life With Mikey,’ which kind of got trampled under some dinosaur feet.”

But while working at the Taper, Lane isn’t hustling movie auditions. “Los Angeles has sort of grown on me over the years,” he says, “and now I have friends here. But this is not a fun place to be if you’re not busy. It’s not a terribly spontaneous town, like New York is, and when you don’t drive . . . “ Lane pauses, and then deadpans: “I only work with playwrights who drive.”

Instead of networking Los Angeles, Lane is “revisiting Sam” and trying to keep the character’s “lips together, teeth apart.”

“I have the feeling that the play will touch a nerve here,” Lane says, “especially with what’s going on in the military. People are just scared, like Sam. These characters represent a lot of people’s fears about homosexuals, about AIDS, about blacks. I think it will be very successful. But I’ve been wrong before. I was in ‘Claptrap.’ ”