The View From Backstage

“A LIFE IN THE THEATRE” An Interview in Three Acts

THE PLAYWRIGHT: David Mamet

THE PLAYERS: Jack Lemmon and Matthew Broderick

THE DIRECTOR: Gregory Mosher

ACT I

The curtain rises on the Mayfair Music Hall in Santa Monica. It’s late afternoon.

“Everyone applaud,” orders Gregory Mosher. Crew and visitors sitting in the audience begin wildly applauding and cheering as Matthew Broderick and Jack Lemmon walk out on the stage and bow in front of the camera.

“Cut,” Mosher shouts, as two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Freddie Francis sets up to shoot the scene again.

It’s the second week of production on “A Life in the Theatre,” premiering Saturday on TNT. Adapted by David Mamet from his popular 1977 play, the two-character drama focuses on the relationship between two theater actors--one whose career is on the rise and the other whose career is in its twilight--over a repertory season of plays.

Today, Mosher, the former director of Lincoln Center and longtime Mamet collaborator, is shooting a scene from a make-believe costume drama, one of the many plays-within-the-play in “Life.”

The crowd starts applauding again as Lemmon walks on stage wearing period clothes, complete with a long, foppish gray wig. He looks like he stepped out of a Moliere comedy. Lemmon hams it up for the makeshift audience. After shooting several more takes, Lemmon improvises by taking his wig off as he bows and throwing it into the wings.

It’s just the capper the scene needs. “Print,” Mosher says with a smile.

“A Life in the Theatre” marks Mosher’s film debut. He directed the first production of “Life” in Chicago in 1977 and has directed Mamet’s Broadway hits “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Speed-the-Plow.”

“There’s a huge, huge problem having Jack and Matthew in your first movie,” Mosher says, laughing. “You know it will never be better than that. That’s the big problem. Everything will be downhill.”

Back in the 1980s, Mosher talked with Broderick about a national tour of “Life” with the late Rex Harrison. It never came to fruition, and then Harrison died. Lemmon, Mosher says, had made “this Mamet connection” when he did the 1992 film version of “Glengarry.” That connection “was really the impetus for the piece.”

Last year, Lemmon did a staged reading of “Life” as a benefit for a theatrical group putting on a play about AIDS. “I had in all of these years never seen a production of the play,” says the Oscar-winner (“Mr. Roberts,” “Save the Tiger”). “I knew of the play, but I hadn’t read it. I just flipped when I read it. I loved it.”

And so did Lemmon’s agent after he saw the benefit reading. He suggested to Lemmon that “Life” would make a great theatrical or TV movie. His agent called Mamet and the next day the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright phoned Lemmon.

Mamet, Lemmon recalls, told him: “ ‘How about doing this? I will open it up a little, make it a little longer.’ So he added a few scenes and he took some of the scenes that were there and moved us out into the alley.”

“I think it is Dave’s most popular play that he’s ever written,” Mosher says. “I think it’s the most performed. Dave called me the next day (after talking with Lemmon) and sat down to write the screenplay.”

Lemmon, 68, had never worked with Broderick (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Biloxi Blues”), but knew his father, the late James Broderick.

“When we were going to do it, his was the very first name mentioned,” Lemmon recalls. “I said, ‘Don’t go any further. As far as I am concerned, I would love to work with him. I think he would be great in the part.’ He’s still young enough. I knew his dad, who was a heck of an actor and from the theater, like Matthew. All the good young actors come from the theater because you can’t learn--and I am now making a sweeping statement--how to act in films. You can’t get the background or the knowledge that you get from doing plays.”

ACT II

Two weeks later. Afternoon. Upstairs at the Mayfair Music Hall. Broderick is chatting in the makeup area during his lunch break.

Though known mainly for his film roles, Broderick began his acting life in the theater, winning a Tony Award a decade ago for his Broadway debut in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

The theater is “more exciting” for him than films. “The fact that you can go on at 8 and win or lose, there it is,” he explains. “It’s very exciting. Most films you are waiting around.”

Doing “Life” is a dream come true for Broderick, who has long wanted to work with Mamet. He almost got to do a Mamet play when he was just beginning his acting career. Broderick, 31, recalls that he prepared a scene from Mamet’s early comedy “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” to use at his audition for Uta Hagen’s acting class in New York. “At the last minute, I didn’t do that scene,” Broderick says, laughing. “I found out that she didn’t like swearing.”

The actor has enjoyed working with the veteran Lemmon over the past three weeks. “I didn’t know Jack, but you feel like you know him because I have seen so much of his work,” he says. “But I didn’t know what to expect. When you meet these icon guys, it can go either way.”

Lemmon’s been pretty much what the personable actor thought he’d be like. “If anything, he’s more gentlemanly than I would have thought,” Broderick says. “He’s like a flawless professional. He’s never late. He’s never bad tempered. He tries to be helpful to other actors. He is almost frighteningly nice.”

At the beginning of “Life,” the two actors portray close-knit buddies sharing a cramped dressing room. “But at the end, we are kind of polite,” Broderick says. “It’s not like we have a big breakup scene. You kind of figure out it’s over between us. What we are doing today, we are all sort of short sentences. Before that, we are much more relaxed. Then he starts to drive me crazy, trying to tell me things and babbling on. I don’t want to listen after a while. Gregory says it’s sort of like a father and son.”

Their relationship, Broderick believes, is common to most actors. “You have these very close relationships at times. The season ends in the theater or the movie wraps and you move on to another job. So, in a way, it always ends badly. Very rarely do you stay friends with someone, and you could have been very close at the time.”

Broderick had his own acting mentor, Jason Robards. The Oscar-winner played his grandfather 10 years ago in Broderick’s first film, “Max Dugan Returns.”

“My father died basically right as I started,” Broderick recalls quietly. “A lot of elders took me under their wing. The first was definitely Jason Robards. He was very, very kind to me. We had lunch together most days, a little like this. He never really tried to teach me acting. He was very respectful and fatherly toward me and wonderful. I think he influenced me just watching him on the set and how he approached acting.”

ACT III

Three months later. Morning. Jack Lemmon’s Beverly Hills office. Lemmon is sitting behind his desk.

“I think he did a hell of a job, Greg Mosher, for his first film,” enthuses Lemmon, who is as gentlemanly as Broderick describes. “It was the perfect film to pick, with just two speaking (parts) and so forth. But still, his choices of setups were at times wonderful.

“It’s really very, very fortunate to get both of the Mamet projects within a year or so,” Lemmon continues. “There are great parts as you get older, but there are fewer of them.”

Lemmon’s discovered each Mamet play has its own rhythm. The dialogue in “Life in the Theatre” has almost a sing-song rhythm. “I adore his writing,” Lemmon says. “But there’s nobody whose writing is harder for an actor to remember than David Mamet’s. There may be some actors who disagree, who kind of fall into it easily. All the actors I know agree with me. Alan Arkin came in one day (on the set of “Glengarry”) and said, ‘I am going to kill myself.’ It’s not just the rhythm, but the language, which sounds so perfectly normal, but it’s not. It’s slightly off. That’s part of the wonder about it.”

Mamet also doesn’t provide any back stories for his characters. “Life in the Theatre” takes place at a nameless theater over an indefinite period of time. All one knows of Lemmon’s Robert is that he lives alone in an apartment. Even less is sketched in about Broderick’s John.

Not that Lemmon didn’t really have to do a lot of research to play Robert. He knows these actors all too well. “I have seen all around me, all of those less fortunate than me,” Lemmon says softly.

“I don’t think he ever had children which would (explain) why he had, along with the professional, a very fatherly feeling about the kid,” Lemmon says. “Sure, there is a jealousy there, which is funny. I think he lost his wife because she wasn’t an actress. His wife is the theater. He has nobody in the world except the kid and he knows he is going to lose him.”

And Robert knows his career is over. “He’s never going to move on,” Lemmon says. “I think he had been on Broadway, but I don’t think he was a star. I don’t think there is any question that he played on Broadway, probably in good supporting parts.”

Lemmon envisioned Robert as a member of different Shakespearean companies. “My own personal feeling is that he considers himself to be an English actor, just in his whole demeanor and his preoccupation with speaking good English,” Lemmon explains. “I was talking about it with Gregory, and for me, I think he would given his left (eye) to have been born in London and gone to (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) and been in the English theater. It would have been the high point of his life to have played London. But it is too late now....”

The lights dim on Lemmon’s face as the curtain slowly falls.

“A Life in the Theatre” premieres Saturday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. on TNT; it repeats Oct. 13; Oct. 14; Oct. 17; and Oct. 19.