That’s Him, Red With ‘Laughter’ : Turning Crimson on Cue, Hesseman Earns Spotlight in Neil Simon’s Homage to ‘Show of Shows’ Days

He’s about 20 years older than the character is described in the script, his humor in the past has tended toward sardonic deadpan rather than grandiose gesticulation and he had never even seen a Neil Simon play before. Nonetheless, the consensus seems to be that Howard Hesseman is letter-perfect casting as apoplectic comedy legend Max Prince in Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.”

Simon wrote the piece--which deals with a roomful of gag writers coping with such sundry problems as McCarthyism, uninvited network tampering and their boss’s volatile unpredictability--as a nostalgic waxing on his days as a writer on Sid Caesar’s landmark ‘50s variety series, “Your Show of Shows.”

But Hesseman, whose resume includes seven years with the comedy troupe the Committee and three different situation comedies, most notably “WKRP in Cincinnati,” found echoes in the story that were pertinent to his own life.

“The camaraderie, the sense of us-against-them is certainly something I can relate to,” Hesseman says during an interview at Hollywood’s Doolittle Theatre, where the production continues through July 9. “Having done three different series, especially one in particular which I won’t mention, I do know what it’s like to feel as though I’m under the thumb of, let’s say, people with a low-aim mentality.”

Hesseman, who responds blithely to a fluttering sound outside the air-conditioning unit of his dressing room with, “It’s pigeons, not rats--something about the lore of the theater,” likewise says that Caesar was, for him, “in some sense, a mentor. He represented something very important to me as a kid, when I watched him doing those shows--that there was something beyond my life in a small town in Oregon that was very appealing, and I wanted to get to it. There was something about that behavior, it showed me that I must have had some proclivity toward insanely large and goofy actions. It’s a wonder I didn’t go into politics, I guess.”

For Hesseman, the mission was to suggest Caesar’s manic qualities without impersonating the comic. “The challenge was to in some way suggest the kind of size and power of him. I only saw him in performance, but he seemed so huge and so energized,” he says. “Most of my humor is dry, laid-back, but it was no way to go with this role, because this guy is tearing down and chewing up everything within reach. You have to get people’s attention and make them understand that if they don’t watch and don’t pay attention, they’re in danger.”

To that end, Hesseman--who admits, “I didn’t think I had a chance in hell of getting this role”--spoke to a friend who had dated a chorus girl on “Your Show of Shows.” This friend would stop by rehearsals, and once, at the end of a sketch, Caesar, three feet from the young man, “suddenly wheeled and looked my friend right in the eye,” Hesseman recalls, doing the same, inches from the face of his interviewer, his eyes wild with Caesar-fever.

“He thought he was going to grab him by the throat and throw him out of the rehearsal hall, and then he realized that he was just looking at him imploringly, to find out if the scene was funny or not,” he continues, sitting back down. “But with that ferocity and the energy, he was terrified for a second. I went to the audition with that in mind.”

Hence, during his audition, Hesseman suddenly found himself screaming at Simon, director Jerry Zaks and other production luminaries. “That was the first real rush of power I felt in that audition, and quite possibly, what it must have been like--at least given the surprise in their eyes--what it must have been like for those writers back then.”

Prior to “Laughter,” Hesseman performed in Arthur Miller’s latest play, “Broken Glass,” at the Coconut Grove (Florida) Playhouse. “Talk about a polarity among living American playwrights,” he says with a laugh. “Fascinatingly enough, they’re both Jewish men who smoke cigars--neither holds true for me.”

Hesseman concedes that at 55, he’s a little long in the tooth to be playing someone described in the script as being in his mid-30s.

“That caused my eyes to roll back when I first encountered it, believe me,” he says. “It’s interesting. None of these writers are described as anything near the age of the writers playing them. It is rather strange toward the end of the play when I say, ‘We’re all young, we’ll only get better,’ well, I’m not gonna get any younger and I’m not gonna get any better.

“But it doesn’t seem to be an issue--nothing is ever made of it except for that line. There’s no comment on that line, I hope, in my performance. It’s something the playwright did that doesn’t necessarily hold the same weight it did in the previous [Broadway] performances, or that it did at the time the playwright wrote it.”

One aspect of Hesseman’s performance in particular that has been astounding audiences has been his ability to, on cue, register Max’s sputtering rage by turning his face bright crimson. Many have inquired as to how he does it, but, he says, “I don’t know exactly how. My physical trainer asked me what I was doing, he wanted to make sure that I wasn’t doing it in a certain fashion that could in fact be dangerous. I said, ‘I don’t think it is, I don’t feel like I’m power-lifting. I’m not attempting a 600-pound dead lift in my muscular memory.’

“The best comment I heard was a friend telling me that when he saw the show, a woman in front of him turned to the gentleman with her, saying, ‘They hit him with a red spotlight,’ ” he says, laughing at the idea of such precisely placed lighting. “Their timing is impeccable! Not to mention their choice of gel tones.”

* “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday 2 p.m.; Sunday 7 p.m. Ends July 9. $15-$47.50. (213) 365-3500 or (714) 740-2000.