The Next Date With ‘Jake’s Women’ : Neil Simon’s Play Makes Jump to TV With Alan Alda Back in Midlife Crisis Role

Neil Simon is pleased that he opted to bring his 1992 Broadway hit “Jake’s Women” to television rather than to the big screen.

“Infinitely more people will see it on TV than saw it on the stage--I think more even than [if it was] in movie houses,” he says of the comedy-drama that airs Sunday night on CBS.

But when executive producer Robert Halmi Sr. asked the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner to adapt “Jake’s Women” for TV, Simon would only do it on one condition: Alan Alda, who starred as Jake on Broadway, had to reprise his Tony-nominated role.

“There was no one I could think of who was as good as Alan,” says Simon, who previously worked with Alda on the 1978 feature “California Suite.”

“We did try the play [earlier] in San Diego with another actor and a different script,” Simon explains. “Things didn’t go as well as I wanted until I rewrote it and then brought Alan in to do it. We had a reading of it in front of 100 people at a small theater in Los Angeles and the response was enormous. He’s the quintessential Jake for me.”

When the film opens, Jake is going through a midlife crisis. His eight-year marriage to a career woman (Anne Archer) is on the rocks. An acclaimed writer, Jake retreats into his rich imagination when reality becomes too real. In his imagined world, Jake seeks help from his wise, funny sister (Julie Kavner) and his offbeat shrink (Joyce Van Patten).

Obsessed with his beloved first wife, Julie (Mira Sorvino), who died in a car crash 10 years earlier, Jake keeps traveling back in time to their joyous marriage.

Just as on stage, the role of Jake seems to fit the 60-year-old Alda like a well-worn, favorite sweater. But the Emmy Award-winning star of the classic series “MASH” acknowledges that he was initially scared about playing Jake. As it happens, however, Alda prefers projects that instill fear.

“Some of the times that I managed to come up with something interesting as an actor started out with that feeling,” Alda says, munching on a Popsicle as he relaxes on a sofa in a conference room at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena. His feet are propped up on the coffee table.

“ ‘MASH’ was one of them,” he says. “I learned since then that most of the time when I feel that I am really on unfamiliar territory--like I don’t understand something about the character or I don’t know if I can do something in a particular style--then I had to come up with something different. Something I had never done before. It’s kind of exciting. It means I won’t repeat myself.”

Alda approached the TV version with fresh eyes. “I had to learn it all over again for the movie because I don’t remember things,” he says with a smile. “After I finish a play, the next day I can’t remember it.”

Besides, Alda says, “we didn’t do the film the same way, and you shouldn’t. We had the great advantage of having this director, Glenn Jordan, who hadn’t even seen the play. Not only wasn’t he wedded to the way we had done it before, he didn’t know what it was. He didn’t care. He had a whole new vision. It really puts you on your toes.”

Jordan, Simon adds, did a “terrific job in helping me to open it up and make it a film and yet keep it intimate enough for television. I started from Page 1 and treated it as if it was a movie. So I think the changes from the stage to film and television helped us enormously. There were things I was never able to do on the stage. I couldn’t get out and go to places I wish I would have gone to and which I do in this film version.”

Alda acknowledges that he doesn’t think he could have tackled Jake’s complexities for TV had he not played the character for a year on Broadway and then three months in 1993 in Los Angeles.

“It’s like a Paganini solo,” he explains. “There were a lot of notes. They come very fast and yet I didn’t do it in the way I did it on stage. It’s more intimate because of the camera. The way I had of relating with my sister and my wife, it was quite a different relationship. Thanks to Glenn’s contribution, it makes the play a little richer and more complicated when you watch it.”

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As with the play, Alda’s TV Jake still addresses the audience. “Sometimes it’s dangerous to talk to the camera,” Simon says, “but he doesn’t talk to the camera. He talks to the one person who is watching and listening to him. He’s just so easy and yet when he has the big moments he can go there to the big dramatic scenes and that great emotional feeling that he has.”

Simon, Alda says, “in this play knows better than ever how to make people laugh and also more than ever knows how to just stop and tell the truth, and it is startling sometimes. You would hear [the audience] go through those changes. On the stage you could hear the audience go from laughing to opening their pocketbooks [to get Kleenex]. It’s very nice for the actors to hear all that sniffling.”

“Jake’s Women,” Alda recalls, actually changed one theatergoer’s life. “Somebody came back stage who I had known years earlier,” the actor says. “He said he was very moved. His eyes were still glistening and he said that his wife had died years earlier and the play that night had helped him let her go. He felt it had changed him watching the play. It had allowed him to give up this idealized attachment. It was an amazing feeling.”

* “Jake’s Women” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS (Channel 2).