Crouse Legacy Surfaces With ‘State of Union’

Ask Lindsay Crouse about life with father, and you’re likely to hear about “Life With Father.” The actress is, after all, the daughter of Russel Crouse, one of Broadway’s most famous scribes, not to mention the man who wrote the play by that name. And she’s even named after her father’s writing partner, Howard Lindsay.

In addition to “Life With Father,” the Crouse-Lindsay team was responsible for such archly American standards as “State of the Union” (1945), “Call Me Madam” (1950) and “Mr. President,” as well as the books for the musicals “Anything Goes” (1934) and “The Sound of Music” (1959).

But for all the legacy she carries in her name, Lindsay Crouse has never performed in one of her late father’s plays--until now, that is. She appears in journalist-playwright Sidney Blumenthal’s adaptation of “State of the Union,” which kicks off the L.A. Theatre Works season of live radio theater at the Doubletree Guest Suites hotel in Santa Monica on Wednesday.

Remembered by many as a 1948 movie featuring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, the 1946 Pulitzer-winning play is a comedy about a presidential candidate, his estranged wife and a newspaper publisher who is also vying for the man’s affections. It’s pointedly political, filled with thinly veiled allusions to the events of the day.

For Lindsay Crouse, though, the political is also personal. “There’s a lot to be learned about [my father] from working on his plays,” the actress says during a recent conversation at her Westside home. “It tells me both that it was a different world that he inhabited and that his attitude toward it was quite amazing.

“There’s a naivete about government [and] politics in the play which doesn’t exist anymore, but which is still valuable because there’s a tremendous longing for it, for a kind of leadership that cuts through this massive weight of bureaucracy, party politics, self-interest and big business,” she continues.

“These plays are lifted up by a kind of buoyancy and renewal. I wonder whether we think that’s possible now.”

*

Born to onetime journalist Crouse and his wife, Anna, who was 25 years his junior, Lindsay Crouse grew up in a New York household frequented by the likes of Fredric March, Edna Ferber, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Irving Berlin and many others. The family living room functioned as a kind of salon, where the composers, lyricists and performers would often gather and try out their latest songs and other material.

“Looking back on it now, it seems like a time of amazing accomplishments,” Crouse says. “I envy the bubbling up of life that was always happening in this wonderful group of people.

“And these guys had so much fun!” she continues. “And the fun and the hopefulness and the humanity are in the plays.”

“State of the Union,” which was a hit when it opened on Broadway, was written before Lindsay Crouse was born, during the year in which President Roosevelt died and Harry S. Truman assumed the Oval Office.

The play’s events, however, allude to Wendell Willkie, the utility company head who became the surprise Republican candidate for president in 1940. “This is a play about a businessman who is a dark-horse candidate,” says Blumenthal, a widely known author-commentator and political correspondent for the New Yorker. “His appeal is not only that he speaks his mind, but that he’s outside of politics.”

So, with an enduring type like that as its central figure, it’s easy to see why “State of the Union” remains viable. “The political motivations really come out in high relief when you make the play contemporary, which shows how vital the play is,” Blumenthal says. “The sensibilities, mores, references and many things in politics change, but a good deal about this endures.”

Lindsay Crouse didn’t get around to reading “State of the Union” until she was a teenager, not long before her father died in 1966. But she never discussed this particular work with him.

“I talked to him a lot about theater and was constantly at the theater seeing things that he wrote, but I don’t remember talking with him specifically about his playwriting,” she says. “I wasn’t really old enough to be having those kinds of talks with him.”

Crouse went on to study choreography at Harvard. Afterward, she returned to New York and took up her acting career, working at respected off-Broadway theaters such as Circle Repertory and Yale Repertory during the ‘70s.

During the late ‘70s and throughout the ‘80s, Crouse worked in both theater and movies. Her films include “All the President’s Men” (1976), “The Verdict” (1982) and “Places in the Heart” (1984), for which she received an Academy Award nomination.

In 1992, Crouse, who is now in her 40s, moved to Los Angeles, prompted in part by her divorce from playwright David Mamet. She became a founding member of the Matrix Theatre in 1993, but since then has been concentrating on film and TV to be home at night with her daughters, now 14 and 8 years old.

Yet the more Crouse works, the more she misses the kind of women’s roles her father and Lindsay wrote. “It’s nice to see in what regard women were held in the ‘40s,” she says. “Women were not in the same position they are now, but there’s a lot of wonderful writing for women--and for women who were not 20--at that time.”

Nowadays, it’s a vastly different story. “Women are unbelievably muzzled at this time in this culture,” Crouse says. “In the parts I receive, the women are assigned powerful positions--executives, lawyers or whatever--but they’re not given much to do. They don’t have the real force behind them to create change.”

* “State of the Union,” L.A. Theatre Works’ “The Play’s the Thing,” Doubletree Guest Suites, 1707 4th St., Santa Monica. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m. $23-$26. (310) 827-0889.