The Unlikely Couple

It is often said that politics makes strange bedfellows, but can show business be far behind? Not this month at the Ahmanson Theatre, where Neil Simon’s newest play, “Proposals,” is being directed in its world premiere by 34-year-old Joe Mantello, who helped make Terrence McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!” one of the most celebrated gay plays in recent years.

A director fluent in frontal male nudity joins forces with America’s most conventional playwright for an evening of . . . what? Neil Simon Undressed? We’ll find out Wednesday night, when the curtain goes up on this, Simon’s 30th play and the seventh to have its premiere in his adopted home of Los Angeles.

“Proposals” is set in the 1950s at a summer cottage in a resort area of eastern Pennsylvania, where a man is visited on a fateful afternoon by his ex-wife, his grown daughter and his housekeeper’s wandering husband. It’s an ensemble piece, with a cast of nine that includes Ron Rifkin and Suzanne Cryer. After its Ahmanson engagement, the play will travel to Phoenix, New Haven, Conn., and Washington before reaching Broadway in November.

Apart from his last-minute work on “Proposals,” Simon is also looking in on Paramount Pictures’ “The Odd Couple II,” which is currently shooting here, reuniting Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in their original roles as Oscar and Felix 30 years later.

Mantello, who received a Tony nomination as an actor for his part in “Angels in America,” is scheduled to direct McNally’s next play, “Corpus Christi,” at the Manhattan Theatre Club after the first of the year. He lives in New York with playwright Jon Robin Baitz, author of, among other plays, “Three Hotels,” which Mantello directed.

Before this current association, Simon, who turned 70 on July 4, and Mantello had never met. They agreed to discuss their collaboration and the new play in a second-floor conference room at the Center Theatre Group offices on Temple Street.

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Question: Whose idea was it to bring the two of you together?

Simon: My wife’s. When I finished writing the first draft of the play, I said to her, who do I get to direct this? And we had seen “Love! Valour! Compassion!” in New York together. And she said, “Joe. Joe Mantello.” I said, “Great idea. Absolutely.”

Q: And Joe, how did you greet this offer?

Mantello: My boyfriend came home one night and said, “Are you directing the new Neil Simon play?” And I said, “Excuse me, what?” He said, “I was just out with my agent and he says you’re directing the new Neil Simon play.” I sort of fell on the floor, and I was, like, there’s not a world in which I’m going to direct the Neil Simon play, that’s just not going to happen. He doesn’t even know who I am. And I put it out of my head. A couple days later I got a call from Bill Evans, the press rep who has worked with Neil for years and is a friend of mine, and he said, “There’s going to be this reading of this play and I’d like you to come and see it.”

Q: Can it be said that Joe Mantello has always wanted to work with Neil Simon?

Mantello: I don’t know that I would say that, just because I never thought it was a possibility. There are plays of Neil’s that I would have no natural affinity for, like, for example, “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” which I think is a wonderful play, but if that had been the play, I don’t think I could have done it. I don’t know that I understand that world in a way that would bring anything new and fresh to it or even any innate understanding. But when this play began, I started smiling, thinking, “Oh, I can do this; I understand this.” There’s a kind of Chekhovian quality to it. [Laughter] It may make you nervous for me to say that . . .

Simon: Well, if you didn’t, I was going to mention it.

Q: How did it go at that first reading?

Simon: Joe made about 10 points about the play that he thought needed addressing. And I thought every single one was a good suggestion. So I thought, “We’re going to hit it off.” I mean, you never know until you start to work together.

Q: And you felt this play needed a young director?

Simon: It’s a young play basically. There are five young people out of nine and they pretty much dominate the story, although there are other stories that are very important. I needed somebody who was not of the older theater--not to put anybody I’ve worked with down because I’ve worked with some really terrific people. But the two plays I’ve seen that Joe directed, in terms of just the set and the physical side of it, were so fresh and it seemed like today’s theater.

Q: You say you admired “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” which got a lot of attention for its sexual candor and male nudity. Did seeing a play like that make you want to do something different?

Simon: Well, this play is a lot different than a lot of the plays I’ve done. I’ve never written such a complex play. It’s like a spider’s web, where everything crosses each other. So the play would have gone that way anyway. But when I saw “Love! Valour!,” despite the fact that our lifestyles may be different, I saw nothing foreign in that play to me. These were all people I could relate to, problems I could relate to and the way he handled it, both in the humor and the drama.

Q: So, is it safe to say audiences should be prepared for something not entirely familiar from Neil Simon this time?

Simon: The form is new to me. I always felt that if you want to get deeply into the characters, you could only just use a few characters--four or five--and then really tell their story. But because you can tell a lot more with less now--in film and [it’s] starting to happen on the stage . . .

Mantello: People are going to bring whatever agenda or perspective they have to Neil’s work, and, to a much lesser extent, to my work; and then they will also have a preconceived notion of what the collaboration between the two of us is going to be like, based on whatever we’ve done separately. This will be viewed as these two sort of . . .

Q: An odd couple.

Mantello: Maybe.

Simon: But we’re really not.

Mantello: No, not at all.

Simon: Joe has the same attributes as the best directors I’ve worked with, in that he is so open to everything and also contributes so much to what I should be thinking. Maybe the closest comparison is Mike Nichols. I’ve worked with other directors who are great with the actors but don’t get into the play as much, kind of leave it to me to do it.

Q: Let me ask each of you if you feel confident saying, especially about a new play you’ve seen, that it’s been well-directed or not well-directed?

Simon: When I go to the theater, I hope that when I come out I don’t say, “This was well-directed,” or “It was a good play,” either one. I just want to say, “What a great night.” I don’t want to know what the director directed or what the writer wrote. It should be seamless, a meeting of the minds, including what the actors contribute.

Mantello: I think it happens with me more in the reverse, where I’ve seen a play that hasn’t been well received, and I thought the play was much more interesting than the production, that somehow the production diminished the play. I think that’s unfortunate when that happens. I’ve also seen direction that takes a mediocre play and makes it thrilling.

Q: Neil, there have often been parallels drawn between your life and your work. Is there something in particular that suggested this play?

Simon: Yeah, it goes back to a place, a resort that was the first place I ever wrote with my brother, where we were found by the producer Max Liebman and brought to work on “Your Show of Shows.” There was a place outside of this resort called Sandyville and that’s where people had these cottages. If there’s any of me in this play, it’s only one character, one small part of the play, nothing major. It’s far from my story. It’s really a story about this girl and her parents and then all of the other people.

Q: Back in 1980, you and the Center Theatre Group were criticized in this newspaper for “trying out” a new play, “I Ought to Be in Pictures” at the Mark Taper Forum. The question was whether the city’s leading nonprofit art theater should be spending its resources on aiding America’s most commercial playwright.

Simon: Yeah, but it made a lot of money for them, you must remember. For a long time, they got a percentage of the play’s profits. I mean, my name is on one of those [benefactor] blocks out there. It happened, too, when my plays were done in regional theater. “Why are we doing him, he’s so commercial?”

Q: Has that criticism softened at all in recent years since you won the Pulitzer Prize?

Simon: It may have softened. But you know, “commercial” comes after the fact. When you see “Chorus Line” in the first week of previews down at the Public Theater, you say, “Wow, breakthrough, a new kind of theater.” Fifteen years later: “I’m sick and tired of that thing.” It happens all the time. You can’t win for trying, sometimes. You do a play and it becomes an enormous hit and runs for two years and then the critics start to take potshots and call it “commercial.” If the same play didn’t run very long, then it’s a “flop,” not very good. The same play.

Q: Let’s go back to what you said about getting by onstage today by saying less.

Simon: I don’t want to be held to that. I don’t want to imply that we don’t dig deep enough into the characters. I think we do. But look at commercials on television--there must be 180 cuts in a 30-second commercial. You go to the movies and it’s bang-bang-bang. I think the same in the theater: the more you can have in it and say with fewer words seems to be the way things are going now. I myself like that. I like plays that move along.

Take “Love! Valour!” That kept moving--a lot of quick scenes. But I got to know a great deal about those people. As opposed to--to take the same subject matter--”The Boys in the Band,” which was in one set and the story went all one way. That was a great way, the only way to do that kind of play at that time. In today’s world, you might have done it differently.

Q: Joe, as a director, do you think about how styles have changed?

Mantello: I try not to be a slave to fashion in that sense. You know, I feel like my job is to interpret the play to the best of my ability and to not impose anything on it. I don’t know that I would do it that well and it’s not very interesting to me to have a signature style, to get locked into something like that. My job is to serve the play, period.

Simon: I don’t think he has taken the style of “Love! Valour!” and imposed it on this, not at all. This play was this way when we gave it to Joe. We’ve just worked on the innards of the play--what the characters are about, what the story is about.

Mantello: I have a sensibility, but not a style, maybe. Whatever my innate sensibility is about the world, you can filter a play through that. I think it would be a disaster if people walked away from this play saying, “Wow, that was really brilliantly directed.” If you can see my hand in this play, I’ve failed. I’m serious. It’s just not that kind of play.

Q: It sounds like you’re going against the grain. Haven’t we seen the rise of the director as auteur, onstage as well as in films? As in “Joe Mantello’s ‘Henry IV’? “

Mantello: I don’t think I’d be very good at it. It’s not interesting to me. If you can do a play and the house falls over at the end [slams table], you’re [considered] a good director. I thought when that play, “An Inspector Calls,” was on Broadway a few years ago, it was one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen. Utterly ridiculous. If you ask any person what that play was about, they’d say, “I have no idea.” But when it rained and that house fell over, Damn! Now what is that about?

Q: What’s the hardest part of directing? Is it working with actors?

Mantello: For me lately it’s been having a kind of patience. I used to have more patience. And I forget what it’s like to be on the other end.

Simon: And yet he’s more patient than I am. I mean, I watch things sometimes, and I think, “If I had a gun now . . .” But then you come in the next day and go, “Oh, that’s good.”

Mantello: I’m not troubled when anyone in the room is wrong. I’m troubled by no ideas, when I feel like we’re treading water.

Simon: No ideas from the actors?

Mantello: Or me. Some days you’d rather be by the pool.

Q: So, it sounds like directing must be a subtle skill as you’ve defined it, getting out of the way of the play and yet leading at the same time.

Mantello: It can be. It’s always different. It really depends on the play.

Simon: The mystique for me of what a good director can do that I could never, ever do, is to know how to communicate with the actors--without stepping on their toes, without diminishing them, making them feel secure, knowing how far to go. I just watch it, I’ve always watched it. And I’ve worked with a few who didn’t know at all. Those are the plays where the actors start looking at me instead of the director, and I know, God, am I in trouble.

Q: So, you have never directed your own work?

Simon: I redirected “Plaza Suite” in London, but to direct from the beginning? I would not know how to block a play in a million years. I can visualize the entire play but I never know where they’re standing. I put down [stage] directions which I don’t really mean to be used.

Q: In 30 plays, you never even filled in?

Simon: It happened to me one time, when we were doing “Sweet Charity” and Bob Fosse was sick for the day and he said, “Neil, would you direct the scene?” and I freaked out. I did it. I had them say the lines and had them cross and move over. And I said, “When is Bob getting back?”

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* “Proposals,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Also next Sunday and July 27, Aug. 3 and 10, 7:30 p.m.; Aug. 14, 21 and 28, 2 p.m. $15-$52.50. (213) 628-2772.