Lavin’s Literati

Los Angeles seems to be enjoying a mini-trend in the theater these days: two-character battles of wit in which one of those wits is a famous writer. In two different plays on two local stages, a writer clashes with another character over the role of truth in fiction.

At the Mark Taper Forum, Donald Sutherland continues to hold forth in “Enigma Variations” as the reclusive Abel Znorko, who is baited into revealing more than he’d planned and discovers more than he wanted to know about the hidden story behind his latest novel, “The Unconfessed Love.”

More recently, Linda Lavin has also taken up the mantle at Westwood’s Geffen Playhouse, starring with Samantha Mathis in Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories,” directed by Geffen’s producing director, Gilbert Cates.

Lavin, 61, is enjoying glowing reviews as short-story writer Ruth Steiner, who despite an irascible temperament is a devoted teacher. She is ultimately betrayed by her young protegee, when the story of Ruth’s affair with poet Delmore Schwartz turns up in the younger woman’s first novel. The story was loosely inspired by the real-life case of novelist David Leavitt and author Stephen Spender, who accused Leavitt of appropriating Spender’s memoirs.

The petite, dark-haired Lavin, who shows up for lunch on the patio of Orso’s dressed in an oversized white blouse, black capri pants and low-heeled red mules, is as friendly as the character of Ruth is reserved. She knows everybody here. And she doesn’t shrink from handshakes, even though she’s still in physical therapy for a finger badly broken when her beloved Rottweiler got too frisky on its leash.

The fashionable Orso’s is a different kind of restaurant than the one that made Lavin a household name. She is probably best known to Los Angeles audiences as Alice, the scrappy waitress and single mom who slung hash at Mel’s Diner in the title role of the CBS sitcom, from 1976 to 1985.

Nevertheless, she has had a long stage career; last year, she received her third Tony nomination, this one for “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “Collected Stories” marks her first stage appearance on the West Coast.

“Collected Stories” had its premiere three years ago at Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory, with Kandis Chappell playing Ruth. For a recent New York production, Lavin was offered the part, but turned it down because she’d just portrayed another tough-minded writer, Lillian Hellman, in “Cakewalk” in 1996.

Lavin says that although she found it thrilling to play Hellman, “she just about killed me! She died when she was 87, and she was still smoking in the hospital with the oxygen tank attached to her mouth and nose. I did a great deal of smoking during that play.”

Lavin also was not eager to immediately take on another two-character marathon. “Those are tough, just learning the 85 pages alone--where are the dancing boys? Let’s have a little musical number in here,” the actress jokes.

Now, with a few years of distance, Lavin says she’s glad the role of Ruth Steiner has come into her life again. And apparently she’s also recovered from the smoke-a-thon; her lunch arrives with sides Hellman herself might have requested: vodka, two olives and two cigarettes daintily delivered on a saucer.

Lavin says she is also pleased to be performing in Los Angeles, loving the fact that friends from both coasts are making the trek to the Geffen to see her in the role. Among recent visitors was Neil Simon, who in 1986 tapped Lavin to originate the role of Kate Jerome in his hit “Broadway Bound,” for which she won a Tony.

Lavin notes that Ruth possesses a different sort of ego than Hellman--evidenced by Ruth’s honest revelation of her own pangs of envy when her prized student receives her first rave review.

“I think that Ruth Steiner is one of the bravest people I have ever known,” Lavin observes. “[Ruth says] it may be about envy, but it’s not about professional envy. And then she says: ‘It’s because you have all of life ahead of you, and I can’t just sit back and watch you do the dance that I did so long ago, and not think about time.’ I think that’s a very brave action.

“Lillian Hellman would not have been able to do that. The Lillian Hellman that I know [from research] was covetous of her position, her station, her friends and her place in the world.”

The ethics of the young writer’s decision to cannibalize the secret life of her teacher becomes a hot topic of debate in post-play discussions at the Geffen--and Lavin likes the ambivalence the story evokes. Still, it’s clear she sides with Ruth. “She’s a callous girl,” Lavin says with more than a little heat of the younger character, student Lisa. “My sensibility, as a human being and as an actor in this play, is ask me.”

Like her character, Lavin likes to teach. She is holding master classes for UCLA students while performing at the Geffen and was instrumental in launching a performing arts program for girls, age 11 to 14, called Girlfriends, in her recently adopted home of Wilmington, N.C.

Although she’s in the public eye as an actor, Lavin says her own quiet life has never made the tabloids--though the Portland, Maine, native has weathered two divorces (she remains devoted to her two stepchildren from her second marriage to actor-director Kip Niven).

“One learns that whatever one says to a writer might show up later in a screenplay or a book,” Lavin observes. “Because we all steal from each other--artists use each other’s stories or moments or visions; we all learn from each other. We do have fuzzy boundaries, as actors, using human behavior that we see around us. It’s what we do. It’s a very moving, and loaded and provocative subject.”

Lavin compares the events of the play to recent news reports that Sotheby’s New York plans to auction letters from the very private J.D. Salinger to Joyce Maynard--written during an affair between the then-53-year-old writer and the then-18-year-old Yale freshman.

To that one, Lavin offers a retort in the dry style of Ruth Steiner: “My mother used to say: ‘Don’t write anything down that you don’t want people to see later,’ ” she observes tartly. “I’m thinking Salinger didn’t have that kind of a mother.”

* “Collected Stories,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends June 13. $30-$40, $10 student rush. (310) 208-5454.