A Lot on the Table

During a Chinese takeout dinner after a day of rehearsing a new play by Neil Simon, actor John Ritter finds the following message in his fortune cookie: “You may attend a dinner party where strange customs prevail.”

Unlike most such predictions, this one is right on target. Ritter is one of six in the cast of Simon’s “The Dinner Party,” which makes its world premiere at downtown’s Mark Taper Forum on Dec. 2.

Although no one associated with the production will reveal much about the play, all acknowledge that Simon’s latest comedy focuses on a dinner party that is very strange, indeed.

On this particular evening, several weeks before opening night, the show’s cast, which in addition to Ritter includes Frances Conroy, Veanne Cox, Edward Herrmann, Rita Wilson and Henry Winkler, gather with the play’s director, John Rando, in an empty rehearsal room adjacent to the Taper to talk about the play and about working with the legendary Simon, a first-time event for them all. Simon, 72, was invited, too, but was unable to attend because of a case of the flu.

“I would like to say that I stalked this role,” offers Wilson, who has performed onstage locally in “Ashes” and Shakespeare/LA’s production of “As You Like It,” and appears frequently in film and television. “I knew about it, I told my agents about it, and I stalked it, because I wanted to be in this play. I called my agents all the time.”

Said Winkler, “The first play I ever saw was [Simon’s] ‘Come Blow Your Horn,’ and now I’m in a Neil Simon play, and I’m in a Neil Simon play with these incredible people. It is a thrill with a big exclamation point.”

Cox admits to both excitement and fear when it comes to testing out new dialogue from the Tony Award-winning playwright when he is sitting right there in the room. “It’s terrifying,” she says. “Having him sitting there, for me, comes close to being debilitating. I want to do it well for him, because of who he is.”

Simon’s play is set in the private dining room of a chic three-star restaurant in Paris; the action takes place over sumptuous hors d’oeuvres, entrees and champagne. (Though “Dinner Party” fare is represented to the audience as the height of French cuisine, what’s actually eaten onstage by the actors is a menu that may include seedless green grapes, olives, plain turkey or marinated mushrooms--plain, small, slippery foods that go down easy and don’t get stuck in the teeth or get in the way of the dialogue.)

That fine French meal represents the polar opposite of this behind-the-scenes “dinner party,” with food served up from shiny red cardboard cartons onto plastic plates, at a long folding table surrounded by metal folding chairs.

But this close-knit cast likes to eat together, regardless of the circumstances. Whereas actors in some productions have had more than enough of each other by the time a day’s rehearsal is over, the excitement of playing not only a part in the play, but also a role in developing a new work by Simon, often keeps this group together for meals both onstage and off. And sometimes, Simon joins them--treating the entire cast.

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In “The Dinner Party,” six guests have been invited to the Paris restaurant. No one knows who the host is, who the other guests are or why he or she has been invited. Each character is presented with a surprise from his or her past. This dinner, according to notes provided by the Taper, “will forever change their lives.”

Like their onstage characters, some actors came to the first rehearsal in mid-October as strangers to each other; some didn’t. Ritter and Winkler have the longest association, having worked together on various projects since 1971. Wilson also knew Ritter and Winkler, having guest-starred on TV with Winkler during his tenure as the Fonz on “Happy Days” and with Ritter on “Three’s Company.” Cox, Conroy and Wilson have all worked with writer Nora Ephron, but not with each other; Cox and Wilson both had roles in the Ephron film “Sleepless in Seattle,” but had no scenes together.

Director Rando, whose West Coast credits include “All in the Timing” and “Merton of the Movies,” both at the Geffen Playhouse, and “All in the Timing,” “The Comedy of Errors,” “Sylvia” and “A Moon for the Misbegotten” at San Diego’s Old Globe, joined forces with Simon in casting the play, a process that began in June. Even earlier than that, Simon and Rando began meeting to shape the script, which went through seven rewrites before the actors ever saw it.

The “Dinner Party” scenario suggests a murder-mystery, although cast members will not confirm whether murder is involved. Wilson comes close.

“Well, can’t you kind of say, sort of?” she protests, tentatively. “No!” the others respond loudly--suggesting that if Wilson, wife of Tom Hanks, says another word, her life will not remain a box of chocolates for very much longer.

“Don’t tell about the murder!” cries Ritter. “Don’t say it was the butler!”

“Well, ‘sort of’ is kind of ambiguous,” counters Wilson. “Can’t we be vague, ambiguous, enigmatic? Can’t we say? What is the big deal?”

“I’m Beau Bridges,” Ritter solemnly replies, trying valiantly to cover the truth by joking about his uncanny resemblance to Bridges.

And this evening, nobody is giving away any secrets--despite cleverly placed bottles of wine intended to loosen lips and lower inhibitions. There are two reasons for this. One, “The Dinner Party” contains a few mysteries best revealed in the theater, not the newspaper. And two, like all new plays, Simon’s latest is a work-in-progress, subject to rewrites and revisions until opening night.

Whether or not there is a kind of, sort of murder involved, the actors praise “The Dinner Party” as being both a comedy in traditional Simon style, but also a dissection of the institution of marriage that is both painful and poignant.

“Anybody in the audience will identify with something that somebody has to say in this play,” Winkler asserts from his position at the head of the dinner table. “It is, ultimately, about the human condition, how we are in love, and the loss of love, and the rekindling of love. We all represent facets of what it is to be a couple, and being a couple is really work-complicated and painful and interesting.”

“It’s about marriage, its complexities, how it falls apart and how it comes together,” adds Herrmann. “What marriage is good for, and what it isn’t.”

“It’s a love letter to marriage, it really is, and its complexities,” offers Conroy.

“It’s a love letter to marriage, and also a wish-you-weren’t-here postcard to marriage,” cracks Ritter.

The last new Simon play to premiere at the Taper was 1980’s “I Ought to Be in Pictures,” a production marred by artistic differences and an uproar when stars Tony Curtis and Dinah Manoff left at intermission during a Sunday matinee; Curtis never returned to the show. The play garnered mixed reviews (former Times critic Sylvie Drake called the play “banal” and “ordinary”). Beginning in 1976 with “California Suite,” six Simon plays have premiered next door at the Ahmanson Theatre, with more success.

Reached by phone a couple of days after the backstage dinner, Simon, too, spoke in vague and enigmatic terms about “The Dinner Party.”

“I never know why or when an idea comes to me, it just does,” he muses. “You are walking, sitting, looking up at the sky or something, I don’t know. It’s probably in your head, smoldering for a while, before you come up with it.”

And why did this quintessential New Yorker choose to set his play in Paris?

“It seemed like such a universal idea, I didn’t want to set it in a particular place like Los Angeles, or New York,” Simon replies. “Because then you have to localize the idea and make people speak in an L.A. style or a New York style--you know, they’re quite different.

“Setting it in France was the first idea that came to me. It makes it a much more universal idea,” he continues. “I found a way of writing dialogue that I think sounds as though it was translated from the French. It’s a little more formal than what I’ve written before, but I think it works.”

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The actors and director Rando say they find watching comedy master Simon at work an exhilarating experience. “The chance to sit, and collaborate, and play, and imagine with Neil Simon is truly a gift,” Rando says. “I think everybody in the theater has a story about being an eighth-grader or a ninth-grader and doing a scene from ‘The Odd Couple.’ I think this play is going to be that way; it’s a special play. It’s a thrill for me, too, to be surrounded by actors who are so talented, who have a wonderful sense of what the play is, and are also just loony as can be.”

The basic story of “The Dinner Party,” Simon says, has never changed in the development process. What has changed, and continues to change, is the dialogue. An actor’s interpretation may trigger a decision in his mind to change a line.

Observes Simon: “I think they [the actors] historically know that I rewrite a lot. I went through seven drafts before they ever saw the play. It’s hard for them; they are learning, like, two or three plays. They are getting to know the characters, and through them, I am getting to know the characters.

“Just because I wrote it doesn’t mean I know everything about the play.”

Cast members are impressed by Simon’s humility about his own work. “You’d think a writer with that much experience would say, ‘Shut up and say the words,’ ” marvels Ritter. “He loves that process of collaboration--otherwise, he’d be a novelist.”

When Simon needs to come up with a new line, he stares at the script in front of him until something floats into his imagination, observes Rando. “He’ll say: ‘It’s there, but it’s in invisible ink. If I look at it long enough, it will come out of the page.’ ”

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While actors may inspire Simon to make changes, however, they never dare to rewrite Simon; he takes care of that himself. Ad-libbing is not welcome. “The way I write, a certain word or line or sentence connects with another sentence. It’s sort of like music; you can’t just leave out a line of music.”

“When you get it wrong, he says: ‘That almost sounds like a play I once wrote,’ ” Ritter says with a laugh. Adds Winkler, “When you actually get these adventures of sentences word-perfect, it’s so much fun to have them fall trippingly off your tongue. If you don’t get it word-perfect, however, you raise hell.”

“The first day of rehearsal, he said that sometimes we have to think of him as a dead playwright--meaning we are going to have to say the lines exactly as they are written,” Wilson says. “But other days, he’ll come in and he’ll change things. It’s great having . . .

“Having a dead playwright who’s alive,” Cox interrupts, laughing.

Both Rando and Simon are there to give notes to the actors, but who gives notes to Neil Simon? “In a way, they all do, when they ask certain questions,” Simon says. “ ‘Why does my character behave that way?’ Or ask about things they don’t understand. Then, I might think over that line.”

But ultimately, Simon says, “I’ll get the notes from the audience. You can see whatever reaction they have; I listen to audiences. [At the Taper], we have eight preview performances; that’s not as many as I would have doing a play on Broadway. You would have three or four weeks of previews, or you’d take the play out of town for three or four weeks of previews. Eight or nine performances--the actors are just barely getting into it, they’re still thrown by the laughs.

“But that’s the way it is. Eight performances, and we just have to open with it. Perhaps the critics are not going to see the play as I ultimately would like it to be.”

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“The Dinner Party,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $33-$42. (213) 628-2772. Exceptions: Matinees for Dec. 23 and Dec. 30 at 2:30 p.m.; Dec. 20 and Dec. 27 at 8 p.m.; no performances Dec. 24, 25, 31, or Jan. 1.