Hitting on the Right Answer

There’s this troublesome thing about defining moments. You can be smack dab in the middle of one and not realize it.

Richard Greenberg’s “Night and Her Stars” at the Alliance Repertory Company revolves around a series of defining moments. The play concerns the quiz show scandal of the late 1950s, an unprecedented betrayal of a public trust that paved the way for an increasingly cynical age.

On a societal scale, “Night and Her Stars” deals with the bureaucratized corruption of the fledgling television medium and the historical ramifications of the quiz show scandal. On an individual level, it examines the insidious nature of personal compromise, and the unfortunate decision of Charles Van Doren, a college lecturer turned national pundit, to willfully engage in deception--the defining choice that set his life on a careening course from obscurity to celebrity to disgrace.

Ironically, the production of “Night and Her Stars” was a defining moment for the Alliance Repertory as well. The Alliance had fallen on hard times and was on the verge of closing when Kristin Cloke, the show’s producer and the Alliance’s recently appointed artistic director, made a last-ditch effort to save the 14-year-old Burbank-based theater company.

“Basically, the Alliance’s board came to me and told me they were going to close down the Alliance unless I accepted the post of artistic director and helped put the theater back on its feet,” says Cloke, a strikingly attractive, Emmy-nominated actress who appeared in a recurring role on the television series “Millennium.”

“I was overwhelmed,” she continues. “I didn’t feel I was qualified to be an artistic director. But at the same time, I didn’t want to see the doors of the Alliance close. That was just too sad to let happen.”

After putting up her own money for the production, Cloke settled upon “Stars” as the perfect comeback play for the beleaguered company. But she knew that staging a drama as long (at 2 1/2 hours) and complicated (with a cast of more than a dozen) as Greenberg’s posed a particular challenge.

In early 1999, Cloke had seen “The Jack Monty Show,” a parody of ‘60s television, at the Egyptian Arena Theatre. She approached the director of that show, Steve Rudnick, to stage her pending production.

On first examination, Rudnick seemed an unlikely candidate to direct “Stars.” After all, “Jack Monty” was an outright comic romp, and Rudnick, a 48-year-old former comic, is best known for co-writing the lighthearted family films “The Santa Clause” and “Space Jam” with his longtime comedy partner, Leo Benvenuti. Although it certainly contained comedic elements, “Stars” was more philosophically sophisticated than anything Rudnick had attempted before.

“Clearly it’s different material from what I’m used to,” Rudnick says. “But I found the material intriguing. I knew that this is just too long a play to take itself too seriously. I just had the instinct that if it were too long and drawn out, it wouldn’t be interesting. I kept telling the cast to pick up the pace, to go through it with a nice tempo.

“As we were in the rehearsal process, we were able to find the gravity yet still have some fun with the script. In fact, we were having so much fun that we had to take out some of the stuff that was a little too much shtick. My first instinct is always to ask, ‘Where’s the laugh? Where’s the funny?’ But this is a very serious piece, and we didn’t want to compromise that.”

Rudnick’s comic sensibility galvanized the show, as did the decision to trim the play’s multimedia components--which included prerecorded video sequences--to a bare minimum, and to keep the set, by Cloke’s co-producer SuzanFellman, strikingly spare.

“When the play was done off-Broadway and at South Coast Repertory,” Cloke says, “I think the technical trappings, all the multimedia outlined in the script, might have weighed the play down. Our staging really streamlines those elements. A lot of the stuff that was originally done on video is now done live on stage. We’ve taken a simpler approach.”

Many authors have approached the subject of the quiz show scandal for both book and film. The most famous treatment to date had been the 1994 film ‘Quiz Show,” directed by Robert Redford. But as Rudnick points out, Greenberg attacked the popular--and arguably overworked--topic from a different angle.

“The play is a mirror image of the movie,” Rudnick says. “The film was all about the uncovering of the scandal, focusing on the Rob Morrow character, the lawyer who exposed the story. The play is about the inner workings of the scandal, about the people involved and how it affected them.”

The three central figures of Greenberg’s play are Dan Enright (Bob Neches), producer of the popular early quiz show “Twenty-One”; Herb Stempel (David Keats), a brainy Jew from Brooklyn who was an early champion on the show; and Van Doren (Dana Ashbrook), the WASPy college professor who usurped Stempel and went on to become a popular public icon, featured on the cover of Time.

*

One of the most gripping moments in the play occurs when Stempel, acting on Enright’s orders, reluctantly takes a dive on the show, throwing the match to Van Doren.

“I went to the [Museum of Television & Radio] and watched the actual scene that Greenberg uses in the play,” Rudnick says. “It’s heartbreaking. You know Stempel knows the answer, but when he’s asked ‘What film won the Academy Award for best picture of 1955?’ he comes out very sadly with ‘On the Waterfront.’ The answer really was ‘Marty,’ which was Stempel’s favorite movie. And he had to bite his lip and say ‘On the Waterfront.’

“Enright was the puppet master--he manipulated the whole thing. But the thing I liked about this play was that these characters had a choice. There’s another great scene where Van Doren could have walked out on Enright’s proposition--and he should have walked out.”

But Van Doren was trying to live up to the image of his father, Pulitzer-winning poet and scholar Mark Van Doren. “His Achilles heel was his intellectual vanity,” Rudnick says, “trying to measure up to the kind of fame his father had.”

Puppet master Enright hadn’t counted on one of his puppets cutting his strings. Bitterly resentful of his ousting, Stempel went public about the deceptive practices of “Twenty-One.” At first, Stempel was dismissed as a crank, a spoilsport motivated primarily by his jealousy of the more telegenic Van Doren.

As played by David Keats, a veteran New York actor making his L.A. stage debut, Stempel is an archetypal nebbish, motivated largely by his own wounded ego. But his insistence on shouting the truth, in the face of public opprobrium, gives Stempel an oddly heroic stature.

“I love Herb Stempel,” Keats says. “He’s a guy who is a little too big for his britches, socially awkward. He’s in over his head from the get-go. But I love it because he tries so hard. And he keeps on trying, even when people dismiss him as a nut. He would run head first through a brick wall to get his point across; I firmly believe that.”

As Rudnick and his actors were well aware, the play simply updates the old Faustian bargain, with Enright as a postmodern seducer who uses television as the bait in his unholy bargain. Yet Bob Neches’ Enright is a pillar of affability and bonhomie--right up until he reveals his underlying relentlessness.

“Enright’s no fool,” Neches says. “He is Mephistophelean, really. But I didn’t want to play him as a blatant villain. I’m convinced that Enright, as I play him, doesn’t believe he’s doing anything wrong. He feels that he’s just making new rules for a new medium. And he may have been the manipulator, but Stempel and Van Doren sure went along with it, didn’t they? They all turned a blind eye to their own moral behavior.”

*

Dana Ashbrook plays Van Doren as an essentially well-meaning man, the victim of his own hubris. “Charles Van Doren’s father genuinely earned his good name,” says Ashbrook, who may be familiar to television viewers as Bobby Briggs in the series “Twin Peaks.” “Then Charles, in the next generation, wants to have it faster, quicker, easier. I think Charles actually believed the bull that Enright was dealing him--that he would be helping the cause of education in the long run. But he was also attracted to the excitement of it. And at the time, this kind of quick, mass celebrity was a new thing.”

It was just that element--the notion of instantaneous celebrity--that Cloke found particularly timely. “At the time I chose the play, back in September, it seemed as if the only things that were on TV were game shows,” Cloke recalls. “ ‘Survivor’ was this huge hit. ‘Twenty-One’ was even back on the air. I felt the play makes such an amazing statement about the whole cult of celebrity. And the play continues to be profound today, especially with the election. In the long run, we’re making these huge decisions based on telegenic appeal.”

Cloke hopes “Night and Her Stars,” which will be dark over the holidays, will continue to appeal to audiences when it resumes its extended run in the new year. The show has done turn-away business since it opened in October, and though there’s no assurance that the hit will ensure the Alliance’s survival, Cloke feels the company has definitely turned a corner.

“I set my sights on reviving the theater, and I think that we can at least do another play,” Cloke says. “I’m just going to take things play by play. This production is a great steppingstone for the Alliance, a steppingstone to our next endeavor. And that’s all I can hope for, to keep the doors of the Alliance open and put other actors on stage.”

*

“NIGHT AND HER STARS,” Alliance Repertory Company, 3204 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank. Dates: Dark through the holidays; reopens Jan. 4. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Price: $15. Phone: (323) 930-9304.