‘Menagerie’ Stars Not in It for the Money

Sheree North and Thomas Jane both know what it is to be touted as a hot new thing in Hollywood.

They have been labeled a “blond bombshell” and a “hunk,” respectively, although North whirled through the celebrity-making machine more than 40 years ago and Jane is still in progress.

North lit up the cover of Life magazine in 1955, when 20th Century Fox hyped her as a successor to Marilyn Monroe. Jane has a reputation as a film actor on the rise--his role as a ruggedly handsome shark fighter battling super smart, biogenetically enhanced man-eaters in last summer’s “Jaws”-meets-”Jurassic Park” action thriller, “Deep Blue Sea,” has made him the object of several Web sites.

For the next four weeks, these sex symbols from old and new Hollywood will concentrate on live theater in a labor of love-gone-horribly-wrong. They will circle and claw at each other in the family hell of Tennessee Williams’ 20th century classic “The Glass Menagerie” at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater.

Director Fox Gets the Credit

North plays Amanda Wingfield, raised genteelly as a Southern belle, now stranded in a drab St. Louis tenement. Jane is her son, Tom, an aspiring writer who dreams of freedom and adventure but is chained by obligation.

He is the sole support of his mother and his sister, Laura, a fragile creature who has withdrawn from the world and occupies herself with a collection of crystal animals--the glass menagerie. Igniting the action are Amanda’s desperate, compulsive attempts to turn Tom into a solid provider and/or secure a husband for Laura.

Hollywood may like to play in Laguna, but established film actors seldom want to perform in Laguna. “They hardly ever work for our salaries,” said Andrew Barnicle, artistic director of the Playhouse. North and Jane earn an Actors Equity union scale wage of $571 per week, said Richard Stein, the theater’s executive director.

Credit director Marilyn Fox with drawing them in. She was a champion of Jane when he was an unknown actor on Los Angeles’ grass-roots small-theater circuit--before he became known for parts in high-profile independent movies and art films (including “Boogie Nights,” “The Thin Red Line” and “Magnolia”).

Fox didn’t know North until she visited the actress’ Pacific Palisades home to persuade her to play Amanda.

North’s Credits Are Many, Varied

North’s professional life has had many second acts beyond her bombshell 20s. She played opposite Elvis Presley in 1969 in “The Trouble With Girls” and opposite John Wayne in 1978 in his critically esteemed last film, “The Shootist.”

North won plaudits as Lou Grant’s girlfriend in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and had a guest spot on “Seinfeld.” She has many credits in plays, from national tours in musicals to roles in classics by Shakespeare and Chekhov. But she had no wish to add Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie” to her list.

“When I’ve seen [the play], I found her so distasteful, such a neurotic woman that I could never understand her. It was played too much as a nut case without any compassion or feeling,” North, who exudes the graciousness of a kindly aunt, said during a recent interview at the playhouse.

Fox had a different take on Amanda. She wanted an actress who could do justice to Williams’ prefatory notes on the character, who was drawn from his own mother--just as Tom is an extension of Williams’ youthful self (Tom was the playwright’s given name), and Laura an avatar of his sister Rose.

“There is much to admire in Amanda, and as much to love and pity as there is to laugh at,” Williams wrote. “ . . . she has endurance and a kind of heroism, and though her foolishness makes her unwittingly cruel at times, there is a tenderness in her slight person.”

Fox, the artistic director of Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, said auditions did not turn up an actress who could embody this cruel-yet-tender duality. Then Gar Campbell, the L.A. theater veteran who is her romantic and creative partner, thought of Sheree North. Fox loved the idea.

“My mother always had pointed her out to me as an excellent, deep, beautiful actress, and she’s very feminine,” Fox said. “In the productions I’ve seen of “The Glass Menagerie,” I’ve always felt the Amandas were too hateful and cold. Sheree is somebody who is capable of [projecting] love. She has a strong, feminine, maternal thing going on.” North was quickly sold on the director’s vision.

So how does she generate what she and Fox have found lacking in other stage Amandas?

“I’m coming from the most caring, loving place I can come from,” North said. “I have to remind [Tom] through anger or tears--any way I can--to manipulate him into working for the [family’s] greater good. I can’t judge [Amanda] poorly, or else I’m just going to play a bad guy. If you make a judgment on your character, how can you play that character?”

Jane: Good Looks With Attitude

At 31, Jane has the Robert Redford gift of perfect dimples, a perfect cleft chin, and longish, tousled dark-blond hair, but with a smidgen of attitude attached. Had he been a contemporary of North’s, he probably would have been pitched as another James Dean.

There’s an offbeat, quasi-rebellious streak in him; during the interview he twiddled with a ring that was actually a circular cooling-hose clamp from an automobile engine, something he said he found on the ground at a convenience store in the San Fernando Valley a few months ago and has worn ever since because, well, it fit.

Jane’s push toward stardom will continue this year with the already-shot “Under Suspicion,” in which he plays a detective helping Morgan Freeman stalk murder suspect Gene Hackman. As soon as “The Glass Menagerie” closes, he will begin shooting “Dancing in the Dark,” a picture set in Cuba 100 years ago. His co-star is Angelina Jolie. “It’s a romantic thriller,” Jane said. “She’s the romantic and I’m the thriller.”

Jane says the thrill of playing on stage in a classic more than compensates for the paltry--by film standards--paychecks he will earn in Laguna. Could doing Tennessee Williams after becoming known primarily for a wham-bam-gore-and-pyrotechnics exercise such as “Deep Blue Sea” be a useful way to reassert his artistic credibility?

“No,” Jane said. “It’s too much work to make that kind of a statement. It’s too much a pain . . . to give up months of your life and any sense of a social life. It has to be for a love of the stage. If they’re going to say, ‘Maybe he’s a real actor after all,’ great. I like to mix it up a lot.”

Jane’s stage roots run deep. Theater is all he did for several years after arriving in Los Angeles from Maryland, where he grew up. Jane said he is a founding company member, and a construction crew veteran, of the Space Theater, a 99-seat house in Hollywood.

North said, in a mock-conspiratorial whisper, “I go over to him sometimes and say, ‘You’re gonna be a big star; you’d better think about your image. What are you going to say when you go on David Letterman? What are you going to say when you go on Jay Leno?’ ”

Jane plays down the importance of stardom. “I’ve always known [acting] is what I’d do with my life, that I was exceptional at it,” he said. “I have a great love for what I do and I’m continually getting better at it, and I’m going to be around for a long, long time. It’s interesting to see the business, [how] the machine that surrounds the acting profession becomes aware of people as they come up.”

Jane, 31, and North, who turns 67 on Jan. 17, have not had a chance yet to compare notes on their generations-removed rides on the star-making machinery.

“Any time we look at each other, it’s ‘Do you want to run lines?’ ” North said.

Jane says he is eager to hear North’s rich trove of stories, “but we’ve been working so hard we haven’t had the time to have a real conversation.”

Is ‘Menagerie’ Still Relevant?

Starting Tuesday night, when the play opens, North, Jane and director Fox will be the new century’s first chief custodians of a treasure from the mid-20th century.

Can “The Glass Menagerie” (1944) still speak as piercingly to audiences in this therapeutic age, when family counseling, Prozac for Laura, and the ability of a woman like Amanda to apply her considerable energy and gift of gab in the work force might have broken the circle of pain?

Jane thinks so. “It draws on family--the kitchen sink--and the arguments and love that go with it. That’s why [the play] is such a universal experience.”

“I was telling Tom the other day, ‘It’s like “Sophie’s Choice,” ’ “ Fox said. “[His character] has to leave or stay and die. It’s about survivor’s guilt. I think there are people who are survivors of their family, and other people who aren’t. I think for any neurotic, this play still holds up pretty damn well.”

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“The Glass Menagerie,” by Tennessee Williams, at the Moulton Theater, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Tomorrow through Jan. 30. Every Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m., matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. $21-$40. (714) 497-2787.