Truly in Step

She made her 1938 Broadway debut with Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne in “The Seagull,” won a 1963 Tony as the original Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” wrote the now-classic “Respect for Acting” in 1973 and, in the course of five decades, taught her craft to everyone from Jason Robards to Matthew Broderick.

But none of that much mattered when Uta Hagen arrived in Los Angeles this spring to begin rehearsals with David Hyde Pierce on a new play. She wanted to know where her candy dishes were.

And the cups.

And the stove.

The rehearsal room, it seems, was under-furnished. Hagen likes her props in place, the sooner the better. “I walked in the first day and there were some drawings of some chairs, but I said nobody lives here. I live here. What am I doing here, am I just standing by the kitchen all day long? I told them, you better bring me some more!”

Pierce says, “And they scrambled, I’m telling you--when she speaks

Hagen finishes his thought: “It’s how a human being reveals his human behavior. There’s not a moment when you’re not connected to some thing.”

A couple of pros talking shop, Hagen, 81, and Pierce, 42, have just emerged from a six-hour rehearsal for “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.” She plays a reclusive retiree living in a Florida condo; he plays the disillusioned dance instructor who teaches her to fox trot. The two-character play, written by Richard Alfieri and directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman, has its world premiere Thursday at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood.

Pierce ambles into the theater’s conference wearing jeans, running shoes and the neatly trimmed beard he’s grown since filming “Frasier’s” season finale weeks earlier. Hagen, dressed in black, lights a cigarette, sips a glass of pink punch spiked with vodka, and confesses that, legendary status be damned, she still gets as anxious as any other actor when she’s considering a part. “At first when I read this play, I turned it down for almost a month because I thought, ‘There’s no way I’m gonna fool anybody; I’m gonna look like an ass pretending to dance and jitterbug and all this stuff.

“I read that last description in the play, which is rather poetic--’he picks her up, her feet barely touch the floor,’ and I thought, is there any 800-pound man who can pick me up and make it look as though I’m not touching the floor? I said to the producers, ‘Why don’t you get a dancer, Rita Moreno or someone like that?’ And they said, ‘No, no, no, we’ll fix it up, we’ll get a choreographer.’ That was my biggest hesitation. Once they said it was OK, I got so excited, because I love to work, and at my age you don’t find a part very easily that’s interesting or challenging in that way.”

It’s no wonder the producers pressed Hagen. Pierce had already agreed to do the project with Seidelman, who’d previously directed him in the 1999 Reprise! production of the musical comedy “The Boys From Syracuse.” But there was one condition. “We started talking about who would do it,” Pierce says, “and when they told me that Ms. Hagen was interested, I said, ‘OK, here’s the problem: I won’t do it with anyone else. Seriously, I’m telling you if, for whatever reason, she decides not to, that’s it, it’s off, I will not do it.’ ”

Why so eager? “Like everybody and their mother, I read the book,” quips Pierce. As a theater student at Yale University, Pierce recalls, he immersed himself in “Respect for Acting,” Hagen’s textbook on acting technique that has become required reading in many theater programs. “It is extraordinary to have someone who is as gifted an actor as Ms. Hagen is, who can also monitor what she’s doing and put it into coherent words. Because most actors who are that good don’t know how they do it, or if they do know, they can’t speak about it.”

“My biggest battle,” Hagen says, “is that I’m bright, and I have seen that very fine actors can be not intelligent at all.” To illustrate her point, Hagen names three famous actresses she’s known, then continues: “Every instinct they have is an actor’s instinct, a human instinct to behave as a human being does without analyzing it intellectually in any way. When I play a part, I have to fight my own intelligence to stay subjective so I don’t end up writing an essay about it but do it instead.”

Hagen has been in Los Angeles since mid-April preparing for the show. “Oh, I’d love to have another month,” she sighs. At her own school in New York, the HB Studio, which her late husband, Herbert Berghof, founded in 1947, the actress works in front of an audience only when she’s good and ready. “Nobody pays, nobody gets paid. We rehearse as long as we want until we’re ready to start the show, and then we send out invitations. That’s what I’m used to and that’s very spoiled.”

Pierce, by contrast, is accustomed to a streamlined regimen for each “Frasier” episode: five days from table read to final performance. “We have a different kind of depth on ‘Frasier’ because it’s been on the air so long,” Pierce says. “We may only rehearse for a week but we’ve been playing the same characters for eight years ....” Hagen, ever mindful of the set, adds helpfully, “in the same place ....” Pierce continues, “So with the living room on the ‘Frasier’ set, we don’t have to wonder, ‘Now what does this mean to us?’ Doing a series is a totally different animal than this kind of work, this kind of digging and digging and digging, which I love, especially when you’re digging with someone this phenomenal.”

Actually, Hagen started digging into her role months before rehearsals even began. In January, she hired a trainer to get in shape for the dance sequences. And because Hagen’s character, Lily, grew up in South Carolina, Hagen spent hours every Sunday talking on the phone to an old friend from Greenville, S.C., absorbing the nuances of her accent.

Director Seidelman says the actress also began quizzing him long-distance about the nuances of the play. “Uta had me working at 4 in the morning in Melbourne,” he says. “I was in Australia doing a film, and I’d be getting up early in the morning to call Uta in New York so I could deal with her questions while she worked on the development of the character.”

It may be taking time for Hagen to prepare for her new role, but she immediately grasped the general themes explored in “Six Dance Lessons.” “Loneliness, feeling outcast, feeling not part of something--that has happened to so many actresses so often. It’s so recognizable to me, it’s not difficult at all to identify with that. These characters are holed up; they’re really afraid to go out and risk being rejected, she by her husband, by so many people. That sense of having been betrayed, having been lied to, having lost people you loved, that’s universal. There’s not going to be anybody who can’t identify with that.”

Pierce adds, “You have two people who are putting a toe out of their safe environments in a way that they both think are sort of cozy ways. She’s going to hire some guy to teach her dancing lessons; he’s going to make some money teaching some old lady to dance. No one’s feelings are going to get hurt, no bad things are going to happen, we’re just going to have this quiet little wonderful time. And they both just pick the absolute wrong person in a sense, because they both get opened up in ways that they never expected.

“This play examines the way we lie to ourselves and to each other,” he continues. “There’s some very obvious lies that are told, then there are other ones, that we are not aware we are telling ourselves. It’s only when we meet ...” Hagen cuts to the chase: “Misfits, two social misfits

Hagen and Pierce’s fondness for each other is palpable. In fact, the pair proved almost too simpatico during early rehearsals, says Seidelman. “In the play, their relationship starts with some pepper. At one point, David and Uta were liking each other so much, caring about each other so much, I had to sort of pull themselves out of each other’s arms and remind them, ‘Let’s not do the end of the play at the beginning.’ ”

It’s nearly 8 and Hagen has a long drive to Malibu, where she’s staying during the run of the play. She eyes the nearby takeout containers of dinner. But before the actors call it a day, Pierce says, “I’m reading her second book, ‘A Challenge for the Actor,’ almost every day now--don’t tell her or she’ll get a big head--and I do it not just because I’m working with Ms. Hagen, but because it’s so exciting, first of all because it points out the infinite possibilities you have as an actor.”

Says Hagen, “That’s the best part of the book, it opens the door. It never stops, the hunt never stops. Everybody says, ‘Well now you know how to act.’ Nobody ever learns how. If you did, it’d get boring. If you have all the answers, what else is there to learn? But the search for human behavior is infinite; you’ll never understand it all. I just think that’s wonderful.” *

*

“Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Opens Thursday. Runs Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends July 8. $21-$43. (310) 208-5454 or (213) 365-3500.