At Play in Lucy Territory

The first time actress Debra Messing heard herself compared to Lucille Ball was during the taping of the pilot episode of “Will & Grace.”

In the show, Grace’s best friend, Will, committed the unpardonable sin of advising her not to marry her fiance, and she’d stalked off, angry and hurt.

In a later scene, Grace was to show up at Will’s office, attired in a wedding gown and floor-length bridal veil, to tell him she had ditched the fiance.

Messing, who plays Grace, had an idea: As Grace enters the office, closes the door behind her and walks toward Will, the veil gets stuck in the door and pulls her backward at a 90-degree angle.

“It’s too Lucy,” the show’s director, James Burrows, said.

“What do you mean it’s too Lucy?” Messing protested. “It’s funny.”

“It’s funny, but it’s too broad,” Burrows said.

It’s hard to imagine anything being too broad for “Will & Grace,” but this was the pilot and the writers were trying to establish characters. Will, who’s gay, and Grace, who’s straight, are the closest of friends--phoning each other from their beds at night to gossip, guessing each other’s obscure clues during parlor games.

Messing, 33, thought she could play it without overpowering the moment. And she didn’t borrow the idea from Lucy. She stole the bit from herself. Once, in a production of Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever,” she had her character walk into a room and get her long chiffon scarf caught in the door.

“I didn’t even think of Lucy,” Messing recalls.

In the end, the veil-in-the-door scene stayed. (“It’s one of the moments in the pilot I’m most proud of,” she says.) And the comparisons to Lucy have not stopped.

After three seasons pratfalling, snort-laughing, crying, singing (she broke into song with guest star Sandra Bernhard), flirting and even occasionally cat-fighting (with the kleptomaniac neighbor played by Molly Shannon), Messing is perhaps the only actress on TV at the moment who evokes images of Lucille Ball playing Lucy.

“I was thrilled but also embarrassed by it,” says Messing, sitting in her dressing room on the Studio City lot where “Will & Grace” is taped. “She is untouchable. I just attribute it to (a) having red hair, (b) being on a comedy, and the fact that I developed a love of physical comedy from watching her.”

But really it’s about the water bra episode. When Grace’s friends make fun of her lack of cleavage, she dons a water-filled bra, which, of course, springs several leaks and starts squirting like a fountain when she’s out on a date at an art gallery. She struggles to cover the leaks with her hands and drink a glass of champagne at the same time. If there had been water bras in Lucy’s day, she would have worn two at once and they would have exploded like geysers.

“I’m not trying to be Lucy at all,” says Messing, who is, once again, up for an Emmy for best actress in a comedy. “It’s just that you watch and admire certain performers when you’re growing up, and your comic sensibility is shaped by those performers. She happened to be a pivotal one for me.”

It’s not fair to bestow on any actress a label as grandiose as inheritor of the Lucy mantle. Nor does anyone really want it. It’s too unseemly to suggest you were even trying for it, let alone declare that you achieved it.

“Nobody can be Lucy. That’s like a god. You aspire to be Lucy,” says James Burrows, one of the creators of “Cheers” and something of a god in the universe of TV sitcoms. Burrows has directed every episode of “Will & Grace.”

“It’s almost a curse to say another actress is the embodiment of Lucy,” says Diane English, creator of “Murphy Brown.” “It’s impossible. She was the star of the show, she drove every story.”

“Debra will find a niche of her own, not being compared to Lucy,” Burrows says. In fact, he’s given her one: “I’ve referred to Debra as Juicy, which is the Jewish Lucy.”

There is no re-creating Lucy today--unless you could somehow restore the 1950s, the novelty of television sitcoms, the repression of women in society, and viewers’ ability to fall madly for a solidly built bandleader’s wife played by an extraordinarily talented actor.

“Being a woman today, you’re expected to be smart and sexy and savvy and self-sufficient and politically involved,” Messing says. “When I watch Lucy, I see someone who is mischievous and completely lacking in malice. She doesn’t have a sexuality and that’s very powerful. Now we’re very aware of our sexuality, asserting it, having it be known. I think it was irrelevant then.”

In the years since Lucille Ball reigned as the queen of comedy, sitcom actresses have given us almost every image of women except the simply playful woman.

Some of them became touchstones of their decades: Marlo Thomas was the striving single girl in the city in the ‘60s; Mary Tyler Moore was the career woman making her way without needing a husband in the ‘70s. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Candice Bergen’s Murphy Brown was the successful career woman who was bombastic and arrogant--just like successful men. On the other side of the tracks from Murphy Brown, Roseanne was the unapologetically low-rent, shrill, working-class woman.

None of those actresses, even when they did physical comedy, conjured Lucy.

In the last 10 years, the currency of “funny” has soared on TV. Drama shows have comic stories; sitcoms have gotten broader. Calista Flockhart’s Ally McBeal stumbles over her feet and accidentally cozies up in bed with her roommate’s sleeping naked boyfriend. (“Aaaahhhh!!!” ) Brooke Shields energized a moribund career by playing a klutzy pretty girl on “Suddenly Susan.” But no series has produced a standout comic actress with the effect of Lucille Ball. The bawdy Bette Midler, who would seem to come closest to succeeding Lucy, mounted her eponymous sitcom last season, filled it with physical comedy and musical numbers, and saw it sputter along for barely one season.

“Probably the closest today to that retro feeling of comedy was Fran Drescher’s show,” observes English, referring to “The Nanny,” which ran for several seasons on CBS in the late ‘90s. “As far as someone being a real force of nature on-screen and controlling her own destiny, [Ball] was unique.”

English says Bergen once got a fan letter from Ball. Not that Murphy Brown was anything like Lucy. “She was the exact opposite character--no children, no husband, the set was not the home, the office was,” English says. “But I think Lucille Ball just really enjoyed watching another woman take the stage and run with it.” What Messing may have restored to the screen is the playful woman who makes a fool of herself. Although Grace is an interior decorator with a business, she is all vulnerability even when she’s being brassy. She’s sophisticated and flustered at the same time.

“Like Lucy, you can read the funny plot points on her face,” says David Kohan who, along with Max Mutchnick, created “Will & Grace” and executive-produces it. Conventional TV wisdom holds that a beautiful woman can’t be really funny. Ball so obliterated all her movie-star glamour that she looked like a clown--the painted lips, the frothy hair, the clothes a little fussy and silly.

Messing never hides her beauty--greenish-hazel eyes, a sleek body, a perfect mass of hair--but she never flaunts it either. It’s as if Grace’s beauty is unreadable to her friends. They tease her, tell her she’s flat-chested (hence, the water bra), make fun of her stylish, tight-fitting clothes. When she wears a ruffled-front white shirt, her assistant, Karen (played by Emmy-winning Megan Mullally), asks, “Did a can of whipped cream explode?”

The only way viewers will come along with you on “the comic ride,” Messing says, is if they see there’s something vulnerable, flawed, not perfect about you.

“I’m always looking for the thing that’s going to take the edge off the perfection,” Messing says.

In an episode in which she’s fumigating her apartment, she wore oversized flannel pajama bottoms and a surgical mask--to guard against fumes--on her head “like a unicorn head.”

The episode that flashed back to the ‘80s, when Will and Grace--in denial about his being gay--were dating steadily, Messing looked practically homely. She sported bushy eyebrows and a mass of chin-length frizzy hair. “I said I have to look like--no offense to her--Debbie Gibson. I have to have Debbie Gibson hair,” Messing says.

“Debra is such a fearless performer,” Kohan says. “I think she would do just about anything.” Incidentally, Kohan has never been a fan of “I Love Lucy.” “It was not interesting to me in the least.”

In Messing’s dressing room is evidence of both the funny girl and the pretty girl. On the floor sits a Lucy doll in a green satin coat that was given to Messing. And in her bathroom hangs a variety of gowns offered by fashion designers hoping she’ll choose one for the Emmys--a testament to her effect on red carpets. She’s so secretive about the gowns, she not only won’t let a reporter see them, she won’t say how many she has. (Five? “About that.”) On a table is a copy of Marie Claire, which features her on its September cover.

Since the success of “Will & Grace,” Messing, married just a year to Daniel Zelman, an actor-turned-screenwriter, has become a high-profile actress. She plays Woody Allen’s girlfriend in his next movie “Hollywood Ending.” She is acutely aware that she is continually being photographed and scrutinized.

Funny or not, she faces the same pressures as any young Hollywood actress. When she came here for her first series, “Ned and Stacey,” she whittled herself down from her usual size 6 or 8 to a size 4. “I did lose weight the first year I was on the show because the clothes were coming in and I wasn’t fitting into them,” says Messing, who stands 5 feet 71/2, “and because I was profoundly heartsick. My boyfriend--now husband--was doing a Broadway show, so he was in New York and I was in L.A. I started getting an amazing amount of positive reinforcement from the powers that be. They were like, ‘You’re losing weight! You look fantastic!”’

Messing didn’t hone her comedy skills in improvisation troupes or through stints on “Saturday Night Live” the way some comic actors do. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Rhode Island, she grew up watching funny women Ball, Carol Burnett and Madeleine Kahn. “And ‘Laverne & Shirley’ was just killer for me.”

Messing knew as a child that she wanted to be a performer, but she figured she would do musical theater. After graduating from Brandeis University summa cum laude in theater arts, she was accepted into New York University’s prestigious graduate acting program, where she earned a master’s of fine arts. She flourished onstage, appearing during her final year as Harper in the workshop production of “Perestroika,” the second part of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” opus, before it went to Broadway.

But Hollywood beckoned. Her first foray into television was a four-episode appearance as the scheming sister of Donna Abandando on “NYPD Blue.” That was followed by a lead role in the sitcom “Ned and Stacey,” which ran on Fox from 1995 to 1997. She made her feature film debut in “A Walk in the Clouds” (1995) with Keanu Reeves and had a tiny role in the Woody Allen film “Celebrity” (1998). In 1998, she played an anthropologist in ABC’s short-lived dark drama “Prey.”

She was just settling down for a vacation when her agents told her to read the script for “Will & Grace.” Kohan and Mutchnick went over to her house with a bottle of vodka and a lime one evening to talk to her about the role.

“We got rip-roaring drunk and talked for four hours,” recalls Messing, who peppered them with questions about how they would portray the characters. “This is uncharted territory--exploring a friendship between a gay man and a straight woman. You’ve seen the gay friend but it was always the supporting character.”

The fact that Messing was a talented physical comic figured in later. “When we saw she was really good at it, we wrote for that,” Kohan says.

Certainly, Mutchnick and Kohan had no more intention of re-creating Lucy as Grace than they had of making “Will & Grace” an updated “I Love Lucy.” But there’s something both discordant and delicious about the idea that a gay lawyer and his straight gal pal and their sharp-tongued friends--the physically manic, exultantly gay Jack (Emmy winner Sean Hayes) and the overpampered, over-liquored Karen--are the 21st century Ricky and Lucy and Fred and Ethel. And like Lucy and Ricky’s seemingly sexless marriage--as befit a 1950s TV show--Will and Grace have a sexless relationship.

“Lucy has thrived on conveyor belts and stomping grapes,” Burrows says, referring to two classic episodes. “Their level of outrageousness is much higher than this show.” But Messing is always looking for a way to make Grace physical, to take a moment “and punctuate it with some sort of physical gesture,” she says. “I just dive in and kind of do it.” *