Taciturn Strangers on a Train

“Chris is a laconic fellow,” says Holland Taylor. She’s describing the lantern-jawed guy in jeans and gym shoes sitting next to her in a conference room at the Geffen Playhouse. It’s Christopher Lloyd. He listens intently as Taylor talks about their new two-person play, “The Unexpected Man,” which opens Wednesday. “This play has a whole new set of rules,” Taylor says. “I’m used to the juice coming from working with my partner. I’m used to that being the fuel; with that, you combust. And in this play, each of us has to make our own little combustion engine.”

Lloyd plays a famous author, lost in thought, who shares a compartment with Taylor’s equally introspective character during a six-hour train trip from Paris to Frankfurt. It’s about 70 minutes into “The Unexpected Man” before the characters speak to each other and, during a recent interview, a good 20 minutes before Lloyd himself says a word.

“The Unexpected Man,” written by French playwright Yasmina Reza and translated by Christopher Hampton, offers Lloyd and Taylor loads of lines in the form of alternating monologues. For the play to work, these actors must ignore each other. “When he’s speaking, it’s his inner thoughts, so that’s nothing I would be aware of,” Taylor explains. “You can’t incorporate listening into it. That would be very destructive to do. You’re having a dialogue with yourself, which takes tremendous energy. Once in a while at rehearsal, I’ve sat to the side and watched Christopher do something [for the first time] because I hadn’t been paying attention to it, because I’ve been trying, mostly been thinking about what I was going to say next.”

Lloyd nods.

“That’s the whole thing about this play, it makes its own rules,” Taylor continues. “You usually rely on dialogue, where you’re firing off of each other, but here, you have to be firing off of yourself. It’s rather exhausting. Usually, the duality, the exchange with another actor creates energy and heat. Here, I have to be lighting my own fire. Sometimes my coals are, eeiiayy, this is not catching,” she laughs.

Taylor, dressed in cream pants and blouse, flops her leg over the arm of a chair, noshes on a bagel, and says, “I remember in rehearsal, the first time we got to our dialogue sections, I was like a spiritual invalid--I fell on Chris like somebody had saved me from an island, fell on his bosom like a starving person who’d been abandoned at sea. Because it’s hard to be out there [onstage] on your own.”

Taylor studied acting with Stella Adler in New York, where she worked as a stage performer for 15 years. She appeared with playwright A.R. Gurney in the very first performance of his two-person drama “Love Letters.”

“There’s a difference,” Taylor says. “In ‘Letters,’ again, you’re sitting next to the person. But it’s like a billiard shot: You hit the ball to the audience and it bounces back to the recipient of the letter, so it’s still much more connected than this thing.”

After moving to Los Angeles, Taylor, 57, found work in dozens of made-for-television movies and series. In 1998, she was cast as the randy, cranky Judge Kittleson on “The Practice,” for which she earned an Emmy for outstanding supporting actress in 1999 and 2000. “I’m quite certain that I owe this part in a way to David Kelley for giving me that extraordinary role on ‘The Practice,’ ” Taylor says, “because I think that show very much changed people’s perceptions of the kind of character I would play well or enjoy playing and find natural to play. I got to ride on the coattails of the success of that character, and I’m sure that’s why I’m in the position of playing in a two-hander at the Geffen with Christopher Lloyd. Praise de Lord.”

A television role also gave Lloyd’s career a big boost. He, of course, became famous as the acid casualty Reverend Jim on “Taxi,” earning consecutive outstanding supporting actor Emmy awards in 1982 and 1983. Lloyd’s gallery of eccentrics actually began a few years earlier when he played a lunatic in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and continued with his mad scientist Doc Brown in the “Back to the Future” trilogy starting in 1985.

“The Unexpected Man” is no comedy. The play recalls instead the serious dramatic material Lloyd performed in the early ‘70s. He appeared with Meryl Streep at Yale Repertory Theatre; performed off-Broadway in David Rabe’s “In the Boom Boom Room”; co-starred with Christopher Walken in “Macbeth” at the New York Shakespeare Festival; and earned 1973 Obie and Drama Desk Awards when he starred at Brooklyn’s Chelsea Theater Center in “Kaspar,” an avant-garde play by Peter Handke about an animal-like 16-year-old gradually trying to become human.

When “Unexpected Man” director Maria Mileaf and Phyllis Schuringa, assistant to the artistic director, put together their wish list of candidates for the roles, Mileaf had never seen Lloyd or Taylor onstage, but remembered hearing about Lloyd’s virtuosity in “Kaspar.” “It was all done over the phone,” she says. “When I was casting, I was looking for people who would bring their own ... quirkiness and passion to these parts, because for a large part of the play, it’s just two bodies in space, it’s about what’s going on in their heads. And so I wanted people where I cared about being in their heads. And their choices at rehearsals have been bold and honest and not the norm.”

Mileaf directed the touring production of Reza’s “Art,” which earned the Tony for best play in 1998. Both “Art” and “Unexpected Man” deal with similar issues, she says: “the theme of these characters questioning what their mark on the world will be, and also exploring the nature of friendship and, really, the necessary bonds among people, friends that you have, that you leave, or take for granted. I think that’s very similar in both plays.”

“The Unexpected Man” debuted in 1995 in France. Translated by Christopher Hampton, the piece was produced by London’s Royal Shakespeare Company in 1998. Last fall, the play, starring Eileen Atkins and Alan Bates, opened off-Broadway at the Promenade Theatre to mixed reviews.

The specific setting for “Unexpected Man” may be largely foreign to many theatergoers here--who takes trains in Los Angeles?--but Mileaf says being confined to a train compartment for six hours is not that different from being stuck in freeway traffic.

What will resonate with audiences here, Mileaf says, is the intrigue of witnessing the inner workings of a revered creative mind. “With the character of this very famous author, the idea of getting inside the private mind of someone famous who’s worried about their legacy, that has some serious parallels in terms of the culture in Los Angeles.”

Because the premise for “Unexpected Man” relates to a chance encounter with a famous artist, Lloyd is asked if he’s had any sightings of the great or near-great in his own life. Suddenly animated, he recalls spotting Orson Welles in a New York sushi bar. Taylor, in turn, remembers running “like the blazes” up the street so she could turn around and casually walk down Fifth Avenue to take a look at Greta Garbo.

Lloyd then recalls being asked to fill in at the last minute in an off-Broadway play opposite one of his longtime heroes, Jose Ferrer. “The director gives me this script. I go to rehearsal next morning at some dingy, cold place in Times Square, walk up these stairs to this unheated, miserable rehearsal room, and there’s Jose Ferrer ... Cyrano! I couldn’t believe it. He’s sitting, wrapped up in his coat, with his coffee, 10 o’clock, Sunday morning, waiting to rehearse. With me! I was just blown away!”

Roused to comment, finally, on his character in “The Unexpected Man,” Lloyd offers, “There’s certainly the sense I can identify with him, just as an actor who’s vulnerable to criticisms, to critics’ opinions, from others. There’s a lot of similarities. He’s a man filled with insecurities. I can recognize that, the self-doubts, swinging back and forth. I guess, he’s at the point in his life when he’s not sure what kind of legacy he’s leaving. He’s got problems with his kids, he’s kind of lonely and doesn’t know what’s in store for him.”

Taylor says, “Both these characters are in similar places in their lives--they’re of an age--and they have certain things behind them that they’ve achieved and done. She’s at a crossroads and doesn’t really know what’s left, and she’s trying to cope with the fact that certain aspects have collapsed in her life. So she’s thinking about what’s it all totaling up to, and about the last period of her life, the twilight.

“I look at her being in the twilight of her life, and he in his, as a very positive thing,” she continues. “But unless they connect, the twilight alone is not desirable. And so, that’s the question. She’s at a time in her life when everything seems under control, but she’s inexplicably very sad, and she’s just trying to manage that.

“The occasion of the play eventually becomes about these two people becoming increasingly aware of and focused on and hooked to each other, silently, in this train compartment, and how is that going to resolve? And it’s quite suspenseful in a way. God, is that is going to work out? Is anything going to ever happen with them?”

Lloyd takes one more shot at the essence of his character. “I think my guy wants to be truly accepted by someone, more than just critics, be really appreciated and accepted and loved for who he thinks he is. And he’s running out of time.” *

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“THE UNEXPECTED MAN,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Dates: Opens Wednesday. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m. Prices: $30-$46. Phone: (310) 208-5454.