The Claws Are Out

The audience attending the very last Broadway performance of Clare Boothe Luce’s “The Women” leaned forward expectantly. On stage was actress Jennifer Tilly, sloshing around in a sudsy bathtub. Despite the business at hand--a phone call to a lover, a nasty exchange with her stepdaughter, a catty conversation with a friend--the central question was: Is she wearing anything? The answer, when it was finally delivered, elicited an audible gasp.

“It seemed excessively coy for me to be in the bathtub rolling back and forth for 20 minutes and not stand up,” Tilly says now. “It’s a shocking moment because you [the audience] think you’re safe. People think that I’m going to be in the bath the whole time and then when she stands up, it’s like, ‘Aahhh.’ ”

This one scene excepted, “The Women,” which was taped for PBS and will air June 18 at 9 p.m., is not about the clothes women are not wearing, but about what they are wearing. (They were designed by Isaac Mizrahi.) And about what they say and do while wearing them.

“The Women” is a cat fight among high-society friends, written by a woman, Luce, who was on intimate terms with this social circle, first as an editor for Vanity Fair, then as wife of Time co-founder Henry Luce and finally as a congressional representative from Connecticut. Her career suggests a woman who was, in a manner of speaking, her own man. The play was first performed on Broadway in 1936 but is best known from director George Cukor’s 1939 film adaptation, starring Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine and Paulette Goddard. Those are tall high heels to fill.

“The whole run people would say, ‘You were just like Rosalind Russell’ or ‘You were nothing like her,’ ” says Kristen Johnston, who starred in this version, which had a limited run at the end of 2001 and the beginning of this year and received mixed reviews. “It was shocking to me how popular the movie is. It’s got a whole legion of fans. It’s like a cult classic. There were actually a lot of good friends of mine who confessed that they’d seen the movie 10 or 20 times. I don’t know if they were coming out of the woodwork or it’s everyone’s dirty little secret guilty pleasure.”

At the center of the story is the insufferably noble Mary (Cynthia Nixon), whose husband is having an affair with a trollop, Crystal (Tilly). Mary’s “friends” include the grotesquely gossipy Sylvia (Johnston), who’s having an affair of her own; the permanently pregnant Edith (Jennifer Coolidge); the serial divorcee Countess De Lage (Rue McClanahan); and Mary’s amusingly cynical mother, Mrs. Morehead (Mary Louise Wilson). The men in their lives, almost all of them philanderers, are omnipresent but never on stage. You have to wonder how they put anything over on these women. In a sense, they don’t. The enemy is within.

“It’s cynical about women and also sort of despairing about women who are raised to have the wrong values,” Nixon says. “I think why Mary gets duped is that she has friends who aren’t really friends. They are just women she has fallen in with because their husbands are business associates or they have the same level of income. She never stops to ask whether they have her best interests at heart. She’s so blissfully unaware, so invested in her husband and her children, that she never bothers to think about who her friends are. She doesn’t really need friends. And then when she’s stripped of her husband and her home and her place in life, she makes some real friends who not only help her get her man back, but talk the truth to her.”

Nixon is talking about the relevance of the show, which at times is perilously close to anachronistic--or politically incorrect. Johnston for one thinks that it’s not “today” or “now,” but that it “makes people really glad we no longer live in an era where women, to hold onto their status, have to hold onto a man. I know it’s true, being a woman in her early 30s who is not married and has everything she could want.”

Tilly is not so sure. “If you look at Hollywood and the power wives and the Beverly Hills wives, a lot of their status and identity is who they’re married to,” she says. “And you also look at the girls who call themselves actresses, but basically their one goal is to land a powerful man who can keep them in Versace.”

All agree that everybody enjoys a good cat fight, which may be the unstated reason why PBS chose to make “The Women” the second installment in its Stage on Screen series. (The first was last season’s live broadcast of “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”)

According to Judy Kinberg, who produced “The Women” for PBS (the play itself was directed by Scott Elliot, the television production by Jay Sandrich), the appeal of the show is that audiences are familiar with the Cukor movie and with these particular actresses. Nixon is on the HBO hit “Sex and the City.” Johnston previously co-starred on the long-running sitcom “3rd Rock From the Sun.” McClanahan is best known for her TV stint on “The Golden Girls.” And Tilly regularly appears in feature films (most recently as Louella Parsons in “The Cat’s Meow”).

Many of these actresses started on stage, found fame and fortune in other venues, and now possess enough name recognition to get a production off the ground. They are doing what they love, they have the time and wherewithal to do it, and they’re introducing audiences to the pleasures of the theater.

PBS is on a similar mission. According to Kinberg, “We’re taking you into theater in a very deliberate way so that a broader audience can share the theater experience. And we don’t pretend that it is anything else. It is what it is. So we don’t aim to make it less theatrical.”

Which is to say that the show’s broad acting style--it’s played almost as a farce--hasn’t been toned down for television.

Tilly was worried about the cast shortchanging the live audience by pulling back for the cameras. In fact, she says, the filming suppressed the cast’s natural impulse to let it all hang out at the end of a run and may have inhibited audiences too. In other words, it seemed to enhance the play’s dramatic qualities (to the benefit of Nixon, whose role is essentially straight) while tamping down some of the comedy (to the detriment of Coolidge, whose marvelous turn as a bovine socialite doesn’t come across in quite the same way).

The last four performances were filmed, although only the final two were used, the first two being technical run-throughs. Ten fixed cameras were deployed. The stage lighting was altered because it was too “hot,” or bright, for the cameras. The actresses were fitted with radio mikes, a considerable feat given how many costume changes there were (or not: Tilly’s mike was hidden in her wig during the bathroom scene). There will be nips and tucks in the final product to accommodate the allotted air time. Jason Alexander is the host and interviews the principal actresses during intermission.

None of this necessarily interferes with the TV viewer’s theatrical experience. What may get in the way is the decision to cut between characters. All those cameras were busily trained on actresses talking and reacting, but not necessarily in the same frame. There are few, if any, wide-angle proscenium shots.

“One of the things that television can give you is focus,” Kinberg says. “When you’re in a theater, you’re at the mercy of the actors and the director in terms of focus. But we get to decide that for you, which can be very helpful. It can add clarity to a production. So there are reaction shots in the production. As soon as you put a camera on somebody, you’re offering a point of view. Every form has its--I hate to use the word ‘constriction’--every form has its rule, and we use cameras.”

Which leads, inevitably, back to Tilly’s bathtub scene. Her big moment was actually shot between performances in an empty theater, with Tilly’s back to the camera.

“It’s over and done, but I still wake up in the middle of the night going, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have stood up,’ ” Tilly says. “It was what it was, and that’s the great thing about theater. It’s something that people remember in their heads.” As for filming it, she adds, laughing, “I didn’t want them to, but they didn’t want to either.”

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“The Women,” which is rated TV-PG, will be shown June 18 at 9 p.m. on KCET.

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John Clark is a regular contributor to Calendar.