A grown-up version of ‘Simon says’

Neil Simon is sitting intently and somewhat nervously in the rehearsal hall at the Geffen Playhouse, observing as Jane Alexander and Len Cariou read the new last scene of his play “Rose and Walsh.” The prolific, Tony Award-winning author of such hits as “The Odd Couple,” “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Lost in Yonkers” wrote the new version the previous evening, so this is the first time the cast is seeing the revised finale.

Alexander and Cariou breeze through the new lines as if they have been rehearsing the scene for weeks. Co-stars Marin Hinkle and David Aaron Baker, though, are a bit hesitant. Every time there is a particularly pithy line or poignant moment, Alexander flashes a smile over to Simon, who seems pleased with the response, and she makes a note in her script. After the scene is over, director David Esbjornson and the rest of the staff applaud enthusiastically

“Oh, Neil,” Alexander says graciously, “that was lovely. Your brain must have worked overtime!”

“Sometimes you are disappointed when you hear a play because you don’t have the right people,” Simon says a few days later. “But that’s not the case here. I think Jane and Len are terrific together, and I like the two young people. They don’t try to rewrite the script for me. They will maybe make a suggestion here and there, which makes me say, ‘I can go in that direction.’ ”

“Rose and Walsh,” which opens Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse, casts Alexander and Cariou as successful writers who have been longtime lovers. Rose, a once-famous novelist and playwright, is now near penniless and afflicted with a bad case of writer’s block. One evening, though, Walsh arrives for his nightly visit at her beach house on Long Island and informs Rose that he must go away forever. “Rose and Walsh” has a major twist to its love story -- one that is revealed early in the play.

Though theater veterans Alexander and Cariou have never worked together before and have just been rehearsing for a week, they already have a familiarity between them. “They fit like gloves,” says Simon.

“It’s very comfortable, very easy,” Alexander says of the collaboration. Both actors are dressed in black. Both are 63 and, even in this age-conscious era, they aren’t hiding the fact they have gray hair. Alexander is warm and funny; Cariou is more serious and less effusive.

“Len and I have been around the block, you know,” says Alexander, who took a break from acting from 1993-97 after President Clinton tapped her to head the beleaguered National Endowment for the Arts. “We have been in a lot of shows and with a lot of different people over the years. I would be surprised if it was less than comfortable. You get to a certain stage in your career.”

80 years of experience

With some four decades of theater experience each, Cariou and Alexander are two of Broadway’s brightest lights -- true royalty of the Great White Way. A seven-time Tony nominee who won for “The Great White Hope” (1969), Alexander has also received four Oscar nominations (“Kramer vs. Kramer,” “The Great White Hope,” “All the President’s Men” and “Testament”) and won an Emmy for the 1980 TV movie “Playing for Time.” Cariou received Tony nominations for the musicals “Applause” (1970) and Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” (1973) and won the award playing the title role in Sondheim’s landmark musical “Sweeney Todd” (1979). Currently in the Jack Nicholson comedy “About Schmidt,” Cariou had just finished a six-month run on Broadway in “Proof” before coming to “Rose and Walsh.”

“They are real pros,” says director Esbjornson (“The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?”) of the two actors. “What you want to try to do to some extent as a director is stay out of their way. Obviously with a new play, there is a kind of a leadership role that you need to take as a director. But at the same time you want to listen to the instincts of your actors because they are a real barometer in terms of trying to figure out what’s working and what isn’t.”

Lunching on salad, sandwiches and huge cups of pea soup during a break in the rehearsals, Alexander and Cariou discuss the new scene they had just read and how it differed from the original ending.

“He had retained some of the humor of it,” Cariou says of the playwright. “And a couple of references to time, but it’s virtually a totally new scene.”

“On Sunday, he was sitting there quietly,” Alexander says. “He had just sort of rewritten the scene prior to this, and he heard it and said, ‘I have to rewrite the last scene.’ He said it had to have a more buoyant feeling, and he came back with this. He’s a master.”

The actors love the crusty, passionate relationship and banter between Rose and Walsh, who are anything but an odd couple. “He’s a bit of a rogue,” Cariou says of his character. “They had a long relationship and never married. He was a bit of a philanderer, but that’s something they both understand. They are fascinated by one another and they are like soul mates. I think they have a lot of fun.”

Rose, Alexander adds, is a tough cookie; a mother who spent far more time with Walsh than she did with her daughter. “Neil has a line at the end: ‘I have too much man in me. I know because I have been kicked in the testicles so often.’ She is passionate, very passionate and she holds her own with him.”

‘Plenty of material’

Bringing a new play to life is exciting but often nerve-wracking. “First of all, you are there because you want to be there,” Cariou says. “In effect, you are converted and you know that you are going to have to work on it. Most good plays are long. If there’s not enough material you are usually in trouble. If there’s plenty of material -- that’s a good sign. You always enter into it with kind of one foot in and one foot out of the water because you know it is going to change.”

Still, he says, laughing, “we have both said separately after our first week of rehearsal, ‘From now on I am going to work with dead playwrights.’ ”

Not that they have anything against Simon. They both seem to adore him. But it’s remembering all the changing lines.

“There is a point where you get older that you can’t do the lines anymore,” Alexander says. “I haven’t reached that point yet. I remember playing with some actors who reached a certain age with new plays, and it’s really difficult.”

Alexander and Cariou have been quieter than “the younger kids” when it comes to asking questions about the script. (Hinkle, 36, plays Rose’s daughter, and Baker, 39, is the writer whom the daughter loves.)

“You have to have a go at the stuff and see how it comes out,” Cariou says, “and see how it lands. The only fair way is to read it exactly as he has written it and let him hear it and then you can go to him and say, ‘I think we don’t need this here because I have said it here and we say it again.’ ”

“We don’t know what we have until it is on our feet,” Alexander adds, glancing over at Cariou. “I don’t know what the baby is. There may be surprises when you have it on its feet.”

Alexander was starring in Eugene O’Neill’s demanding drama “Mourning Becomes Electra” at the Long Wharf in Connecticut last November-December when her agent called her about the play. Exhausted, Alexander told him that she didn’t really feel she was able to read anything. “He said, ‘Maybe I will send it off to you.’ Of course, I got to it right away. Who would not read Neil Simon, right away? I just called up and said, ‘I love this, but am I going to work this out?’ I had other commitments. But it worked out.”

Cariou had previously worked with Simon on Broadway two years ago in the comedy “The Dinner Party.” His agent called him about two months ago. “I said, ‘Let me read it and we’ll talk.’ I read it and said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’ ”

Simon says he never writes a play with specific actors in mind. “For me, Len fit even physically the kind of guy I had in mind,” he says. Alexander, however, wasn’t someone he had considered. “We were thinking of a lot of people and then her name came up and the director and I said that’s a very good idea. You still don’t know if you have them until you send them the play.”

Simon, who scored a commercial success last year at the Geffen with his update of “The Odd Couple,” says that the cozy theater is the perfect home for his four-character play. But he says he doesn’t know what the future will hold for “Rose and Walsh” when it closes at the end of March.

“Broadway is unpredictable now,” Simon says. “There were a huge amount of shows coming in this year and a huge amount leaving, shows closed suddenly. You can’t figure out New York.”

His last original play, “Forty-Five Seconds From Broadway,” closed in January 2002 in New York after a disappointing two-month run. “Even early in the play I said: ‘Nope, it’s not going to work. We didn’t go out of town with that play. We just tried it in New York. Had I tried it out of town, I might have stopped it as I did ‘Jake’s Women.’ I stopped the play, rewrote it and recast it and then it became good.”

Alexander and Cariou would like to go to New York with the play, but both seem just to be happy working together and with, as the actress calls him, “our master playwright.” And let’s face it, they just enjoy the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd.

“Nothing touches it,” says Alexander, as the two walk off to start the afternoon’s rehearsal. “Nothing,” Cariou says, “comes anywhere near it.”

*

‘Rose and Walsh’

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood

When: Opens Feb. 5. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m.

Ends: March 9

Price: $28-$46

Contact: (310) 208-5454