Returning to the mirror of a play

When Christine Lahti took over the title role in Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles” on Broadway in 1989, she began a lasting association with the playwright that continued through Lifetime’s adaptation of “An American Daughter” in 2000 (later renamed “Trial by Media”) and continues now, after Wasserstein’s death, with the West Coast premiere of her final play, “Third.”

“I felt she was writing me,” Lahti remembers thinking about the playwright and her best-known heroine (“Heidi” won both the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award). “I felt such a kindred spirit. We became instant friends.”

Wasserstein died of lymphoma in January 2006 at the age of 55, only months after “Third” made its debut in a limited run at Lincoln Center, with Dianne Wiest in the leading role that Lahti will play at the Geffen Playhouse. This production, directed by Maria Mileaf, is not only the first on the West Coast but is just the second anywhere. It opens Wednesday.

The last time Lahti saw Wasserstein was at a preview of “Third” in New York. She spotted the playwright in the lobby at intermission, although she wasn’t absolutely sure. “I knew she was sick, but I hadn’t talked to her in a while,” the actress says after a rehearsal one afternoon in Westwood, “and I saw this elderly woman with gray hair and she had a cane and I said, ‘Wendy?’ and she said, ‘No!’ Then I said, ‘Oh, sorry’ and went back to my seat. But it was driving me crazy because I was sure that was her.”

‘I have to do this play’

Before Act 2 started, Lahti saw Andre Bishop, the head of Lincoln Center, talking to the same woman, who had now taken the seat Lahti knew was reserved for the playwright during previews.

She went over again and said, “Excuse me, Wendy, I know it’s you,’ and then, Lahti recalled, Wasserstein said, “ ‘Oh, my God, Christine, I didn’t recognize you!’ She was so used to matinee ladies bothering her, and she was so sick. I didn’t mention the illness -- she obviously didn’t want to talk about it, it was this elephant in the room -- but I was so moved by the first act, I said, ‘Wendy, I have to do this play in L.A., you know that.’

“And she laughed and said, ‘That would be wonderful.’ I hadn’t even seen the second act, but I was already convinced that I had to play this part. And that was the last time I talked to her.”

The part that Lahti was determined to play is that of Laurie Jameson, a frontline feminist English professor of a certain vintage joined in battle at an Eastern liberal arts college with a cocky young wrestler (Matt Czuchry, of “Gilmore Girls”) whose term paper on “King Lear” she believes has been plagiarized. The wrestler’s name is Woodson Bull III, and his prep school nickname, “Third,” lends the play its title.

Professor Jameson’s vintage is, like that of Heidi and Wasserstein and Lahti herself, the decade of the 1960s, whose countercultural assertions and pieties have been subjected to a harsh cross-examination during the Bush-era Republican ascendancy that frames the events of “Third.”

If Heidi was a woman who famously sacrificed herself at the altar of women’s rights (choosing a meaningful career over middle-class family contentment), Laurie has pursued those same goals to a fault, tempting fate with her rigid deconstructions of the white man’s canon and presumptions about red state America. While she has a husband and grown daughter, the certainties that have defined Laurie’s life, including the view that Lear’s unfaithful daughters Regan and Goneril were right to betray such a sexist patriarch, seem to be unraveling as the invasion of Iraq approaches.

Some playgoers are apt to find Laurie less sympathetic than Heidi and possibly even agree with her daughter Emily (Sarah Drew of “Everwood”), who calls her mother “arrogant, glib and impossible.” But Lahti, seated in a restaurant a few blocks from the theater, rushes to her character’s defense over dinner. “I think she’s incredibly sympathetic,” she says. “She’s at a precipice: She’s feeling powerless, feeling invisible. As a feminist and activist whose ideals were cemented in 1969-70, she realizes at the end of the play she hasn’t challenged her perspective in 30 or 40 years.”

Lahti, who is in her mid-50s, clings to this dilemma as her own and says, “Laurie is Heidi 20 years later.”

Although she never had a chance to discuss the play with Wasserstein, she knew her well enough to presume the main character’s introspection is a reflection of the playwright’s own misgivings about the arrogance of her generation -- misgivings that Lahti seems to share. “It really takes a hard look at liberals and baby boomers who tend to categorize and judge as much as the other side,” she says. “I think politically what she’s talking about is the need for the red states and the blue states to become purple. And it takes work on both the Republican and the Democratic side for that to happen.”

Lahti’s early political views were formed by the anti-Vietnam War movement in which she took part as a student at the University of Michigan. “In the ‘60s, I was right, we were right, people over 30 were not to be trusted,” she says, as if owning up now to the self-importance of youth.

“Barack Obama said recently that we have to get over ourselves, and I was so offended at first, but then I thought about it and thought maybe we kind of do, in a way. This play takes that position. Maybe we have to be not so divisive.”

Lahti speaks as a card-carrying Hollywood liberal who has blogged for the Huffington Post on occasion. One entry from 2005, headlined “Cindy Sheehan Is My Hero,” wondered “if Laura Bush would be camped out in Crawford with Cindy Sheehan if one of her daughters was killed in Iraq.”

Last spring, recalling the sight a few years ago of her 10-year-old daughter, Emma, marching for women’s rights in Washington, D.C., Lahti wrote in a Huff Post entry about her own feminist awakening. It occurred when she was a struggling stage actress in New York waiting tables and thought she had finally won a good-paying job in a commercial until the casting director explained that she would only have to do one more thing, which was to sleep with the director.

Taking the initiative

Most familiar to audiences for her work in TV as a regular on “Chicago Hope,” “Jack & Bobby” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” Lahti has not performed in a play since Jon Robin Baitz’s “Three Hotels” at the Mark Taper Forum with Richard Dreyfuss in 1995. She came up in the theater in New York and misses the regimen of “taking that journey every night, living it -- I love that.” She goes to see plays, at least at the Geffen, which she thinks of as her “home” theater because she lives on the far Westside. “I see most of the productions, I’ve done fundraisers. It’s the equivalent of our local off-Broadway theater in New York, the Second Stage, where I did Jules Feiffer’s ‘Little Murders’ and John Guare’s ‘Landscape of the Body’ ” before moving to Los Angeles with her television director husband, Thomas Schlamme, 15 years ago.

Lahti took the initiative in bringing “Third” to Geffen artistic director Randall Arney. “I was proactive, which I’m not known for,” she says. She also gave the play to Michael Ritchie, who runs the Taper. “They both read it. Michael said, ‘No, it’s not for me,’ and Randy said, ‘I love it.’ That was two years ago, and then we didn’t get the rights until now. After Wendy passed away, her agent and estate were determined to mount a production on Broadway, and then that didn’t happen for whatever reason.”

Mileaf, a New Yorker who directed Yasmina Reza’s “The Unexpected Man” at the Geffen in 2001, also saw the Lincoln Center production of “Third” but now wishes she hadn’t. “I find it a disadvantage,” the director says. “You have images in your head that aren’t your own, and you want to create your own version of the character.”

It goes without saying that Lahti is a different type than Wiest, so that should help, plus, Mileaf has found “an ally in Christine in rediscovering this work,” she says. “Christine has a gift for finding the clean intention of a character. It feels like a different play to me.”

Also a fan of Wasserstein, Mileaf last summer directed a production of “Heidi Chronicles” at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. But she had never met Lahti. Her most vivid impression, she says, was from the 1987 Bill Forsyth film “Housekeeping,” the small classic in which Lahti played an enigmatically antisocial aunt looking after her two young nieces in the back woods of the Northwest. It was a complex performance that the New York Times’ Vincent Canby called “spellbinding,” and it remains at the top of her reel, along with her Oscar-nominated role in “Swing Shift” and her affecting portrayal of a 1960s political fugitive and mother in Sidney Lumet’s “Running on Empty,” opposite Judd Hirsch.

That character too carried her back to the days of riot and rage that so defined her generation. But the increasingly distant calls to glory of that fervent period are getting hard to hear in “Third.” If Wasserstein remains, in Lahti’s words, “one of the few women playwrights who was writing for our generation, who understood the joys and sorrows of being an old guard feminist,” in this last play she seems to have looked at the presidential election results of 2000 and 2004 and thought, maybe this isn’t working.

“Third” offers Lahti the chance to bash Bush in the voice of Laurie, and she does not shirk from that opportunity; but in the end she believes Wasserstein was looking beyond such easy entertainment to a deeper meaning suggested by the play’s title. “I think what she’s saying about baby boomers and women specifically is, what are you going to do with the third chapter of your life? You’ve done this and accomplished this, but are you going to stay stuck in your point of view or are you going to be open and challenge your perspective?”

Unfortunately the playwright is not around to offer further explanation of exactly what it was she intended to say.

“The sadness to us every day,” Lahti says, her eyes suddenly tearing up, “is that she is not in that rehearsal room to ask her.”