March 5, 2000

Trying to measure up

A blue-chip creative team worries about pulling off Elaine May's new stage comedy, 'Taller Than a Dwarf'

By Joan Anderman, Boston Globe

NEW YORK - By all accounts, Taller Than a Dwarf is vintage Elaine May: smart, savvy, and wonderfully funny. May's new comedy, which comes to Boston's Wilbur Theatre for a pre-Broadway run March 7-19, has a gifted director in Alan Arkin. Stage and screen star Matthew Broderick and indie-film It Girl Parker Posey lead the cast. Tony Award-winning designer Tony Walton is creating the set. It's what you call, according to producer Jon B. Platt, a blue-chip creative team. Everyone is understandably thrilled to be working with everyone else. It's stimulating. Exhilarating. Fun. But there's another emotion running through the veins of this production. Two and a half weeks into rehearsal, that other feeling is just as vivid as the good cheer.

"They scare the [dickens] out of me." That's Broderick commenting on May and Arkin.

"I've been dreaming that the world is ending," is how Posey, preparing for her theatrical debut, expresses her anxiety level.

"Every time I have to block a scene with six people, my heart is in my mouth," says Arkin, who recalls that several years ago film director Martin Scorsese went through a similar crisis of self-doubt.

Unpleasant as it may sound, this fear is a very good thing. It's a testament to the enormous respect these enormously respectable artists have for Elaine May, who has been writing, directing, and performing comedy for the better part of five decades. Superlatives like genius, formidable, and brilliant - accompanied by awestruck shaking of the head - are used to describe her many times throughout conversations with all of them. It also underscores the standard of artistic quality to which they hold themselves, something that seems to be magnified in one another's company.

Taller Than a Dwarf is set in New York, and is about an average couple at the beginning of the millennium learning the new rules of the American dream. So goes the impossibly cursory plot description on the official press release. Broderick embellished the story line at a sushi bar in Chelsea, near the rehearsal studios where the play is being staged.

"I play a guy who's an accountant, who wakes up one morning late for work, and things escalate," Broderick begins, his voice hoarse from a bad cold. "He`s late, the shower won't work right, there's a little boy who wants help crossing the street, a policeman bothers him for littering. Things just add up. He goes back to his house and decides not to get out of bed anymore."

Broderick, who participated in a staged reading of the play last year before being cast in the role of Howard Miller, says it reminds him of comedies with serious themes like Prisoner of 2nd Ave. and Barefoot in the Park. He calls the dialogue delicious and the plot hilarious. But it's surprising to learn that Broderick - embraced for his boyish, good-natured appeal since becoming a simultaneous theater and film star at age 19 in Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs onstage and WarGames on screen - identifies with the lying, cheating character he plays.

Not a nice character

"I hate to admit it, because he's kind of repellent, in a way," says Broderick, now 37 and married to the actress Sarah Jessica Parker. "I mean, he lies the whole time. He tries to finagle and wheedle out of everything. But it's because he wants to please everybody all the time. That's what his wife can't stand about him. It's something I try to avoid. But this really brings it out in me."

In fact, Broderick says, he's really not so much the charming fellow he seems to be. (Although you wouldn't know it from his unfailingly sweet, affable manner over lunch, and his similar behavior with a stranger who stops him on the street to inform him with great enthusiasm that he looks just like "Matthew Broadway.") "If you talked with friends of mine, `nice' wouldn't be the first word they'd use," Broderick insists. "I'm probably a little more hostile than some of the characters I've played. One director called me 'Stiletto Broderick' because I said so many nasty things."

Arkin would beg to differ. The esteemed actor (Catch-22, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!) and director (he staged the original The Sunshine Boys and most recently 1998's Power Plays, his first collaboration with May) calls Broderick shy, wonderful, open, and inventive. But it's precisely that convoluted sense of identity, the complicated interface of image and reality and the ensuing collision of the mundane and the profound, that seems to be at the heart of this play.

"It's basically about a really bad day this couple has, and how it changes their lives," says Arkin, chatting in an empty room at the Chelsea Studios. He's been a part of this project since its inception. Arkin and May have a special chemistry - based, the director says, on a sense of humor that's rooted in the same view of reality. Asked to characterize that view, Arkin will say only that they laugh at the same things. He laughs, more in amazement than amusement, when he confesses that sometimes "I don't know where to move" the actors. "That's why I like to sit around a table, reading, long enough so they know who they are as characters, and then where they go onstage becomes easier."

Like May, Arkin says, he is consumed with remaining true to the integrity of the play. "Things keep piling up and get worse and worse and worse and the couple decide to completely revise their lives," Arkin says. He loves this idea. "My feeling is that generally, if you're not in a constant state of change, then you're dying. The way these people change their lives may not be the healthiest way in the world, but it's better than what they

Posey's changes

Parker Posey is no stranger to the concept of radical change. During the past decade the 31-year-old actress has ricocheted from college student at State University of New York at Purchase to soap opera actress (As the World Turns) to indie goddess (30 films in 8 years, including Party Girl, Dazed and Confused, Waiting for Guffman) to gypsy dropout (traveling the globe for a year and a half) before landing in Hollywood to make Scream 3 and stumble into her first stage role.

"Oh, yeah, I check out a lot," Posey says, rummaging through her huge, tattered blue purse for lip gloss, envelopes, and a pen to doodle with throughout the interview. It's not hard to believe; she's a true eccentric, a believer in the powerful winds of fate. Posey hadn't given a moment's thought to the theater when Arkin called her last fall. "It was serendipity," Posey says about being cast in the role of Selma Miller. "Alan and I had a really good talk. We just hung out, and I got cast."

Posey's casual attitude belies the magnitude of this latest shift in her professional life. Says Arkin, who cast Posey without an audition after watching her work on film, "She's inordinately gifted. But it's different from anything she's done - psychologically, sociologically, and every other way. So on top of being afraid she's had to find her way into this milieu that was completely foreign to her."

May, who gave the cast a week to get on their feet before coming to rehearsals, is staying relatively hands-off, says Broderick. "Sometimes she'll say `If you have a problem with anything, if you feel uncomfortable, tell me. Because you'll take better care of your characters than I'm able to right now. You'll know better than me what doesn't work.' I don't know if she meant it, but it was really nice," Broderick says.

In a sense, though, the critical work begins in Boston. "There are a lot of physical things, different things happening in different parts of the stage," Arkin explains. "It's painstaking timing. But audience response will dictate a lot." Arkin and May will be in the theater every night - taking notes, marking where the laughs come (and don't come), fine-tuning dialogue and delivery before opening the show on Broadway March 24.

Judging by the talent mounting this play, odds are it will be in pretty great shape on arrival. Posey, for her part, is figuring out how to "be more free. It isn't the easiest thing in the world." Arkin is itching to get out of the studio and onto the stage, he says, explaining that the Marx Brothers used to perform their movies in front of audiences before filming them. "I won't have any perspective until we get to Boston," he insists. And Broderick, despite his fame and acclaim, is wrestling with the challenge of "doing justice to this playwright's material. It's amazing. That scares the hell out of me."