The Long Road to Broadway

Progress is painful for play and playwright

A new movie or TV show always involves considerable risk. But the real high rollers are in the theater, and opening night in Manhattan is always a kind of crap game. Within two hours the play is either a success or a flop. Either way, years may have gone into the production, and the story behind the play is often more interesting than the play itself. To find out what goes on, TIME's Elaine Dutka spent three weeks behind the scenes of William Hamilton's Save Grand Central, a comedy of manners in which two couples find happiness by exchanging marriage partners. The show opened off-Broadway last week, and here is her report:

Unlike Shakespeare, who took most of his ideas from history, news and other playwrights, Hamilton, 40, had to go no further than his own collapsing marriage. "I wrote Save Grand Central three years ago while I was trying to find a way out of an unhappy marriage," he says. "At the time I was madly in love with another woman and hoping my wife would find someone herself and let me off the hook. This never happened in real life, so I invented a play in which this happy ending took place. It was intended as a farewell present."

It was Hamilton's first attempt at drama, but he had been writing snappy dialogue for 15 years as a cartoonist for The New Yorker. Though he lived in San Francisco part of that time, he tOOk aim at the Upwardly mobile everywhere, those who flit from trend to shining trend. Grand Central, like his cartoons, was supposed to be pointed and sophisticated, a Private Lives of the '70s. "Cartoons are very much like plays," he says. "A whole way of life is revealed in one sentence. In a play you just move this through time."

When the sentences were assembled, the play received two readings on the West Coast and in 1978 full production at the California Actors Theater in Los Gatos, near San Francisco. But Grand Central was not to be saved in California, and nothing much happened until last September, when Hamilton got a call from Anne Cattaneo, literary manager of the Phoenix Theater, one of the several off-Broadway groups that had received the script. She suggested a reading as part of the Phoenix's play-in-progress series.

Hamilton immediately agreed and put the play through the typewriter again. He reduced his characters from nine to six, cutting out whole chunks of the dialogue. "You can't stick with good lines just because they're good," he says. "They've got to move the play." The reading, Nov. 18, was a success, and the Phoenix gave the play two weeks in its schedule. Hamilton went to work on script No. 3.

Theater people still look to Broadway for money and approval, but producers themselves look to off-Broadway. Production costs have risen to such heights that backers no longer put money into a new play and send it on the road for seasoning. Instead, they will take an off-Broad way hit like The Elephant Man or Talley's Folly and move it to a larger house on Broadway. Thus, with what Cattaneo calls "a nod toward the future," Hamil ton asked Gene Saks, who directed such big budget hits as Same Time, Next Year and I Love My Wife, to stage Save Grand Central. "It's obvious I'm not here for the two-week run," Saks candidly admits. "We all hope it catches on and moves to Broadway."

At this point, Bonnie Timmermann, the Phoenix's casting director, brought in dozens of actors to audition. "Bill would start to sketch a person as soon as he became bored, and Saks' face would light up when he saw the right person. I would keep an eye on Gene's face and Bill's pad to get a sense of what was going on." Finally the six were chosen: Remak Ramsay to play the stuffy lawyer and Linda Atkinson for his wife, who always had a cause like saving Grand Central Terminal from the developers; Michael Ayr as the unbusinesslike architect and Jill Eikenberry as his aristocratic Italian wife; Luis Avalos for a comical Latin bartender and Evelyn Mercado as the maid he lusted after.

On Jan. 30 the cast assembled at the Showcase Studios at Eighth Avenue and 56th Street. At first Saks concentrated on blocking out how the actors were to stand and move. The script came later. For the next four weeks the actors worked at the Show case eight hours a day, six days a week.

Unlike many play wrights, Hamilton was both willing and able to make changes in his script. But his innocence showed up in other ways, and he was sometimes shocked at both the egos and the greed of many people in the business. "If you go in thinking everyone is trying to help you, you wind up bitter," he observed at the time. "Everyone is just in it for himself." Talking about one of his colleagues who he thought took advantage of him, he said: "It was like that scene at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The hero is talking to his best friend, and as the friend's eyes glaze over, he realizes that he is one of THEM."

There is never enough time for perfection, particularly off-Broadway. The cast did not even see the set until the day before the Feb. 27 dress rehearsal. "It was like we had just barely moved into a house, but were having 150 people for dinner," says Linda Atkinson. At 8 p.m. the audience was in place in the 250-seat theater of Marymount Manhattan College on East 71st Street, which the Phoenix calls home. Saks gave a little speech, asking for consideration: "Things are pretty rough, and we may have to stop. Please be patient and give the actors your sympathy. They're out here with no net." No one fell, but at the end of the first act, Cattaneo judged that things were rocky. "The actors are tentative," she said, "because they don't know when the laughs are coming." Hamilton added glumly: "I'd say it needs a lot of work." When it ended, he went home and got drunk.

Saks later told the actors that they were going too fast: the audience wanted to laugh but was given no time. At the first preview, Feb. 28, the pace was considerably slower. "We felt like we were walking through water," says Atkinson. "But Gene loved it, and Bill thought his play had come back from the dead." March 2 was the last of the six previews and the best, sparked perhaps by the presence of some critics. Indeed, the last preview was better than the official opening on March 3. That night a vase of flowers fell during the first scene, throwing off the entire act. Unable to watch, Saks and Hamilton dashed for the lobby, sitting there in agony until intermission. "The play is half what it was last night," moaned Hamilton. "It's terrible to see."

The second act picked up, and at a small party afterward, Saks admitted that he was encouraged. "We need more playing time, but people seem to be hearing Bill's language. And that's a good sign." At 11:15 the newspaper and TV reviews were called in. Almost all were positive. The following day even Hamilton was cheerful and looked back on his experience more positively. "I was taking such a gamble that I failed to see that everyone else was too. Being under pressure made us all act strangely." He kept repeating to himself the words of Mel Gussow in the Times: "Save Grand Central is not a fully formed play, but the author is resoundingly a playwright." With those words resounding in his mind, Hamilton started script No. 4--and waited hopefully for a call from Broadway.

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