When Life Refuses to Follow the Script

By MICHAEL PHILLIPS

March 27, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES THEATER CRITIC

NEW YORK — “How do I say this?” wonders Jack O’Brien, at an uncharacteristic loss for words. At a table near the back of O’Neal’s, an Upper West Side restaurant halfway between Central Park and Lincoln Center, the director has just finished his Sunday morning eggs and bacon.

He has arrived at a painful subject, one never far from his thoughts these days: In November, O’Brien’s companion of two years, composer James Legg, died in an accident in Legg’s apartment.

A pause. “It’s been very helpful to find myself in the security of the rehearsal hall,” O’Brien says. “To be with first-class actors, working on one of the most challenging and exhilarating projects I’ll ever get, it’s just a privilege.

“And it’s gotten me from November to here, sanely.”

For most of his 61 years, O’Brien has lived a life in the theater. That life routinely serves up a lion’s share of cruelties and rewards. These recent months, however, have been especially extreme for the 20-year artistic director of San Diego’s Globe Theatres.

In June at the Globe, O’Brien launched the raucous stage version of “The Full Monty” in an unusually smooth pre-Broadway tryout. The musical is now in its sixth month on Broadway. A national touring edition--due sometime next year in Los Angeles--is in the works, as are London and Australian versions. This spring’s Tony Award nominations will probably send a nod O’Brien’s way.

That’d be enough for one season, for most directors. But this week brings the New York premiere of Tom Stoppard’s memory play “The Invention of Love,” about Latin scholar and poet A.E. Housman. O’Brien’s fifth assignment for Lincoln Center Theater, the production--for which O’Brien’s late companion Legg was to have composed the score--opens Thursday at the Lyceum Theatre.

A rigorous translator of Horace, Propertius and others, Housman revealed something of his inner life with the publication of “A Shropshire Lad” and other poems. In a paradoxical age of Victorian repression and its counterweight, the Aesthetics movement symbolized by fellow Oxonian Oscar Wilde, Housman expended years of psychic energy--however cloaked--longing for his heterosexual friend, runner Moses Jackson.

“I would have died for you but I never had the luck!” says Stoppard’s Housman, reflecting on a life lived, and unlived.

“There are good directors who work conceptually,” Stoppard says, “and then after that, you kind of cross your fingers about the details. And there are directors who are very interested in detail, but in the end, you don’t know quite why they did the play. Jack is one of the few who works on both scales. He responds to an overall idea, the overall poetry of an idea--and then he gets down to the hard work of delivering it.

“He’s also a very sweet, jolly, funny man who wears a bow tie. You’ll never spend a dinner with him without laughing a great deal. But he’s a very serious man of the theater. He has been continuously thinking about it for 40 years.”

To O’Brien’s friend and colleague Nicholas Martin, artistic director of Boston’s Huntington Theatre, there’s something “positively Greek” in the recent turns of O’Brien’s life. “That he would have a hit of such enormity at a time of such an enormous personal tragedy . . . well, that’s a lot to bear.

“But he has been phenomenal. It’s given him a kind of clarity. It comes at a time when he’s at the top of his form, and for him to go from ‘The Full Monty’ to a huge new Tom Stoppard play is remarkable.”

It’s not O’Brien’s first Stoppard. In 1995, O’Brien staged his famously difficult spy outing, “Hapgood,” for Lincoln Center, starring Stockard Channing. On that project he collaborated with British designer Bob Crowley (“Aida”). Crowley and O’Brien have re-teamed for “The Invention of Love,” fashioning a dream world encompassing the River Styx and 19th century Oxford, suffused by romantic ache and possibility.

“Hapgood” thwarted everyone who’d tackled it before New York. “Fine--not wonderful, but fine,” is Stoppard’s own assessment of the 1989 production seen in Los Angeles, starring Judy Davis.

Somewhat rewritten, the play’s Lincoln Center incarnation came off, according to the author, as “a very happy event. God knows the plot was pretty complicated--too complicated for its own good in London and in L.A.” Under O’Brien’s easygoing but astute tutelage, the production flew by, making full atmospheric sense of Stoppard’s puzzle.

The sexual current in “Hapgood,” not immediately evident on the page, came through as well. It’s something that needs to be teased out of the “Invention of Love” text as well, in O’Brien’s estimation.

The director admired the play in its London premiere but “felt somehow they hadn’t found the style of the piece--it wasn’t romantic enough, or painful enough, or beautiful enough . . . and visually it was so dry, and so straight! Forgive me, but . . . and these were really good people, and John Wood was dazzling, but. . . .

“I was in love when I was in college; we all were. I remember how beautiful everybody was. Even the plain people looked beautiful. At that point everything is alive. You’re drunk with excitement and expectation and confusion. All the pores are open; all the possibilities are there. It’s when we’re at our most arrogant and our most vulnerable.” This, he says, must be felt in Housman’s story.

“He’s very strong without being overbearing--a very good leader in that sense,” says actor Robert Sean Leonard, who plays the younger version of Housman, opposite Globe veteran Richard Easton as the mature Housman. “He takes charge of the room, and of the production, but it’s done with confidence, grace and intelligence. When people pretend to know something they don’t, they get into trouble, and the thing I love about Jack is he’s first to admit when he’s clueless about something.”

A rarity, according to the playwright. “Jack’s got an absolute eagle eye. We’d be watching the play together, and I’d laboriously write down something in the dark, something about a light cue seeming to be late or early or whatever. The next morning I’d produce my little findings--and Jack would have eight or nine things I hadn’t noticed.”

Born in Saginaw, Mich., O’Brien attended the University of Michigan, where he hooked up with Ellis Rabb’s repertory company Association of Producing Artists, better known as APA. After two years teaching at New York’s Hunter College, the stage-struck O’Brien gladly took a 50% salary cut to join Rabb’s troupe, eventually known as APA-Phoenix. There’s a book on all that waiting to be written, O’Brien says. And he’s going to write it.

The Huntington’s Martin met O’Brien as a fellow APA grunt. “He was always more fun to be with than anyone else, and he always worked harder than anyone else,” Martin says. “And he’s never consciously tried to be trendy, which may have landed him in the ‘old-fashioned’ box. But he’s also very good with a hard-edged play like Mamet’s ‘Oleanna’ or ‘Hapgood.’

“Nobody,” Martin says, “worked harder than Jack for what he now has.”

And yet, says Tom Hall, O’Brien’s former managerial partner at the Globe, as well as “The Full Monty” co-producer, “to some extent Jack hasn’t looked after his own career the way some directors have, either the institutional [nonprofit] directors or commercial directors. In a very real way, he’s always looking after other people.”

For years O’Brien has been vocal--in a quippy, civilized way--about the challenges and frustrations of running a big mainstream operation. He feels that his own work there has sometimes been slighted. He is looking, he says, “for a richer, broader palette,” for time to pursue outside projects.

He envisions for the next phase of his Globe tenure a grand artistic round table. Such an arrangement might involve various A-list theater artists; O’Brien has discussed the idea with everyone from Mike Nichols to Kenneth Branagh to Nicholas Hytner to Harold Prince. Each artist would commit to, say, three Globe projects over three years.

Ideally, says O’Brien, the Globe could eventually follow the model of the New York Shakespeare Festival, producing outdoor classical work in the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre space, located (as are the other two theaters) in Balboa Park. The park, however, has in recent years become more vexing than ever, due to the nearby and increasingly screechy zoo activities; the sonic aggravation of the nearby airport; and the ever-present parking hassles.

The dream: A new arts center built somewhere on the water, used in conjunction with the San Diego Opera and other organizations.

“It’s a wonderful goal,” says managing and producing director Douglas C. Evans, Hall’s successor at the Globe. “And it’s not unachievable. But it’s going to require the philanthropic community in San Diego to step up to the plate.”

O’Brien acknowledges that such a vision would require him to raise “a hell of a lot of money.”

Meantime, he has a theater to continue running, and a few more “Full Montys” to stage. He’s no-nonsense about what may turn out to be his biggest monetary payday. “I’m going to ride this pony as far as it wants to go,” he says.

The last few months have proven enormously full. “I’ve been touched by both love and immense happiness these past two years,” he says, referring to composer Legg, his late companion, whose music graced such recent Globe productions as “Henry V” and “The Trojan Women.”

“And I was offered two of the most amazing properties of my entire career, back to back. This one,” he says of “Invention,” carries “almost unbearable reverberations for me, echoes of loss and love and mortality and missed opportunities.

“Tom’s plays are never about one thing, but surely one of the things this one’s about is: Don’t miss out. Don’t miss the act.”