Can a saxophone player’s wacky, gawky daughter from Cincinnati succeed on the sophisticated Manhattan stage as an ultra-WASPy Eastern-elite John Cheever person?
Julie Hagerty certainly has proved she can. The actress best remembered as the daffy stewardess who had sex with an inflatable automatic pilot in the movie “Airplane!” is an integral part of the six-member cast of playwright A.R. Gurney’s just-opened “A Cheever Evening” at New York’s Playwrights Horizons’ Theater, where she is showing appreciative audiences she can be as Cheeverian a martini-soaked Vassar-grad country-club heroine as the 1940s and 1950s ever produced.
Gurney’s play, his latest, blends 17 tragicomic Cheever short stories into a two-act drama that takes its 53 characters from the city to the suburbs to the sea and back again.
The author of “Love Letters,” “The Cocktail Hour” and “Later Life” (a production of which closes at Evanston’s Northlight Theatre Sunday), Gurney is as obsessed with the decay and decline of upper middle-class WASP society as was the late Cheever, and he lays it out here in all its pain and mannerly pathos with brittle, worldly wit.
Hagerty is, of course, famous for her “ditzy” persona-the flight attendant in “Airplane!” (1980), the far-out compulsive gambler-“Twenty-two! Twenty-two!”-in Albert Brooks’ “Lost in America” (1985), the neurotic journalist mixed up with a bisexual Jeff Goldblum in “Beyond Therapy” (1987), the psychiatrist’s wife in the comedy “What About Bob?” (1991) and the bumbling, ultimately pregnant stage assistant in the theatrical farce “Noises Off” (1992).
And she does come from Cincinnati, not New York’s upscale Westchester County, and she didn’t even go to college.
Yet she dazzled the not easily dazzled likes of the New York Times critic David Richards, who wrote: “One moment, the wonderful, willowly Julie Hagerty is flirting with a proper stranger. The next, she’s all gritted teeth and baleful stares as an unhappy housewife who may have sprinkled pesticides on her husband’s lamb chops. Will the real Miss Hagerty please stand up?”
To Gurney, she’s proved an amazement.
“I think she’s excellent, excellent,” he says. “She’s doing things I’ve never seen her do before. She’s a master at playing the kind of ditzy, harassed wife. She’s good at that. But the intensity and seriousness with which she plays that woman Mrs. Sheridan, who has the affairs, or when she plays Zena, the woman who may or may not be poisoning her husband, or the passion with which she plays the character Joan, at the end, not wanting to go home, I’ve never seen Julie Hagerty do those things before.”
Hagerty, who offstage goes from girlish gush to wicked laughter to winsome sadness in the space of a few seconds, says she’s fond of being “a Cheever person.”
“Zena was kind of the most difficult, going someplace that was a little scary for me. I love all of these people. Cheever people are amazing to me. It’s an interesting evening because you never know what the response is going to be. Someone in the audience might be laughing, sitting next to someone going, gasp! You can’t always say, `Here comes the funny part.’ “
Cheever’s short stories have been dramatized before. Gurney made “Oh Youth and Beauty” into a teleplay starring Michael Murphy for PBS, which also aired Wendy Wasserstein’s television version of Cheever’s “The Sorrows of Gin,” with Edward Hermann. Burt Lancaster and Janice Rule starred in the movie “The Swimmer” in 1967.
“That was awfully bleak-very bleak,” Hagerty says, observing that Gurney’s Cheever is “not as dark.”
Gurney comes from Buffalo, not New York’s Upper Westchester County, where most of Cheever’s stories were set. But he grew up reading Cheever in The New Yorker.
“I don’t think I saw him as a particular bard of a particular world or anything like that,” Gurney says. “I just thought he was a very good short story writer. Only later, in the mid-1950s, when I became a little more of who I was, did I see him as a social observer and the kind of artist I now think he is.”
Gurney was reading an anthology of Cheever stories two years ago when it occurred to him “there may be a play here.”
Shifting scenes and genders for balance, employing his own words where necessary, Gurney crafted two acts that haven’t satisfied all critics with their dramatic wallop but that provide some extraordinary dramatic moments.
The cast, including Hagerty, Mary Beth Peil, Jennifer Van Dyck, John Cunningham, Jack Gilpin and Robert Stanton, has won high plaudits. So have John Lee Beatty’s evocative sets, which portray city skyline, suburban countryside and the seashore with the clarity of Edward Hopper paintings.
The play unfolds in the New York City, Upper Westchester County and New England seacoast of the 1940s and 1950s. As Cheever noted, it was “a long lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartet from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like `the Cleveland Chicken,’ sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are.”
It is about a people who presumed they were born to social superiority but had to work for a living and were desperately fearful of losing their jobs-an educated, sophisticated class who pursued happiness through the elaborate tribal rituals of social and cultural custom, yet always found it eluding them. In the end, they led terrifying and unsuccessful lives. And now they have vanished.
“There is an element of tragedy in Cheever and it’s a particularly American tragedy,” says Gurney. “The gap between the yearning for happiness and the inability of the world-the country, people, life-to provide that. First the city, then the suburbs, then the summer and the sea, all do their best, but these people are ultimately disappointed. They rent their happiness . . . just as they rent their beach or their canoe.
“Like Fitzgerald, Cheever has this sense that around the corner somewhere, there’s something awfully wonderful going on, but it’s not happening to him.”
“They’re dinosaurs, dying and migrating,” says Hagerty. “But also I think there is hope. These people are very hopeful because they’re still trying. The language is very poetic about that. And so sexy. It’s lovely and sexy.”
No stranger to Gurney, Hagerty did his “Love Letters” in six different productions with Christopher Reeve. (“We promised not to do it with anyone else.”)
She is the daughter of a former model and a musician in the band of Cincinnati’s long-running Paul Dixon Show. Hanging around the studio as a child, she yearned for a show-biz career and skipped college in favor of a local acting school. Discovered and recruited by the Ford Agency, she went to New York at age 17 and supported herself as a model, doing mostly photo and television work.
Her first role was in an off-off-Broadway effort called “Mutual Benefit Life.” The onstage furniture came from her own apartment-“so I wouldn’t feel so shy and uncomfortable.”
One of 75 actresses who auditioned for the stewardess part in “Airplane!” she had the role-and a major career-won almost from the outset.
There has been down time. Her only marriage ended in divorce after 4 1/2 years. Her star-trip TV series, “Princesses,” failed after eight episodes in 1991 and she fled Hollywood.
Now in her “late thirties,” Hagerty lives on New York’s Upper West Side. She has “a fella”-a California writer she won’t name-and a Boston terrier named Raisin, which she bought out of sympathy when she saw the animal at a pet shop marked down to half price (“How horrifying to be on sale in a cage!”).
She recently appeared off-Broadway in the Paradise Theatre production of Sundance Film Festival award-winner Tom Noonan’s play “Wifey,” and she stars in a movie version of the show, to be released next spring.
Hagerty would like to go on with “A Cheever Evening” as long as possible. “If I had a little hope jar, I would wish this would run for a very long time, because I don’t think you can get any better than to come do something like this every night.”
The Cincinnati girl was a Cheever person herself for a few years, in Redding, Conn., just a few miles from the Westchester County line.
“I was living next door to a very Connecticut Yankee family, and being from Cincinnati and not realizing the etiquette, I thought, `Well, I’m living next door. I’ll make Christmas cookies and say hello,’ ” she said. “They didn’t answer their doorbell. I left the Christmas cookies and they never said anything.
“The gentleman was always mowing his lawn and every time I’d see him I’d wave, but he ignored me. Finally, after three years, he finally waved back! But it was also the day I put my house on the market, so I didn’t know if he was waving hello or goodbye.”
Dinosaurs, indeed.
