Sam Waterston is finally getting to scratch his itch.
That’s an inelegant way to describe the patrician, Cambridge, Mass.-born, Ivy League-educated Waterston’s summer-time theatrical collaboration with his son, Jamie, Chicago actress Elizabeth Franz and the late Eugene O’Neill — in, of all places, Syracuse, N.Y.
But that’s how he feels about it.
The star of NBC’s “Law and Order” and the acclaimed public television series “I’ll Fly Away,” Waterston, at 59, is one of America’s hardest-working actors.
He has 70 films and TV productions to his credit, including such major accomplishments as “The Killing Fields,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Lincoln” and “Oppenheimer”; a few bow-wows, such as “Serial Mom,” “Shadow Conspiracy” and “Heaven’s Gate” (possibly the worst movie ever made); as well as some obscure, small but quite brilliant gems, such as 1969’s “Three,” with Charlotte Rampling, and the more recent “Journey of August King,” with Thandie Newton.
As befits an erudite actor educated at the Brooks School, Groton, Yale and the Sorbonne, Waterston has shone most brightly in the lights of the Broadway stage, notably in the Lincoln Center’s stunning 1993 revival of “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” but also in “Hamlet,” “Oh Dad, Poor Dad,” “Indians” and “A Walk in the Woods.”
His six-year tour of duty as irascible prosecutor Jack McCoy on “Law and Order” put an end to that, as he observed ruefully in a conversation we had shortly after he assumed the role.
“I feel there’s still a million things for me that still could be done,” he complained at the time. “As long as I’m doing `Law and Order,’ if I’m to have any time off at all, I can’t do a play. But, boy, am I itching.”
He’s itched and itched since and was still doing so last December. He could sneak away to do a quick TV movie or two, but there was never window enough for a fully rehearsed stage play.
This week, however, he finally got to scratch, opening in O’Neill’s classic “Long Day’s Journey into Night” at the Syracuse Stage with his 31-year-old son, Jamie — with whom he’d never acted before.
“The idea came to Jamie and me because I’d seen him do [the play] in Pittsburgh, and I thought he was wonderful in it and I wanted to do it with him,” Waterston said. “We were very, very lucky the Syracuse Stage was willing to put itself out for us. It extends their regular season, and people are staying an extra two months, which is pretty darn nice of them.”
Waterston was luckier still. Playing the role of the doomed mother is Franz, who won the Tony Award for her performance in the Goodman Theatre-originated production of “Death of a Salesman,” with Brian Dennehy.
“This was all so last minute we had no right to expect we were going to get anybody of her caliber,” he said. “If we had all the time in the world and all the choices in the world, we really couldn’t have done any better.”
Another Chicago actress, Jennifer Beals, joins Waterston this summer in a small, brilliant gem of a movie called “A House Divided,” which, like “The Journey of August King,” has a slavery theme.
A true story, it will be telecast on the Showtime cable channel late this July. Beals plays a supposed white Southern belle in the years following the Civil War whose mother is a black slave. The mother was raped by her owner and Beals’ father (Waterston), a rich planter with supposedly high ideals.
“He was a queer mix of forward-thinking and whatever kind of thinking makes you think you have permission to keep slaves and rape them at pleasure,” Waterston said. “He regularly promoted able slaves and paid them extra for new skills as they acquired them. He promoted her until she was really the manager of the entire estate.”
When he dies, he leaves Beals his immense fortune, which makes her the richest black woman in America. But the bequest is challenged in the courts by her fully white half brother — in part on racial grounds.
“You can tell how it ended because she was the richest black woman in America,” Waterston said. “But it was a very near thing.”
Delighted to be on stage with his son, Waterston noted that the only other time they performed together was in the 1980 public television drama “Oppenheimer,” with Jamie cast as one of the young sons of nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, portrayed by Waterston.
The son is following his father’s footsteps — somewhat astray.
“He went to school where I went to school,” said Waterston. “He went to college where I went to college, and then he went into the profession I went into, that neither the school or the college are designed to prepare you for.”
And the footsteps are still being followed.
“My daughter Elisabeth just graduated from Yale herself last year,” Waterston said, “and has moved to New York to begin her [acting] career. My younger daughter Catherine is at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, studying drama. My son Graham is a junior in high school, but he’s going to do the Tisch School of the Arts summer program for people who are interested in making movies, so it’s a completely lost cause.”
Does this portend some really big family collaborations?
“That would be great,” Waterston said. “The trouble is, the director is coming up last, so we’re all going to have a long wait.”
