TWENTIETH CENTURY
Opening night: March 28
What do the people of "Twentieth Century" have to say to the people of the 21st?
More than you might think, says Alec Baldwin, who is starring with Anne Heche in this revival of the 1932 comedy by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur ("The Front Page") about an egocentric Broadway director and his equally headstrong star.
It is, in a word, a comedy about the theatrical temperament - and that's not likely to change anytime soon. "I don't think that tradition has vanished in the theater," Baldwin says.
Baldwin has long been pigeonholed as a serious and even brooding actor ("A Streetcar Named Desire" on the stage, "Ghosts of Mississippi" and "The Hunt for Red October" on film). Even in the dark comedy "The Cooler," which won him an Oscar nomination this year - many are calling it his "comeback" year - he plays true to form, as a hard-boiled casino manager.
But Baldwin also surprised many recently with his comic flair in such films as "The Cat in the Hat" and "Along Came Polly." "Twentieth Century" seems perfectly tailored to this newer, lighter Baldwin.
"The thing that you do that's most memorable to people tends to be how they ID you," he says.
As it happens, Baldwin did comedy early in his career. It's just that people are more likely to identify him with tough-guy roles like his motivational-speaker-from-hell in the 1992 movie version of "Glengarry Glen Ross." ("First prize is a Cadillac El Dorado, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you're fired.")
"I'll be walking through the lobby of a hotel where there's a sales convention, and if somebody spots me, they'll literally try to get me to come up in front of their convention and do it for them," he says. "It's so amazing to me, what people remember you for."
If Baldwin is remembered for his role in "Twentieth Century," he won't be the first.
John Barrymore played it, famously, in the 1934 film version, opposite Carole Lombard. Orson Welles starred in a 1956 TV adaptation, and John Cullum took it on in the 1978 musical "On the Twentieth Century." But Oscar Jaffe, the flamboyant impresario who boards the 20th Century Limited to chase after the runaway star he "created," is a character as timeless as theater itself.
"Denizens of the theater are theatrical," he says. "These are perhaps people who are frustrated performers themselves, people who have opinions, people who want a lot of attention. The drama doesn't end when this guy steps out the stage door. I think this [play] is about the theatrical animal."
The notion of a director "creating" a star, the way Jaffe creates Lily Garland (Heche), was once taken for granted in show business: Gloria Swanson was the "creation" of director Cecil B. DeMille, Marlene Dietrich the "creation" of Josef Von Sternberg, and so on.
If that mentoring tradition has vanished today, show business may not necessarily be the better for it, Baldwin says.
"The play is from a different time, a time when you built people's careers," Baldwin says. "Today, people's careers aren't really built. They have a fresh crop of younger stars, and they throw these people out there before they really learn how to act, and they're forced to act in the white-hot light of stardom. And sometimes they sink, and sometimes they swim. They just strap you on a rocket ship and shoot you up, and if it blows up on the launch pad, they get the next guy."
