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A THEATREGOER'S NOTEBOOK

by Rebecca Morehouse

[[image - black and white photo of John Malkovich and Joan Allen in Burn This]]
[[caption]] John Malkovich and Joan Allen in Burn This [[/caption]]

QUOTE WORTH NOTING
John Malkovich offers a scorching, lauded portrayal in Burn This, by the Pulitzer Prize laureate Lanford Wilson, at the Plymouth. Interviewed by "Live at Five," he said: "Of all the parts I've done - and I think I've done most of the good American dramas - this is the best part I've played. Joan Allen [opposite him] really, really has talent. We worked together at Steppenwolf in Chicago." Malkovich acts Tom in the new Glass Menagerie film with Joanne Woodward and directed by Paul Newman. He played Biff in the Dustin Hoffman Death of a Salesman, the wild brother in Sam Shepard's True West. 

MEMORABLE TAKEOFF
Calder Willingham's End as a Man is not glibly recalled. But as a launch site for actors, it was Cape Canaveral. Lifted into space in this one capsule were such dazzlers as these, in A-B-C order and a drum roll, please: James Dean, Anthony Franciosa, Ben Gazzara, Pat Hingle, Albert Salmi, William Smithers, and Arthur Storch. The hit play pictures life in a brutal Southern military academy.

"It began as an actors' project at the Actors Studio," Pat Hingle has told me. "We worked on it four or five hours a day because we didn't have much else to do. Gazzara was selling subscriptions to The New York Times by telephone. He was a chain smoker, and I kept him in cigarettes. Albert Salmi was an usher at the Alvin. The play turned out so well we moved to the Theatre de Lys and then to the Vanderbilt Theatre, my first trip to Broadway (in 1953). 

"Gazzara (the evil Jocko de Paris) really hit it big, and Salmi, and Bill Smithers. There was the bit part of Starkson that nobody wanted, it was 'No, Sir,' 'Yes, Sir,' like that. Jimmy Dean was hanging around, dying to act, and Jack Garfein gave him the part; he played it at the Studio. After he got The Immoralist and left, Anthony Franciosa got that part. The memorable thing was that the two guys with the tiniest part struck it so big on the screen."

Caught in a stalled elevator in the late fifties, Pat Hingle tried to escape and plunged 54 feet to the shaft's bottom, sustaining grievous injuries. It was front-page news, but as the showgirl sings in Follies (Sondheim's not Ziegfeld's), he's still here and still an actor of consequence on stage, screen, and television. William Smithers, by the way, is the white-haired oil tycoon who implacably opposes J. R. in "Dallas."

SOME NERVE
Only three brief years ago, Glenn Close won a Tony Award opposite Jeremy Irons in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. Three years earlier she played Mrs. P.T. Barnum 

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