David Mamet’s ‘China Doll’ for Al Pacino, and more plays created for the actor

When Al Pacino opens Dec. 4 in David Mamet’s “China Doll,” this will be the actor’s fourth collaboration with the playwright — and the first work Mamet wrote especially for him.

Pacino, whose lack of enthusiasm for press chatter is rivaled by Mamet’s unwillingness to discuss his work, did release a statement when the project was announced last year.

He said the “relationship and the collaboration with David Mamet has been one of the richest and most rewarding” and “the opportunity to create a new character in the David Mamet canon was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.” Not known as a gusher, the star enthused that the new play “blew me away,” and gave him “one of the most daunting and challenging roles I’ve been given to explore onstage.”

So here we are, slightly over a year later, and the theater gossips are buzzing over estrangement in the relationship, a conspicuous postponement of the opening and problems with the piece, which Mamet has described as a “play about a wealthy man, his young fiancée and an airplane.”

But this is not the place for backstage rumors. The box office is booming and results will be public record soon enough.

For now, I’m fascinated with something more rare today than gossip — a playwright creating a role for a specific actor. Shakespeare and Moliere had companies to supply with new scripts, of course, and knew the strengths and weaknesses in their closed circle.

Now that resident companies are almost unknown, especially in New York, however, it’s unusual for a playwright to be able to depend on a scheduled production, much less the luxury of a guaranteed cast. We’re a long way from the ’70s and ’80s heyday of Off-Broadway’s Circle Repertory Theatre, where playwright Lanford Wilson, director Marshall Mason and many others made work for a real company — including William Hurt, Jeff Daniels and Swoosie Kurtz.

According to Jeffrey Sweet, veteran playwright and theater historian, Wilson wrote his 1980 Pulitzer-winning “Talley’s Folly” for company members Judd Hirsch and Trish Hawkins. “When Lanford wrote ‘Fifth of July,’ he originally named the characters after the actors,” he adds.

Sweet, who has interviewed multitudes for “The O’Neill,” the major 50th anniversary book about the Eugene O’Neill Center, and for “Something Wonderful Right Away,” the classic oral history of Second City, says, “It’s often a valuable thing to write for specific actors. Even if you don’t get them, you have a consistent voice for other actors to play.”

I am startled to hear him say that August Wilson, despite the emotional coherence throughout his 10 epic plays about 20th century African-Americans, did not cast his plays in his head. “August’s characters talked to him in their own voices,” Sweet says, “not in the voice of a particular actor.” Stephen Sondheim says he has tailored songs to what he calls the “talents and limitations of particular performers.” These include the indomitably brassy lyrics to “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” for Ethel Merman in “Gypsy,” the words and music to “I’m Still Here” for Elaine Stritch and, most amusingly, his best-known song, “Send in the Clowns” for Glynis Johns.

In “Finishing the Hat,” the first of Sondheim’s two revelatory books about lyric writing, he says that Johns’ “chief limitation was an inability to sustain a note; the breathiness that I loved was, ironically, her liability as a singer. The solution was to write short breathy phrases for her, which suggested to me that they should be questions rather than statement.”

Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the character of Emile de Becque, the expatriate French plantation owner, for Ezio Pinza. When they offered Nellie Forbush to Mary Martin, she didn’t want to have her voice compared to that of the former Metropolitan Opera star. Rodgers promised they would never sing at the same time and, for the most part, Emile and Nellie never did.

I love the story about the early birth of “Once Upon a Mattress,” the 1959 fractured fairy-tale musical being revived next month by the iconoclastic Transport Group. According to Sweet, composer Mary Rodgers wrote it around the actors at Tamiment, a legendary adult summer camp and then an entertainment center in the Poconos. For example, “One girl had a tremendous voice but couldn’t walk across the stage without tripping on herself,” says Sweet, “So they put her character in a cage where she couldn’t move. . . .” Thus, all the actors who have ever performed these characters are really playing the limitations of that summer company.

In the ’50s, anyone who wasn’t writing for Tamiment was probably in the writers room for Sid Caesar’s NBC comedy-sketch hit, “Your Show of Shows.” “This was training to write for specific people,” says Sweet, “for very specific voices.”

That kind of training isn’t the norm these days. Still, regular off-Broadway theatergoers must have noticed how, in the ’90s, playwright Nicky Silver had a certain type of neurotic, brilliant woman in his poignant satires — first played by Patricia Clarkson, then Hope Davis.

Then there is the supremely in-synch creative partnership of Pulitzer-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire (“Rabbit Hole”) and an idiosyncratic character actress named Marylouise Burke. In fact, I’ve often thought that if Burke did not exist, Lindsay-Abaire would have had to create her. And vice versa.

In 1999, both burst onto the scene with “Fuddy Meers,” a quirky and totally original work that included an elderly, haplessly cheery stroke victim who spoke in strangely persuasive, virtuosic gibberish. Then Burke returned as an amateur sleuth tailing a runaway wife (Sarah Jessica Parker) in his “Wonder of the World,” followed by “Kimberly Akimbo,” in which Burke played a Jersey teen with the genetic disease that ages her at four times the normal rate.

Burke, currently playing a woman in an assisted-living home in his “Ripcord” at Manhattan Theatre Club, calls it “quite a luxury and quite an honor” to have Lindsay-Abaire “tell me that he’s heard my voice in creating a character. None of his characters are ‘like’ me, so I actually don’t usually understand why he thinks that — but I’m very glad he does.”

She says she never knows what he has in store for her. “Aphasia? An aging disease that allowed me to play a 16-year-old when I was actually 62? I love that he challenges my imagination, and that it seems as if I do that for him, too. That’s a beautiful collaboration.”

Somehow, playwrights have voices in their heads, which they channel to actors, who, through some mysterious alchemy of empathy and exhibitionism, create people who make sense to strangers sitting in the dark.

Mamet introduced the world to lots of his Chicago pals — including William Macy and Joe Mantegna — when he moved from his own company to New York in the early ‘80s. When I interviewed him after his “Glengarry” Pulitzer in 1984, he called them his “co-conspirators.” Mamet has not been nearly as complimentary about the actors’ role in the creative process in recent years, but I’d like to believe that doesn’t apply to Pacino.