Playwrights who act, actors who write plays

Keep your eye on the lawyer. Granted, with Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson heating up the pavement in "A View From the Bridge," it should not be easy to concentrate on the old guy in the big suit who lurks around the Brooklyn waterfront making ominous pronouncements about destiny's "bloody course."

I've always had a problem with this lawyer, an immigration attorney named Alfieri, created by Arthur Miller to be his Greek chorus-narrator, to try to convince us that the tale has mythic significance beyond a good story.

But this time - in fact, for my first time - I actually almost believe the man. This time, he is played by Michael Cristofer, a bear of an actor, who brings a gravity, a weight and a wisdom that - who knows? - just could be channeled from some ancient regretful deity.

This is fascinating. Buried in his program bio is confirmation that this is the same Cristofer who wrote "The Shadow Box," which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony in 1977. He also wrote screenplays for Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson and directed Angelina Jolie in "Gia" for HBO. Meanwhile, though his recent decades as a playwright have not been as notable, he has quietly become one of those stage actors who makes small roles big.

"Michael insisted from the first rehearsal that his character be far more than a narrator, that he is personally implicated in the play's tragic outcome," says Gregory Mosher, director of the shattering revival. "I don't know if that's a writer's perspective or an actor's, but it is doubtless one of the keys to the production's success."

Oddly enough, the theater is suddenly full of new plays by people we know as actors and performances by people we know as playwrights. "Clybourne Park," by Bruce Norris, opens Sunday night at Playwrights Horizons. "Next Fall," by Geoffrey Nauffts, opens March 11 at the Helen Hayes Theatre. And, after "August: Osage County" and "Superior Donuts" closed on Broadway, playwright Tracy Letts went , right back to his home base at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, where he was known first as an actor, and is now starring - to great acclaim - in a revival of David Mamet's "American Buffalo."

As Letts recently joked to The Wall Street Journal, "If I didn't act, I would eventually climb up in a tower with a rifle and a scope." More to the point, Letts - who, yes, did appear in the Festivus episode on "Seinfeld" - also claims "I know I'm a better playwright as a result of acting."

Of course, nobody is going to say that actors, with their empathy for character, automatically make more stageworthy plays, or that playwrights, with their affinity for word and structure, are all natural performers. I suspect Edward Albee, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams might have choice comments about casting themselves in anyone else's work or their own.

But Noël Coward wrote characters for himself and, in "Present Laughter" (currently at the Roundabout Theatre) even wrote a character for himself based on himself. Although Sam Shepard only appeared once in one of his early plays, his formidable screen persona makes it hard to watch his characters without hearing them talk through his mouth.

What about Norris? You probably would recognize him as the schoolteacher from "The Sixth Sense" or countless characters on "Law & Order," or even as Matthew Broderick's successor as Eugene in "Biloxi Blues" in the mid-'80s. Not incidentally, he called his first play "The Actor Retires," though that was long before what he now calls "semiretired" from acting. He wrote it in 1992, after being hired and fired from a string of TV pilots. (You can hear him firing his agent, etc., on an audio book version of the play also starring Chicago cohorts William Petersen and Amy Morton.)

Until a few years ago, I mostly cherished Norris as the merciless gay neocon friend of the first female U.S. Surgeon General in Wendy Wasserstein's 1997 play "An American Daughter." But that was before I saw "The Pain and the Itch" at Playwrights Horizons in 2006, in a brutal production directed by Anna D. Shapiro (just before she staged "August: Osage County"). Norris challenged the accepted sanctity of the nuclear family in this hilarious and vicious, cheerful and upsetting, unpretentious yet globally significant domestic tragicomedy and political satire. Norris, bless him, says he doesn't "do redemption." Rude? You bet. And dazzling.

"Clybourne Park," about gentrification and race, is his first world premiere in New York after many plays at Steppenwolf. Now I want to see everything he has ever written.

"Next Fall" is everything Nauffts has written, at least for the stage. TV watchers will know him from lots of good cop dramas, including "The Commish," while his many theater appearances include the recent revival of "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial."

But the actor, who is artistic director of Off-Broadway's Naked Angels Theater Company, has recently been one of the writers of ABC's "Brothers & Sisters." He also has written the screenplay for "Show Stopper," an upcoming film for Ben Stiller, with a score by Elton John. In fact, John and his partner, David Furnish, have signed on as co-producers of "Next Fall," his drama, an Off-Broadway hit last summer, about a gay couple - one Christian, the other an atheist.

Although Nauffts believes that "actors and playwrights have a different wiring," he insists they share "the need to fully understand the psychology of our characters. . . . Some of my favorite playwrights are former actors. There's a shorthand there that somehow makes the dialogue and the underlying conflict ring true."

Crossovers are nothing new in arts and entertainment, of course. In theater, more actors evolve into directors than playwrights. The most established is Joe Mantello ("Wicked"), whose production of "The Pride" (a first play by British actor Alexi Kaye Campbell) opened last week. But Ethan Hawke has developed into the compelling director of "A Lie of the Mind," the Shepard revival that also opened last week, and Stanley Tucci is about to direct a Broadway revival of "Lend Me a Tenor" (opening April 4), starring Anthony LaPaglia and Tony Shalhoub.

But, as the joke goes, what everyone really wants to do is direct. In Hollywood, anyway, the other joke is about the ambitious star dumb enough to have sex with the writer. That appears not to be the joke here.