The New York Times

February 9, 1986, Sunday, Late City Final Edition

CLASSIC COMIC ACTOR TAKES THE REINS OF A CLASSIC 20'S FARCE

BYLINE: By Anna Quindlen; Anna Quindlen, former deputy metropolitan editor of The New York Times, 
is at work on a novel.

Sitting sipping soup in a rundown room filled with fedoras and doors, Alan Arkin has the unmistakable air 
of a man who has been here before. It is not this particular rehearsal hall he has inhabited, but the roles: of 
director talking about a new production, of actor talking about a new movie, of author talking about a new 
book, of father talking about his sons. Alan Arkin has lived a charmed actor's life. He has had wonderful 
parts in good movies, directed terrific plays, written books, worked with his wife and his children, even 
recorded albums and appeared on ''Sesame Street.'' And he has been very, very good at all these things. 
Smart, thoughtful, articulate, he also happens to be very, very good at talking about them. He has, his black 
eyes periods at the end of his sentences, only the slightest air of a man who has been obliged to discuss 
what he does somewhat more than he would like to.

What he is doing right now is directing that funny old farce called ''Room Service.'' Lots of people outside 
of the theater don't connect Mr. Arkin with directing, but he's been around that track many times, ever since 
1967, when he took over a floundering play called ''Eh?'' which featured a promising young actor named 
Dustin Hoffman and made it an Off Broadway success under the pseudonym Roger Short. He's done ''Joan 
of Lorraine'' in Connecticut and ''The Sunshine Boys'' on Broadway, both the film and theater version of 
Jules Feiffer's ''Little Murders'' and some programs for television.

Now he's doing this classic comedy by John P. Murray and Allen Boretz, due to open Thursday at the 
Roundabout Theater. It is the story of a small-time producer who runs any number of scams, including the 
casting of a waiter in a leading role in exchange for room service and the bogus suicide of his playwright 
on opening night, to keep his cast lodged and his production alive at a Times Square hotel called the White 
Way. Although it was first directed by George Abbott in 1937, Mr. Arkin thinks the play is timeless.

''Nothing's changed,'' he said. ''You still have fly-by-night producers trying to put on junk, people trying to 
scrap by on no credentials and sometimes succeeding. I think all the characters are pretty recognizable.''

In fact, a few of the characters in ''Room Service,'' which was made into a Marx Brothers movie, seem 
made to order for Alan Arkin the actor, the one who had such a smashing and sudden success on Broadway 
in the early 1960's in ''Enter Laughing'' and ''Luv.'' But one of the things he loves about directing is that it 
keeps him away from acting.

''I'm always grateful that I don't have to do it,'' he said. ''One of the actors, Kurt Knudson, said he read a 
statistic recently that the average actor in the average part for two hours expends more energy than a 
construction worker in eight hours. And I believe it. I have the greatest sympathy for all involved. I haven't 
been on stage for 20 years and there have been maybe 15 minutes when I wanted to go back.''

Not now. The 52-year-old Mr. Arkin is having a wonderful time directing, although he is talking during 
that delicate, difficult period of rehearsal which he characterizes as the production's adolescence, and he is 
the occasionally stern, sometimes unloved father. ''They're going out on their first dates, borrowing the car, 
sometimes cracking it up,'' he says metaphorically of the cast, who are actually out on their lunch break. 
But he is pleased with the results. ''I almost cried at the run-through because I was getting such joy from 
them, such unity. Also I sat there laughing my rear end off.''

Mr. Arkin talks a lot about unity, family, ensemble and laughs, not unusual for a man who has always been 
an actor, not a star, who has worked continuously with both his wife, the actress Barbara Dana, and his 
three sons, and who is a veteran of what is, these days, often seen as the ultimate comic ensemble. Mr. 
Arkin, a native New Yorker, is an alumnus of the Second City improvisational group in Chicago, which, in 
the post-Belushi era, has become to comic acting the sort of shrine that the Actors Studio has long been to 
drama. In fact Mr. Arkin has three Second City alumni in the ''Room Service'' cast: Miss Dana, Eugene 
Troobnick and MacIntyre Dixon. He cast them in part, he says, because they make his work easier; he 
would have cast other Second City alumni if only they had been available, particularly Richard Libertini, 
who played the dictator who has the world's largest collection of paintings on black velvet in the film ''The 
In-Laws.''

''A Second City actor, you put them in a play and they have a sense of themselves as part of a whole,'' he 
said. ''You're forced to give center stage to other people. You have to write, you have to direct, you have to 
be an actor, a mime. And you can fail. The audience comes knowing that about half the evening is going to 
fail. So in terms of their reactions they are part of the creative process.

''That's very important in comedy. It's a more intimate sharing with the audience. Your performance must 
change from night to night because the laughs are going to be different. It's a game that goes on every night 
between you and the audience.

''I took the Second City job because I was failing in New York. I couldn't get arrested. When I got there I 
wasn't funny at all. But slowly I built one character, then another, and the audience helped teach me what 
was funny and what didn't work.''

It's difficult to think of Alan Arkin as not funny, after ''The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are 
Coming,'' ''Catch 22'' and ''The In-Laws.'' It was difficult for some in his cast not to be intimidated by that. 
Mark Hamill, who is playing the producer Gordon Miller, said it took some time for him to not see the 
director as ''Alan Arkin Alan Arkin.''

''I was overwhelmed,'' he added. ''At first I wanted to squeeze him and see if he'd make those little noises he 
makes in movies. And I got this feeling at one point, 'That's it, we'll never be able to do it as well as he 
could do it himself.' It hasn't been easy all the time. I had a much different idea about what Gordon would 
ultimately be like, and his viewpoint was totally different. And we tried to merge -no, not merge the two; I 
was willing to go way over to his side because each day I saw more what he meant.''

Added Mr. Troobnick, who was with the Second City troupe at the same time Mr. Arkin was, ''I think he 
has the ability to lead an actor to an insight and yet give the actor the ability to think that he came to it 
himself.''

And Mr. Arkin, whose fourth book, a fantasy called ''The Clearing,'' is being published this month, likens 
his approach as a director to writing. ''I start with nothing and go back to nothing,'' he said. ''I'm the world's 
worst writer but a great critic. So I put a lot of stuff down and say no, no, no. Directing to me is just a 
process of weeding away what doesn't work until you get to what does.''

His next job will be directing, too, in Sarasota, Fla. A family friend has written a play which will be 
produced at a theater run by family friends and will include the whole Arkin family: Adam, who is working 
on a television series called ''Tough Cookies''; Matthew, who just became a lawyer, and Tony, who makes 
his professional stage debut as the Bank Messenger in ''Room Service.'' In Sarasota, says Mr. Arkin, ''I 
think Adam's going to be playing Tony's father, and I am going to be Adam's understudy. And Barbara's 
going to be playing this eccentric woman. Matthew's not in it, but he's representing the writer.''

There may also be a feature film in the works with a screenplay by Miss Dana. Mr. Arkin is even 
tentatively thinking of returning to the stage -Gene Feist, the artistic director at Roundabout, would love to 
see him in Shakespeare - although the thought boggles Mr. Arkin's mind a bit. Although Mr. Arkin has one 
of those faces that seems to have ''New Yorker'' tattooed on the forehead and he eschewed Los Angeles, the 
city where he spent his adolescence, for Westchester County some time ago (''I don't think it's necessary to 
live out there. I don't think it's necessary for anyone to live out there''), it seems that more than two decades 
after his successes on Broadway, he doesn't like the theater much. And after two Oscar nominations - for 
''Russians'' and ''The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter'' - he doesn't have much reverence for movies, either. He has 
good things to say about television.

''I don't go to the theater that often,'' he said, sending Tony out for a tuna sandwich to supplement the soup. 
''It's probably my least favorite of the three forms. I like directing for the theater but I don't like going to it 
much and I don't like acting in it. It was those two long runs. I didn't know who I was, didn't know who the 
character was. I had lost touch with any particular reality. I think it's probably inevitable with a long run; 
either it has to retain the form or the spirit. One or the other has to go out of it. The excitement to me has 
always been exploring, finding the character and making it work. Once I've done that I like to move on.''

''I never did any television until five or six years ago,'' added Mr. Arkin, who has a television movie about a 
whistle blower in the toxic-waste industry, entitled ''Deadly Business,'' airing Mar. 4 on CBS. ''There was a 
period of a year or two when I wasn't getting many good offers. And a television show came along that I 
thought was exceptional, and within two weeks there was another one. My agent warned me about doing 
the two of them because he thought it would kill my movie career. I talked to my family and I finally told 
my agent if doing terrific work and making terrific money is giving up something, I'll take it. Everyone 
says you sacrifice so much because of speed. I don't think you sacrifice anything except exquisite 
cinematography. Although I'm more impressed by movies, I find I'm more moved by television. I haven't 
seen anything since ''Gandhi'' that moved me as much as the thing Joanne Woodward did on Alzheimer's.''

Nevertheless, Mr. Arkin says that recently he has begun to entertain the idea of a limited run in some stage 
vehicle ''to see how I've changed.'' It would have to be very limited indeed, however. ''Three months, four 
tops,'' he said, unwrapping the tuna. ''After that, Bermuda.''