Interview: 13 THINGS ABOUT ED CARPOLOTTI's Penny Fuller & The Many Wonderful Things About Her

Actress/Los Angeles theatre inaugurator, Penny Fuller has embarked on a new leg of her career as a cabaret artiste. Ms. Fuller will be bringing her solo musical play 13 THINGS ABOUT ED CARPOLOTTI to the Broad Stage for a limited engagement beginning January 11, 2017.

I had the most delightful opportunity to chat with the vibrant, vivacious Ms. Fuller. She possesses a memory of an elephant, effortlessly listing off names of cast compatriots and retelling, in detail, intriguing incidents in her resume of theatre highlights.

13 THINGS ABOUT ED CARPOLOTTI came about when Penny was asked by Michael Bush, the artistic director of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, in the mid-2000's, to teach a session at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre's Cabaret and Performance Conference. Michael paired Penny with Barry Kleinbort, successfully teaching in tandem there for eight years. Searching for new material to impart in their eighth year, Penny introduced Barry to a monologue from Jeffrey Hatcher's THREE VIEWINGS, a play that brought Penny back from Los Angeles to New York. "They asked me to replace somebody in rehearsal because somebody didn't like acting alone. These were monologues. I realized acting alone was like doing Shakespeare soliloquies. So I got up on the part in nine days, and that was in 1995."

At first, Barry nixed the monologue as the basis of a musical, as he could envision no hook to its story. "About two weeks later, he found one. He wrote the first song 'The House on Bray Barton,' which was a killer song. In the play, she breaks out in a rash, but he makes that she hums. Every time she gets nervous, she hums. That's how we bridge it into reality, into music. We did it our last year at O'Neill."

From that one song, 13 THINGS ABOUT ED CARPOLOTTI was born and was offered to open Off-Broadway at 59E59 as a sub for a last-minute Christmas cancellation. "So Barry got to work and wrote another song, raised the money, started rehearsals and we opened in a huge clique kind of way."

If you Google Penny's Broadway debut, the result will be A MOON BESEIGED in 1962. "That's wrong! I was an understudy. I was not appearing. The day before we opened, they said, 'Would you be in the square dance?' 'Alright, if you put a hat on me, so you can't see me.' I knew people would say that was my Broadway debut. Nobody knew I was in that until somebody google-spoogled and found it. My real Broadway debut was in BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, unless you count a square dance in a hat."

In the 1963 production of BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, Penny was hired as Elizabeth Ashley's standby for the lead of "Corie" opposite Robert Redford playing "Paul." With only four rehearsals under her belt and a half-hour notice, Penny was called to go on for Elizabeth, due to Elizabeth's debilitating, tweaked back. "I'm in her dressing room. She's writhing in pain from some back spasm. She's so worried about me and I'm worried about her, which was probably good. I'm putting on the make-up and said, 'I don't have a wedding ring.' She said, 'Use the one I use. It's my ex-husband Jimmy Farentino's.' They put this heavy fur coat on me which she wore and they said, 'Good luck!' I heard the audience go 'Awwww' when they said Elizabeth Ashley wasn't going on."

With just two minutes into the show; Penny went up on her lines, her actions, her everything. "I started to go over to sit down on the stage and cry. I thought everybody will understand. Talk about jumping off a cliff."

Then she eyed her prop - Corie's suitcase. "I thought, 'There are logs in the suitcase that go in the little stove.' I put that in and never missed another thing. Robert Redford comes on with terror in his eyes. Mildred Natwick is terrified. Kurt Kasznar... I just calmed them down. I never forgot another thing. Eventually when she went on to do a movie, they put me on, that became my role. And to this day, we are besties, Elizabeth and I, we still are friends."

Penny was just a little thing when she realized she wanted to be on the Boards. "As far as I can remember, I always wanted to. I was an only child, at least the first part. I would play by myself a lot. I played all the people with my dolls. It started there. Then, when I was about five years old and living in New York, my parents took me to see HIGH BUTTON SHOES with William David, who had been married to one of my great aunts. They took me backstage to meet him. I wanted to impress him. I told him I wanted to be a movie star."

In the musical APPLAUSE, Penny played Eve Harrington on Broadway with Lauren Bacall in 1970 and, later, in its 1973 television adaptation. "They called me in out of town before they opened on Broadway. They were in trouble. The Eve they had chosen was not working. They flew me in from California to Baltimore to look at it. I understood immediately, looking at it what was wrong. The girl was too young and not a real threat to Lauren Bacall; I mean, Margo.

This is how I approached it. I want everybody who saw the movie to think 'Maybe I got it wrong. Eve really was not the evil person. That was Margo.' I wanted to play her so well when she was first coming in and trying to help that you thought, 'I don't remember this movie right.' So when the turn came, it was even more exciting."

Working in front of a camera or a live audience isn't all that different for Penny. "My work is to create this character and open myself. Either I'm pouring it out to audience or the camera is coming into me and taking it out of me. It takes more mental energy to do film, and more physical energy to do theatre, but ultimately it's not that different. Also, in television, you don't know what they're going to cut or not cut."

"The last Broadway play I did was called DIVIDING THE ESTATE by Horton Foote. Elizabeth Ashley, who's a contemporary of mine, played my mother. I'm southern and so is she. So we know things y'all don't know, that we don't even know we know. They're just southern things. I was playing her older daughter. I was the one who's now widowed and taking care of her. I said (sliding into her most delicious Southern accent), 'Mama has to have a chair, right by the other chair. And then, we have to have a little bowl of candy on there.' Obviously picking up on the people from my past growing up in the South. Liz and I know things that we both forgot we know about the South, and we can pull on them for those things."

The much sought-after actress, Penny inaugurated not one, but two Los Angeles theatre companies as a founding member in the early 1990s - the Matrix and the Antaeus. "It was bliss on earth!" Antaeus concentrated on producing classical theatre, "which most of us were raised in. Didn't know about TV and cabaret." Gordon Davidson's Mark Taper Forum Repertory Company wanted Penny in their first production also.

Matrix theatre owner Joe Stern used double casting for his initial show, George M. Cohan's THE TAVERN. "And they were not like a brilliant cast and a nice little understudy. Two equal casts, equal TV-Q. This kept us alive creatively, so we could do television. They couldn't afford to pay us. The next play we did was THE SEAGULL. Barbara Babcock was the other person. Most of the time they would try to get people totally different, not a double Penny Fuller."

Joe Stern would switch up the cast after all were comfortable with their respective castmates for a week. "It was so exciting. Talk about having to concentrate. Talk about being in the moment. Our leading men were Cotter Smith and Robin Gammell. Cotter Smith is tall and poetic, and Robin Gammell is probably the most brilliant farceur we have in America, and short, and crabby. Somebody said, 'Robin stands still until he knows where he wants to move, and Cotter moves until he knows where he wants to stand.' So what's happens is, we're all dedicated. It's not about Me, Me, Me, Me. It's all about the play and about this process. It gave the most wonderful giving-ness. Some actors couldn't do it, because they didn't like watching other people. But if you did do it, it was thrilling."

Asked to give a quick thought or two on some of the projects she's been involved in, here's what Penny quips:

CABARET (1966): "Glorious! Again went on the first time with four rehearsals. It's amazing I'm still alive!"

REX (1976) with Nicol Williamson and Glenn Close: "Wrecks! An adventure, one for the books."

The television version of Bernard Pomerance' THE ELEPHANT MAN (1982) with Penny's Emmy-winning performance as Mrs. Kendal: "My dearest, dearest director Jack Hofsiss was the youngest Tony winner. He was so brilliant. And Philip Anglim, who was the Elephant Man, has become my dearest, longest, deepest friend. We had a word 'celestial.' That's what Philip and I would say, 'How was the performance tonight? It was pretty good.' But if it was really great, we'd say it was 'celestial.'"

The American Playhouse made-for-television version of Tennessee Williams' CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1984), in which Penny played Mae (a.k.a. "Sister Woman"): "Incredible cast and that's Jack Hofsiss, as well. My naughtiest thought was that I wanted to play Blanche DuBois with Tommy Lee Jones as Stanley. He's a real southern guy who understands those guys. Just an honor, an honor to be with those people - Kim Stanley, Rip Torn, Tommy Lee Jones, Jessica Lange and David Dukes. What else do you want in life?"
The original production of William Finn's A NEW BRAIN (1998): "One of the most wonderful experiences of my life!"

Neil Simon's THE DINNER PARTY (2000) in which Penny was Tony-nominated: "God, am I lucky! The cast - Henry Winkler, John Ritter, Veanne Cox, Len Cariou, Jan Maxwell. Having started with Neil Simon in BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, how fabulous that this point in your life you have written something so far from your usual thing. These were about French people in a restaurant, kind of like a therapy session in a way. That's what some of the ladies would say after meeting me after the matinees. I got to have the most glamourous part, in the most glamorous dress, and be with these wonderful people."

Carey Perloff's KINSHIP (2015) with Cynthia Nixon: "That was just last year - quite any experience. That's when I learned that I need glasses. I walked offstage in the dark and ran into a wall. I tried to walk onstage and ran into another wall. Then I came on curtain call, forgot the step, and fell on my knee, but I didn't break it or anything.

That was fun. That was really interesting to work on a new play with no real set. One of those abstract-y kind of things. Very interesting play based on the Phaedra legend, the woman who fell in love with her step-son. Cynthia and I and my son Chris (Lowell) could not be on stage at the same time. It was naturalistic in the emotions, but it was kind of not. It was hard to make it real in a mythical context. But I loved it. Cynthia Nixon had also played my daughter in THE CHERRY ORCHARD, so I knew her. I didn't know Chris. Carey Perloff and I shared a house together. She's up in San Francisco, of course, with A.C.T. I just wrote her: 'Dear Roomie. I am coming up.'"

Penny has no problem portraying unlikeable characters. "I don't mind playing the villain. They think they're doing the right thing or doing the thing that's important. I believe that actors on the stage create something that go out over the orchestra and the audience is leaning forward and meet in the middle. This is not original. Bob Benedetti taught it. It's like life everlasting, 'cause what happens to that person you created when the play is over? It's a person and it's up there in the ether with my part and your part mixing and they have life eternal up there. God knows how many Lady Macbeths are floating around."

Asked if any specific roles in the ether she would still like to tackle - "Yes, but I think it may be past my time. I would have loved to play Shakespeare's Cleopatra, I could still play Medea, I guess. Hedda, those are the classical parts. I got to play something I was dying to play, which was Desiree in A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC. I'm sorry they didn't do a revival of APPLAUSE with me playing Margo. I thought that would have been fun for the people who were old enough to remember. It's an old-fashion form and theatre's so different now."

Queried on which directors she'd like to work with, that she hasn't already - "Yes, anybody! I got to work with Mike Nichols. That was just wonderful. But I would love to work with any of those Brits that come over. Everybody in New York is named Michael - Michael Mayer, Michael Greif. Any Michael would be fine. And Joe Mantello, I remember him when he was an actor. He was a wonderful actor! So, no reason he's a wonderful director!"

Getting back to 13 THINGS ABOUT ED CARPOLOTTI:

"There's more than what's exactly there. I don't want to be a spoiler on this show, but there's such a big thing at the end of it. It's a surprise, not like a WOW surprise. It's a deep surprise. There's her love of her home. A woman came up to us when we did it in Massachusetts and said, 'Oh, I remember my husband and I were going to move to Norway and I was so excited. Then I realized I had to sell my house. It just tore me apart - that song ('The House on Bray Barton').' So that's one of them. And the other one; I can't tell you 'cause it's a spoiler. I do know that just the straight line of the narrative - it's got suspense, got dark in it and it's got the most restorative thing about life in it. I remember one of the last times I did it in New York, a man stood up and he put his hands over heart. He bowed, and he said, 'Thank you! Thank you!' The story itself, if you just see the show; it's very entertaining. You never know where it's going. You cannot judge what's going to happen in this play. It's funny. It's got a mystery. It's got bad guys and good guys. It's got it all and I play them all. And it's got the pianist, who's in my living room 'cause someone has got to play the music. He's there, but he's in my mind. The second time we did it, people said, 'Can't we hide the pianist?' And Barry said, 'Of course not. (short pause) I know how to fix it.' So we put him in white tie and tails. He's in my middle-class living room and I'm by myself and he's sitting in that outfit at a grand piano. Obviously, he's some figment of my imagination. So that worked. His name is Paul Greenwood and he's so extraordinary. I'm so glad we didn't have to get somebody else. He does Anita Gillette's and my cabarets. He's just wonderful, wonderful - Paul Greenwood.

Alvina Krause, the famous teacher at Northwestern, would probably roll over in her grave if she knew I was doing cabaret. In our class alone, was Tony Roberts, Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss. It was a golden age; a golden, golden age. I found a postcard from her the other day. And it said, 'Dear Fuller, How are you doing? Write to me and tell me how you are and if you're going to save the theatre.' Not much pressure from Ms. Krause. I think Ms. Krause would be proud. I took what she taught me and turned it into a lot of different things. I think she would love this musical if she were alive."

For 13 THINGS ABOUT ED CARPOLOTTI show info and tickets for performances at The Edye at The Broad Stage January 11 thru January 29, 2017, log onto www.thebroadstage.com