Weston has arrived

as a tragicomedian

Continued from Page 1 ond play, when Marvin the businessman and his wife get back together after she finds the hooker in his bed there's a kind of clumsy poignancy to the whole thing. And that is life."

From behind his tinted glasses, Weston reflected on the more serious undertones of Simon's work. Martin Gottfried wrote that there was a beautiful man-child quality to Marvin, which is also there in the lead character in Simon's 'Last of the Red Hot Lovers.' Morton Middleclass Ronald Rotarian what makes him do what he does? What makes him want to have a fling? Why is he afraid of living and dying?

"People identify with this character. Women walk up to me and say, 'When you get out of that bed and go to the bathroom, that's my husband! That's the way he looks!' It's a gift to be able to write characters like that. I'd love Neil to write a play not just a one-actor, but something deeper

about this character. The definitive play on the middle-class American male.”

3)

For Simon, Weston and director Gene Saks "That second sketch was created totally through collaboration,' Weston said, the middle-class American male is something of a clown, and it takes a clown to play him. “I didn't have any particular model in mind when I worked on the part of Marvin.

—

"I just lent myself to it I'm Russian-Jewish, and I suffer. When we were working together on Maria Irene Fornes's play "The Office, Elaine May said, 'You have a cloud, Jack, that follows you wherever you walk.'

*

a

"I have always been a great admirer of Bert Lahr," Weston continued. "He was my idol physical comic who could communicate so much through his face, his eyes, the curl of his lip, the way he used his hands. Zero Mostel, too, and James Coco and the great Bobby Clark were all influences. They were all part of a marvelous school of physical comedy that's dying or dead. The material is no longer being written. We have cerebral comedy now Woody Allen and Mel Brooks. It's 'ha-ha' instead of 'haha-ha!'

W

"I'm not knocking that kind of comedy. But here Weston grew excited, leaning forward in his 'chair and speaking with infectious enthusiasm "if you only knew the laughter you get with comedy from the older tradition. You hear laughs that sound like thunderclaps! I get goosebumps in the middle of a scene a couple of times, I've almost wept with joy, right on stage. To look out there and see people doubled over, unable to straighten up in their seats...

"The polite laughter you hear with verbal comedy is fine, but maybe people are getting a little tired of it. With the physical comedy in those two sketches in ‘California Suite,' people in the audience my age, middleaged, say, 'My God, here it is again!' And the youngsters say, 'My God, I've never seen anything like it!'

Despite his Silly Putty face and ample figure "I'm going on my annual diet next Monday, I swear I am" Weston considers himself an actor who plays comedy, rather than a comedian, although he numbers among his Hollywood friends Don Rickles and Milton Berle.

"Milton keeps saying, 'Why don't you just admit you started in the mountain!"" he chuckles. "But I didn't. I don't have anything against comedians they're very gifted people. But I think if I played a club and somebody heckled me, I'd just cry and walk off the stage. I couldn't take it. I'm too sensitive.

"I need to be liked. I'm the king of paranoia. If people look at me cross-eyed, I get nervous — I have to be liked. Not only by the audience but by my fellow actors. We all get along very well in 'California Suite,' thank goodness. If we didn't. I don't think I could stay on."

If Weston is a devotee of the comedy of hard knocks, it might be because he suffered more than a few of them growing up. He

says he always loved acting, but 'wasn't what you'd call your matinee idol, cosmetically speaking." Born in Cleveland, the son of a shoe repairman, he remembers the days when his father brought home $10 a week and the family was on Home Relief.

During the Depression, my brother and I used to go to the movies to escape a miserable boring existence. I was hypnotized by those shadows on the screen. I identified with the character actors -Wallace Berry, Eugene Pallette, Edward Arnold, Frank Morgan. You'd see a Clark Gable once or twice a year, but the character actors were always there, like glue holding the films together.

Weston was something of a character himself in public school, and one of his teachers convinced his father that there might be some talent beneath the cutting up. Morris Weinstein "I think he had a deep artistic bent, and he gave me a lot of encouragement"

took his 10-year-old son to the Cleveland Playhouse for an apprenticeship that was cut short in his late teens when the Army. beckoned.

After World War II, Weston came to New York to study at the American Theatre Wing on the GI Bill, holding down odd jobs, making the rounds, and eventually landing featured parts in Broadway plays of the '50s, including the 1956 musical "Bells Are Ringing," in which his wife, Marge, was standby for Judy Holliday.

Weston also worked in television in New York, on such shows as the Philco Playhouse. But "TV in New York seemed to be falling apart. In Los Angeles, it was blossoming." So the Westons quit "Bells Are Ringing" and took off for the coast in their new Volkswagen, which crashed en route, turning over three times but somehow leaving Marge and Jack intact.

"We flipped a coin to see if we should go on to Hollywood. Two out of three, it came up that we should. So we boarded a plane and went."

The Westons' flip of a coin resulted in numerous television roles for Jack in "Gunsmoke," "The Untouchables" and "Twilight Zone." His film debut in "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" in 1960 was followed by small but featured parts in such films as "The April Fools" with Jack Lemmon, Elaine May's "A New Leaf" and "Cactus Flower" with Ingrid Bergman.

"All those years watching Ingrid Bergman, then arriving on the set to work with her for 12 weeks. I trembled!"

Weston might have been consigned to a career of being a familiar but unidentifiable face on the wide and small screens had it not been for playwright Terrence McNally, a longtime fan who insisted that Weston be cast as Gaetano Proclo, the good-natured nebbish of a sanitationman who unknowingly flees to a homosexual bathhouse to escape his murderous brother-in-law in "The Ritz." "You seldom get the part you played on stage in the movie, too," Weston beamed, "but Terrence stuck with me all the way.”

How long will he be staying on with "California Suite"? "Until it's not working for me anymore. It's tough physically doing the show you start high, and have to get higher. I don't want to get bored with the part it would hurt the play, and myself, to cross that fine line between acting and burlesque, and start to invent shtick. If the audience doesn't believe. what I'm doing, doesn't believe in Marvin's fear, for example, then the play is out the window. You have to keep your performance on that straight line that the playwright intended.

"When you reach a top of sorts," Weston concluded, leaning back in his chair, trying, as he said, not to be sentimental, "when reviews like these come out, you want to turn to the person who encouraged you to do it all.

Water Ma

"My father never saw me act he died when I was 14, hit by a truck. But I was thinking the other day as I was walking home from the theater if only he could be here to see it. I wanted to say, look, I did it. It worked. It happened." Not only Morris Weinstein, but Wallace Beery and Bobby Clark would be proud.

Jack Weston and Tammy Grimes in "California Suite."