How Woody Allen set Jeff Daniels on the wing

By Jerry Tallmer

The blackbird sings to him,“Brother, brother,If this be the last song you shall sing,Sing well, for you may not sing
another;Brother, sing.”

— from “Into Battle,”by Julian Grenfell, 1915

Jeff Daniels is the kind of actor who, even when he’s playing an unpleasant person, a disloyal person, an exploitative person, or, as it may be, a nice but boring person, a schlemiel, he still makes you want to meet that person. In other words, he’s a very fine actor indeed. I know that when I saw him Off-Broadway as the son in “Lemon Sky” a dozen years ago — playwright Lanford Wilson’s alter ego, going home to face dad — I thought, hey, this guy (in the play) could be my friend. He’s as real as it gets.

Apart from theater, think upon some of the more than 50 movies that Daniels has been in, from his ultra-persuasive early work in “Ragtime,” “Terms of Endearment,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Something Wild,” and “Radio Days” — all those in the 1980s — to recent winners like “The Hours,” “The Squid and the Whale,” and “Good Night and Good Luck,” in which transfixing film about Edward R. Murrow he, Daniels, appears briefly as an important but forgotten CBS News executive named Sig Mickelson.

“Everybody wanted to be on that movie,” Daniels said over a sandwich on the Upper West Side the other day. “My agent said: ‘I don’t know if the part’s that big, but it’s an extraordinary picture.’ Everybody knew their job. George [screenwriter/director/actor George Clooney] was so passionate. No hogwash, no bullshit.”

There is even less hogwash in the play that now brings Daniels (who broke in here — burst in — with Lanford Wilson & Co. at the Circle Rep in the 1970s) back to the New York theater from which he’s been absent while his kids were growing up. Not that Daniels was absent from theater, up there in Chelsea, Michigan. We’ll get to that.

The play, a big hit in London, is “Blackbird,” by a 40-year-old Scotsman named David Harrower. It enters previews March 15 toward its April 10 American premiere at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s City Center Stage I under the direction of Joe Mantello. It is not a nice play; it is, however, in the reading, a sharply compelling one as its two characters bit by bit unloose a tight-wound skein of broken-sawtooth dialogue that cleaves apart the past. Here is a fragment of what passes between its Ray (Jeff Daniels), a man in his 50s, and the considerably younger Una (Alison Pill, the girl from “The Lieutenant of Inishmore”):

RAY: You’re a
some kind of ghost
turning up from nowhere to
          Go home.
          Please
          Leave me alone.
        Go home.
UNA: You think I still live in the
same town?
RAY: I don’t know.
          I don’t know where you live.
          How would I know that?
UNA: I do.
          I still live there.
          We
RAY: Get out of here and
UNA: never moved
RAY: Go back there.
          Go back.
UNA: I do feel like a ghost.
          I do.
          I feel like a ghost
          Everywhere I go.

“When I go to theater,” said actor Daniels over his sandwich, “I don’t watch the actors, I watch the writing.” Actor Daniels is also playwright Daniels, who writes them — 11 to date — between movie jobs. Several of those plays have been sellouts at his Purple Rose Playhouse in Michigan. One, the serious comedy “Apartment 3A,” scored well in its staging last year at West 71st Street’s ArcLight Theater, a few blocks from where we were now sitting.

Jeff Daniels and Kathleen Treado — “No, we weren’t high-school sweethearts, but I knew her” — have been married 27 years now. Their three children, two boys and a girl, are well enough across the doorstep of life for Jeff — who wanted to be around until they got out of high school — to resume “flirting” with the frenetic New York scene. (“Movies are different. They give you lots of time off, and you can come home and be dad.”)

Lynn Meadow, artistic director of the Manhattan Theatre Club (from which she is now on sabbatical), had over the years — ever since Daniels had been in the “Three Sisters” she directed in 1982 — sent him this script and that script, to all of which he said thank you, but no.

And then, this past June, when he was out on the Coast making a picture, she sent him a script of “Blackbird.” The deeper he read into its cryptic reencounter of Una and Ray, whatever the meaning — “and I didn’t have a clue” — the more he knew that this was the stuff that “would get me on stage every night at 8, that I’d have to be there. There’ll be no cruising” — no letting up, taking it easy, going through the motions. When Joe Mantello came on as director, Daniels called him and said: “You choose a girl and I’ll show up.”

In “The Purple Rose of Cairo” — a movie about movies, inspired by and almost as great as anything by Keaton (Buster, not Diane) — Jeff Daniels plays the leading man who steps out of the screen and into Mia Farrow’s heart. Halfway through the 1985 shooting, Woody Allen said to Jeff: “You’re good.” It changed everything.

“I had been in New York nine years, and really didn’t know if I’d last. I was 30 years old. But I knew from that moment that I could go on; that the critics didn’t matter. It was validation. That’s all I needed to know.”

The Purple Rose Theater of Chelsea, Michigan, constructed with materials from the Daniels family’s Chelsea Lumber Company, is of course named for that movie. “I didn’t ask Woody’s permission. And he sent some money, which was nice.” The Purple Rose opened 16 years ago, operates 44 weeks in the year, sells 40,000 tickets a year (with no subscription list), and — Daniels would have you know — is in large part responsible for the growth of shops and restaurants and bars that keep Chelsea, Michigan, thriving in the face of the disaster of the U.S. automobile-manufacturing industry.

Daniels is the unpaid executive director, then and now, “and from Day 1 it was designed for other people to run it so I could go off and do movies, which pay a lot of money.” He’s also been sort of Playwright in Residence, with several of his works selling out, particularly ”Escanada in da Moonlight” and “Escanada in Love,” a pair of comedies about deer hunting in Michigan. His newest drama, “Guest Artist,” is a nominee for the Steinberg Award of the Humana Festival of New American Plays, to be decided March 31 in Louisville, Kentucky.

When Jeff Daniels played the son in Lanford Wilson’s “Lemon Sky” in 1985, Wilson took one look and screeched: “Hey, you’re doing me!” Daniels well remembers his very first sight of Lanford Wilson, all spread out on a couch at the Circle Repertory in 1976. “All splayed out, that’s the word. Here he was, a playwright, alive and well. I had no concept what a playwright looked like, or if they even existed.”

They did and they do, and listen, Jeff — one of them looks a lot like you.

BLACKBIRD. By David Harrower. Directed by Joe Mantello. Enters previews March 15 toward its April 10 opening as a Manhattan Theatre Club presentation at N.Y. City Center Stage I, 131 West 55th Street, (212) 581-1212.