NOT THAT there haven't been plenty of turkeys interspersed with the caviar. But the much-decorated actress Shirley Knight made her reputation doing the work of every important American playwright from William Inge (her first) to Tennessee Williams (her favorite) to Horton Foote (her present).
Nevertheless, it was "a whole bunch of really bad movies" - as she capsulized it - that she began listing recently when a tourist at the next table told her she looked familiar; "Diabolique." "Color of Night." Knight moved back in time- "Endless Love" - and tried a different tack: "Last year I won a couple of Emmys, maybe that's what you remember (an episode of "NYPD Blue" and the HBO film "Indictment: The McMartin Trial.")
Knight wasn't just rousing an old fan here in the restaurant where she was having dinner; she had a new one in mind. And, preferably, one who'd end up in the quality column. Once a film title finally registered, the actress quickly cut to the chase: "I'm in the play next door, a wonderful play, you should come to see it."
She was pushing Foote's 'The Young Man From Atlanta," which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize and is in previews, opening Thursday at Broadway's Longacre Theatre. The drama, about a Houston family in the 1950's crippled by a failure to communicate, premiered off-Broadway as part of Signature Theater's Foote retrospective two years ago, but with a different cast. It now stars Knight and Rip Torn as Lily Dale and Will Kidder.
Like a number of the plays Knight has done, Foote wrote "Young Man" with her in mind. "He called about four years ago to tell me about it." Knight said, returning to her dinner and the interview at hand. "Then he hired his cousin (Peter Masterson) to direct it who chose his wife (Carlin Elywin), so that didn't happen. It's interesting that it came back to me."
At 60, Knight is a little dumpy but very fresh-faced and forthcoming - like somebody's aunt blown in from Kansas, a quality she's had forever. She says that Inge, a fellow midwesterner, told her she looked like "a girl from Kansas" when they met in 1959 on the set of the movie of his "Dark at the Top of the Stairs," her first major movie role, filmed shortly after Knight had made her stage debut in a California production of the work in the '50's. (Chekhov brought her to Broadway in 1963 in a production of "The Three Sisters" that also starred Geraldine Page, the late actress and wife of Torn. The three of them later were in the film of Williams' "Sweet Bird of Youth.")
Casually dressed, Knight had pushed her hair behind her ears,and she eyed the menu through round-rimmed glasses, her bright red nail polish, the only sign of the impeccably groomed '50's matron she plays on stage, the one who's careful to drape her skirt along the sofa seat and who wears a dainty lace handkerchief tucked under his belt. (The actress said she borrowed the first gesture "from my Aunt Opal...the hanky is just me, although my grandmother used to tuck one in her sleeve."
Lily Dale is a character who's appeared in several of Foote's plays, at different ages, and is based on his own aunt. Knight said she thinks the playwright thought of her this time "because she has a delicacy I'm able to do. The kind of delicacy Blanche has. Tennessee said that was my part," she proudly recalls of her performance as Blanche DuBois in Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire." The playwright later wrote "A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur" for her to do.
With occasional forays into plays by foreigners such as Sophocles - and her British husband, John Hopkins- Knight's resume is a compedium of great american writers. There's Eugene O'Neill, John Guare, Mary McCarthy, Edward Albee - although she's no fan of this playwright after appearing in his "Marriage Play." "I hate him," she said, leaning into the tape recorder to make sure her sentiments were on the record.
The good scripts are actually easier to do than the bad ones, she's found. "You have more work to do when the characters aren't well-defined. Particularly with television, the characters are just a play like this ("Young Man"), I just let the character speak to me and things appear.