Say the name Chip Zien to many New York theatregoers and two landmark musicals spring to mind: William Finn and James Lapine's Falsettos and Stephen Sondheim and Lapine's Into the Woods (both directed on Broadway by Lapine). In Falsettos, Zien played Mendel, a neurotic psychiatrist who marries the wife of his patient Marvin after Marvin comes out as a gay man. In Into the Woods, he played the sweet, lovable baker who becomes embroiled in a host of fairy tales. These days Zien is back on Broadway, but now in a play: a Mike Nichols-directed revival of Clifford Odets' The Country Girl, which stars Oscar winners Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand.
Zien plays Phil Cook, a Broadway producer reluctant to take a chance on a down-on-his-luck actor (Freeman) whose alcoholism may be enabled by his wife (McDormand). Zien calls his character "the curmudgeon of the crowd" but notes that audiences shouldn't expect to see him playing the stereotypically paunchy, balding Broadway financier. "I am in fact smoking a cigar," he admits, but "we've tried really, really hard to flip it as much as we possibly can to something that we hope to God is interesting."
In Nichols' production, Cook is the kind of producer who's "more understanding and not so obviously cantankerous at every moment," Zien says. "I'm trying not to yell too often, because every time we do it's reminding us of older productions." The aim is to make Cook's relationship with Bernie Dodd — the director of the play within the play, portrayed by Peter Gallagher — like that of old friends. "The language of the part is sometimes difficult to turn that 180 degrees," Zien says, "but we've worked really hard to do that."
For those who associate the diminutive, 61-year-old Zien with musicals, his casting in The Country Girl may seem unusual. His last appearance in a Broadway play was in The Suicide, starring Derek Jacobi, back in 1980. Before that, he was an understudy in Murray Schisgal's All Over Town in 1974, Dustin Hoffman's only Broadway directing credit. (Zien recalls Hoffman quipping, "You know, if I can't get this to work, I can get Mike Nichols because I know him.") Off-Broadway, Zien earned a 1984 Drama Desk Award nomination for his role in Wendy Wasserstein's Isn't It Romantic at Playwrights Horizons and another in 1998 for his work in the Finn-Lapine musical A New Brain. And it was at Playwrights Horizons that Zien began working with Finn and Lapine on what would become the three "Marvin" musicals, starting with In Trousers in 1979 and culminating with Falsettos in 1992.
But Zien's relationship with musical theatre goes back even further. He began singing at an early age in his hometown of Milwaukee. "The family folklore," he says, "was that my mom thought I wasn't going to have any hobbies because I was going to be small, short, and I should try to take advantage of singing, which I seemed to be able to do." An early memory is of winning "a tiny-tot talent show. I won a gigantic box of potato chips singing a song wearing a cowboy hat and six-shooters on local television." Afterward he was asked what he'd do with the box and he lied, claiming he was "going to eat them for breakfast because my mom never gets up to make breakfast for me." His fib got a huge laugh and taught him two things: "I could make people laugh and that I sang well enough to win this contest, which was really cool."
Zien continued performing at summer camp, where "they did a show every year — a big Broadway show — but it was an all-boys camp, so the boys played girls. I played every great female lead in the American musical theatre. I played Lola in Damn Yankees and I played Eliza Doolittle." His one male role there came at his mother's insistence: Harold Hill in The Music Man.
But Zien had no intention of pursuing a theatre career and by the late 1960s was planning to go into law. He was accepted into law school at the University of Wisconsin four years in a row but kept deferring. He says it wasn't until "they sent me a letter...saying, 'We have begun to doubt your sincerity, and if you do in fact wish to pursue a career in the law, you have to show up in person and explain to us where you've been' " that Zien decided that "officially I'm going to do this actor thing."
Ah, but Underneath
Zien was trying his luck in Los Angeles when he heard about the possibility of participating in the first musical in the Finn-Lapine trilogy, In Trousers. After listening to a tape of the score, he agreed to it immediately. His work on the shows spanned 10 years and led to his relationship with Sondheim, when the actor appeared in a Lapine-directed revival of Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along at California's La Jolla Playhouse, which in turn led to his being cast in Into the Woods. Zien had learned from a colleague that Lapine and Sondheim were having difficulty committing to someone to play the baker, so a little strategizing was called for. The colleague told him, "If you fly into town and audition, they'll find some reason to change their minds." So when Lapine called the actor about auditioning, Zien begged off, saying he was too busy working in L.A. Lapine thought about it, then he "called me a couple of days later, and I was lucky and I got the part."
Whether working on musicals or plays, Zien has a simple approach to his craft: "I read the script over and over again. I think about what's missing...just trying to make sense out of it." From there he can begin to find "what's underneath the words," he says. But different shows make different demands: "I don't think it was that hard to figure out what we were doing in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but I think in a piece like [The Country Girl] you're going to spend a lot of time digging as deeply as you can to figure out what's going on underneath."
While Zien has also worked in film and television, he admits he's never felt fully successful making the transition. "I've always been hard on myself about how I've appeared on film," he says. When a director yells "Action!," he feels it's like notorious theatre critic "John Simon and opening night and I've got to kick it up a notch. In fact, on camera that's probably the wrong way to think."
But he describes one onscreen performance of which he's proud: a scene in a TV series in which he played a man talking to his analyst. His character had "nothing to do except talk about the problem bothering him at the time. I thought that for some reason it was one of my most successful scenes," Zien jokes. "Maybe I'm giving away too much: It felt familiar."
Outtakes
First Jewish president of the University of Pennsylvania's all-male musical comedy troupe, the Mask and Wig Club
Provided the voice of the title character in the film Howard the Duck
Appears in the upcoming film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead, starring Jake Hoffman, son of Dustin