Finally, Somebody Wants ‘Miss Mary’ : After 6 Years, Muriel Resnik’s Play Has Found an Admirer--Illusion’s New View Theatre in Fullerton

Muriel Resnik had all but given up on “Miss Mary,” a play she wrote more than 6 years ago.

The writer--best known for her comedy “Any Wednesday,” which opened on Broadway in 1964 and continued for 986 performances--had pretty much accepted that “Miss Mary” would never do anything but take up space in her desk and the realm of her failed hopes.

It had come close to a production in 1982, but the plans collapsed when the backers couldn’t raise $1 million for costs. And when nobody else seemed interested, Resnik figured that was that. But then, those weird visions started.

And then, all those phone calls from Fullerton. . . .

While on a Christmas trip to Rome with her husband, Resnik recalls, she had premonitions about someone desperately wanting to stage the play.

“It was wild, a recurring thing that got to me,” she said during a recent telephone interview from her home in the seaport of Beaufort, N.C. “I never told my husband about it because I knew he’d think I was crazy. Well, when we finally got home and I told him, of course, he thought I was crazy.”

But even he took pause when they played back the answering machine: It was jammed with anxious messages from Jeff Ault, the man behind the fledgling Illusion’s New View Theatre in Fullerton.

He wanted to produce “Miss Mary.”

“It was so amazing to hear from this man I knew nothing about who seemed so eager, even desperate, to do my play,” Resnik said. “It really is the fickle finger of fate. Magic, really.

“All I know is that he has this little theater the size of a closet, but that he’s producing plays, which is saying something. Apparently, Jeff saw a copy of the play and just fell in love with it. I’m looking forward to seeing it (staged) . . . I just hope he does a good job.”

Resnik was planning to arrive in Orange County Tuesday for the last rehearsals and mini-parties leading up to Friday’s opening of Illusion’s New View production, which will continue through March 19.

As gratified as she is to finally see “Miss Mary” under lights, Resnik realizes that all expectations must be scaled back.

The Illusion’s New View Theatre, in a mini-mall on Brea Boulevard, is much more than a cross-country jump from the historic Broadway playhouses with which Resnik is familiar. And the excitement and trepidation associated with “Miss Mary’s” opening are far different from those Resnik felt in 1964, when “Any Wednesday” introduced the first-time playwright to the scene.

She was 30, and the advance word on her comedy about a wealthy philanderer, his sweet young mistress and her loving suitor was, Resnik recalls, pretty blunt. Trial runs had been taken in New Haven and Boston and “everyone thought it was a turkey. In fact, on opening night, it was known as ‘The Turkey.’ Theater regulars didn’t even attend the Broadway opening. They gave their tickets to their maids.”

Its New York backers still thought it had a chance, though. And so, with a cast that included Gene Hackman and Sandy Dennis, it opened on Broadway--to more bad reviews.

But despite the critics’ disdain, the show began drawing audiences. People liked its lightweight entertainment and felt sympathy for the poor mistress. “I think,” Resnik now says, “it was popular, in part, because I had hit on a universal thing: (a young woman) having an affair with a married man. That’s going on all over the world, even behind the Iron Curtain. It was like a fable. . . . People used to hiss and boo the rich man and applaud the young man.”

After its successful run on Broadway, “Any Wednesday” was picked up by theaters all over the country and in other nations as well. And the best news of all, at least from a bank book’s perspective, came when Hollywood bought the rights and turned it into a 1966 movie starring Jane Fonda and Jason Robards.

Resnik herself hated the film (“They just went at it strictly for laughs. I always wanted the play to show what a lonely, unsatisfying life the mistress had, but they didn’t see it that way.”) Still, the $750,000 she received was soothing, and it allowed her to pursue her writing.

Writing was harder than ever, though. Resnik said the popularity of “Any Wednesday” put an almost paralyzing pressure on her. Though she wrote other plays, only a few were produced, and none approached her earlier success.

So Resnik turned to magazine writing, doing travel pieces, profiles and movie reviews for Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Town and Country and the Saturday Review, among others. She currently is completing a novel, “Davis Landing,” about seaside life in North Carolina.

Asked about “Miss Mary,” Resnik was reluctant to describe the plot in detail and only would say that it’s about “love and changing relations between two sets of sisters. . . . It goes into the fact that love takes forms that are most unexpected; what you think is going to be love isn’t, and what you think isn’t love is.”

She didn’t hesitate at all, though, when asked to compare it with “Any Wednesday.”

“Oh, this is better. It has more substance. I’m very satisfied with it, and I’m pretty proud of the way it turned out.”

“Miss Mary” by Muriel Resnik opens Friday and will run through Sunday, then from Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m. through March 19, at the Illusion’s New View Theatre, 3030 Brea Blvd., Fullerton. Tickets: $7 to $10. Information: (714) 990-9605.