STAGE : Comeback Player of the Year : His Tony Award-winning portrayal of Truman Capote taught Robert Morse how to succeed in show business by <i> really </i> trying

N ot even Broadway could have invented the kind of comeback actor Robert Morse experienced last year. Floundering in dinner theater and little-seen musical revivals for over a decade, he found himself picked in mid-1989 by writer-director Jay Presson Allen for a daunting assignment: Morse, the perennially youthful musical comedy star, would do a one-character drama about two days in the life of the late author Truman Capote. Putting aside skeptics who scoffed at the notion that the gap-toothed kid of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” could turn into the witty, emotionally scarred Capote, Morse made “Tru” his own, and went on to nab, among several other prizes, the Tony for best actor in a play.

Allen’s play shows Capote puttering around his New York apartment during Christmas, 1975, and trying to absorb the ferocious reaction his novel-in-progress, “Answered Prayers,” has been getting from jet - setter friends who feel slandered by the book. Capote experiences shock that they would turn on him the way they have.

After over a year of regional theater successes, a healthy Broadway run, and nightly donning makeup artist Kevin Haney’s elaborate head mask, Morse and “Tru” open at the Henry Fonda Theatre on Friday. Relaxing backstage after a matinee at Cincinnati’s Taft Theatre, he talked by telephone about “Tru” and his amazing comeback.

Question: When “Tru” opened in August, 1989, you confessed to feeling some terror about this role. Has the terror gone?

Answer: Oh yes, it’s long gone. Absolutely. I felt that when I realized the immensity of the role, to say nothing of the fact that I was working with the director (Allen) who also happened to be the author. On top of that, I was given the script only eight weeks before opening at Vassar College’s Powerhouse Theatre in Poughkeepsie (New York).

This was a whole new direction for me, doing a play, not a musical comedy. With musicals, you hear laughs, you go offstage for awhile and rest. With “Tru,” it was me eyeball to eyeball with the audience. I knew this would be a hard job. But I also thought that it was one of the finest scripts I had ever come across.

Still, Jay and I were wary of one another. The thought of a curtain going up, and me being onstage alone--would I be ready in time? It caused a little anxiety and panic. But Jay was very helpful and understanding, giving me small bits of wisdom like “When the audience is silent, that doesn’t mean that they don’t like you.”

Q: Was there a point when you realized that “Tru” had a future, that it wouldn’t die somewhere on the road?

A: My first clue that we had something was at Vassar. After eight performances, I was beginning to find myself, and stay in the present with the role. At this point, New York journalists and others were coming, as well as some of Capote’s friends. It seemed that this might be something hot.

The next clue was after a matinee at the Hasty Pudding at Harvard. A woman who had seen it went to the box office the next day and demanded her money back. She said that she had seen Robert Morse in everything he had done, from “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (for which Morse won his first Tony in 1962) to “The Loved One” to “Sugar,” and insisted that that wasn’t Robert Morse onstage, but an understudy. That’s when I knew we were on to something!

Q: The early reviews, such as Kevin Kelly’s in the Boston Globe, predicted that the play would be a hit. But did you really anticipate that, or the Tony Award?

A: Not at all. I never wrote a mental script about what would happen. Our feeling was that we would open in Vassar, and see where it went from there.

From the first week of the play’s life, people would say to me, “You’ll win the Tony for this.” In my gut, I didn’t want to hear that kind of thing. In my head, “Tru” has remained just a little play. But here I was, up against artists like Charles S. Dutton and Dustin Hoffman for the Tony--the same people I’d see during various cast softball games we’d play during the summer. We realized that this “Best” stuff was bull. I don’t like competition among actors. I’m not going to make a stand about it, I just don’t like it. It helps the show, of course.

Still, winning the Tony was a wonderful happening. I know this sounds corny, but I truly feel that my award belongs to all of us actors who have struggled in dinner and small theater across the country. When I heard the announcement, it was as if a 100,000-pound weight had been taken off of me. All the awards stuff had been getting a little too much: The Drama Desk award, the Outer Circle award, the (New York) Drama League award and the Elliot Norton award in Boston.

Q: How have you managed to sustain the original drive for the role after over a year’s worth of solo performances?

A: I’m amazed at that myself. But I just can’t wait to go on again tonight. For some God-given reason, the role stays fresh. Nobody has come up to me and said, “You’re getting old in this part.” I’m lucky that hasn’t happened. At times, I’ve felt as if I were dragging myself to the theater. But that’s only natural. I’ve gone through up and down periods doing the show, but I haven’t missed a performance in almost a year and a half.

It’s grueling to do, eight times a week, plus Kevin Haney’s incredible makeup and mask. There’s a technique to sustaining a performance, which is hard to put into words, but you don’t let it show. The trick is to make it feel that it’s happening for the first time every time. When the curtain comes down, I feel like I’ve just beat the Lakers or Jack Nicklaus.

It’s a job and a workout. It makes me sweat. It’s healthy for me. And it’s sure as hell better than collecting an unemployment check, which I will be doing soon.

Q: We know about the raves heaped upon “Tru.” Did you ever get knocks, though, from any of Capote’s friends? Were you and Allen concerned about offending his acquaintances?

A: I never heard any bad words from people who knew him. We never got even a slightly negative review. George Plimpton, for instance, who knew Capote for a long time, wrote a beautiful personal letter to me after seeing the show.

Jay and the producers were concerned about how Capote’s estranged friends would take it. He knew e verybody . When you’ve met--as he did at different times--both Bobby Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, you’ve gotten around. He was a writer and an artist, and an artist must observe life around him. Is it any wonder, then, that he wrote about the people around him, which ended up as a very unflattering depiction in his unfinished novel, “Answered Prayers”? Whether he was justified in thinking what he did, he was amazed and offended that the people he slightly fictionalized in the book turned on him and wrote him out of their lives.

I didn’t know these people, except for Gloria Vanderbilt. Slim Keith, who had had a bad parting with Capote, came on opening night in New York, and Jay was a nervous wreck. But (Keith) saw me afterwards, saying that she felt that she was in the same room with him. At the same time, I also sensed some deep regret that things were never patched up.

Q: What was the biggest challenge in building the role?

A: We were aware that the play shouldn’t be about Capote’s decline and fall, and worked hard to figure out how to avoid that. Jay made it clear that she wasn’t writing about the alcoholic, self-piteous Capote, but the charming, witty gadfly he was before that. What I had to keep in mind was that even though the audience may know that he’s going to die an alcoholic, Capote doesn’t know that. Actors love to fall into bathos, which I could have done here. But Jay’s Truman is determined to bounce back.

Q: Actors say that a strong character can invade their lives. Did Capote invade yours?

A: Yes, he did, but only during the rehearsal phase, and only then when the play deals with his alcoholism, which is one of the few things I share with him. Dealing with this would sometimes touch a part of me that would make me cry in rehearsal. Jay told me to get it out then, before we toned it down for the stage. She was my eye. Later, I added little things to Capote once I saw him more clearly. Things are pretty set now. Jay drops by every so often and gives me notes. But Capote doesn’t follow me home. He stays in the makeup room.

Q: How have you made this a performance, instead of an impersonation?

A: I honestly don’t know. (Long pause.) What I can say is that I approached this as a play, not as a one-man show, trying to keep Robert Morse out of it, so I could be there with Capote. Q: Many thought that after Capote became a celebrity, he wasn’t the same. Doesn’t “Tru” risk pumping him up as a celebrity, not a writer?

A: You have a point about that. But even though we do read bits from “In Cold Blood” and “A Christmas Memory,” we didn’t want to turn the evening into a reading of his works. Jay just wanted to show what happened to him over two days.

Audiences tell us, though, that the show has made them go out and get his books, even Gerald Clarke’s biography.

Q: Do you feel at this point in your life that the “Bobby Morse” of before has been replaced by “Robert Morse?”

A: That’s a tough one. I think so. I sat in L.A. for seven years and broke my hump, changing agents, wondering why I wasn’t working much anymore. I’m not alone. We actors wonder why we keep doing it. I guess it’s all we know how to do. Jackie Gleason once said that he’d shine actors’ shoes if he couldn’t act anymore.

You know what I’d really like? A movie career. I’m not praying that it happens. Most people casting movies today don’t know who I am. They didn’t see me in ‘How to Succeed,’ or anything else. Something may come along. But it’s not up to me.

Q: What do you do for an encore?

A: My head is so full of this play right now. Once it’s over (in San Francisco, after the Henry Fonda engagement), I think I’ll take some time off--maybe a couple of days. I mean, my wife and I are having a baby in April, and we just celebrated our first anniversary--we married two days after “Tru” opened in New York. I haven’t had much time to realize it, but I’ve had a helluva year.