Source:  The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), Nov 23, 1997 p001.
                                                                              
    Title:  Crossing swords with 'Cyrano'; From Bayonne to Broadway, Frank
            Langella follows his muse.
                                                                              
   People:  Langella, Frank                                                                            

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1997 The Star-Ledger. All rights reserved. 

Byline: Michael Sommers

NEW YORK -- Frank Langella is an actor who knows all about grand gestures. He
can swirl a cape, brandish a cigarette holder, or flash a fencing foil better
than nearly anyone in the business.

Langella's featured roles in movies like "Dave" tend towards wicked White
House chiefs of staff, but he's long been a reigning prince of the American
theater. Dracula. Prospero. Sherlock Holmes. He's played young Shakespeare and
old Junius Brutus Booth, Strindberg fathers and Jacobean seducers.

"I'm a romantic actor," he says, smiling. "I like the big emotions. I'm not
very good in contemporary roles - though I'm better at them now. I still have
a hard time saying, 'I'm going down to the corner for a bottle of milk.' " At
Roundabout Theatre Company this month, Langella is taking on one of the
grandest roles and plays created over the last 100 years.

"Cyrano de Bergerac" is Edmond Rostand's sweeping romance about a
mid-17th-century French swordsman-poet-hero with a huge nose and an even
bigger heart. Ever since its 1897 triumph in Paris "Cyrano de Bergerac" has
enchanted audiences with its bittersweet sentiments and swashbuckling spirits.
(Three different productions are in Paris right now.)

Long a stage and screen showcase for stars like Ralph Richardson, Jose Ferrer
and Gerard Depardieu, the play is a three-hankie weeper about unrequited love
that packs laughter and thrills amid its whirl of sword fights and balcony
wooings.

Langella, who plays Cyrano in this new production that he has adapted and
directs, is well aware of the classic's tendency toward extravagance.

"When you ordinarily see a production of 'Cyrano de Bergerac,' the curtain
goes up and a big crowd scene is already under way. Banners flying everywhere.
Guys dueling. Girls racing around with trays of fruit. Candles being lit and
chandeliers flying up. Eight dozen people coming on in huge hats. All of that
business.

"It's wonderful," he chuckles. "If I had 150 actors and a budget of $8
million, I might do a 'Cyrano' like that."

Actually, Langella is deliberately readying a different kind of "Cyrano de
Bergerac" that he's been mulling over for years. Small in scale. Intimate in
approach.

"I'm trying to wipe away all the artifice," he says. "It's going to be as real
as I can get it to be."

In Langella's chamber version, performed by an ensemble of 12 rather than the
customary horde of 40 or 50 actors, emotional impact comes, he notes, "out of
the humanity of the characters rather than the grandeur of the production."

Langella has already performed the play with all its trappings. Twice. He
first wore Cyrano's plumage at the relatively young age of 30 at the
Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1971. The summertime production at the
Massachusetts theater mecca was such a hit that Langella encored it there 10
years later.

The actor's view of the role has changed with his years. "You know more about
unrequited love and pain - the reality of it - than you do when you're 30," he
says. "Now that I am pushing 60, my feelings are different. With the passing
of time, the trials and tribulations of love seem funnier."

The appearance of an older Cyrano underscores the work's autumnal qualities.
"There isn't so much time left for Cyrano in life," Langella says. For all of
his own professional and personal satisfactions in recent years - glowing
reviews for his impressive theater work and two years of a close relationship
with Whoopi Goldberg, with whom he shares an Upper East Side home - Langella
says he understands Cyrano's need for affection. "Love seems far more poignant
to me now."

As he tackles this latest summit in his career, it's obvious Langella has
flourished far afield from his roots in Bayonne and South Orange. His 20 or
more film roles haven't meant so much to him, he says, but his award-winning
stage performances in both classics and new works by the likes of Edward Albee
and Peter Nichols have brought him great distinction. Over the years, the
long-lashed screen Romeo of 1970's "Diary of a Mad Housewife" has seasoned
into a big, handsome cat of a man.

Until "Cyrano de Bergerac" previews began, Langella's lair was a rehearsal
room in the East 30s, a beat-up loft with a floor criss-crossed by tape
indicating the various levels of the play's setting. Dressed in soft shades of
black, Langella padded in during a lunch break to talk about his new venture.

For all of its derring-do, Langella observes, "Cyrano de Bergerac" simply
concerns a proud man with a problem that many people face today - feelings of
inferiority.

"Cyrano has created his own tragedy. He writes well, duels well, he's a man's
man, he likes women, women like him. But he has one great tragic flaw: He
can't overcome the thing inside himself that makes him feel diminished."

Cyrano's reason for not wooing beautiful Roxanne seems as plain as, well, the
nose on his face. "This nose of mine that marches on before me by a quarter of
an hour," he despairs. But Langella considers that to be a surface excuse.

"Every one of us has got something like that. Something outside our reach that
we use as a major reason why we can't in life."

Cyrano's fear of rejection is something Langella wants to explore in his
production. "The notion of why one does not speak to someone," he says. "The
terror and fear behind one's inability to say to another person, "Want to have
dinner? Want to talk?' Because if you deal with someone on an equal level,
you're going to have to face yourself. It's easier to reach for the moon. Say
it's unattainable. It will never turn and look at me. So you never connect."

Langella believes that paring away Rostand's baroque trimmings will better
reveal the true heart of the drama.

"I want to play it in an intimate way without ever giving up what's epic about
it," he says. "Because you must pay honor and respect to the emotions in this
play. They're huge. Sweet, comic, tragic stuff." He points to the open boxes
of tissues the cast has been using to wipe away their tears during rehearsals.

Langella has been fiddling with his adaptation for nearly seven years,
distilling Brian Hooker's venerable 1923 English version of Rostand's poetic
text. "I'd scribble a note every now and then." His intimate concept started
to become a reality when Langella and Roundabout artistic director Todd Haimes
talked about working together five years ago. Langella's subsequent success as
Prospero in Roundabout's "The Tempest" and triumph in its 1995 production of
Strindberg's "The Father" paved the way for "Cyrano de Bergerac."

"He is truly a stage star in a classical sense," Haimes says. "Not all that
many actors can really do the great roles of dramatic literature. Frank is one
of them. For a company like ours that does classical theater, it's been a
terrific match."

Langella began writing in earnest in early 1996 even as he prepared to star in
"Present Laughter" on Broadway. While hilariously storming around as Noel
Coward's butch alter ego eight times a week, he planned the details for his
chamber Cyrano. "Timeless," he calls the look of it. "Almost any period."

Designer James Noone's single gray-green setting of a weathered classical
portico adapts to Parisian locations and fields of battle. Carrie Robbins'
costumes slim down flamboyant Cavalier modes for spare simplicity and soft,
tactile fabrics. "It's hard to do timeless," she says, wryly.

The clothes are so sleek - with scarcely a cloak or plume - that famed
illustrator Al Hirschfeld purportedly was sorely challenged to find niches for
his Ninas in his New York Times caricature.

Up to now, any directing that Langella's done has been unofficial doctoring of
his own shows. "It's no secret that I'm a strong-minded actor," he says.

After all of the eminent directors he's been associated with during his 33-
year career, Langella says he finds himself staging the show a bit in the
manner of George C. Scott. "Far and away the best director I've ever worked
with," he fondly says of Scott, who guided Langella through "Design for
Living." "He understands the process so well because he's an actor."

That's a key point. "I love actors," Langella says. "They're the heroes in the
theater. They're the ones in the trenches." His greatest directorial concern,
he adds, was "Would I be there for my colleagues? I know I have my own
language for my own instrument. My own way of getting at the truth. But would
I be able to help them if they get into trouble?"

Langella confesses to making the task easier for himself "by casting actors
who are dead-on right for their roles." He firmly believes that "if you're
born to play a part, don't complicate it. Get out of your own way."

Hewing to Langella's concept for the production, of course. "My vision of how
actors should behave with each other. How they should move. How the language
will be played. I have a very strong feeling about American actors in
classical pieces." Langella says he hopes he has in that process eliminated
the over-plummy "acting noise" Americans tend to make in such roles. "I've
tried to find a way in which one can be real and organic and honest."

It's an acting trait that has certainly served Langella well over the years.
Speaking as a director, he believes that a daring simplicity in performance
and staging will breathe fresh life into "Cyrano de Bergerac."

"I like having to stand up for my vision," Langella says. "I like the notion
that there will be no one to blame but me if it doesn't work."