Michael McKean, still rocking stage and screen
Q&A | 'Spinal Tap' star takes on the 'Donuts' challenge
Michael McKean says he knows one thing for sure about doughnuts: If he ate every one that looked good to him, he'd be living large. Literally.
Tracy Letts' new play "Superior Donuts" looked extremely appealing to McKean -- and it was calorie-free. He couldn't resist. The 60-year-old actor stars as the lead character, a lonely and lost man named Arthur, who runs a neighborhood doughnut shop on its last legs. So is Arthur, until a young upstart of a teenager (Jon Michael Hill), his only employee, tries to alter the fate of the shop in the most provacative ways.
(Michael Brosilow)
McKean is perhaps most familiar to folks as Lenny (as in Lenny and Squiggy) on the classic TV sitcom "Laverne & Shirley," and David St. Hubbins, the lead singer of "the world's loudest rock 'n' roll band in "This Is Spinal Tap." The actor's film credits also boast "1941," "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," "Best in Show" and "For Your Consideration." He is no stranger to Broadway, having starred most recently in Harold Pinter's "The Homecoming" and followed Harvey Fierstein as Edna Turnblad in "Hairspray."
He's back to the land of comedy in "Superior Donuts," and he spoke to the Sun-Times recently about stepping into Letts' newest play -- hot on the heels of the playwright's Pulizter Prize and Tony wins for "August: Osage County."
Q. How did you decide to do this play?
A. My manager called and asked if I wanted to read the new Tracy Letts play. The answer could have been anything but no, as far as I was concerned. I finished reading the script and I was just weeping. It's very funny, but very moving. It's this wonderful play about neighborhoods and second- and third-generation Americans. It's about at least three wars, displacement and adoption of new countries and the tracks that all that leaves on the human heart. I very very much wanted to do this play.
Q. What is it about your character, Arthur, that struck a chord?
A. He's just this guy who runs this old doughnut shop. He's been OK with being alone and in the quiet and watching his clientele gradually vanish as they move on to bran muffins and Starbucks. But through the course of the play he's forced not to be an island anymore, and that journey just fascinated me.
Q. The play is a portrait of a Chicago neighborhood. Did you grow up in a real neighborhood?
A. I grew up in Sea Cliff, Long Island, but I've been living in Los Angeles for years. So I didn't have that sense of a neighborhood as much until I started living in New York City these past five years because I've been working there so much. Chicago was really mapped out so well with an eye toward neighborhood identity.
Q. What's it like to step into Letts' new play on the heels of the Tonys and the Pulitzer Prize for "August: Osage County"?
A. He's very much an actor's writer. There are very few of those. For me, coming off a Pinter play which is about mystery and the unspoken, there's so much in "Donuts" that rings so true and real. There are very, very few times when I wonder "Why does this guy do this?" Everything in Tracy's script makes sense.
Q. Do you even like doughnuts?
A. I used to love doughnuts. I can't do it anymore. If I ate every doughnut that looked good to me, I'd be 300 pounds. A friend of mine runs a restaurant in New York and he's kind of eccentric. He came out once with this itty-bitty jelly doughnut for our dessert and it was just phenomenal. It was this basic jelly doughnut, but it wasn't the kind you get from a chain where the filling is extruded from a vat. This play is about those little places that made the simplest of things so good. Like Arthur's life, it's a piece of Americana slipping away from all of us.
Q. Your Broadway musical debut was "Hairspray." Why did you choose that particular show for your song-and-dance stage bow?
A. I used to do musicals in high school, and I have performed with guitars with Spinal Tap and that kind of musical construction. The only bit that gave me some pause was the dance stuff [laughs]. Kids, don't wait until you're in your 50s to learn dancing. It's just a really fun show to do. I went to see George Wendt in the role recently and he seems to be having a great time with it, too.
Q. What are theater audiences like nowadays?
A. Audiences have morphed in a funny way. People who saw the movie were now coming to see the play, and they don't know how to shut up and watch a live show anymore. People were missing stuff because they were talking, translating things for each other, talking about how it was different than the movie. And I'm like, shut up until after the show. It's like people decide that a $110 ticket gives them permission to do what they want regardless of the fact that there's a live show up on that stage.
Q. Would you step back into Spinal Tap?
A. We do it periodically. The last time was for Al Gore's [Live Earth Concert] last year. Rob [Reiner] was working with Al Gore to organize the event. We got to follow Metallica [chuckles]. That's an absurd world right there. We had 17 bass players on stage for "Big Bottom."
Q. Do you plan on playing a few music gigs while you're in Chicago?
A. There are great music clubs here. We [the Credibility Gap, his earliest band] played Mr. Kelly's in Chicago; we played the Riviera. We played Summerfest in Milwaukee and dinner theater in Valparaiso. Lenny and the Squigtones played the Park West. So anything is possible.
Q. What was Lenny and Squiggy's imprint on American pop culture?
A. They were the perfect wrong neighbors [laughs]. The greatest philosophical question of that show was "Why didn't the girls ever lock their front door?"