Ben Pesner: What a great cast for God of Carnage.  It’s interesting that all four of you are actors with major film and TV careers, but you also have very solid stage backgrounds.

Jeff Daniels: The advantage in having done a lot of film and TV is that it brings an immediacy, a happening-for-the-first-time kind of feeling to the show every night. The mechanics of film acting require that there’s not a lot of rehearsal and you find yourself doing things in front of the camera that you haven’t rehearsed, or that are happening for the first time, or that you’re just trying. That’s a great thing, especially with God of Carnage, which is so raw and so honest.  You have the foundation of stage acting, and you can add on all that immediacy of film acting on top. But you’ve still got to do that same show every night.

The play is often described as a comedy of manners.  That means it’s not exactly Dumb & Dumber. Is comedy fun to do, or difficult, or both?

All of the above. The thing with comedy is that you can’t teach it.  You either know where funny is, or you don’t. You can’t get around that.  Matthew [Warchus] has been really great about going, “Play it straight, play the darkness, play the anger, play the passion, and that’ll be funny.” That said, there’s craft and precision to comedy.  You have more leeway with drama. It’s wonderful to do both. I’ve never thought of one being less worthy than the other, even though comedy is sometimes dismissed. The last time I looked the Greeks were holding up two masks.

It’s a lot of what makes the play so wonderful and so funny. Underneath the civility and the manners is this primal, animalistic behavior, sometimes. My boys played travel hockey, so I’ve had 15 years of sports

Yasmina Reza is French, and the translator, Christopher Hampton, is British.  Is it true you are making the play American?

The play had been translated from the original French for the London production, but that was more of a British way of speaking. We have made it feel like we were in Brooklyn. 

You actually changed the words?

With permission of Yasmina and Chris Hampton and Matthew Warchus.  Yasmina was there when we were all sitting around the table discussing how Americans would say this or that.  Instead of, “Shall I get a drink?” we would say, ‘Would you like a drink?” I was really happy that we Americanized it, because it pulls the audience right into the living room with us. When you see us doing accents or if it’s set in Paris, there’s a filter that comes up between the audience and the actors, and you lose something.

As a playwright, when you act in someone else’s play, do you turn off that part of your brain, or does it inform your performance?

If asked, I will venture an opinion, and then walk away.  I have always had such respect for playwrights, which is often not the case in Hollywood.  When I went to Circle Rep in 1976, I walked in and there was Lanford Wilson sitting in a chair, a living, breathing playwright. I was fascinated. But I love turning off that side of my brain, just being the actor. It’s such a relief. I know the work that has gone in to getting the play written, draft after draft.  I’ve never been a believer in the “star” thing, where the actor comes in and tells the writer what’s wrong with the play.  I remember Meryl Streep, who I revere, when we were filming The Hours in London. The director, Stephen Daldry, asked her, “You know, Meryl, could you just say something as you’re coming in the door and greeting Jeff?”  She goes, “What, I have to write it, too?” And we had [screenwriter] David Hare sitting right there! It was so wonderful to see that. 

I’ve outlined a play that I’m going to write this spring, once the show gets up and is running.  It’s the third in a trilogy. I wrote a couple of Upper Peninsula plays, Escanaba in da Moonlight and Escanaba in Love.  It’s a tip of the hat to Lanford [Wilson], who wrote about the Talley family with Fifth of July, Talley’s Folly, and A Tale Told. I’ve concocted a fictional family, and I’ve taken

them from 1989 back to 1944.  This play will take place when they built a deer camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 1922. It’s great fun to go back in time and retrace the family tree.

Since you mentioned the Upper Peninsula, could I ask you to explain your life? Most stars live in New York or California, but you have this Michigan thing happening.

Michigan is home. Kathleen, my wife, is from there. I had been in New York City for about ten years, the ‘70s into the ‘80s, and I had done five or six movies. At the time we had a two-year-old boy, and we were going to have another kid or two.  We just didn’t know how to do it in New York, and I certainly didn’t know how to raise kids in L.A.  I had done a movie with Sissy Spacek, and she was living in Virginia. I knew Robert Redford was in Utah, and Tommy Lee Jones was in Texas. I thought maybe I could live in Michigan.  Why not? They have an airport. My agents said, “As long as you’re willing to get on a plane and pay for it to go to L.A. or New York for a meeting, as if you’re just down the street, we don’t care where you live.” So we moved back to Michigan. We were able to raise three kids in a place that we understood and that we called home, outside the [entertainment] industry. Creatively, I got a little lazy, so I started the Purple Rose Theatre Company, and that’s been a real source of inspiration.

That said, I’m really glad to be back in New York. My youngest kid is now in college and we’re empty-nesting, so what a perfect time to do a Broadway show!

You’re a musician as well, and you recently appeared in a new musical called Turn of the Century in Chicago. Have you ever considered writing a musical?

I wrote a play this past summer, Panhandle Slim and the Oklahoma Kid, with six or seven songs for a cowboy to sing. That’s the only plan I have for musicals.  I loved doing Turn of the Century.  I learned a lot, and I absolutely loved working with [director] Tommy Tune, [musical arranger] Michael Biagi, and [co-star] Rachel York. The musical needs some more work and as soon as the economy lightens up a little bit maybe we can raise the money and bring it in.

Fingers crossed!  Is there anything else you’d like to say to your fans?

Just one thing.  For all the singer-songwriter stuff I do, any proceeds I make go straight to Purple Rose Theatre. I don’t see a dime.  Every CD I sell helps my company.

There’s lots of information about your music at JeffDaniels.com.  Thanks for taking the time to speak with us!

My pleasure.

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