This was published 9 years ago
Award-winning director brought comic instinct to Simon’s plays
By Bruce Weber
GENE SAKS
Director
Gene SaksCredit:
8-11-1921 – 28-3-2015
Gene Saks, an actor who switched to stage and film directing in mid-career, winning three Tony Awards and becoming the leading interpreter of the plays of Neil Simon, has died at his home in East Hampton, New York. He was 93.
As a director, Saks focused on comedy, and he excelled with the kind of snappy, battle-of-the-sexes material that might be termed the theatre of repartee. He often said he was concerned that laugh lines be not simply jokes but also expressions of character; nonetheless, he was known for his comic instinct and for helping actors with line readings and timing to make a scene work. That said, he was never a wit.
"He could direct actors to be funny, but he wasn't funny himself," said Emanuel Azenberg, who produced nine Broadway shows directed by Saks, including eight written by Simon. "He would say, 'This is funny,' in a very serious way. And you'd laugh, because that was funny. All of those fundamentals – pacing, timing, line readings – that had to do with if you said it this way it would be funny, but if you said it another way it wouldn't be funny. That's what he was good at."
Quick wit and effective cadence were hallmarks of the musicals Saks directed on Broadway: Mame, the long-running hit (from May 1966 to January 1970) with Angela Lansbury as the famously charismatic and irrepressible control freak of an aunt, and Saks' first wife, Bea Arthur, as her perpetually pixillated pal, Vera Charles; and I Love My Wife, a spoof of the sexual revolution about a pair of married couples and their experiment with partner-swapping, which ran for two years in the late 1970s and earned Saks his first Tony Award.
Saks also directed Bernard Slade's two-handed bittersweet comedy Same Time, Next Year, about a couple's annually recurring adulterous tryst. With an initial cast of Ellen Burstyn and Charles Grodin, it opened in 1975 and ran for more than three years, largely owing to what Walter Kerr, writing in The New York Times, called its conscientiousness "about getting a laugh every 40 to 60 seconds".
Simon was, of course, the king of this sort of comedy, and in the latter part of his career, Saks became his go-to director, staging eight of Simon's plays on Broadway, beginning with California Suite in 1976 and including a distaff revival of The Odd Couple in 1985 that starred Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers as the mismatched roommates.
Saks directed what many critics considered Simon's more serious comedies and his finest and deepest work – Lost in Yonkers (1991), which won the Tony for best play and the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and the original productions of Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985) – he won Tonys for both – and Broadway Bound (1986), an autobiographical trilogy.
Saks also staged Simon's Rumors (1988), a farce set at a dinner party with Christine Baranski and Ron Leibman, and Jake's Women (1992), which starred Alan Alda as a writer with marital (and other) problems. And he directed four screen adaptations of Simon's plays: Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Last of the Red Hot Lovers and Brighton Beach Memoirs.
"Aside from Neil's wit, his brightness and his ability to characterise, he writes about things I know about and care about," Saks explained once in an interview. "We both came from middle-class, first-generation Jewish families, and our humor springs from the same roots."
Jean Michael Saks – he legally changed the spelling of his name as an adult – was born to Morris Saks and the former Beatrix Leukowitz in Manhattan and he grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey, where his father ran a wholesale women's shoe business.
He graduated from Cornell and, after serving in the Navy during World War II – he took part in the Normandy invasion – studied acting at the New School for Social Research and the Actors Studio. He helped start a theatre cooperative at the Cherry Lane Theater and appeared in a number of productions as off-Broadway blossomed.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Saks appeared on Broadway in small roles in a number of hit shows. His best-known stage role was as a temperamental children's television star, Leo Herman, aka Chuckles the Chipmunk, in the 1962 Herb Gardner comedy A Thousand Clowns. He reprised the role in the 1965 film, but by then he was mostly a director.
Saks' relationship with Simon endured for more than quarter of a century, and though professionally rewarding, it was not always smooth. They had an explosive falling out in 1993 when Simon and the producer, Azenberg, replaced Saks as the director of The Goodbye Girl, the musical based on the film of the same name written by Simon, during a pre-Broadway run in Chicago. After his dismissal, an angry Saks said it was only the latest of the slights he'd endured from Simon over the years.
"I have enjoyed conversations with him," Saks said. "I have enjoyed moments of creativity. But I have not enjoyed his friendship because I didn't have it."
The rift between Saks and Simon was eventually repaired, but they never worked together again.
Saks' marriage to Arthur ended in divorce. He is survived by their two sons, his wife, the former Keren Ettlinger, whom he married in 1980, their daughter and three grandchildren.
New York Times