Long Day’s Journey : The peripatetic Judd Hirsch gives himself, and a visitor, an invigorating workout in the Tony-winning ‘Conversations With My Father’

NEW YORK —  It was going to be a long workday. Before it would end about 13 hours later, he would give two emotionally draining performances in “Conversations With My Father” that would leave him sweaty and spent, though invigorated by a second round of enthusiastic curtain calls.

Right now, though, it’s midmorning on a gloriously sunny Wednesday, and Judd Hirsch is taking it easy. He’s walking his two dogs, the rambunctious Lucius and the woolly-haired Ashley, in a paved expanse beside the Hudson River. The dogs had passed a few days at his place “up there”--he points vaguely up-river in the direction of the Catskills--and had been cooped up in his suburban wagon during the trip to Manhattan. They needed this chance to get off the leash.

While they frisk around, Hirsch’s unleashed mind rambles through a discussion of his West Village neighborhood, with its mix of lovely old homes, apartment buildings and grungy workplaces, and what he thinks are misguided building plans for the area. That leads him into a riff about New York City’s inability to realize the enormous potential of this stretch along the river.

By now, his dogs have struck up a snappish acquaintance with a big, galumphing puppy, and Hirsch trades dog talk with the puppy’s owner. With a cap over his wavy black hair and tinted glasses hiding his green eyes, he isn’t recognized by the other man--and wouldn’t, in fact, be recognized by anyone on the street all day.

He had already spent the early morning driving to a hospital in Queens that was to discharge his mother--for whom he had held up a written “I love you” message when he received his best-actor Tony three months ago. Still ahead of him were matinee and evening performances as the combative, funny, obtusely wrongheaded bar owner in Herb Gardner’s memory play.

“This play,” Hirsch says, “I’m telling you, is the hardest damn thing in the world, doing two of them in one day. Vocally, you go into the toilet for a while. When you start a play like this, you really have to learn where to place your voice, how to conserve energy.”

After dropping the dogs off at his apartment, he drives us uptown in his wagon, through thickening traffic on Eighth Avenue. Though he’s left time to reach Broadway’s Royale Theatre an hour before the 2 o’clock matinee, he changes lanes whenever the one he’s in starts to dawdle, displaying a hint of the impatience he says feeds into his performance as quick-on-the-trigger Eddie Ross.

Up ahead, a young bicycle messenger is holding onto the back of a moving truck, which reminds the 57-year-old Hirsch of the days when he and his boyhood friends in the Bronx used to hitch rides on the back of streetcars. And the slow-moving traffic recalls the day back in the ‘60s when he had set out late for a performance of “Barefoot in the Park,” breathlessly arriving to find the audience on the sidewalk, waiting for “technical difficulties” to be solved.

As he pulls over to a lot, he explains why he drives to the theater instead of taking a taxi: “One, I like to be in control. And two, I’m afraid I’ll die, the way these guys drive.” That from someone who gained fame as cabbie Alex Rieger on TV’s “Taxi.”

Hirsch stops in a small deli to buy coffee and rolls to consume in his dressing room before the matinee. Then he’s off to work, with a few caustic words about the littered alley that performers in three shows must traverse on the way to their stage doors. After signing in, he pauses to chat with Warren Crane, the production stage manager, and Deborah Clelland, the assistant stage manager, then has a laugh with David Margulies, who makes a mock-grand entrance befitting his role as the old Yiddish actor Zaretsky.

There’s plenty of time left for Hirsch to get into character as Eddie Ross. Only, as far as I can discern, he doesn’t. Chatting nonchalantly in his cozy dressing room, he’s as loose as if he were just waiting to see the play.

“I don’t believe that anybody comes up with any damn good ideas unless they come on empty of their endeavor,” he explains. “I always thought when I was a student of acting that the less you know before you say a word, the more that word’s gonna be authentic.”

Sipping his coffee and munching his roll, he talks about the day he had come to check out the Royale, only to find every corner of the theater filled with dancers waiting to audition for a musical elsewhere on Broadway. It reminded him of the only time he’d ever had to wait for his own chance to audition. That was for his first major role--a quarter of a century ago--as the telephone man in Neil Simon’s “Barefoot.” It was a replacement part he had found out about from an actor friend and decided to try for, despite an agent’s assurance that the show wasn’t auditioning replacements. “Imagine if I hadn’t had that information,” he says, evoking a fleeting image of a major career derailed.

He remembers feeling, “of the seven or eight guys who auditioned, there was only one who was wrong for the part--me.” He’d started reading the part as a “schlub”--he reprises his Denny Dimwit delivery--until a voice from the darkness asks him to do it in his own voice. Still, he was the one who was hired. But for a couple of months, he kept his day job as a clerk in a law office.

With scarcely a pause, Hirsch changes into costume--the starched white shirt, black bow tie and creased black pants that represent Eddie Ross’ idea of what a bartender should wear in a dingy, Depression-era joint on Canal Street. Then, with some of ex-boxer Eddie’s bouncy lift, he’s striding from the dressing room. But even now he’s not focusing on the transformation into Eddie; he’s exchanging backstage pleasantries with cast members and technicians and giving company manager Stanley D. Silver a funny, stooped-over performance as the man who had disrupted the opening scene the previous night by pushing his way to a front-row seat.

Aaron Lebedeff’s classic recording of the Yiddish music-hall song “Romania, Romania” signals the curtain’s rise. From my perch off stage right, I can see only a slice of Tony Walton’s dead-on bar setting. Before long, Hirsch is bustling jauntily into the sliver of space, accompanied by a crescendo of applause.

He’s in character immediately. Cajoling, taunting, hurling sarcasm, he’s Eddie Ross (ne Itzik Goldberg), trying to get his infant son Charlie to speak by holding up a wooden duck as a cue. When the child doesn’t respond, he furiously hurls the duck across the bar. His violence foreshadows his angry scene with co-star Margulies in which memories of a pogrom underscore Eddie’s eagerness to shed the outward vestiges of his Jewishness and swim in the American mainstream.

Hirsch had based his conception of the character on his own father, he says later. “He was that guy, back at that time,” he remembers--even though his father was an electrician, rather than a bartender, and didn’t deny his Jewish heritage. “He didn’t have to. He sort of wasn’t one, in a way. It’s funny, because he became a Jewish guy late in life.”

At intermission, Eddie Ross, the fight fan, becomes Judd Hirsch, the baseball fan. On the mini-TV in his dressing room, he watches the Yankees--what other team would a boy from the Bronx root for?--exulting as they break yet another losing streak.

Because there are no actors’ entrances from stage right, the backstage area there seems eerily detached from the action onstage. During Act II, sound engineer Scott Stauffer can even leave his terminal for an occasional break. At other times, he chats on a headset with Crane, the production stage manager, who is “calling” the show--giving the sound and lighting cues--from stage left.

For Hirsch it’s a workout in two acts, and after the matinee he has his dressing-room air conditioner on high. He takes a large bunch of grapes from a small refrigerator for us to share--his only between-shows repast. He usually doesn’t eat much on matinee days unless he’s on tour, he says, nor does he nap. “I should go to sleep for an hour,” he concedes. “But I get so afraid when I fall asleep that when I wake up I’m gonna be so tired I won’t be able to do anything.”

He reflects on the difficulties of playing a character who’s so unbending, so unforgiving, that at the play’s first reading his actor’s instinct made him soften Eddie.

“There are certain problems in every part you play,” he points out. “This time I said, ‘Hate me! They’ll hate me!’ And I started out in my career not even thinking about this idea of being loved. It didn’t matter beans, really. I thought I was gonna play villains, crackpots, idiots, schmucks--people who you’d probably wanna kill anyway. And then I thought I might get the opportunity to be a soft guy, or somebody you might feel sorry for.”

By now, though, he wants what he does to be “measured on that risky scale,” he says. “Otherwise, you don’t know what you did. You sail through it if the part’s too easy. I played enough of those.” He adds with a rueful laugh, “Not lately. Lately I’ve had to work for my money.

“Funny, when I was younger all I wanted to do was get a part; I just wanted a play. And then I had to learn a part in like five days, because this was stock.” That was for the leading part of Murray Burns in “A Thousand Clowns,” his first brush with playwright Gardner’s work.

“I thought I was reading for Chuckles the Chipmunk. I’d already accepted the fact that I was a character actor, a simple, straightforward or complex character actor. Hoping that I’d find the opportunity to play many different kinds of people--old, young, stupid, smart, whatever.”

He has, of course, found ample opportunities, whether as a longtime member of Off Broadway’s Circle Repertory, as a Broadway star--a word he disdains--and as a movie and television actor. He won his first Tony in 1986 for playing an 81-year-old Jewish radical in another Gardner play, “I’m Not Rappaport,” and was nominated for playing the wisecracking Wiseman in Jules Feiffer’s “Knock Knock” and the endearing Matt Friedman in “Talley’s Folly,” a role created for him by his Circle Rep colleague Lanford Wilson.

In the tradition of incomprehensible Tony oversights, he wasn’t nominated for his conflicted George Schneider in Neil Simon’s 1978 “Chapter Two,” and his role in the movie version went to James Caan. But Hirsch has made his own film impact, including an Oscar nomination for playing the compassionate psychiatrist in 1980’s “Ordinary People.” His “Taxi” work earned him two Emmys, and other admired television roles have ranged from a public defender in 1974’s “The Law” to a member of a support group in the recent “Dear John.”

Now, the toughest character of them all, Eddie Ross. Hirsch has subtly altered his performance since the play opened five months ago. “I don’t believe in this idea of freezing performances,” he declares. “I think you enrich them.”

He puts on his “disguise,” the cap and tinted glasses, before we leave to take a walk around the theater district. But we don’t get beyond the sidewalk outside the theater, where two cast members, James Sutorius, who has replaced Tony Shalhoub as the adult Charlie, and John Procaccino, who plays a small-time hood, are hanging out. Hirsch joins them in talking about a fire alarm at the next-door Milford Plaza Hotel that has summoned fire engines to the street, and he leads a transition into remembrances of hotel fires they’ve survived.

Procaccino remarks that he’s always wanted to sit out on the sidewalk in a reclining lawn chair, the way the folks back home in Ohio relax. Before long, he’s fetched a substitute--a straight-backed dressing-room chair--and proceeds to read his newspaper in front of the theater. No passers-by pay attention to the three actors as they turn a piece of West 45th Street into a front porch, talking animatedly about the headline scandal in Procaccino’s tabloid.

I watch the end of the evening performance from the opposite end of the backstage area. It has more activity than stage right, if only because the actors pass through to make their entrances. But there’s no view of the stage, and I have to watch on a small black-and-white monitor, which scales down even Hirsch’s powerhouse performance.

The show ends at 10:40, a bit earlier than usual. Hirsch, waiting offstage to take his solo bow, calls to his fellow players as they take their first curtain call, “Perfect, perfect, you got us out of here.”

In his dressing room, with the air conditioner again at an arctic setting, he attributes the shorter playing time to the size of the audience; unlike the standing-room-only matinee, the evening performance drew about 70% of capacity. Those in the evening crowd, he says, are younger--and tougher; they don’t laugh as much, though they pick up swiftly on what he calls the play’s “cumulative humor.”

With “Dear John” canceled, Hirsch expects to remain with “Conversations” until early December. But he knows that playing on Broadway in even a moderately long run takes its toll, especially when one is portraying a character like Eddie, who never lets up and is rarely offstage.

“You can’t be the same person,” he says, “you can never be the same person. You have to be awful patient with the people around you, at least somebody who means a lot to you. And you have to be able to blank this thing out, for all the hours you’re not in it, because it’s so consuming.

“Most people have a job from 9 to 5. They can take a coffee break. They can even get a sandwich. Or they can yawn, or they can sneeze. Or they can go to the bathroom.”

He laughs and adds, “You can’t do it here. The clock starts, you gotta finish it. Theater is the most demanding thing I know, in acting. You are the show. You are the time it takes. And you are the one who has to be absolutely on the ball. You let it down, they lose. You forget something, they lose. Bobble your words, they lose. And they notice, believe me. I mean, it’s not ‘just get through it.’ Be inspired. Every day, every show, twice a day some days.”