Tom Lenk was a perfect fit for the items on director Don Stephenson's checklist. The actor who will star in Pittsburgh Public Theater's production of the one-man show "Buyer & Cellar" would have to be an actor who ...
* Has proven comic timing and stage presence. Check.
* Can engage an audience for a couple of hours. Check.
* Understands the L.A. vibe and the Barbra Streisand mystique. Check.
* The director knows and likes, even after sharing a dressing room with him. Check.
* Can summon demons ...
OK, that last one wasn't on the list, even though Mr. Lenk is perhaps best known as reformed evil-doer Andrew Wells on cult TV fave "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
Mr. Stephenson met Mr. Lenk when they played father-son German developers Hertz and Franz in "Rock of Ages" on Broadway. The bad guys of the piece shared a dressing room and became good pals offstage, so when Mr. Stephenson signed on to direct "Buyer & Cellar" for Pittsburgh Public Theater, the wheels were already set in motion.
"We knew each other from 'Rock of Ages,' so I instantly thought, 'He would be good.' He was at the top of my list, and I just hoped he would do it," said Mr. Stephenson, who also directed last season's finale, "Noises Off!"
With "Buyer & Cellar," the Public gives this season a comedic send-off as well.
Jonathan Tolins' wickedly funny solo show, an off-Broadway tour-de-force for Michael Urie, imagines that the basement of La Streisand's Malibu estate has been transformed into a pristine mall stocked with her collectibles and overseen by a "shoppe" keeper, who will play-act with her and cater to her whims.
Mr. Lenk portrays a handful of characters, chief among them Alex More, the down-on-his-luck actor hired for the job. This is Alex's funny, sometimes touching story, and as such, he portrays all the roles, including that of his megastar employer.
The idea sprang from Ms. Streisand's 9.4-by-1.1-by-12.2-inch coffee-table book "My Passion for Design," which is a presence in the play and one of the few props.
Mr. Lenk knows the book but has never seen the show performed. "That is maybe for the best," he says, "because I don't have the ghost of someone's else's performance in my brain. Weirdly, though, I had the book in the trunk of my car for about two or three years."
That revelation sets off a riff on the book and its size by director and actor, seated side by side in the O'Reilly Theater's upstairs cafe before rehearsal.
"It's in your trunk? You can use it as a spare ...," Mr. Stephenson says.
"It's also useful as a weapon. In an earthquake, I can use it as a shelter ... or a floatation device. ... I'm based in Los Angeles, that's why the earthquake thing," says Mr. Lenk.
As he explains that the book arrived in mail he was picking up for a friend and he was told to keep it, the actor remembers he got rid of it at a white elephant gift exchange party.
"You regifted it? Fantastic," Mr. Stephenson says, enjoying the moment.
You can tell these guys get along, which was part of the job description. It wasn't just important to the director that the audience find the sole actor onstage likable and engaging.
"I would not have wanted to do it with someone I didn't know," Mr. Stephenson said. "That's one of the things Ted [Pappas, the Public's producing artistic director] said to me early, that it should be someone I know and trust and like. I've never directed a one-man show and I've never done one as an actor. What if you get in the room and you can't stand the guy? It's just you and him and the stage manager. Those are long days."
A mantra for Mr. Stephenson, whose Broadway credits include "The Producers" and "A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder," is funny comes first. Both actors are not big on read-throughs. Mr. Lenk came to Pittsburgh, his first trip here, having familiarized himself with the script. The director staged the show quickly, as is his wont, so they could move on to the physicality of the role.
Mr. Lenk has very little to work within a prescribed pristine environment, with projections representing the faux mall.
"There is a table, the book, a chair, a piano bench, a couple of little accessories ... that's the cool thing. It's very much like 'Our Town' " -- the comparison draws laughs, but Mr. Lenk continues -- "where it's all space work, it's all invisible props stuff. The character mentions that he took improv classes at Groundlings, which is a similarity. I do a regular show at Groundlings back home. That's one of the big things about improv, but you have to be accurate about what you are miming and remember where things are."
"That's a big thing because if you crush the [invisible] doll, the audience will know; they have kept track of it," Mr. Stephenson says.
A doll named Fifi is part of a continuing exchange between Alex and Ms. Streisand. ... Ah, that name. It's the big brass band in the room.
"A similarity to [Alex] that I share is I wasn't a big Barbra fan, although I appreciated her," Mr. Lenk says. "But in the process of trying to learn to somewhat sound like her, I've been watching a lot of clips and movies, and it has been fun learning about one of the greatest performers of our time. I've learned you can only make fun of something you love, and it's very clear that Jonathan Tolins has a great love for her. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to go this far down the rabbit hole in imagining what this world would be like."
Mr. Lenk's closest real-life encounter was via a friend who recently went to a Hollywood party attended by the singer. She took a selfie with the friend's teenage daughter, disproving a theory put forth by David Letterman's writers in the "Late Show's" penultimate Top 10 list, titled "Famous Last Words." No. 4 was: "May I take a selfie, Ms. Streisand?"
"Buyer & Cellar" imagines eccentricities, but nothing quite so mean as that. Using such a recognizable name, it can be easy to forget what playwright Tolins makes clear from the beginning, that this is an imagined scenario and hopefully a funny one.
"If Tom is having fun, then the audience will, too, because he is their surrogate," Mr. Stephenson said. "It's like, 'What if this happened to you?' Then he takes us down there. His reactions are our reactions of being near her, of the insanity of working in this person's basement."
First Published: May 28, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
