NR: What has been your favorite role to date?

DC: Probably Polonius in Hamlet. I just did it recently. Doug (Sills) and I are going to do it again. We don't know where. Maybe he does and he's not telling me.

NR: Well, you'll have to tell us.

DC: Yeah, I know. We will.

NR: Do you have a dream role that you haven't played yet?

DC: No. I don't want to sound weird, but I'm very happy about something. I've done everything I really want to have done. I don't have anything to prove and it kind of relaxes me and frees me up to do the next thing, whatever it is. I like working in the theater, that I know. I'll do anything in the theater. I think it needs some positive energy. I don't like it turning into this kind of formula stuff that we see so much. I don't like the "Hollywood mentality" of low common denominator thinking coming into the theater. I think it's going to kill it.

NR: Can you explain your duties as dialect coach?

DC: I was not able to do a very comprehensive job with this because I started late. The horse was well out of the barn, so the dialects are not consistent and they are not at all anything I'm proud of. In fact, I've had my name taken off.

I love to do it. It's something I really enjoy, and I have been inspired by a few people in my career - Tim Monick, another guy named Gordon Jacoby, who's now at Rutgers, I understand. It really gives you a way in to a character through your voice, which is also a physical way in. The voice is so physical. People don't realize how important the sound of the vowels are in terms of conveying emotion, something I learned doing a lot of Shakespeare. An old exercise when you're doing Shakespeare is to remove all the consonants from the line, and you play with just the vowels, and you can still feel the content of the line. That's the way Shakespeare used to write, that's the kind of dedication he had to the voice in the actor, and we need more of that.

NR: Since you play the only two historical characters in the show, did you do any research on them?

DC: Yeah, some. Not much. The Prince of Wales - not really because he didn't really fit what Nan (Knighton) had written. It's kind of a combination of the actual grandson of the Prince of Wales, historically speaking. And, of course, he's different now than he was when we started.

Robespierre is interesting though because he was a paranoid schizophrenic. We're going to try to play him for laughs, but it's pretty much pared down to simple exposition right now so there's not too much humor in him anymore. When we first started out we had a lot of fun with the paranoid schizophrenic aspect of it.

NR: Let's talk about that. How hard was it, because they changed your characters a lot? They took away your Fisherman.

DC: Yeah, I really don't like what happened with Robespierre in the first scene because they took away the way that Terry (Mann) and I had discovered we could play it. Terry said to me once, "I HATE this scene," and I said, "I know. It's not working." He said, "I just hate what I say to you. I just hate it" because he used to say all the things that the soldiers used to say. Remember Jeff (Gardner) and Eric (Timothy Eric Hart) used to say all those things? He used to say all of that and it made him look really stupid and cowering just before his big song. I said, "Well, what do you want to say to me?" and he said, "I don't want to say anything." I said, "Then don't. Point to the soldiers and let them talk. And then we'll see. We'll experience the paranoia of the time, of the Reign of Terror, and the fact that these soldiers are being political. They want to climb up by saying the right thing, and they'll stick their necks out, and you're not sticking your neck out at all. You're going to let them fry." And it really worked. I'll never forget the first night in front of an audience and we were really happy that it got laughs, because we weren't sure whether that scene was going to get laughs or not. When it got solid laughs we were really happy. Well, that's gone now, and that's a hard thing to let go, because it's the first thing I do in the show, and God knows I don't do much in the show anymore. My job used to be to make sure the audience knew the kind of humor we were going to be presenting to them, especially the verbal stuff, especially the more "sarcastic edge" stuff and audiences love it. They love to be allowed in to aspire to the ideas that we're trying to give them. They don't like to be shown everything on a plate, you know? They want to play too. And we used to let them play. We used to let them in more in good scenes like that, and I miss that.

NR: How about "Creation of Man?" Do you miss that?

DC: I think it's great. I think it's absolutely wonderful, and I love coming in after it now. I love coming in and just kind of cleaning up a little bit in a way. It's lots of fun.

NR: What about the Fisherman? We miss that.

DC: I miss the Fisherman. I didn't want to play the Fisherman to begin with. I said, "Peter (Hunt), I just want to play Robespierre and the Prince of Wales." He said, "No, you're going to play the Fisherman too." I said, "All right." And it became one of those....there were nights that it turned into the old Carol Burnett Show. With Terry with the gag and those big blue eyes of Terry's and Doug and I up there with Christine (Andreas), we used to have such a good time with that scene.

NR: You have so much more offstage time now. What do you do to fill the time?

DC: (James) Judy and I play cribbage.

NR: What's the best part of working on this show?

DC: Money.

NR: (laughing) OK, that's honest.

DC: The money's good. I love the people, don't get me wrong. I love working with Douglas and with all of them. It is a great bunch of people, and working in a first class Broadway show like this is a hoot. I say the money, flippantly, but of course the money's a part of it because you really get treated very well, money being one of those things, and it's nice to make a very decent living for a change. It's not what I set out to do. I didn't set out to make a good living in this business because you really can't as an actor. It's not what you do. I gave up Hollywood and television where the money is because I HATED it.

NR: Really? Why was that?

DC: You don't know when you're through working. People have to tell you when to go home. You don't know what you've achieved or not. You have no way of knowing whether you've done your job or not, and that is a very distressing thing. You know the expression, "There is no there there in LA" attributed to Gertrude Stein or Dorothy Parker or somebody? But it's exactly true. Nobody is committed to being there. They're there to make the money but they certainly wouldn't send their kids to school there, they certainly wouldn't put down roots there. When you get five or six million people thinking that thought, it's not a place any human being really wants to spend any time. There's nothing there. There really is no commitment there. And you do your job. My first director in television once told me, "All we really want to do is go home." What a scathing indictment that is! And it's true, so I went home. I came back here, and I'm really happy I did.

Interview conducted and photographs by Nancy Rosati.