A template for the new woman
Playwright celebrates two extraordinary friends in 'Bookends'
BY TOM CHESEK
Correspondent

Katharine Houghton

Katharine Houghton has had the honor of knowing some extraordinary women in her time, many of them no further away than her own formidable family tree.

For instance, her grandmother, the ardent suffragist and philanthropist Katharine Houghton Hepburn, was instrumental in founding Planned Parenthood with Margaret Sanger in the 1950s.

And then there was her aunt, the dynamic, iconic Katharine Hepburn, alongside whom she starred in 1967's Best Picture, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" Although she has expressed some disappointment over the excising of a key scene (in which her character, "Joey," defends her relationship with her black fiancé to her supposedly liberal dad), Houghton remains "very proud" of that movie debut, one in which she kept pace with such screen heavyweights as Aunt Kate, Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier and director Stanley Kramer.

While she has remained intermittently visible on film (most recently in "Kinsey" starring Liam Neeson, with whom she also appeared in "Ethan Frome"), it's on the stage that Houghton the actress has turned in her most acclaimed work, with a lauded performance in the 1969 "Scent of Flowers," and a portfolio of leads in classics by the likes of Shakespeare ("Taming of the Shrew," "The Merchant of Venice"), Chekhov ("Uncle Vanya," "The Seagull") and Ibsen ("A Doll's House").

As Houghton relates in a recent e-mail interview:

"I kept getting offered fabulous roles in the burgeoning regional theaters, and so I decamped from Hollywood to play over 50 leading roles in the classics.

"It was my destiny, I think, to be a stage, rather than a film, actress, if there is such a thing as destiny."

Along the way, the actress evolved into the playwright, having penned numerous award-winning shorts and full-length plays, among them "Merlin," "Mortal Friends," a translation of Anouilh's "Antigone," and "Best Kept Secret," an autobiographical study of a 1960s love affair with a Soviet artist.

The author shared her "Secret" on the stage of New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch with a 2001 reading and, beginning this weekend, Houghton returns to NJ Rep for the fully staged, world premiere engagement of "Bookends," her first long-form musical endeavor and a labor of love that has its roots in an extraordinary relationship.

Featuring songs by the composing team of Dianne Adams and James McDowell, "Bookends" is a melodic meditation on the long professional partnership and enduring friendship of two real-life women, Madeleine "Mady" Stern and the late Leona Rostenberg.

Houghton made the acquaintance of the noted rare-book dealers while researching her own narrated presentation on the life and work of "Little Women" author Louisa May Alcott, and immediately became intrigued by these energetic, educated New York originals, then approaching their 90s and marking more than a half-century of shared business and adventures.

While an all-singing, all-dancing musical about elderly antiquarian booksellers might seem at first like something out of Max Bialystock's playbook, Houghton sets the action at various times in her subjects' lives, from their days growing up in strict German-Jewish families to their debates over retirement.

A colossal (by local professional standards) cast of 14 is headed by Rep regulars Susan G. Bob and Kathleen Goldpaugh as the adult Mady and Leona, and features Jenny Vallancourt, a young performer who made a big impression in NJ Rep's "October 1962" earlier this season.

"If you had known Mady and Leona in their 90-year-old prime, you would understand why we are not playing them as old ladies," Houghton explains. "They were ageless, unique, and to play them as old ladies would be a travesty.

"I was less interested in my relationship with the ladies and more interested in their lives as a template for the 'new woman,' a creature Mother Nature has been striving to create since Mary Wollstonecraft blasted the old female paradigms," the author continues. "We're not there yet, but we've made progress, and Rostenberg and Stern are a major example of these advancements."

Directing "Bookends" is a man with whom Houghton has maintained her own long-term personal and professional partnership, Ken Jenkins, Houghton's husband of 37 years and a newly minted household name, thanks to his role as Dr. Bob Kelso on the hit NBC TV series "Scrubs."

While the 66-year-old actor has plenty of good things to say about the popular vehicle that's garnered him instant recognition from teenage fans, "Bookends" remains a project with which he has been personally engaged from the outset, and the latest chapter in an ongoing collaboration that has taken the two dedicated stage pros to some pretty amazing places.

As Houghton says of Jenkins, whom she first met and worked with when she was 23, "He taught me everything I know about acting in the old days, and any young actor who works with him is bound to benefit from his almost 50 years of nonstop experience in the theater.

"Ken directed my first play, and we have acted together on many occasions - brother and sister in 'The Glass Menagerie,' father and daughter in 'Major Barbara,' loving adversaries in 'The Taming of the Shrew,' and on and on."

An important early project for Houghton and Jenkins was their formation of Pilgrim Repertory Company, a federally funded traveling troupe that brought live theater to Appalachia and other rural areas underserved by arts organizations, an endeavor she likens to "arts missionary work."

"We performed in log cabins, in fields and forests, in insane asylums; 'Richard III' was a great favorite in the latter," Houghton recalls. "It was thrilling … a trial by fire."

Having determined that her "Bookends" project might work well in musical form, Houghton "found my sound" and forged a new and productive partnership when she happened to attend a Broadway adaptation of the children's classic "The Wind in the Willows" scored by the team of Adams and McDowell.

"I didn't want the music to be rock, pop or too intellectual," explains the playwright, who contributed lyrics in addition to the show's book. "I wanted the music to seduce the heart and amuse the soul."

"Bookends"

A musical by Katharine Houghton,

Dianne Adams and James McDowell

Thursday, July 19, at 8 p.m.;

Friday, July 20, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.

(previews $30);

Saturday, July 21, at 8 p.m.

(opening night with reception $50); Sunday, July 22, at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. ($40),

then Thursdays-Sundays until Aug. 26.

New Jersey Repertory Company, 179 Broadway, Long Branch.

Ticket reservations: (732) 229-3166