Now 75, John Astin dates back to what you could call the old-fashioned days of television.
In terms of comedy, they were certainly what you could call — as the present era is not — a time of good, clean fun.
Astin is perhaps best remembered for “The Addams Family,” a ghoulish romp based on the cartoons of New Yorker master Charles Addams, which can still be seen with a lot of other delightful old stuff as reruns off in cableland.
The show premiered in 1964. There was another Astin series two years before called “I’m Dickens — He’s Fenster,” in which he and comic actor Marty Engels played carpenters.
I can still recall a scene in one of the episodes in which the one came to the other’s house for breakfast and asked his pal to pass the sugar. Instead, he got accusations that he was after the other’s job. Finally, after a hilarious contretemps, he succumbs, saying, “If your job is passing the sugar, then, yes, I’m after your job.”
Perhaps you had to be there, but I found it so funny I can still remember it.
“It was a great line,” said Astin, in a long and friendly chat last week. “The show was created by the writer of [Jackie Gleason’s] “The Honeymooners,” and written by the head writer for [Sid Caesar’s] “Your Show of Shows.”
Theater program
Now head of the new theater program at his alma mater, Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, Astin has a long succession of TV series under his belt, including the 1985 Mary Tyler Moore comeback “Mary,” as well as a weird assemblage of feature movies.
He also has been much on the stage, work that includes not only the comedic (Ken Ludwig’s “Lend Me a Tenor” for six months in Chicago) but his Edgar Allan Poe show (performed in Hal Holbrook/”Mark Twain” manner), which he does all over the country as well as on the January anniversary of his passing at the old church where Poe is peculiarly buried.
Astin is also performing in a new play, a farcical period comedy by Ludwig called “Leading Ladies,” which just opened at Washington’s Ford’s Theatre.
Audiences have been roaring, but the Washington Post critic was not so pleased.
“Ludwig possesses an uncanny ability to make new things seem old,” he wrote. “We’re headed back not only to more innocent times but also to the timeless comforts of untroubled America.”
What, asked Astin, is wrong with that?
“This show gets huge, huge laughs,” he said. “I brought some of my students to see it. They got a huge kick out of it.”
Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah Wilderness” is old-fashioned as well but still plays to happy audiences. “Lend Me a Tenor,” set before World War II, continues touring the country. Ludwig’s Broadway musical “Tom Sawyer” was derailed by critics as something of an anachronism — when it would have provided some good clean fun for tourists from elsewhere who came to New York in part just “to see a show,” and might not be interested in more cutting-edge fare.
Astin said he recognizes critics are just doing their job, but argues that might put them at cross purposes with the entertainment to be had.
“Being a critic is not an easy occupation, because the theater is an emotional experience not so different from a communion in the Catholic Church,” he said. “It’s a subjective exchange between performers and audiences. It is a kind of communion. When one comes in with a pad and pencil to observe it, there’s a danger that the critic isn’t participating in it. Instead of enjoying the experience, they look for something intellectual to write about.”
Ludwig concedes his work has an old-fashioned commonality but says he’s going to keep on writing that way.
More Top Picks Hoverboard
“I just sit down, keep my head down and write,” he said. “I love to write. I try to do the best work I can and make people happy. I want my plays to be done and let the chips fall where they may.”
Still a player
His plays continue to be done. His comedy “Shakespearean in Hollywood” will open in Philadelphia as a Christmas show. He is at work on a stage version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” and the Gershwin estate has commissioned him to do a stage adaptation of the hardly cutting-edge “An American in Paris.”
To Astin, there is something in this that reminds him of the deterioration of network television since the good clean fun days of yore.
“Ken’s plays remind me of some of the funnier comedies we had in the ’60s,” he said. “I don’t think they’re testing the audience.”
———-