‘I have a little present for you,” producer Robyn Goodman told director Moisés Kaufman and playwright Rajiv Joseph. “Robin said yes!”
The play was “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” a Pulitzer Prize runner-up Goodman hoped to bring to Broadway. But a drama about the Iraqi war featuring an anthropomorphic tiger was a tough sell without a major star. The moment she read the play, she knew the one she wanted: Robin Williams.
“I called his manager and he said his wife liked the play when she saw it in Los Angeles,” Goodman recalls. “I made the offer, and [Williams] accepted right away. Usually you have to wait a year for a star.”
Williams, who died this week, was known mostly for his movies and stand-up. But he began his career in the theater as an acting student at Juilliard, where he and Christopher Reeve became best friends. Though Williams appeared here only in two plays — Lincoln Center’s “Waiting for Godot” in 1988 and 2011’s “Tiger” — Goodman says there’s no question that, had depression and addiction not waylaid him, he would have done more theater.
“There was a very serious side to him as an actor,” she says. “This was, after all, an opaque play, and not many big stars would have taken a chance on it. But he loved it, and he was absolutely committed to it.”
So committed, in fact, that he dispensed with his usual bag of tricks — funny voices, improvs — and approached the role intellectually.
“He didn’t use his funny bone until the very end,” Goodman says. “He wanted to know what Rajiv was thinking when he wrote certain scenes . . . At one point, Moisés said he thought Robin should bring some more humor to a section of the play. I said, ‘You have to liberate him.’ Once he realized there were places he could make the tiger humorous, he was off.”
The play received mixed reviews, as did his performance, under Mike Nichols’ direction, in “Waiting for Godot.”
But Williams didn’t dwell, at least openly, on other people’s judgments. “He just made a joke, and moved on,” Goodman says. “He loved being part of the company, and he became close to everyone in the theater — everyone — the actors, the stagehands, the ushers, the box office staff. Everybody in the theater got an opening-night gift.”
He often took the cast out after the show for drinks at Bar Centrale, where Goodman says he never drank anything harder than club soda. His sense of being part of a company of actors extended to his contract. He didn’t receive the usual $100,000-a-week star salary because he knew the play, even with him in it, would be a tough sell.
The only thing he ever asked for was a masseuse.
“I recommended someone, and waited for the bill,” Goodman says. “It never came.”