Jason Alexander Interview Part 2: On 'Seinfeld' and Spit Takes

During with Jason Alexander for his l performance of The Prisoner of Second Avenue, we started reminiscing about Seinfeld. He’d filmed the legendary sitcom at the CBS Radford Studios. 

His skills are even more evident when you see him perform live on stage. As audiences laugh at Neil Simon’s words, Alexander continues to move the play along with gestures and repeating dialogue. He even gets soaked when an upstairs neighbor dumps water on his character from above stage. This weekend is your last chance to see this at El Portal.

Here’s where he realized we were really talking about Seinfeld.

PATCH: I’m sure everyone still asks, were you happy with the Seinfeld finale?

JASON ALEXANDER: You want to do Seinfeld, okay. [Laughs] Yeah, I was but that doesn’t mean anything. I was happy with it for purely emotional reasons. They found an organic way to reunite most of the actors, the wonderful actors who had come through and been so meaningful to the joy and to the success of the show. Larry found a way to organically bring them all back. For me, it was great. I can’t tell you whether or not the story was good, bad or indifferent or the script. I’m well aware most people think it was an underwhelming finale, and okay.

PATCH: Do you ever catch one on TV and go, “I don’t remember that one?”

ALEXANDER: I mean, I don’t tend to watch them. I don’t watch a lot of TV so I don’t bump into them that often. I have the DVDs but they’re not in the DVD player. It’s a little bit like having to watch your home movies. I can tell you that every fan knows more about the show than I do at this point, about the on screen stuff. I don’t have a clear memory of most of the episodes. I kind of remember the more famous ones but some of the week to week ones, I just couldn’t tell you what storyline went with what or what exactly I was doing. I haven’t revisited them for a while.

PATCH: I’m more surprised that many of the actors I’ve spoken do remember every episode of a show they were on for 10 years or more.

ALEXANDER: That’s fascinating because the ones that I’ve met that have done a long running series, they don’t tend to remember in my experience.

PATCH: What were your favorite places in the area when you spent so many years here?

ALEXANDER: The truth is we didn’t venture out much during our work day. My trainer who I’ve been with for 14 years is in Valley Village so that was always a big pit stop for me. There’s a wonderful little place that we sometimes took out for lunch called The Wine Bistro right on Ventura, I think a little bit to the east or south of Radford. They used to have a great Manhattan Bagel place right in the little mini-mall and we’d get over to The Daily Grill and things like that. The truth is, I went to that area to work and then I got out and came home.

PATCH: Have you discovered any spots in North Hollywood?

ALEXANDER: Yeah, actually l has been a great little place for us.  bar and grill right across the street from the theater is lovely. is right there and my kids, there’s a wonderful martial art and gymnastics facility a block down on Lankershim called . It stands for Extreme Martial Arts where my kids have been training for years. I’ve just done a little further exploring of that neighborhood but we’ve been kinda headed out there for the last four or five years.

PATCH: Did Seinfeld afford you the ability to do a lot more theater?

ALEXANDER: Yeah, yeah. I don’t have to worry about paying the bills which is a nice thing. Very few people are really able to make a substantial living in the theater so it’s much easier to take these jobs and pursue these things if you don’t have to worry about where your next rent check is coming from.

PATCH: Do you have tricks to keep the show moving through the laughter and applause?

ALEXANDER: Every piece of material has a sort of premium tempo. Good writers, and I think Neil Simon is an outstanding writer, but all prolific writers I think have a certain music and rhythm to their writing. Tennessee Williams does, Shakespeare does, Lanford Wilson does, certainly Neil Simon does. Almost any notable writer you can think of has a certain musicality to the way they write. Neil’s stuff tends to work best, because he tends to write people who begin and end in some sort of crisis. It has a tempo to it and if you duck under that tempo, first of all you lose some of the comedy, but you lose the reality of the situations. For Mel, at the beginning of the play he’s fighting a ticking clock. He feels like the world is closing in on him, he’s going to lose his job and things are going wrong. It’s late at night, he has to go to work the next day and everything’s bothering him so there’s a tempo to it all. Now, aside from that, yes, I think any experienced actor worth his salt has a kind of internal director where you are feeling your relationship with the audience. There are some audiences that need you to slow the material down in order to get it and there are some that if you don’t pace it up, they’re going to be miles ahead of you. You have to be able to feel and lead your audience to see where their sort of communal sense of humor is for that performance and do your best to play to that audience. That’s kind of one of the joys of doing theater is that no two audiences are really exactly alike.

PATCH: Taking the bucket of water, how do you not expect it night after night?

ALEXANDER: It’s hard to not expect it because you definitely see it coming. It’s fascinating. It’s quite shocking when it happens because even though they fill the bucket with warm water, by the time they get it to me it’s cooled off. The truth is that the amount of water it takes to really make the effect funny requires that I really can’t breathe for a second or two because it’s full on in your face. I’m sure if you were standing right next to me, you would see a momentary flinch just before it hits me, but from the first row back, you’re not going to see that flinch. In some ways it’s very refreshing. In other ways it’s very daunting. This play ran on Broadway I think for two to three years. Guys like Peter Falk and Hector Elizondo and Jerry Stiller did this role. They had to take one for the team much more than I’m going to have to take.