On a rooftop in New York’s Greenwich Village, five friends and neighbors gather to celebrate a couple’s fifth wedding anniversary. As the conversation ebbs and flows, glimmers of other possibilities, hints of secret desires, reveal more about each character than they perhaps intend.

Outside a rehearsal hall at La Jolla Playhouse where five actors prepare to play those characters in Terrence McNally’s “Unusual Acts of Devotion,” the playwright said theater resembles the life his play depicts, “It’s a changing beast. Every day it’s different, like life. Every day it’s filled with surprises.”

The La Jolla production, a West Coast premiere that opened in previews on Tuesday, unfolds over one act instead of the two-with-intermission it had during its first staging at the Philadelphia Theater Company last October. But the script still conjures “the unusual acts of love that we all make,” said McNally. “Sometimes they’re misinterpreted. Sometimes they’re not wise because things done out of love are not necessarily the right thing to do. So it’s a kind of a meditation on that. “

The soft-spoken, blue-eyed McNally, looking younger than his 70 years, said the play is “very much about mortality and the fragility of life. There’s young couples just beginning their life together. There are middle-aged people who have had enormous difficulty establishing meaningful relationships. And then there’s an old lady that we don’t know much about. She’s near the end of her journey.”

The versatile Richard Thomas, who plays Chick in the play, “described the play as a nocturne. I think that’s about right,” McNally said.

Joining Thomas in the starry cast is Doris Roberts in the role of that mysterious old lady. Working with Roberts brings McNally full circle from her award-winning role in his early “Bad Habits” off-Broadway in 1974.

“That really put her on the map,” he said. “It was a play that got her a lot of attention. Then she got her TV series (playing the mother on ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’) and now walking with Doris is like walking with the Pope or Obama —- she’s that well-known: ‘Oh, there’s Marie!’”

Actor Harriet Harris, who plays neighbor Josie, agreed about veteran Roberts. “She is just so wonderful. It’s so much fun to watch her work and see what she comes up with in rehearsal. To say that she’s brilliant is such an understatement. “

McNally feels similar admiration for Harris, confiding, “I’ve never worked with a better actress than Harriet. She’s just amazing. She commits 110 percent. She’s uninhibited, bold and daring. She’ll try anything, and she makes it work.”

This is Harris’ third show at the Playhouse and her first dramatic role. She scored as the dastardly Mrs. Meers in the pre-Broadway “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (later winning a Tony Award for her portrayal) and as the Mamie Eisenhower-like mother in “Crybaby.” She’s also known for her role as Bebe, Frasier’s cutthroat agent, on the long-running TV show “Frasier.”

Harris said she’s always wanted to work with McNally and was thrilled to return to the Playhouse, where Christopher Ashley is artistic director. She credited Ashley with her breakthrough to big comic roles when he cast her in Paul Rudnick’s AIDS comedy, “Jeffrey” (1993).



But beyond Ashley’s role in her artistic career, she said, “He’s somebody you want to be around. He’s got a vision, he’s smart, he’s a great guy, an extremely generous man. He’s a great guy to have in charge.”

Harris’ character, Josie, has a long-term and loving relationship with her gay neighbor Chick (Richard Thomas). Josie has other issues, Harris said, “But tonight she’s drinking. She’s sublimating. She is really in trouble. She’s out of rehab, and there are many opportunities (in the script) to see what it might have been that sent her there. She’s angry and she’s volatile and she wants to have a good time, but it’s just not really possible.”

Every character on that rooftop, Harris said, has been given a complicated real life by McNally.

“There are moments when you can see who Josie might have been and how attractive in some ways she might have been, how much better her life would have been. She’s capable of moments of joy. So why is she in so much trouble?”

Without revealing too many of the details upon which the plot turns, she explained that Josie’s “relationship to Chick is really difficult. She loves him more than he loves her, as far as she is concerned. She wanted a life that he would have had to agree to and follow through on. He decided there was something else for him, even though they loved each other and didn’t love anybody else better.”

And summing up the playwright’s approach, Harris said that, despite the play’s dark humor, “there are pretty tough things happening that you want to see resolved. You want people to be whole at the end of the evening, but that’s not what Terrence wants to have happen.”

Guiding the production, which features a set by leading Broadway designer Santo Loquasto, is director Trip Cullman, who was in San Diego recently to stage a dazzling, energetic “Six Degrees of Separation” at the Old Globe.

Cullman, from the same younger generation as “Unusual” actors Maria Dizzia and Joe Manganiello, said he encouraged McNally to consider making the play a longer one-act, rather than taking an arbitrary intermission.

“Part of what’s extraordinary about the piece is that it takes place in one setting, the rooftop, and the action is all continuous. The tone is Chekhovian, with the action happening in real time before the audience’s eyes,” Cullman said.

Describing the play as “really beguiling and serious and kind of akin to later Ibsen plays like ‘When We Dead Awaken,’” Cullman said McNally has created “these extraordinary metaphysical, highly symbolic moments wedded to a hyper-realistic style.”

The script is elegiac, he said, written by an artist at a point when he is reflecting “about what his life has meant, the great joys that have followed him and the disappointments.”

Unlike “Some Men,” a play spanning the history of gay identity and which Cullman directed for McNally in New York, “Unusual Acts of Devotion” moves “beyond any labeling of sexual orientation. It’s about human beings and our deep need to connect with one another, to find meaning in our lives. To be able to have meaningful relationships —- and not hurt one another.”

The multigenerational cast includes rising young New York actress, Maria Dizzia, whom Cullman called “one of my muses.”

He said he’s having a great time working with the cast.

“They’re so real and so truthful and so honest onstage. They’re all of such a high caliber that it’s been easy for me. They’re gung-ho and willing to go to the darkest places in themselves so they can bring that to an audience.”

For playwright McNally, next up is “Catch Me If You Can,” his second musical with the Old Globe’s artistic director emeritus, Jack O’Brien. The show, McNally said, “reunites the ‘Hairspray’ gang, plus me.”

Several years after the first New York workshops, the movie-based musical begins rehearsals June 8 at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in Seattle, with Norbert Leo Butz (from the Globe-sprung “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”) in the lead and Tom Wopat (from the locally spawned “A Catered Affair”) as the father. Also cast: Kerry Butler from Christopher Ashley’s production of “Xanadu.”

“I really think the show is good, very exciting,” McNally said. “It just took us a long time to get everyone together at the same time and place. We lost Jack for a year to ‘Coast of Utopia,’” McNally said of the multiple Tony-winning Tom Stoppard trilogy at Lincoln Center.

(O’Brien will land in Seattle after three months in England prepping three different casts for three near-simultaneous openings in London, Toronto, and Shanghai of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to “Phantom of the Opera,” the Coney Island-set “Love Never Dies.”)

Then next year for McNally comes the world premiere of his big three-act historical play “Golden Age” about the quartet of brilliant singers that premiered Bellini’s “I Puritani.” That will open at the Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center along with revivals of his very different opera-themed hits, “Master Class” and “The Lisbon Traviata.”

But before all that, there’s the La Jolla run of “Unusual Acts of Devotion,” an experience McNally said will soon result in a “finished” play. “We began at Ojai (Playwrights Conference) last August with a brand new script in a reading/workshop. We did the production in Philadelphia and felt there was still work to be done to make it better.”

Professing satisfaction now with the ongoing creative process in La Jolla, he says, “I was so happy that Chris Ashley saw it in Philadelphia and loved it and said he wanted to open his season with it. I really feel this will be the definitive edition of the text and production.”

“Unusual Acts of Devotion”

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; 7 p.m. Sundays; through June 28

Where: Mandell Weiss Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse complex, UC San Diego, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla

Tickets: $30-$65

Phone: 858-550-1010

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