in Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, Broadway Bound
and Laughter on the 23rd Floor on Broadway, and
tours with the entire Simon trilogy —Brighton Beach
Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound.
"Neil Simon is a very hands-on person," says
Birkenhead, who first understudied the roles of Eu-
gene and Stanley for Jonathan Silverman and Jason
Alexander in the original touring company of Broad-
way Bound. He later took over the part of Stanley from
Alexander, playing it for a year on the road.
"We got new pages every single day when we were
out of town," Birkenhead says. "Neil Simon likes to
quote Mark Twain: 'You have to be willing to mur-
der your darlings,' referring to your favorite lines.
And he's ruthless in that way with himself. It's a
wonderful thing to watch because he values econo-
my and function over everything, so there's no burn-
ing fat."
Pre-Simon, Birkenhead jump-started his career at
age 10, when his father ran the Cape Cod Melody Tent
summer theater for a few years.
"The theater was used as a church on Sundays
where the Kennedys attended," remembers Birken-
head. "It was pretty weird because they'd be having
mass on the set of Man of La Mancha.
"So when I was a kid, I auditioned for one of these
summer stock productions that toured the Cape Cod
area, and I was in Mame with Elaine Stritch, and
the next year I did Sound of Music with Jane Pow-
ell. And then I hit puberty, so I quit, because it wasn't
a cool thing to do — it was a sissy thing to do — so
I went home and stopped and didn't start again 'til
college."'
Birkenhead's first year was at the University of Col-
orado, and then he moved on to New York Universi-
ty, where he would major in political science and
religious philosophy before quitting in the middle of
his senior year to become an actor.
"Everybody moved into the theater when I left
home," he laughs.
Birkenhead's brother Richard is a rock `11' roll song-
writer and performer in the band Into Another, his
sister works for the Writer's Guild in New York and
his brother David is a policeman on Long Island.
"He's the only conservative in the family, and we
have lots of fun fights about politics," jokes Birken-
head. "I'm the only one of my siblings without a tat-
too."
Birkenhead's father, a former professor of econom-
ics at Brooklyn College, is now a theatrical general
manager; his mother, Susan Birkenhead, is a lyricist,
whose musical score for Jelly's Last Jam was nomi-
nated for a Tony Award in 1992.
"A Jewish woman who wrote this black show," ex-
claims Birkenhead.
'We've been talking about Jelly's Last Jam and
Goodnight Irene a lot lately. Obviously, she was dis-
tinctly in the minority in that process and that was
an interesting thing for her. She's a big fan of Good-
night Irene; she's seen two readings of it at the Man-
hattan Theatre Club (where the play was first
commissioned in 1993 with a grant from the Nation-
al Foundation for Jewish Culture), and she thinks
that the most important part is the story of black/Jew-
ish relations as told in a microcosm kind of way in the
play."

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ccording to playwright Ari
Roth, Peter Birkenhead just
walked in off the street to au-
dition for the role of Josh in
Roth's award-winning Oh,

The Innocents in 1990.
After that, the two became fast friends.
"That was a play where, in a way, I discovered a
voice that I had which was
sardonic, laconic, and pas-
sionate and confused, and
intellectual and full of de-
nial," Roth says about
Birkenhead and his char-
acter Josh, a 28-year-old
single man caught up in
the relationship throes of
his best friend and his wife.
"It was just a kind of neu-
rotic, vibrant kind of ex-
pression that Peter could
do immediately. His sense
of rhythm and tempo and
complexity were uncanny
— exactly what I wanted
... For this playwright, at
least, if you can find an ac-
tor who sings the words
the way you compose
them, it's really a gift, and
you want to hold tight to
those people."
Following Oh, The Inno-
cents, Roth's next play,
Born Guilty — an adapta-
tion of Peter Sichrovsky's
interviews with the chil-
dren of Nazi war criminals
in Germany — premiered at the Arena Stage in
Washington, D.C. It was subsequently produced off-
Broadway at the American Jewish Theatre and then
on to Chicago where it ran for seven months.
It was at the Arena Stage when Roth first met
Gilbert McCauley, who would eventually direct Good-
night Irene with Birkenhead as the lead.

The production team was nearly complete.
The first reading of Goodnight Irene, which Roth
started writing in Israel while there for a 10-month
stay, took place in the winter of 1994; the play was
four acts at the time. Following the end of the An-
gels in America tour in December of '95, Birkenhead
joined Roth and McCauley in New York and re-
worked the show down to two acts. McCauley and
Roth met one more time
in March for final tweak-
ings.
Roth, a lecturer in the
English and theater de-
partments at the Universi-
ty of Michigan, approached
Johanna Broughton, exec-
utive director of the Perfor-
mance Network, to produce
his play.
"I had been an admir-
er of her theater's scrap-
piness and ambition, and
they had a very eclectic
repertoire," says Roth,
who graduated from U-M
in 1992. "I thought that
the Performance Network
provided a really good ser-
vice to Ann Arbor, and so
I called her up and told
her, 'I like the work you
do.'
"The first thing I said
was that I could only
launch it for its very first
production with my very
trusty collaborators,
PHOTO BY GLENN TRIEST
Gilbert and Peter, and I
wouldn't feel very comfortable entrusting the mate-
rial to people who had no history with the play or
with my work," he says. "And much to her surprise
and mine, Jo said yes and committed herself to a
very ambitious undertaking for such a small theater
(about 120 seats)."
Tonight, the curtain goes up on that undertaking