Chris Domig is ready to throw in the towel.
After a year and a half of searching, a church chapel in Gramercy Park was the only affordable space Domig, the artistic director of the Off Off Broadway company Sea Dog Theaterhas found to mount a production of “Tuesday With Morrie.” The seats need to be fixed to a set of altar risers. The props are a piano, a pair of chairs, a walker and a wheelchair.
The company has almost no advertising budget.
But it has Len Cariou, an elder statesman of the theater who in 1979 won a Tony Award for the origin of the role of Sweeney Todd on Broadway. He will play Morrie, a former sociology professor who, after receiving a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, reconnects with one of his students in what becomes a series of weekly meetings.
Cariou, also known for his appearances in musicals such as “A Little Night Music” and “Applause,” took on the character of Morrie after reading Mitch Albom’s 1997 memoir on which the 2002 play was based.
“I said, ‘Someday, I want to play that part,'” Cariou, 84, said last month in a joint interview with Domig in St. George’s Episcopal Church, where the recently extended “Tuesdays With Morrie” is set to run through April 20. “It’s a wonderful role in a show that asks, ‘What if despair and death aren’t the end? What if there’s something else?’”
But one big hurdle remained, Domig said: How could they finish the play with so few props?
Cariou didn’t miss.
“Len was like, ‘You know, we don’t need any of this,'” Domig said. “’We can make this a memory play that takes place in Morrie’s mind.’”
That attitude is typical of Cariou, says Erwin Maas, the director of “Tuesdays With Morrie” and Cariou’s longtime friend and neighbor in West New York, N.J. “He doesn’t need a big theater or a feeling that has any thing beneath him,” Maas said in a recent phone conversation. “What drives him is a passion for work.”
In his more than six-decade stage and screen career, Cariou also played the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law in the 2015 film “Spotlight,” and, for 14 seasons and counting, played the former New York City Police commissioner on CBS’s “Blue Bloods.”
But the challenge of playing Morrie is that it’s not a role that can be easily left at the stage door every night. Many older actors, Domig says, can be reluctant to wrestle with a subject — facing the end of life with grace — that can hit a little too close to home.
But for Cariou? “It’s easy,” he said.
“Like what Morrie says in the play when he hears he has ALS,” he continued. “He said, ‘I asked myself, am I going to leave the world, like many people do, or am I going to live?’ And he decided, ‘I will live as long as I am left.’ And that’s pretty much what I do.”
Domig, who plays Morrie’s former student, Mitch, opposite Cariou every night, just shook his head.
“It was a brave performance,” he said. “Len is not afraid to say, ‘Let’s see where it lives with me.’”
After re-reading the play during the pandemic, Domig said, he was struck by its rawness and frankness. He enlisted Cariou and Maas in 2022 for the first one-night reading of the play in a church basement.
About 60 people sat in folding chairs in the basement of the church, with Cariou and his wife supplying wine for the reception afterwards. “Everyone was in tears at the end,” Domig said. “I had someone say to me, ‘You should do this play as a production.’”
Asking Cariou — who shoots scenes for “Blue Bloods” during the day — to do an evening reading is one thing, but enlisting him for a full run is another. (Dominig knew, he said, that whatever he could pay Cariou for an Off Off Broadway production wouldn’t compare to a TV contract — but that didn’t seem to matter. “We wrote him a check for $100 for the reading,” said Domig. “But in the end, he didn’t cash in.”)
Plus, Domig knew he had something special on his hands — and hopefully Cariou thought so, too. He asked.
And Cariou said: Yes.
He was not, it turned out, dissuaded by the play’s frank discussion of death – even as a man himself in his twilight years.
“You will fight the question of age,” he said. “Morrie was in his 70s when this happened, so I said, ‘Well, then I’ll be in my 70s.’ That’s what you should tell yourself.”
Nor was he fazed by requests to stay on stage for the entirety of a 90-minute show, six times a week, while raging, screaming, sobbing, falling off his wheelchair and inhabiting the body of a man suffering from progressive respiratory failure.
“I find it empowering,” Cariou said. “The muscles you have to make a play are the ones you have to use. It’s like when Morrie said about having ALS: When your muscles don’t get the message, they wither and die. I’m sure the message will reach me.”
Domig interjected: “There were days when he was on set for ‘Blue Bloods,’ and then he would come and do this show. He has incredible strength and stamina — he worries about my energy and whether I’m getting enough sleep!”
Cariou’s commitment to his craft comes as no surprise to his former “Sweeney Todd” castmate Victor Garber, who, along with Angela Lansbury, appeared with Cariou in the original Broadway production.
“Being in the rehearsal room with Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury; I could not imagine anything greater,” said Garber, 75, in a telephone conversation. “Watching Len and Angela do “A Little Priest” at the end of the Act will never be equaled.”
“Len is a consummate artist; he lives and eats and breathes it,” he added. “Fortunate for New York that he’s doing this.”
“Tuesdays With Morrie” sold out the final 11 performances of its original three-week run, and the first show of its extension.
“We had quite a few young people in the audience, and I think they were surprised at how much it resonated with them,” Cariou said. “And so are their parents, the elders. They remember a mentor or a teacher they grew up with who influenced or inspired them, and who, like Mitch, they may never see again.
Others, however, who had read the book, Domig said, told him they were worried about watching the show, either because they had recently lost a loved one or because someone close to them had going through a similar struggle.
“Yes, the man dies at the end every night,” Domig said he told them. “But the way he went on that journey — the resilience and joy and encouragement and hope along the way — it doesn’t get more important than that.”
The show is slated to run for a few more weeks, though Domig hopes that may not be the end of its life.
“We’re happy to do it as long as people show up,” he said. “And if I can somehow think of a Broadway transfer …”
Well, it’s okay with Cariou.
“I’ll play as hard as I can, as long as I can,” he said.
