TO paraphrase a line from the movie “Stand by Me,” could James Bond beat up Wolverine? Or would the “X-Men” mutant’s metal claws dice 007’s Brioni suits faster than he could say “shaken, not stirred”?

Rarely do fans have the thrill of seeing two of their favorite testosterone-charged action heroes square off. But Daniel Craig (Mr. Bond) and Hugh Jackman (Mr., well, just Wolverine) are offering a variation on that theme on Broadway this month in “A Steady Rain,” a dark portrait of two Chicago cops whose close friendship corrodes from suspicion, betrayal and lethal rivalry.

Be forewarned: The death match between the two characters is fought more with words than bullets or blades. Yet the two actors, during a recent interview over lunch, facetiously sought to reassure their admirers (men and women alike) of at least a little blow-’em-up-and-beefcake.

“There’s one mud-wrestling scene between us, yes, but I’m afraid that’s all we can offer,” Mr. Jackman said, deadpan.

“And there’s one explosion — medium-big, pretty impressive,” Mr. Craig added.

“And a few cars crashes,” Mr. Jackman said.

“And Hugh of course flies onto the stage.”

Enormous expectations have awaited “A Steady Rain,” which was originally produced by Chicago Dramatists in 2007 and began previews at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Thursday, starting with curiosity about the chemistry between the two stars. “That was the biggest unknown for me,” the playwright, Keith Huff, said.

But not unlike Mighty Mouse and Superman, the two superheroes that the boys in “Stand by Me” imagined trading blows, Mr. Jackman and Mr. Craig seem too upstanding, too cheerful, too nice to brawl. Just a few minutes into an hourlong lunch at their rehearsal studio in Brooklyn it’s clear that they have developed the sort of finish-each-other’s-sentence rapport that comes from long days of rehearsing broken up by Ping-Pong and catch. During the interview Mr. Jackman thumped a baseball on the floor repeatedly as he listened to Mr. Craig. When Mr. Jackman spoke, Mr. Craig would nod frequently and often follow up with comments to underscore his fellow actor’s viewpoints.

While Mr. Craig, 41, is making his Broadway debut, Mr. Jackman, 40, who won the Tony Award for best actor in a musical in 2004 as the showman Peter Allen in “The Boy From Oz,” knows that audience members can have a hard time separating the actors from their film roles as mythical crusaders.

“During ‘The Boy from Oz’ there was one scene when I was kissing Jarrod, who played my boyfriend, and an audience member yelled, ‘Don’t do it Wolverine!’ ” Mr. Jackman said with a laugh. “I lost it. I literally lost it. The whole audience loved it. I mean, you can’t deny Wolverine.

“That’s part of the fun, though, seeing the different reactions you get from an audience every night, something I miss when I do films. Another night during ‘Oz,’ there was a woman who all of a sudden started running down the aisle —— ”

Mr. Craig yelled, “Take your pants off!,” mimicking the female fan.

“She took her top off,” Mr. Jackman said. “She was right on the edge of the orchestra pit, right over the violin section. She had the biggest chest I ever saw.”

If the campy fun of “A Boy From Oz” might have helped stir a streaker to action, “A Steady Rain” is so dark, so serious, that such spontaneous outbursts seem unlikely. The two-character play starts with a bloody explosion and through its 90 intermissionless minutes turns more intense only as the camaraderie of the cops falls to pieces.

“There’s an immediacy and directness to the way this play grabs you, as if around the throat, that is compelling to say the least,” John Crowley, the director, said. “And for it to succeed, the play requires two actors who can act not only emotionally but also with their head — who understand what’s required for two characters to tell a story of their own unraveling. And these two have it in spades.

“I think both Hugh and Daniel are artistically ambitious enough not to be defined by their film work,” Mr. Crowley continued. Asked if either star had picked up bad acting tics or habits from their years on movie sets, he replied: “I think they would acknowledge that some of their film work isn’t the most demanding. But they brought nothing into the room in terms of Hollywood rubbish.” He did note, however, that he chose to rehearse the play on a film lot in Brooklyn to escape “any potential hoopla from the guys’ fans.”

The production grew out of Mr. Craig’s desire to perform in a new piece of writing on the London stage. A veteran theater actor, Mr. Craig played the central role of Joe Pitt, the closeted Mormon lawyer, in the seven-hour “Angels in America” production at the National Theater in London in the early 1990s and starred in “A Number” by Caryl Churchill in 2002. After reading “A Steady Rain,” Mr. Craig said he knew he wanted to do the play and also knew that, rather than playing the flashier alpha-male role of Denny, he wanted the role of his best friend and fellow cop, Joey, an emotionally damaged, romantically wary, recovering alcoholic Irish-American.

“There is layer after layer after layer to this guy,” Mr. Craig said. “He is quite far from the perfect-in-every-way hero.”

Mr. Craig quickly turned to his “boss,” Barbara Broccoli, the producer of the Bond films, who also produced “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” on Broadway in 2005. They brought the project to Mr. Crowley, the director, who in turn suggested Mr. Jackman for the role of Denny.

Mr. Jackman said he was also gripped by the play — “I’d been wanting to do a new, thought-provoking straight drama for a while now” — but couldn’t see himself performing in London anytime soon because he and his family had just moved to Manhattan, where his children started school this month. Broadway suited his logistics perfectly, and soon Mr. Craig was headed to America.

The two actors spent a week with police officers in Chicago, interviewing them about their lives walking a beat and visiting some of the more crime-ridden neighborhoods in the city, some of which are mentioned in the play.

“Driving from one tough street to another, we got a sense of the challenges that cops faced and how they have to make a potentially life-or-death decision based on instincts,” Mr. Craig said. “What I really wanted was a sense of how these guys defend themselves against the dangers in their lives. And we also kept asking the question to cops: ‘How do you relax? How do you relax?’ Very few cops could answer that.”

Mr. Jackman, whose character in the play has not only a volatile temper but also a family that is torn apart by his police work, said he particularly pressed Chicago officers to open up about how their jobs affected their private lives and relationships.

“The cops were totally transparent about the realities of crime and street gangs,” Mr. Jackman said. “Their attitude was: ‘Gangs have been here since the start of America. They’re not going away. So the question is: How do you manage it?’ ”

“A Steady Rain” was a particularly personal work for Mr. Huff, the playwright, who married into a police family. His father-in-law and brother-in-law were both Chicago policemen, and they had differing opinions about the morality and ethics of police work.

“My father-in-law was a cop during some of the most corrupt years of Chicago, and yet he always defended the ethical and most morally righteous points of view of law enforcement,” Mr. Huff said. “My brother-in-law saw the world as more complicated, a lot more gray areas.”

As for the complications of the play itself — in which the two men largely deliver alternating monologues about events, particularly a brutal crime that helps sunder their friendship — both men described the rehearsal process as unusually exhausting. Mr. Crowley devoted the first week or so to the process that the actors called “actioning” — when they all went through every sentence in the play to discuss the intention behind each line.

“It was like going back to school,” Mr. Craig said. “But John was adamant about it, and he was right. It’s a very complicated play, and to have that grounding is essential for our confidence.”

The two actors ended up getting baseball mitts and going outside on nice days to run lines with each other while playing catch. They also began playing Ping-Pong together in their rehearsal area, less as a drill to accompany their line readings than to boost their energy in the afternoons on long rehearsal days. Both men seemed to have adrenaline to spare, perhaps not surprising for Wolverine and James Bond.

“There is one scene that is very tricky, a complicated scene emotionally and a lot of broken dialogue,” Mr. Crowley said. “I told them we had to speed run it” — meaning, fire off each line quickly to accustom them to the choppy sentence structure — “and at the end of the day they wanted to do the scene one more time.”

While Mr. Craig has another Bond film ahead of him shortly, Mr. Jackman is developing the musical “Carousel” into a new movie and said he would also love to do an original musical. As a full-time resident of Manhattan he has been on a steady diet of New York theater, he said, recently seeing “Mary Stuart,” “Blithe Spirit,” “Next to Normal” and “Twelfth Night.” And his face lighted up, with a smile that you would not expect from Wolverine, at the prospect of adding this new play to the mix on Broadway.

“No special effects supporting us, no sound track,” Mr. Jackman said as Mr. Craig nodded. “This is going to be hard work. If the audience wants to see us sweat a little bit, they’ll go away happy.”

Источник: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/theater/13heal.html