Live from Williamstown

'SNL' veteran Darrell Hammond to star in 'Beyond Therapy'

"Beyond Therapy" director Alex Timbers (center) with actors Darrell Hammond and Kate Burton during rehearsal for the Williamstown Theatre Festival production. (Elizabeth Lippman for The Boston Globe)

Darrell Hammond is nervous.

The stand-up comedian and "Saturday Night Live" veteran, best known for his sly impersonations of Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Al Gore, just looked at the resumes of his costars in the Williamstown Theatre Festival production of "Beyond Therapy."

They include TV and stage star Kate Burton ("Grey's Anatomy"), Tony winner Katie Finneran ("Noises Off"), and Broadway vet Matt McGrath, all led by the buzzed-about young director Alex Timbers.

"If I'd read those resumes before, I'm not sure I would have taken this job," Hammond says by phone from New York before a recent rehearsal. "But I guess Alex looked at my comparatively meager resume and figured I could do it."

The longest-running "Saturday Night Live" cast member considers his resume meager?

"Well, you know, I only have one Broadway credit," he says, "and that was a six-week run of 'The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee' last summer." Hammond played nerdy Vice Principal Panch, the man who chooses the words and the often comic definitions for the spellers in the William Finn/Rachel Sheinkin musical.

"I have the advantage of being blessed with a really good script and great supporting actors again," he says. "But I'm getting the same feeling I had last summer, when I'd wake up in the morning feeling good after a night's sleep, only to have a blade of terror cut through me when I think, 'How am I going to do this?' "

Christopher Durang's popular 1981 comedy, which starts previews in Williamstown on Wednesday, follows the awkward romance of two New Yorkers, Bruce and Prudence, who meet through a personals ad and may or may not be meant for each other. When they each turn to their decidedly twisted therapists for advice, complications ensue.

"I don't know that I've done any thing quite like this," says Hammond, who plays Prudence's therapist, Stuart, who's been trying to convince Prudence to sleep with him. "The action happens all over New York City and the changes are abrupt and incredibly fast. When you see it played in earnest, this is fabulous and so funny."

Timbers, a founding member and artistic director of the hip troupe Les Freres Corbusier, is best known for a distinctly downtown sensibility, as seen in such shows as the Obie Award-winning "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant." Just 29, Timbers says he was surprised that working with such a marquee cast on "Beyond Therapy" was so easy and ego-less.

"Darrell in particular has found a vulnerability to Stuart that I didn't expect," Timbers says. "This is one of the most produced plays in the modern theatrical canon, so I wondered if everyone involved would have preconceived notions of how to approach it. Instead, I've found a real commitment to digging into the characters."

Rehearsal time for Williamstown productions is limited, with the cast having just 2 1/2 weeks before the show opens. But Hammond says the time pressure is something he's gotten used to in his 13 years on "Saturday Night Live."

"One of the things I'm not sure people realize about 'SNL' is that we're really lucky if we have two days to prepare a character," says Hammond. "Sometimes we get an entire show on Thursday or even Friday night."

The difference with "Beyond Therapy," he says, is that the characters are developing over the course of the story. "Home plate is still the funny part," he says, "but getting to it is different in a play as opposed to doing stand-up or the sketch comedy of 'SNL.' There's a style to it, too. When I'm on 'SNL,' it's true there's an audience, but there's also a microphone. Last year [in 'Spelling Bee'], one of the first things they said is, 'You're acting like there's a camera. You have to join the rest of the cast, make it larger and louder without being artificial.' "

Timbers says his challenge as director is to connect the play's intimate, fast-paced scenes with "the electricity of the larger world outside these characters. In a way," he says, "it's like 'Sex and the City,' in that you always want to feel that the action is just a snapshot of one of many relationships going on throughout New York City."

At the Nikos Stage, Williamstown Theatre Festival, June 11-22. Tickets: $35-$37, 413-597-3400, wtfestival.org.

Notes
Ayla Brown, former "American Idol" contestant, daughter of Massachusetts state senator Scott P. Brown and WCVB-TV's Gail Huff, and a forward on the Boston College women's basketball team, will star as the narrator in the Reagle Players' production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," June 12-21. Tickets: $25-$49. 781-891-5600, reagleplayers.com. . . . The Robina Foundation has granted $2.85 million to support the Yale Center for New Theatre. Yale Repertory Theatre will, through the center, increase its commissions for new plays and musicals and support the playwrights through all phases of development. The gift includes a $600,000 production fund to support other non-for-profit theaters producing world premieres or second productions of plays commissioned by Yale Rep through the Center. Paula Vogel, recently appointed Eugene O'Neill professor and chair of playwriting at the School of Drama, will also serve as playwright-in-residence at Yale Rep.