‘Just put in the work’
After 50 years, actor Mark Linn-Baker continues to build on the good, the bad, and the best
The start of Mark Linn-Baker’s show business career seems like a series of good news-bad news jokes.
Good news: Fresh out of school, he lands a small role in a Joseph Papp Shakespeare in the Park production. And there’s more. Woody Allen decides to film the troupe and include it as a scene in his latest movie, “Manhattan.”
Bad news: Allen apparently didn’t like what he shot, refilmed it elsewhere, and cut the Papp players from the film.
Good news: He decides to keep a snippet to run with an opening montage, giving Linn-Baker about one second of screen time.
Bad news: Linn-Baker receives his first film credit — but it reads Mary Linn-Baker.
Despite that inauspicious start (and one more good/ bad news episode to come later), Linn-Baker has gone on to a solid career in film, in television, and on the stage.
He’s probably best known for his role as Larry Appleton (opposite Bronson Pinchot as Balki Bartokomous) in the ABC comedy “Perfect Strangers.” He also starred opposite Peter O’Toole in the well-received film “My Favorite Year,” and on Broadway in plays like “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”
He’s currently ensconced at New World Stages, playing the title role in Molière’s “The Imaginary Invalid.”
That was Molière’s last comedy. In fact, he died while acting in only its fourth performance, which should in no way reflect on the quality of the play — it’s very funny though it briefly runs off the track midway in the 90-minute show — and certainly not on Linn-Baker’s performance in this iteration of it.
The actor’s malleable face and impeccable timing mine every laugh out of his role as Argan, a hypochondriac so wrapped up in his perceived ailments that he fails to notice his new, young second wife plans to make off with his money.
Linn-Baker grew up in a suburb of Hartford, Conn. His father, William, was a copywriter, and his mother, Jane, worked in the insurance industry.
His parents’ marriage was a mixed one, but Linn-Baker points out, “You know my mother is Jewish. I think of myself as Jewish. I’m not an observant Jew. But there’s no escaping the fact that I’m Jewish.”
It seems obvious now looking at his punim and in the Jewish comic sensibilities he offers, even in French farces. But those are sensibilities he didn’t get to demonstrate until much later.
Both of his parents were active in community theater. In fact, they founded Open Stage, which Linn-Baker told me during our Zoom call was “a community theater company in Hartford that featured a mixed-race company and color-blind casting.”
It was also family-blind. Young Mark was never offered a role. “I didn’t act as a kid,” he said. “I did scut work. I hung the lights. I worked the light board.”
In fact, he entered Yale as a math major, switched to psychology, but eventually graduated as a drama major. He then received his master’s from the drama school there, before heading to the Big Apple.
Early on, he teamed with a fellow Yale alumnus, comedian Lewis Black — he was in the playwriting program when they met — in a comedy act called the “Laundry Hour.” It ran at Joe’s Pub, a small nightspot attached to the Public Theater in lower Manhattan, and, as Black told me, they were doing gonzo business.
Good news: “We had a great time,” Black added. “It was a lot of fun. We were getting the overflow from David Henry Hwang’s play [“M. Butterfly”], and Joe Papp was going to let us run.”
“We were doing great,” Linn-Baker echoed. “We went to Joe and said, ‘When do we open?’ He told us you don’t have to open. But we wanted to open. So we did.”
Bad news: On opening night, Linn-Baker continues, “the critics came and slaughtered us.” Adds Black: “That killed the show. We thought it would establish us. Ha ha ha. We learned that a bird in the hand…”
One thing it didn’t do was kill either of their careers. Black became one of the most successful touring comics in the business, and Linn-Baker seemed to be everywhere: on and off Broadway, in cinemas, and on TV. Then came the seven-year run of “Perfect Strangers.”
At the time, I said, your future must certainly have looked limitless. But now looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
“No,” he told me. “I was young.” He was in his early 20s. “I wanted to work. At that age, you have no perspective about the future. It’s all the present. You haven’t been alive long enough to imagine the future. I think part of what allowed me to move ahead so quickly is that I was naive, not having a plan. I was too young to know what possibilities there are. It was just doing the work as it came. Just doing what came next. And it kept coming, fortunately.”
It’s a mantra he repeats when asked to what he attributes his longevity and success: “The willingness to work. To put in the work.”
Just turned 71, he has no inclination to retire. “A dear friend once said to me, ‘I won’t decide to retire. Someone else will decide that for me.’ I still have a strong desire to work. I think I’ve got some work left in me.”
The play is slated to run through June 29. So what’s next? “A thing I’ve learned in 50 years of working is that whatever you think is coming next, that’s not what it is.”
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