SETTING THE STAGE

Before they conquered Hollywood, George Segal, Peter Falk, Roy Scheider, and Wayne Rogers were some of the finest-though perhaps not the finest-stage actors in New York. WAYNE LAWSON, who knew them when, revisits a golden era that revolutionized American theater

- WAYNE LAWSON

PEOPLE ARE SURPRISED WHEN I TELL THEM PETER FALK WAS MY ROOMMATE IN NEW YORK 65 YEARS AGO.

They are even more surprised when I say that Falk was not the only one in our circle of friends to attain stardom; so did George Segal, Roy Scheider, and Wayne Rogers. What still surprises me, though, is that those four weren't necessarily the ones I assumed might become Hollywood giants. Looking back, I realize what a watershed moment in the American theater I was able to witness, surrounded by hugely talented, wildly ambitious, and often tragically flawed individuals.

Watching their old films today, I can clearly remember them in their 20s and early 30s, when they were just ordinary people, and we were all young nobodies.

ALMOST FAMOUS Peter Falk in TV's The Trials of O'Brien, 1965. Below: Roy Scheider (right) with his wife, Cynthia Bebout, and John Heffernan in The Alchemist, 1964. Opposite: George Segal with Sandy Dennis in the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1966.

In the fall of 1959, I started on a PhD in English at Princeton, but after just a few weeks I was miserable. At 27, with an MFA and two years of study in Paris, I had reached the point where I was sick of being a student. When I confessed this to Philip Minor, a Princeton graduate who had already directed a play off-Broadway in New York, he said, "So quit. You should be writing, not taking a bunch of courses you hate." He was alluding to the one-act play contest at Princeton, which I had won three years in a row.