Tara Summers, Dakin Matthews, Jefferson Mays and Michael McKean in “Yes, Prime Minister.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

In luxurious governmental headquarters, political dignitaries and their dutiful underlings grapple with assorted crises, such as a debt-ridden economy on the brink of collapse, illegal immigration, and more, as they attempt to forestall inevitable media scrutiny. Is this a news update on the current US political scene? Not quite. The setting is Great Britain, as the fictional hubbub is related in the US premiere of Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s farcical satire, Yes, Prime Minister.

This West End stage hit, based on a popular British television series, opens at the Geffen Playhouse’s Gil Cates Theater on Wednesday, featuring a notable cast — Jefferson Mays, Stephen Caffrey, Brian George, Dakin Matthews, Michael McKean, Tara Summers, and Time Winters.

Mays previously appeared in the Geffen’s 2005 LA premiere of Doug Wright’s biographical solo play I Am My Own Wife, staged at the Wadsworth Theatre in Brentwood. The actor repeated a role that earned him a Tony and several other awards. (The play was originally developed, pre-Broadway, in 2001 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Page to Stage workshop.) Mays’ other acclaimed Broadway credits of recent years include Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, Pygmalion, and Journey’s End.

Wild and Woolley

Jefferson Mays

In Yes, Prime Minister, “I play Bernard Woolley,” Mays begins, during an interview in the Geffen green room. “He’s the principal private secretary to the prime minister. This is a play about government, not about politics. It’s about how things work and who runs the show. It’s been such a revelation to me, because you think you know who the British are, and their government, but [the US] government wouldn’t be what it is if it weren’t for the British government. Ours is an extension of that, and a reaction to it. It’s Alice in wonderland. It’s crazy.”

Matthews plays the permanent cabinet secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, while McKean appears as the prime minister. Mays explains, “This is a Jeeves and Wooster relationship, but with two Jeeves and one Wooster.” (Mays’ reference is to the comedic butler-servant characters appearing in P.G. Wodehouse stories and novels; they served as the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s and Alan Ayckbourn’s 1975 musical Jeeves — which, in a revised version called By Jeeves, played the Geffen in 1997).

He continues, “We [Woolley and Appleby] are permanent, we don’t change, we are the government, a couple of Oxonians in public school-educated class systems, who keep the mechanism working. These vulgarian politicians come in for a few years, but they’re short-time help. We are the British help. Whereas, in the US, it’s a system of checks and balances between the judicial branch, legislative branch , and executive branch, this is sort of between the Bertie Woosters of government and the Jeeves [the butlers], who keep the thing going. So there’s great comic potential in that relationship. My character is caught between his duty to the senior civil servant and his duty to his prime minister.”

He describes the play as “a comedy, and I would say a farce at points. That’s the way I like working the most, because it’s building a machine. The work is so specific. It’s like doing a really complicated math problem. Jonathan Lynn is fantastic, like Beethoven conducting his own symphony. He’s extraordinarily specific, and it’s like working with a great conductor. He literally sits there and says ‘this passage goes faster, or slow down here.’  He has built in passages.”

The first British TV version of this story (originally called Yes Minister) began in 1980. It was re-dubbed Yes, Prime Minister, for its 1986 revamp. The most recent television version opened in Britain this January. The stage adaptation has thrived in tours throughout England since its 2010 debut.

Dakin Matthews and Michael McKean in “Yes, Prime Minister.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

“The play is now having a second life, with a new cast,” Mays remarks. He believes the Geffen production will resonate with current news headlines. Yet he admits, “I was a little leery at first, thinking this was so Anglo-centric. But all government is fundamentally the same. The comic subject matter, I think, doesn’t change at all, but Jonathan’s a news junkie and he’s not above putting in things that are currently going on in the world. But he’s also uncannily anticipating what’s going to happen. He sort of foresaw the hung Parliament in Britain right now, and there are allusions to drones and things that will ring a bell with us.”

Mays says that the material is “different from the original in that it happens now.  But it’s the same in terms of characters and relationships.” The actor was aware of the show when this role was offered to him but says he still hasn’t seen any of the TV versions. “I met Jonathan a couple of years ago, and he asked if I would read Bernard, in a staged reading, and I said yes, and I asked, should I go and look at the TV show? And he said no, just treat it as a new play.”

Broadway Bound

Mays, who is married to actress Susan Lyons, is originally from Connecticut. He has resided in New York since the early 1990s. He studied at Yale and in the graduate drama program at UC San Diego, appearing in La Jolla Playhouse productions and working with artistic director Des McAnuff. For several years, he was also a member of Anne Bogart’s SITI program, which he believes gave him invaluable training. He has a number of television and film credits, but his career focus has largely been on the stage.

Mays is excited to return to Broadway this fall in Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, a musical set in Edwardian England, which is based on the Roy Horniman novel Israel Rank and its classic 1949 film adaptation, Kind Hearts and Coronets. Directed by Darko Tresnjak, the new musical, with book by Robert L. Freedman and score by Steven Lutvak and Freedman, had an acclaimed premiere last fall at the Hartford Stage and earlier this year at the Old Globe in San Diego, in a co-production between the two companies.

Jefferson Mays as Lord Adalbert D’Ysquith and Lady Hyacinth D’Ysquith and in the 2013 world premiere of “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” at The Old Globe. Photos by Henry DiRocco.

According to Mays, full casting for the Broadway production is now underway. He is set to reprise his lead role of a possible duke — ninth in line to inherit that title. He also plays this gentleman’s eight rivals, each of whom meets with a suspicious demise.  “I play all of the roles that [Alec] Guinness played in the film,” Mays asserts. In the Los Angeles Times review of the Globe staging, Charles McNulty wrote that it’s Mays’ “prolific originality that gives A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder its liftoff.”

“A musical is new territory for me,” says Mays, “but I did an Encores! production of Of Thee I Sing [in New York] in which I didn’t even sing.  It’s extraordinary. I may never want to go back. Plays are such heavy lifting. Act one, scene one tends to be a lot of exposition and trying to get people on board, but in a musical, you sort of step out on this magic carpet, the overture strikes up, and bears you aloft. It’s intoxicating.”

Yet Mays eventually offers a qualifier regarding his debut as a musical comedy star. He tells of an experience in 2008, shortly after he had starred as Prof. Henry Higgins in a Roundabout Theatre revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Following that run, Mays was summoned to take over the role of Higgins in the play’s classic Lerner and Loewe musical version, My Fair Lady, at the Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine, because the actor slated to do the role dropped out at the last minute. Mays says he “knew all the lines, so I stepped in. It couldn’t have been a better introduction because you start out speaking, and you end up singing.”

He adds, “Higgins is such a wonderful role. I would love to do that again.  I was talking to Jonathan about that the other day.  It’s funny because in America, our knowledge and expectations about Pygmalion are so affected by My Fair Lady…People would say ‘what, you don’t do that — this is where you sing the song.’  It’s amazing because [Alan Jay] Lerner, who did the lyrics for the musical, used so much of Shaw, the play is now kind of a disappointment to an American audience. It’s quite different as a musical and, I think, as heretical as this sounds, My Fair Lady is a greater work of art.”

Dakin Matthews, Jefferson Mays, Michael McKean and Corey Brill at the April 1, 2012 opening night curtain call of “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” at Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. Photo by Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.

In Pygmalion, he continues, “Shaw was writing Higgins as himself, and he didn’t permit him to go places where he was not comfortable going — too close to his own character.”  Lerner “humanized Higgins and gave him the possibility of caring for this other person. And then it’s so beautifully structured. You have this wonderful arc, whereas Pygmalion doesn’t allow him much of a change. Eliza is the one who goes through this transformation. And they also flesh out the makeover aspects of it in the musical. There’s not a scene devoted to that in the play.”

He adds a personal anecdote: “My parents had opening night tickets to see My Fair Lady in the 1950s, and ended up giving them away to friends. They asked, ‘Shaw as a musical?  Couldn’t possibly be.’”

Mays says he has thoroughly enjoyed his other Broadway performances.  In The Best Man (Gore Vidal’s 1964 play about a contentious presidential race), “oddly enough, a lot of the cast members from Yes, Prime Minister — McKean, Dakin and I — were in that company as well, so we spent about seven months together on Broadway last season.  It’s lovely. That happens more often as you age. Working with people who you worked with before shaves off two weeks of rehearsals. You have some sort of working vocabulary to work with people, so it’s lovely to see some old friends.

“I played a character named Sheldon Marcus in The Best Man, sort of a sap who comes in with a compromising piece of information in Act II. It was a small role, but it was fun. Another very pertinent play. We were all joking the other day that we seem to do political plays with lots of furniture.”

John Ahlin, Jefferson Mays and Boyd Gaines in the 2007 Broadway revival of “Journey’s End” at the Belasco Theatre. Photo by Paul Kolnik.

He calls his lengthy run with I Am My Own Wife — initially developed in San Diego, followed by the Broadway run, then on tour — “ a great adventure and very fulfilling artistically.” He also speaks highly of his experience appearing in the 1928 drama Journey’s End in its 2007 Broadway revival: “I saw the play when I was 10 years old at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. It’s a play that a lot of Americans are not familiar with, because it’s never done. But it’s a great war play.” He adds, “It’s not a preachy play. It doesn’t wear its politics on its sleeve. It wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s written by R.C. Sherriff, who’s a survivor of the Great War, and it’s based on his own personal experiences as an officer in the trenches in France. All the characters are people he knew.  He had written a memoir that had never been published. It was sort of a memorial to his fallen comrades.  The play was a deeply moving experience. We got along famously as a cast. And we all got blown up at the end. I just remember being so affected by that play. To have this opportunity to do it on Broadway was something I had never anticipated happening.”

What’s Next?

Regarding future ambitions, Mays remarks, “I think a lot of people advise you to have a list of things you want to accomplish — roles that you want to do.  But I love the element of surprise, in which you get waylaid, in which a director will come up and say ‘You know what, you should really play this.’  Look at I Am My Own Wife. It’s crazy. Who ever would have thought they would play a gay 65-year-old East German transvestite? So I always love it when other people get excited for me to do things.”

He elaborates. “I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of different things to do.  I think being typecast is the worst thing for an actor, though there are a lot of actors who make a career out of that. And I know some actors will tell their agents, ‘I don’t go out for that sort of thing.’  But the joy of being an actor is the transformation. I like the other shoes you get to walk in, the other thoughts you get to think.”

Jefferson Mays in “Yes, Prime Minister.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

Speaking of transformation, “I wish theater makeup would come back,” he adds. “I was looking at a book the other day that was astonishing. Think of it. If you’re in a repertory company, or something, in order to keep your audience engaged, you have to transform yourself — putty in the nose, putty in the jowls.  It makes sense and I’d love to bring all that stuff back.”

Despite Mays’ busy schedule this year, he has one additional iron in the fire that’s a very personal project: “I’m starting to work on another one-man show, which I didn’t think I’d ever do again. Solo shows can sometime be a lonely experience, and you get involved in theater to spark ideas with other ideas and play onstage, but this is a project based on the works of Shakespeare. I’m in the process of reading all of his works.  It’s not going to be Gielgud’s Seven Ages of Man, but something like that idea. A friend and I are going to see what leaps out and then craft some sort of evening.  But that’s sort of a long-term project.  It would be nice to have something kind of portable that you could carry around and do.”

Meanwhile, he’s anticipating the opening of Yes, Prime Minister: “I’m fiendishly curious how it’s going to play for an American audience…It’s extremely British, but we love the British.  Plus there are lots of slamming doors, and I think the relationships are extremely funny, and the set is lovely, adorned by French doors and sofas. I think it will have great resonance.”

Yes, Prime Minister, Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood 90024. Opens Wednesday. Tue-Fri 8 pm. Sat 3 and 8 pm, Sun 2 and 7 pm. Tickets: $47-77.  www.geffenplayhouse.com. 310-208-5454.

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