At 91, Tony-winning actor Paul Sand wrote his first play

LOS ANGELES Stepping into a new role can be a little scary, and Paul Sand is certainly nervous. But he didn’t want it any other way.

Are you kidding? That’s part of the fun, he says.

It’s 52 years since Sand won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play and throughout his decades-long career he’s worked with some of television’s brightest luminaries.

All the funny ladies, he recalls. Carol Burnet, Mary Tyler Moore. I’ve always been their boyfriend, their clumsy boyfriend.

It’s 52 years since Sand won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play and throughout his decades-long career he’s worked with some of television’s brightest luminaries.

All the funny ladies, he recalls. Carol Burnet, Mary Tyler Moore. I’ve always been their boyfriend, their clumsy boyfriend.

Mary Tyler Moore, left, and Paul Sand, right, in a scene from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. (Photo courtesy of CBS)

He even had his own sitcom, Friends and Lovers, which ran, as he says, for about ten minutes on CBS. But acting has always been his first love, so in a way, it’s no surprise to find him now in the 90s on stage at the Broadwater Theater in Hollywood.

This time, however, he does not act. He directs the world premiere of a play of which he wrote a comedy titled The Pilot Who Crashed the Party.

Reluctant to discuss plot, Sand said, the play is about the human tendency to make assumptions about people and believe them to be true.

It is a very dangerous thing. And everyone does it, he explained. We all do. I don’t just observe and say they do. We all do. You meet someone, and you assume they have a certain personality, and then you take them for it.

Sand once wrote a short piece that was directed by none other than legendary choreographer Jerome Robbins, but this is her first foray into full production. Turns out he likes to write.

Creativity is great fun, he said in a fake whisper, holding his hand to his mouth as if revealing a deep secret.

He comes from an improv background and was one of the original members of Second City. In fact, they list him on their website as one of the founding members of improv comedy in America. Sand sees writing as improvisation with pen and paper, something he was still doing hours before the first performance of the show.

It changes every day! said actor Sol Mason as he flipped through the heavily highlighted, color-coded pages of his screenplay. Not that he’s complaining. Mason plays the eponymous pilot and also worked on the staged reads last year.

He likes to be part of something from scratch. Especially something as well designed as this, he says. It’s so much fun to play with. And the more I look at it, the deeper it gets, Mason said. Because it’s a comedy. You think everything is on the surface. Then as you read the script, you realize there are things it crashes, like several pages before, and then my reaction happens later. Its kind of brilliant.

A young actor in his twenties who grew up splitting his time between Australia and Los Angeles, Mason admits he hadn’t seen many of the shows Sand had been in, but he did get a kick out of it. duty to educate oneself, he said. In fact, just being around Sand has been a life lesson.

The creativity, I think, kept it so engaged and alive, he explained. It gives me, it gives everyone I think so much hope and encouragement not to stop.

As for what he hopes to do at 91, I want to be here to do that, Mason said emphatically.

Meanwhile, Sand is ready for the next leg of this stage play journey. He is already talking with theaters in Chicago and New York. Acting, he says, is exactly what he does, and he’s happy to be healthy enough to stay in the game.

My passion is to play, he explained. I always like to play outside. And all this theater stuff plays for me.

The Pilot That Crashed Party runs until May 7.