Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker Spend the Night Together

Soon, on Broadway, they will be on view together eight times a week. In Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite,” they’ll play three different pairs in three one-act plays, each set inside Suite 719 of the Plaza Hotel circa 1968. The play, which veers between tragicomedy and farce, was written amid the shifting marital expectations of the 1960s, and each couple is at a different temperature: Sam and Karen Nash, a couple whose 23rd wedding anniversary is chilled by the discovery of an affair; Jesse Kiplinger and Muriel Tate, estranged high school sweethearts who generate their own extramarital heat; and Roy and Norma Hubley, who melt down on the day of their daughter’s wedding.

When they exited the Candy Shop, Parker and Broderick took the bus to a rehearsal space in midtown, where they ran through the three plays backward and forward for six hours. Then I picked them up and walked them to dinner at the Theater District haunt Orso. Watching them together does feel like witnessing a rarefied coupling: With her windup impish curiosity and his reserved charm, they recall one of those adorable wildlife videos where, like, a coyote befriends a badger. When they sat down, Broderick read an alert from his Citizen app — “two men fighting outside bank on West 14th street” — with extreme dad energy, and Parker sweetly ordered, seriously, a Cosmopolitan.

“We haven’t been out to dinner together in a very long time,” she said, and now here they were, on a date with a press escort, a tape recorder wedged between them.

The show — which begins performances at the Hudson Theater on March 13, and will run for 17 weeks — means that Parker and Broderick get to spend a lot more time together. But they are also spending it under the spotlight, and talking about it to journalists, and exposing their private life to public examination. Parker runs an Instagram account that opens just a keyhole view into her private life: a child appears as a wrist adorned with a friendship bracelet, a husband as a pair of socked feet. They don’t discuss work much at home, and they rarely talk about their relationship at work, and perhaps that is partly why it has worked so well for so long.

And yet, every year around their wedding anniversary in May, they are ambushed by tabloid reports of their misery. (Really, they are so sweet together it’s nuts). I asked if they thought The National Enquirer had a calendar alert for their joyous occasion. “In all seriousness, I think they actually do,” Parker said. It’s set to pop up again soon: During the run of “Plaza Suite,” Parker and Broderick will mark the same wedding anniversary that Karen and Sam Nash do in the play — their 23rd.

“We only realized that maybe a few days ago,” Parker said. “Now that it’s been brought to our attention, it’s a little bit ever more so like, Oh, God. People are going to think we’re taking care of business in public, which is not at all of interest to us.”

“Oh, yeah,” Broderick joked. “We’re really exploring our relationship.”

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Parker and Broderick last worked together in 1996, playing the ambitious window-washer J. Pierrepont Finch and the adoring secretary Rosemary Pilkington in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” Broderick had opened the show on Broadway, Parker joined the cast when he left, and later Broderick returned to close the show opposite his then girlfriend. It happened too fast for them to think too much about it; it was a little as if the couple had been dropped, dreamlike, onstage together.

In the 24 years since, Parker and Broderick got engaged, married, and had three children, but what they did not do is act together. But in 2017, a mutual friend, actor John Benjamin Hickey, asked the pair to participate in a reading series at Symphony Space. They paged through works by American playwrights like A.R. Gurney and Elaine May before landing on Simon, and when they bandied the “Plaza Suite” lines back and forth on the Symphony Space stage to riotous laughter, they started to reconsider their professional separation.

Broderick’s career took off by playing Neil Simon’s avatar: He won a Tony Award as Eugene in the 1982 debut of Simon’s autobiographical “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” and his first film was Simon’s “Max Dugan Returns” the next year. But in recent decades, Simon’s brand of broad situation comedy has fallen out of favor, its situations increasingly unrelatable, and a 2009 Broadway revival of “Brighton Beach Memoirs” closed after one week.

Broderick last encountered Simon at that low point, when the actor came into Orso and saw Simon sitting right here at our table. Simon’s death in 2018 only increased Broderick and Parker’s interest in rekindling Simon’s Broadway spark for a younger generation. Symphony Space, in the heart of the Upper West Side, “has a very Neil Simon audience,” Parker admitted, “which you might argue is leading the witness a little bit.” Added Broderick, “And that’s how we got into this trouble.”

When I met them in January, Parker and Broderick were still mired in the most awkward stages of rehearsal. “I can have a terrible time just opening a briefcase and looking for a pen while I’m talking on the phone,” Broderick said. “That’s like a week and a half — to open your little fake door and come in with your little fake briefcase.”

The frankly absurd work of acting can make a person feel vulnerable, even to their own spouse. During the “Sex and the City” run, Broderick was approached about playing several of Carrie Bradshaw’s flavors of the week, but he always found a reason to say no.

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“The premature ejaculator,” Broderick said. “Think of that decision I had to make.” (He declined; the part went to Justin Theroux.)

Even Broderick’s visits to set could be anxiety inducing. “You’d show up on set, and I would be like” — Parker held her napkin over her face and emitted a noise like the call of an exotic bird. “I’d get so nervous. Like, Matthew’s here! Don’t look at me!”

“That’s the thing,” Broderick said. “You don’t want anybody to see.”

“It’s all so embarrassing,” she said.

“The UPS guy comes, and it’s like, We have to stop.”

“Look at what’s happening,” Parker said. She pulled at the gathered neckline of her top and fanned frantically at her skin.

“You’re getting hives?” Broderick said.

“I’m getting hives just thinking about you being on set.”

So for decades, they didn’t do it.

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Anyway, it worked so well for their marriage not to work together. When their children were born, they staggered their schedules by necessity. With her shooting movies and TV during the day, and him doing theater at night, “we were always able to patch together a presence as parents,” Parker said.

Besides, “I love being a baseball wife,” Parker said — to be her husband’s No. 1 fan, with the right words at the right time to soothe his acting nerves. “To be honest, the one thing that I didn’t really relish was having to be in that with him,” she said.

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“It was more fun to complain,” Broderick said. “I mean, it’s nice to have show business and then go home and discuss it. You know, sometimes complaining.”

“Now there’s a missing piece,” Parker said.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do for each other now,” Broderick said.

“I was thinking today,” Parker said, “when we were going to start the first play, Matthew was standing over by the stage manager, and he was looking at me. I thought he was going to come over to me and say” — she mimed a jocular punch to the arm — “Go out and kill ‘em, tiger!”

“But we were in the room,” Broderick said, “with people.”

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When I saw Broderick and Parker again, on an afternoon in February, they were onstage at Boston’s Emerson Colonial Theater, where the production was staging an out-of-town tryout before migrating to Broadway. The Colonial is the same theater where Simon tried out “Plaza Suite” before its Broadway debut in 1968, and Parker and Broderick recently joined his widow in dedicating two plaques to the playwright in the back row. The make-believe work of the rehearsal room had by now materialized into a real play, and the couple was in costume, rehearsing the switchover between Acts 2 and 3. Hickey was roaming the house, its floor sticky from the previous night’s audience’s spilled Champagne.

“I love a quick change, all fumbly fingers,” Parker said from the stage. Up there — her in a mod minidress and a smooth blonde wig, him in a tight pair of plaid pants and a sideburned shag — they looked a little like if Austin Powers and a fembot had been married for 20 years. As the pair paced through the end of the second act, which involves a groovy little dance, Parker put her hand on Broderick’s waist and said, “Are you OK, Matty?”

In between rehearsal and that night’s performance, Broderick, Parker and Hickey paused in the theater’s lounge to discuss their progress. When the trio of old friends picked up the play for the 2017 reading, they intuited something accessible in the old text. “It’s a play about middle age, and being in relationships for a long time,” said Hickey. But even if two actors have known each other for decades, even if they are married to one another, “you really do come into a play together as strangers,” he said. “It’s not your relationship. It’s not your friendship. It’s not your marriage.”

Broderick and Parker could not be confused for any of the pairs in “Plaza Suite.” They represent a throwback to a totally different style of coupling, in which the women are trapped in understimulating domestic roles and the men are cornered by their own anxious masculinity. (Broderick, meanwhile, is so sheepishly conscientious that in the middle of dinner he had asked: “Can I sneak into the bathroom? Am I allowed?”) These characters are from Parker and Broderick’s parents’ generation, and they sprouted from the mind of Simon, who was married five times, twice to the same woman. Parker and Broderick play them with retro costumes and elaborate wigs and outer-borough accents. “I have pants in Act 2,” Broderick said about the plaid set, “where I don’t really have to do anything.”

The “Plaza Suite” cast of characters and their 1960s milieu “don’t feel familiar to me at all,” Parker said. The play “truly feels like a portal.” That distance offers a kind of protective layer over their own relationship. But it also poses a challenge, which is how to make its dynamics spark in 2020.

On the cover of the “Plaza Suite” playbill, Parker and Broderick appear in chic vintage style: He is in a tuxedo, she in a black dress and pearls. The actors are recognizably themselves. It looks almost as if they are a couple going to see this play, if they were a couple who had time to see plays together. “It feels like a party at the Plaza in 1950, but it’s also us,” Parker said of the image. They wanted it to feel like “this is a period piece, but these are people that you may know.”

One of the thrills of watching this play is that there is a fourth marriage hidden within its subtext. After watching three couples deflate and collapse and ignite onstage, Parker and Broderick emerge at the end and take a bow side by side.

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When I saw the show in Boston, he smiled his shy, closed-lipped smile, and she waved brightly to the mezzanine, and then bent all the way over at the waist to keep waving as the curtain fell. As the audience headed for the exits, a woman turned to her companion and said, “I want to know where they’re staying.”

When they arrived in Boston, Parker and Broderick developed a preshow ritual to help ease the other’s nerves. They are in separate dressing rooms — “one needs a room to put the mask on,” Broderick joked — and when it is time to head backstage, Parker departs hers first.

“I come by your dressing room,” Parker said.

“You say, ‘Have a good show,’” Broderick said. “And we kiss.”

“And that’s it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .