E-Mail This Article to a Friend Wise guy Gabe Kaplan welcomes back Groucho BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

If you’ve ever seen any of the 95 episodes of the 1975-’79 ABC sit-com Welcome Back, Kotter, you know that Gabe Kaplan, as the avuncular teacher/warden/social worker, was devoted to his rascally gang of Sweathogs. He was devoted to knowing them well, and that inclination carried over to Groucho Marx when he played the comic icon in HBO’s 1982 Groucho: A Life in Revue. The special was filmed to look like a broadcast of a stage performance. And the script, in which Groucho talks about his life, family, friends, and show-biz cronies in monologues and interviews, grew to have a life beyond the broadcast, with Kaplan touring the country as Groucho in 1983 before passing the cigar to other actors, who kept it lit for years. Now, at the request of the artistic team at Stoneham Theatre, Kaplan will be resurrecting the king of comedy there for two weeks in June starting next Thursday

Over the past few years, Boston has seen Frank Gorshin as George Burns in Say Goodnight Gracie, Kate Mulgrew as Katharine Hepburn in Tea at Five, and Hershey Felder as George Gershwin in Gershwin, Alone and Frédéric Chopin in Romantique. But whereas those pieces were written as tributes by avid admirers, Groucho!, as it’s now called, is the result of a more personal encounter. It was penned by Groucho’s only son, Arthur, together with Robert Fisher, a team who have written for sit-coms like The Jeffersons. But only when they recruited Kaplan to the project did the script take on intimate, candid dimensions that are perhaps best described as "Kotter-esque."

"Groucho had a very difficult relationship with his children and a different relationship with each of his three wives," Kaplan explains when I reach him by phone. His thick Brooklyn accent has lost none of its zing, even though he now makes his home half a continent away in Nevada. "In order to perform his comedy, he had to be in his comfort zone, which didn’t really put the people around him in their comfort zones. He wasn’t an evil man by any stretch of the imagination, he just needed to do things that made him comfortable. There’s people that say funny things, and then there’s people that have a funny appearance. He would say intelligent, funny things with a ridiculous appearance. He bridged all forms of comedy. I think people would like to know more about what’s behind the comedian, what it’s like to be him 24 hours a day."

The original script was a song-and-dance-type revue of Groucho the entertainer, and that’s the version that’s been performed since Kaplan’s stint ended. Since he asserts he’s not a musical performer, when Stoneham asked him to revive the role, he approached Arthur to talk about returning to the Groucho-as-character-study version. Kaplan suspects that Arthur’s age (he’s in his 80s) and the popularity of shows like Say Goodnight Gracie encouraged him to let Kaplan perform the show as it was done in the 1982-’83. He even gave Kaplan permission to add few more personal angles.

"Arthur Marx likes the more singing and dancing aspect of it. When it really got to depth and feeling, he was okay scratching the surface. He preferred the all-encompassing version that included a few more . . . distractions. I’ve always been concerned more with the whole comedy persona, about what it’s like to live with a comic genius like Groucho Marx. What is it like being with him? To be one of his wives or his son? The version we did in the early ’80s had a more personal note. This newer version is really about what he was like as a man. That’s what I’m interested in."

Gabe Kaplan does Groucho! at Stoneham Theatre, 395 Main Street in Stoneham, June 10 through 27. Tickets are $19 to $38; call (781) 279-2200.