Halley Feifer / (Photo by Newsday / Viorel Florescu)

She's in different roles, all at once
Child of a celebrity, Halley Feiffer has one foot
on campus, another in movies

BY JOSEPH V. AMODIO
Joseph V. Amodio is a freelance writer.

"You're not here," is scrawled in erasable marker on a message board on the outside of Halley Feiffer's dorm room door.

A typical message board, in a typically soulless cinder-block dorm. And Feiffer herself is straight out of college-coed Central Casting: fresh-faced, dash of lipstick, jeans, sprawled on her bed with books - "Gilgamesh," "The Iliad," "Roots of the Western Tradition." All standard, humanities-major fare - save for that envelope on her desk with a return address stamped "Screen Actors Guild."

Feiffer, daughter of the famed artist and writer Jules Feiffer, was raised on Manhattan's Upper West Side, about two hours and a world away from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. She began her junior year there just weeks before the release of "The Squid and The Whale" - a new and critically acclaimed film in which she has a supporting role.
There is comfort in being detached from the outside world, tucked away among the Greek revival pillars and campus greenery in a sleepy New England town. "So it's odd," she says, "to have one foot here and one in - I don't know what to call it - the show-biz world."

She's becoming a frequent commuter between the two, traveling to Manhattan about every other week for auditions, she explains with a locomotive elocution that defies commas - not to mention the need for oxygen: "People ask where were you were you sick and I have to say uh no I was filming a movie in the Catskills with Amber Tamblyn from 'Joan of Arcadia.'" Breath. "It's so weird."

A growing movie resume

That film, "Stephanie Daley," shot last month, will be the third flick on her resume, along with 2000's "You Can Count On Me" and this month's "Squid," written and directed by Noah Baumbach.
Turns out one of Baumbach's major inspirations, recalls "Squid" producer Peter Newman, was "Carnal Knowledge," a 1971 film written by Jules Feiffer. "We weren't looking to cast Jules Feiffer's daughter in our film, but it turned out to be a nice coincidence," Newman says.

In "Squid," she plays Sophie, the earnest, hopeful girlfriend of an angsty teenager from an overly sophisticated family of intellectuals (headed by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) that is collapsing in divorce. "She was on the set with experienced, name actors, but she didn't seem intimidated," Newman says. This role is her largest to date and, she adds, her "big break."

"I enjoy acting, but it's frustrating," she admits. College, she feels, should be "an immersion ... and I'm always having to leave."

Cultural omnivores

"Squid's" brainy, book-besotted world is not entirely foreign to Feiffer. Dad is, after all, a veritable cultural icon. But her home life, she says, was unlike that depicted in the film. High art, pop culture - the Feiffers like it all, she says.

"Our dinner table conversation - would that it were more elevated," Feiffer's mother, writer Jenny Allen says with a sigh.

"We'll talk about 'Law & Order: SVU,'" says her daughter, "with the same passion and intensity used to discuss F.Scott Fitzgerald or Theodore Dreiser."

Tripped up by mom

Feiffer recalls being assigned Dreiser's lengthy novel "Sister Carrie" for class. She and her friend Kathleen complained about how they'd be stuck spending an entire week on that one book alone. So Feiffer opted to, um, not.

Later, when she was home and her mother asked her about it, "I tried to pretend I'd read it," she recalls. "My mother ... decided her book group should read it, and she asked me to come to their meeting and share my notes."

Feiffer laughs. Out came her barely used copy of the classic, and she churned through in time for the book club.
"When she first announced she wanted to act, her mother and I weren't very happy," notes Jules Feiffer, who knows how tough the industry can be. "But she's always been dedicated. I just adore what she's done and where she's going."

Her biggest role model? Her dad, she says. Then groans.

"I would hatehatehate that if I read it, like those people who say 'My mom's my best friend.'" She groans again, louder. "It's not that. But I really respect him."

In a world in which so-called artists - from Jeffrey Koons to Britney Spears - seem obsessed with turning themselves into commodities, her dad remains "almost sell-out-aphobic," she says proudly. "We'll ask him - why don't you sign that deal and have them create toys from your children's book? - and he'll say, 'No - I wrote a book; I don't make stuffed animals.'"
Not that the novelist-playwright-screenwriter-Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist doesn't multitask. (His latest children's book, "A Room With a Zoo," came out last month.) It's a gene his daughter - who has two siblings - appears to have inherited. She aspires to be both an actor and playwright.

And like her film career, her writing appears to be taking off. She wrote a one-act play featured in last year's Young Playwrights Festival in Manhattan, and another work was performed this year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.

Neither script, however, was vetted by papa for tips or critique.

"I don't show him that work - I'm too scared." A long pause. "I really should, I suppose."

It's dinnertime, but she throws on a corduroy blazer and grabs her homework off the shelf - a copy of Plato's "Symposium," which was tucked under a videocassette labeled "Halley's Law & Order." (She played a suspect in an episode four years ago.)

Classmate Kathleen catches her in the hall. She's done her work and had hoped to hang out. Feiffer apologizes, explaining she's off to a rehearsal. (Feiffer is directing a campus production of David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago.")

Success is swell, but as Feiffer is learning - there's always another audition, another rehearsal.