"Miss Rowlands, as she has shown in other films directed by her husband, can be incomparably funny while coming apart at the seams," wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times when Opening Night, which premiered in 1978 and then didn't open, was revived in New York a decade later. Gena Rowlands' Myrtle Gordon is, in some ways, A Woman Under the Influence's Mabel Longhetti with the benefit of an artistic outlet: a celebrated actress on the verge of a breakdown with only her own resources to pull her through. Here the men are not just figuratively but literally the producers (Myrtle's producer-husband, played by Paul Stewart), directors (Ben Gazzara as the play's director Manny Victor), and intimate adversaries (Cassavetes as Myrtle's co-star Maurice Aarons) in her life. Challenged with a play about aging called "The Second Woman," Myrtle is faced with casting out her own youth. The image of a young fan who is killed by a car outside the theater becomes first a haunting presence, then a useful device for the actress. It is Myrtle's, and Cassavetes', genius that this "woman's issue," the dread of aging, becomes an artist's issue-and an artist's tool for growth in an extraordinary process to which we are privy. Cassavetes filmed the play's rehearsals in front of a live audience, lending us a camaraderie with that audience, and the film a Pirandellian hyperreality that is beautifully played for its many layers. As Myrtle reworks the play according to her own dictates, sometimes with hilarious results, are we witnessing Cassavetes' mythical process of "improvisation," or Rowlands performing a Cassavetes script, once again cleverly written to sound improvised? The film vibrates with this uncertainty, and the cast-including Joan Blondell as the shrewdly sympathetic playwright and Zohra Lampert as Manny's softly savvy wife-along with it.