Jack may be relegated to the AMC back burner, but his portrayer, Walt Willey, is anything but idle. With his childhood best friend, Howard Johnson, and AMC's Jill Larson (Opal), he'll be starring in The Odd Couple in his hometown of Ottawa, IL — where he's also launching a mentorship program for young thespians.

He and Johnson cooked up the idea last fall. "I was back home seeing old friends and my mom, who still lives there," he explains. "Just in talking to some of the local folks, it came up that Ottawa didn't have a community theater anymore, which it had for years and years, but that our two rival towns still had one! I just thought that that was unacceptable. I said, 'Geez, maybe we can do something about this.' I thought that if we fused some local actors with some above-the-title actors and branched it out to a mentorship theater-training program for some of the students, we could revive the community theater program. And here we are, building a self-sustaining community theater that will be there for years and years.

In picking their first production, he and Johnson were inspired by their own friendship. "Howard and I are disparate in every way. We thought, 'Well, we're an odd couple. How about we do The Odd Couple?' We knew of some local actors that we could use and then I thought of Jill Larson as one of the Pigeon sisters. The high school said that they would let us use their auditorium and we just started producing from scratch."

The production will run from July 24-26, and Willey has found an excellent practicfe partner ("I'm sitting at home in Santa Fe having [son] Chance read Oscar to my Felix") before he begins formal rehearsal in mid-July. And he's looking forward to finally hitting the boards with Larson, of whom he grins, "I just love her; she's a Midwest kid like me who has put her soul into ALL MY CHILDREN for so many years. We had spoken many times about doing something together and I thought she would be brilliant in this. I asked her and she immediately said, "Sure! I'd love to!" And she's agreed to come back in the fall for the mentorship program; we'll do seminars and master classes for the high school kids.

"I'm very excited about how it's going," Willey beams. "And tickets to the show are only $25 — we're really trying to make it affordable for everyone who wants to come."

The Odd Couple runs on July 24, 25 and 26 at the Ottawa High School Auditorium, 211 E. Main St. in Ottawa, IL. For tickets and info, call (888) 688-2924.