I wouldn’t put myself in that category. I saw “Prisoner of Second Avenue” on Broadway. Funny. Never dreamed that I would ever write one. Do you like tomatoes? [Presents a plastic fork holding a tomato]. Isn’t it fantastic? It’s from a place on 55th Street.

Is it your place?

You make me sound like Sinatra in Jilly’s. It’s not far from the theater.

Isn’t the Chinese restaurant episode in “Seinfeld” like a well-made play?

And that’s the one they hated the most. NBC. They didn’t want to air it.

This is your Broadway debut. Did you get any good advice?

Everyone encouraged me to be in it except for one friend, Seth Greenland. He said just enjoy it as a writer. Boy, was he prescient?

“Curb” is improvised, but this play is not. Is it more of a challenge to be scripted?

It’s one of the reasons I didn’t like acting. I don’t like not being able to interject. I don’t like waiting to talk. You have to wait for the other person to finish with his lines. But I have to say the rehearsal process, much to my amazement, has been fun. I enjoyed it. I didn’t expect to.

Did you have an actor in mind when you wrote this?

Anyone but me. That was the problem. I didn’t have anyone in mind and if I did, the character might have sounded different than me. The character sounds just like me, so it wasn’t a stretch for the producer Scott Rudin to go, “You should do this.”

How did he persuade you to star in the play?

He’s a very persuasive guy. He kept talking to me about it. He said, “Let’s do a reading.” I said, “O.K., we’ll read it and see how that feels.” I was in L.A. with a bunch of actors. It was fun. Rob Reiner, also a persuasive guy, said, “You got to do this play!” When Rob Reiner yells at you, you listen to him.