From today’s SFGate.com:

Why not take credit for all of a writer’s life?

“When writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice approached McAnuff with the idea for Jersey Boys, there was no script, just the idea. ‘I didn’t like it very much,’ McAnuff recalls by phone from San Diego, where he’s in rehearsals for Aaron Sorkin’s new play, The Farnsworth Invention, at the La Jolla Playhouse. ‘Marshall and Rick were very gracious about the rejection. And even after I turned them down twice, they were very persistent. So we came up with the outline together. I helped them with the structure.’ (“Jersey Girls are quick on their feet,” Feb. 14)

We can finally put to rest any lingering doubts about who is responsible for the success of our little offering, Jersey Boys, currently at the Curran Theatre. It is, of course, the director. Le spectacle, c’est lui. I see him now, goose quill in hand, fingers raw, eyes bloodshot from his tireless restructuring of our 72-page “idea.”

Would that I had known him years ago so he could have restructured the screenplays for Sleeper and Annie Hall and Manhattan and Simon and Lovesick and The Manhattan Project — they might have won awards and gained some critical acclaim. Or instructed William Shawn in the proper restructuring of my New Yorker pieces.

But I was naive then and didn’t know enough to be persistent. Twice we offered him the crown and twice he refused it, it says. Sheer modesty. We offered it to him 139 times. Only after we doused ourselves with gasoline and lit a match did he agree to interrupt his restructuring of the book for Dracula, the Musical to heed our pleas and, as a bonus, instruct us in the niceties of the musical theater: how to arrive fashionably late, how to humiliate the cast, how to create an atmosphere of collegiality rivaled only by a board meeting at Hewlett-Packard, how to give interviews that, for sheer fantastic invention, rival anything out of Lewis Carroll.

But why be churlish? I owe the man. He wrote our show, ate my dinner, married my wife and fathered my children. For all I know, he may have even written this letter.

MARSHALL BRICKMAN
co-author of Jersey Boys
New York City

Dave and I saw Farm Boys at the New Conservatory Theater one more time last Sunday. It plays for one more weekend, last chance to catch it. The house was sadly far from full on Sunday afternoon (not uncommon for a play that’s extended its run — so much of the publicity has gone out with the old closing date that it’s hard to get the word out that the play is still running), so I feel the urge to do a little evangelism. Go see it. You can probably even get half-price tickets at Theater Bay Area or Goldstar, which will allow you to see it twice for the price of a regular ticket, and the play both benefits from and deserves being seen twice.

Even though, as I’ve said, I think there’s more elusiveness in the writing than is good for a play, Farm Boys has at its core a story that I found honest, moving, and poetic. It’s about a man going back to the place where he spent his unhappy childhood, about him facing up to the regrets of his past, about having to forgive himself for the angry young men he once was and most of all for the misunderstandings and hurts he caused without intending to, just from having been so armored against the world around him that he failed to recognize honest love when it was offered to him.

I grew up in the ‘burbs of Orange County, California, and not the farms of Colby, Wisconsin, but let’s just say it hasn’t been hard to see parallels.

This time around I was familiar enough with the play to pay more attention to its construction, both for good and for bad. Actually, in terms of dramatic technique, I found more to carp with than savor. Sometimes I wanted to stop the play and say, no, no, please listen to me, please don’t let your characters change the subject here, not yet, you’ve just got to let them express themselves more strongly so we know more clearly what’s in their hearts and not have to infer it gradually over the course of the play from all this roundabout suggestive hinting.

The great strength of the play is not its construction, but that all that roundabout suggestive hinting also contains much lovely and authentic and deeply moving poetic dialogue, and tells the story of a brief relationship between two men that is like none I can ever remember seeing or reading, yet rings (to my ear, anyway) very true. I know it doesn’t sound like much out of context, but I am going to be haunted for a good long time by the lines “How far did you run, John? Was it far enough?” They come at the climax of the play and I tear up just typing them and remembering the moment, the mixture of sweetness and painful regret they encompass.

The theatrical flair with which the play mixes realistic scenes, conversations with a ghost, soliloquys for the ghost in an afterworld that looks like a beach on Fire Island, and 20-year-old flashbacks, is stunning. The actors do an amazing job of switching modes in the blink of a lighting change.

Yet I also wish the writers had been more willing to signal to the audience early on what the scheme was. I understand the delight of letting your audience gradually figure out what’s going on over the course of the play, and I do remember the pleasure I felt the first time I saw it, when during the first speech in the second act it dawned on me what the beach was all about. But I think there would have been even greater pleasure in being able to appreciate the subtle magic in the first act more fully without having to see the play a second time.

Given that anyone who decides to go after reading this is probably only going to get to see it once anyway, I feel like I want to give a few hints, hopefully not enough to spoil the pleasure of finding things out but just enough to help you keep your bearings through the play and appreciate more of it the first time around. So if you’re going to go see it and you hate even mild spoilers, stop reading here right now and skip to the next entry, because I’m about to give away a short list of

Things I Wish Were Made Clearer Earlier in the Play

1. As the play starts, Lyle has just died. The beach is his afterworld.
2. In addition to Lyle’s soliloquys on the beach, the play shifts — sometimes suddenly — between scenes in the present and memories of Lyle and John’s relationship 20 years in the past.
3. When Lyle is lit with yellow light, he is a ghost and the time is the present. The lighting changes when we flip into a memory.

Last night Dave and I went to see Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at the Lorraine Hansberry Theater. Somehow I have never seen or read it before. I liked the acting, I liked the production, I was interested all the way through, and yet somehow I never felt much of an emotional connection with the play. I’m not sure why. Some of it may have been that I was having difficulty catching a lot of the dialogue, possibly because of my being deaf in one ear and possibly because some of it seemed to be in a strong dialect I’m not used to. Some of it may have been that I know just about nothing about the black culture of the period — the 1910s. There are, for example, many references late in the play to the Joe Turner of the title, and unless I missed something (certainly a possibility) it was never really explained who he was or how it was that he was still allowed to enslave people decades after the end of slavery, and it may be that this is something in American history just about everyone but me knows about. Some of it may have just been that I was very tired after several long days of work in a row. For whatever combination of reasons, I had trouble following parts of the play.

And that was frustrating because the play is colorful, the characters are interesting and lively, the acting was good, but somehow I just never connected with the spiritual journey at the heart of the piece. I think I understood it intellectually but it didn’t touch me emotionally. I felt I was watching it happen as a detached observer rather than taking the journey vicariously along with Herald Loomis.

I can give dramaturgical reasons for why that might be, I’m just not sure whether the fault lies in the construction of the play or with my own limitations in concentrating last night, or just my limitations in general. I mean, this is not exactly a play that has lacked for acclaim, and the audience around me certainly appeared to be completely caught up in it.

Still, it occurred to me while thinking about it today that, in terms of usual dramatic structure, the real protagonist is Herald Loomis — the emotional breakthrough at the climax of the play is his, and it is the direction of his life far more than any other that is going to be forever changed by it.

Structurally, that ought to make him the central character. Yet he’s not treated as the central character. Far more prominence is given in the first half or two thirds of the play to Seth Holly, who owns the boardinghouse, his wife Bertha, and Bynum Walker, a boarder who practices some kind of voodoo that I didn’t understand very well but who enables Herald to make his breakthrough. (It was Bynum, by the way, whose lines I had the most trouble catching, which is a shame since he seems to me to the most interesting character in the play. I did notice with some annoyance that some of his longer scenes were blocked so that he was turned three quarters away from the audience, so that I was looking at the back of his head while trying to make out what he was saying. Frustrating.)

These three are truly wonderful and distinctive characters and they completely engaged my interest, and then there are several lighter subplots working themselves out among the other boarders and capturing my interest as well, and then into this vivid, lively world Herald Loomis enters looking for all the world like the cardboard villain of a melodrama, and we learn very little about him for a very long time. The play is more than half over before he does much more than pace gloomily and glower at people; only in the last five minutes or so of the first act do we start to see him from the inside and begin to understand his suffering in his heart. And as a result, when events reach their climax near the end of the second act, we don’t — well, at least I didn’t — feel that I’ve spent enough time getting to know him so that I can follow along with him in his spiritual breakthrough.

By the usual principles of dramatic construction, this is weak. A play is structured around conflicts, the most important of those conflicts is the one that is resolved at the climax of the play, and the character whose conflict it is, is the protagonist. The playwright’s job is to create empathy (note: not the same as sympathy) in the audience for the protagonist, so that the listeners identify with the protagonist’s situation and share vicariously in his or her transformation at the climax. August Wilson, though, spent more than half the play leading us — and very skillfully, too — to identify with just about everybody but Herald Loomis. He starts only very late in the play to change course and put more emphasis on Loomis, and for whatever reason, it didn’t work for me last night.

But I hate to say it’s because of the construction, because the play has clearly worked for so many people and because I know very well that sometimes an unorthodox dramatic structure is precisely what is needed to create a powerful play.

So maybe it’s because I wasn’t hearing very well and missed some important points, or maybe I was just too tired to concentrate enough. I’m not sure.

Sunday afternoon was the final performance of Farm Boys, except that it wasn’t because it’s been extended a week. It was the second trip for Dave and me, and the third for Terry, and we’re all even thinking of seeing it one more time.

This time around, I knew better what to pay attention to in the characterizations, and I found the piece really compelling — I think I was tearing up all the way through the second act. Part of what I was responding to this time was that John’s feelings about the homophobic midwestern farming town he grew up in reminded me of my own feelings about growing up in Orange County and my own experiences in visiting the place as an adult and being vividly reminded all over again of the pain that I left the place precisely to get away from. The homophobic culture I was too young to escape from and too young to know how to endure, the terrible habits of feeling helplessness and terror and hatred that I fell into in response and which I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to break. The pain of having to confront the conflicted, angry, fearful, and all in all not very admirable young man I used to be, and figure out how to forgive myself for who I once was.

In the play, the young John responded to his environment with rebelliousness and even physical violence, while in my own life I responded in the opposite direction by turning inward and withdrawing from the world around me. I used to have a certain envy for those who could openly rebel like that, but from where I sit now, in my late 40s, it doesn’t seem like as much of a difference as it used to. In both cases we did a lot of conscious harm to others and conscious harm to ourselves. When you’ve been hurt so often and so deeply by others, it’s a tough thing to forgive yourself for having made the conscious choice to hurt someone too, whether it was physical or emotional hurt, and whether it was yourself or someone else you hurt — and more likely than not, it was plenty of both.

I continue to think the play is somewhat underwritten, and that more could be done to emphasize the especially important moments and themes. It’s a rich play with a lot of subtleties, but the main points could be made to stand out a little more strongly. This seemed true of John, in particular — he’s the central character, and yet we don’t spend much time learning what’s making him tick. Granted, he’s a loner and tends to be uncommunicative, but we still want to find our way into his head so we can understand and empathize better with his difficult journey.

John’s having to face up to his own adolescent act of violence, for example, seems like an important moment to me now, but it’s mentioned almost in passing and the moment goes by quickly, and the first time around I didn’t pay much attention to it. Seeing it a second time, now it seems crucial, and I’d have liked to have stayed with that issue just a little longer and seen it developed a little more. The moment when John admits that he had the wrong take on the older man’s character (why am I blanking on his name all of a sudden?), and must confront the fact that he deeply hurt both his lover and himself with his recklessness and naivete, that likewise seems to me now like a moment that it would have been good to stay with a little longer.

In the many years I spent in writing workshops, I came to find that this sort of thing is a common problem with talented but inexperienced playwrights — in playwriting, less is generally more, and someone with talent will have figured out the power of understatement, of saying the minimum necessary to get the point across, letting the audience infer the larger picture from as few deft strokes as can be gotten away with. But at the same time, because you’re writing for a diverse group of people in your audience, and because their attention is also being drawn by the visual elements, writing on stage has to be bolder and more emphatic than writing on the page to make the same effect. Yet on the page is where one writes, and where one reads over what one has written. It takes a lot of actual experience seeing what you’ve written read before an audience, a lot of writing something that you think is going to have a certain effect and then seeing it performed without its making that effect, and rewriting it and seeing what happens then, maybe many times until you figure out how to get it right — it takes a lot of that before you develop a good sense for how big is just big enough.

It seems to me to be sort of like learning to paint murals — you have to do your painting up close, there’s no other way to do it, but you can’t accurately see what the effect is of what you’ve painted except by backing up quite a ways, so it takes some practice just to learn the right degree of exaggeration to put into your painting up close to create an unexaggerated effect from further away. Just in that way, something that sounds like exactly the right degree of nuance and subtlely when you read it out loud in your study will often be far too subtle to make its impression on the audience when spoken on a stage.

This is not to say that a play shouldn’t have enough richness and enough layers that you see more in it with a second or third viewing — it certainly should. A play’s staying power is all about being rich enough to reward seeing several times. But a play also needs to make a good first impression or few people will give it a second look, so you want a play’s main themes and basic structure to be strong and clear enough that an audience will perceive them even on a first seeing.

Last Thursday Dave and I went to see Thrillpeddler’s latest show, The Hypnodrome’s Night of Erotic Appetizers, subtitled “A Grand Guignol Shockfest”. The shocks were not abundant, and it’s not the best stuff we’ve seen from them, but it was fun all the same.

The program started, curiously, with a performance of Cobra, an essentially aleatory piece of music by John Zorn, a composer I’d never heard of before (though Dave of course had), that was probably terribly avant-garde 50 or 60 years ago. The conductor stood behind a table full of face-down cards, and the musicians improvised and interacted with each other in various ways that seemed to be determined by which card was turned up at any particular time. At various times the musicians seemed to be communicating with the conductor by hand signal as to what card he should turn up next — holding out two fingers to indicate the second card, and so on — though as far as I could see they didn’t know where the cards were and had no particular goal in any of this, so it was essentially random selection. The piece had some amusing moments but it was shapeless and didn’t go anywhere and after a while it just ended.

Next on the program was an interesting talk on the decadence of Weimar Germany by Mel Gordon, author of some terrific books on Grand Guignol and Weimar Germany that I’ve enjoyed a lot. He’s a likeable speaker, too, knowledgeable without being insufferably academic about it, down to earth and good-humored and with an agreeable sense of humor, dry but not cynical — he clearly has a sincere human enthusiasm and affection for his subject.

As he talked, I was struck at how little some of what he was describing about Weimar Berlin differed from life in the United States today, and not just in the big cities, either. For example, he talked about a huge restaurant in Berlin that had some eight or so areas devoted to the foods of different countries (like the food court at any mall today), each with its own live entertainment (not all that unlike the music piped into every restaurant to set the atmosphere). An artificial river flowed through the restaurant (like the Blue Bayou restaurant at Disneyland), and every hour there would be a short artificial thunderstorm (like the restaurant at the Peppermill casino in Reno where we eat sometimes when we’re visiting Dave’s mother, or for that matter, like the produce section at most any Safeway).

He also talked about the craze for nudist camps, and showed a short black-and-white exploitation film from the 1930s about one. A hoot, though not very erotic or scandalous when you already live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have several beaches readily available when you feel in the mood to get naked in the sun and open air.

Mr. Gordon then talked a bit about modern dancer Anita Berber, who seems to have been on a quest to soak up as much drugs and alcohol as she could, and then not too surprisingly died in her late 20s. We were served a variety of aphrodisiacs made from recipes from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sexology Museum (the herbal drink was tasty but I could have skipped the plate of aphrodesiac hors d’oeuvres, which were heavy on the stomach and neither interesting nor effective enough to be worth the sampling). Bijou O’Keefe then performed an interpretation of one of Anita Berber’s dances, Morphine.

The final piece on the program was the one true piece of Grand Guignol, a one-acter called Orgy at the Lighthouse. Dave and I saw Thrillpeddlers do it once before. In some ways it was done better this time, too, though it’s one of Thrillpeddlers’ weaker pieces in any case. Four young people have a drunken party, including sex, when one of the two young men is supposed to be on duty at the lighthouse, and when a storm rolls in suddenly, grisly things happen as a result. So it’s fun and creepy and titillating, and has a fair number of shocks along with all the exposed flesh and stage blood. But even for a sordid melodrama, it isn’t really all that well or imaginitively constructed a piece and it doesn’t build up a lot of suspense. We’ve seen other Grand Guignol pieces at Thrillpeddlers that were more genuinely unsettling.

So all in all, a pleasant and interesting but not extraordinary evening.