Before Broadway’s “Falsettos,” Hartford Stage’s Changed Lives

October 21st, 2016 § 5 comments § permalink

The final scene of March of the Falsettos & falsetto land at Hartford Stage, 1991 (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

The final scene of March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland at Hartford Stage, 1991 (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

When I speak about it with people who saw it, the phrase that comes up most often is, “It was life-changing.”

When I speak about it with people who have read about it, but didn’t see it, the question that inevitably arises is, “What was the ‘coup de theatre’?”

When I speak about it with people who knew nothing of it, they profess surprise that it existed.

I’m speaking of the Hartford Stage production of March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland, the first time the two shows were produced as a single evening. Directed and choreographed by the marvelous Graciela Daniele, the shows were playing exactly 25 years ago as I write this, in a 41 performance run in Hartford Stage’s 489 seat theatre in October and early November of 1991. At most, 20,049 people saw the production; it was at least a few hundred less because, to the best of my recollection, the previews weren’t sold out.

I was the theatre’s public relations director at the time, and it was one of the more ecstatic times in my career. From the moment that artistic director Mark Lamos informed us we would be doing the show, I was thrilled. Though I did not see the original March of the Falsettos in 1981, I played the vinyl cast recording (owned by one of my college roommates, in those pre-digital days) incessantly in my junior year (1982-83), almost as a nightly ritual. When Falsettoland debuted at Playwrights Horizons in 1990, I made sure not to miss it.

I have to credit Bill Finn and James Lapine’s musicals with helping to form my perception of gay life. I was a straight, cisgender kid from a Connecticut suburb in an era and area when one didn’t encounter adults who were out, let alone high school students. I don’t remember any particular fear of or enmity toward gay students on my part, and I hope my memory is correct, but I also don’t ever remember the topic coming up until I got to college.

The humor and sincerity of March, from the opening of “Four Jews in a Room Bitching” to the simple closing of “Father to Son” left me wanting to march along with Marvin and Whizzer and Jason (and Mendel and Trina and Cordelia and Dr. Charlotte) because love, as far as I was concerned, was love. I sang that message over and over in my off-campus room, embedding it in my everyday life as I came to know and love gay men and lesbians as my world expanded through theatre. I should probably give a small shout out as well to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which broke down barriers about sexuality and gender fluidity for straight suburban kids as much as anything we encountered in the late 70s.

It may be difficult to understand today, but producing a musical about a man who leaves his wife for another man, yet attempts to retain family ties, was still an edgy step outside of a major city in 1991. The politics of “outing,” naming someone as gay in the media even when they had not declared themselves to be so, was hotly debated. Gay-Straight Alliances hadn’t really reached northern Connecticut, only 120 miles from New York City, though AIDS certainly had: my first landlord in Hartford died from it in the late 80s.

hartford-falsettos-logo-img_2982In marketing the show, the direction I was given was not to confront the subject matter directly, but only to entice people enough to want to see it, and allow the story to reach them once they were in the door. It didn’t hurt that at the time, subscription tickets filled some 75% of the total seating capacity for the run. A lot of people were coming no matter what I did.

Because we had begun using marketing tag lines, aping film advertising, I cobbled together something to the effect of, “It’s about parents, children, love, sex, baseball and bar mitzvahs.” Our graphic imagery in ads was utterly abstract, saying nothing overt at all. Because this was in many ways an experiment, the show’s title remained the unwieldy March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland; the condensing came later.

I knew something special was going on when I would visit the rehearsal hall, whether to track down an actor for a program bio or to accompany a journalist who was doing an interview during a lunch break or at the end of the day. What struck me most was that whoever was in the room during a rehearsal was, as far as Graciela Daniele was concerned, part of the rehearsal. I remember her calling out questions to me as I sat on the sidelines; curious about bar mitzvahs, she became the only person to ever listen to the audio recording of my own bar mitzvah (including me). There were no barriers in Grazie’s space – only inclusion.

Once the show was in the theatre, audiences responded very favorably, with cheering and weeping. If there were letters of complaint over the subject matter, I either never knew of them or have long forgotten them. One staff member, while out to his friends and co-workers, was so moved after seeing a preview that he promptly came out to his family, as he proudly told us all. On matinee days, many of us would slip into the theatre at certain times for particularly memorable moments: we were often there together as Barbara Walsh, as Trina, nailed “I’m Breaking Down” in March; we were there for the final moments of Falsettoland, perpetually moved as Adam Heller, as Mendel, sang, “Lovers come and lovers go/lovers live and die fortissimo/this is where we take a stand.” We endlessly laughed over the anecdote told by Evan Pappas and Roger Bart, as Marvin and Whizzer, of a student matinee when the lights came up on the pair in bed and one student announced rather loudly, “Ooh, they’re gonna get some.”

The whole experience became heightened when Frank Rich, then the chief theatre critic of The New York Times, rendered his verdict.

“It was a secret, until now, that the two ‘Falsetto’ shows, fused together on a single bill, form a whole that is not only larger than the sum of its parts but is also more powerful than any other American musical of its day.

For this discovery, audiences owe a huge thanks to the Hartford Stage. Under the artistic direction of Mark Lamos, it has the guts to produce these thorny musicals together at a time when few nonprofit theaters are willing to risk aggravating dwindling recession audiences by offering works that put homosexual passions (among many other passions in the ‘Falsetto’ musicals’ case) at center stage.”

With unstinting praise, he went on to note:

“She [Daniele] has brought off an inspired, beautifully cast double bill that is true to its gay and Jewish characters — and to the spirit of the original James Lapine productions — even as it presents the evening’s densely interwoven familial and romantic relationships through perspectives that perhaps only a woman and a choreographer could provide.”

Of course, the box office exploded, selling out the remainder of the run within a day. House seats, which I instituted as a practice a Hartford Stage for the first time when I came to the theatre and were only rarely needed, were in high demand. And the talk began of Broadway.

That talk continued for several months, but without going into what were protracted and emotionally trying times, the Hartford production, as we all know, did not go to Broadway. It was Lapine’s original that returned to New York, with the core original cast members – except that Barbara Walsh, our Trina, joined that production. As a result, the Hartford Falsettos became the stuff of legend, and regional theatre legends tend to fade with time. But over lunch with Evan Pappas a few weeks ago, our first in quite some time, he noted that 25 years on, he still meets people who saw the show in Hartford, and tell him stories about how it changed their lives.

I suspect productions of March, of Falsettoland, of Falsettos, have been changing lives for a very long time, whether directed by James Lapine, Graciela Daniele, or any of the many other directors who have brought that story to the stage. I was privileged to have seen Grazie’s production as often as I wished; I’ve seen the previous Lapine productions several times and will see the new one in a couple of weeks.

I couldn’t be happier that it’s back on Broadway, though the show will always echo in my head with Grazie’s vision, with Evan, Barbara, Adam, Roger, Joanne Baum, Andrea Frierson and the twins who shared the role of Jason, Etan and Josh Ofrane. I only wish that Fun Home were still running, because how marvelous would it have been to have two stories on Broadway about family life, love, and pain, set in roughly the same era but written years apart, exploring the thrill of first love and the need for absolute acceptance of gay parents and children.

Oh, the “coup de theatre’? I haven’t forgotten. I saved it for the end, just as Grazie did, though I tipped my hand with the photo at the start of this essay.

The term, as applied to the Hartford production, comes from Frank Rich’s review. He wrote, “For her finale, Ms. Daniele exploits the spatial dimensions at her disposal with an overwhelming coup de theatre (not to be divulged here) that first reduces an audience to sobs and then raises it to its feet.”

After a quarter century, let me divulge.

March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland at Hartford Stage, 1991 (Photo by Jennifer W. Lester)

March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland at Hartford Stage, 1991 (Photo by Jennifer W. Lester)

Grazie and set designer Ed Wittstein chose to completely open up the vast stage at Hartford to its walls, using no set pieces other than interchangeable cubes – and a bed. The lyrics were scrawled randomly on the entire floor (visible due to the theatre’s arena-like seating), and across the Broadway theatre-sized back wall. To be honest, in shades of black, grey and white, they largely disappeared, allowing audience members to concentrate wholly on the handful of people singing intimate stories, with no distraction.

But at the very end of the show, as Mendel intoned the final lines, a small square suddenly appeared through the drop that masked the rear wall. On it was simply the name: “Whizzer.” Then the drop was revealed to be a scrim as the entire back wall dissolved into a ghostly section of the AIDS quilt. A lever was tripped, rather loudly, and the front drop wafted slowly to the floor, fully and clearly revealing the quilt for just a moment before the lights went out, and the show ended.

While the quilt at Hartford Stage was not part of the real quilt, it replicated panels from that extraordinary expression of loss that once covered the National Mall in Washington. Because members of the company had been asked if they had family and friends who they had lost and wished to see included, audience members who worked in theatre quickly discovered they knew people on the Hartford quilt facsimile. While much of the audience was in tears, those who saw the names of those they loved and lost were often overcome.

Beautiful, sad, simple, funny and transcendent. That was the Hartford March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland. I have always understood and accepted that I am spending my life in a world that is forever fading into memory. But if I could ever go back in time to see just one more performance of any show I worked on, it would be March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland. At least it’s still playing in my head 25 years on, and once again, I’m in tears over its beauty as I write, and proud that I had a connection to it. I wish you’d seen it, and if you did, I suspect you know exactly how I feel.

 

American Theatre: A.R. Gurney’s Last Play? For Pete’s Sake, Say It Ain’t So

October 1st, 2015 § Comments Off on American Theatre: A.R. Gurney’s Last Play? For Pete’s Sake, Say It Ain’t So § permalink

A.R. Gurney (Photo by GregoryCostanzo)

A.R. Gurney (Photo by Gregory Costanzo)

Standing with A.R. Gurney in the garden area outside Connecticut’s Westport Country Playhouse on a summer night evokes a profound feeling of déjà vu. Thirty-one years ago, I met Gurney just after graduating college and beginning a summer job at the Playhouse, when Westport produced 11 shows in 11 weeks. Gurney was a frequent guest during that time, when the theatre also produced his play The Middle Ages.

I’ve seen Gurney, born Albert Ramsdell Gurney Jr. but known to all as Pete, in countless theatre lobbies since then, often near his Connecticut home—at Hartford Stage, where I was public relations director for eight years, during which time the theatre mounted Children and the premiere of The Snow Ball; at Long Wharf Theatre, where his Love Letters had its first sustained production and where I saw it performed by, most notably, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn; and in New York City at the Flea Theater, at Primary Stages, at Lincoln Center.

Gurney, of course, is the enormously prolific author of more than 40 plays, including The Dining Room, The Cocktail HourThe Perfect Party, and Sylvia, which is being revived this month on Broadway. Our meeting in the Westport garden was on the occasion of an “invited performance” of his newest play, Love and Money, which would officially premiere several weeks later at New York’s Signature Theatre.

Pete has let it be known that Love and Money might be his last play, as he turns 85 next month, but he’s been dropping not-so-subtle hints about retiring for at least four years.

We spoke again in his Manhattan apartment a few days later. He’d moved there just a week before, downsizing from his longtime prior home a block away. As in Michael Yeargan’s set for Love and Money, there were packing boxes here and there, a sign of transition in any life—in the play, a home being closed up, but here a new home just beginning to be filled.

HOWARD SHERMAN: So, Pete, is Love and Money really going to be your last play?
A.R. GURNEY: Well, you know, you can’t predict your own psyche to that degree. Playwriting is such a habit with me now. I’ve written an awful lot of plays. You can’t tell what ideas will suddenly strike you.

Jim Houghton [Signature’s artistic director] said, “We want to revive two of your older plays,” and he named the two that I thought would work, and added, ‘We want you to provide a new play at the end.” And I said “A new play? Jim, I’m 84 years old, I don’t think I can whomp up one,” but I did, and it turned out to be a particularly rewarding experience.

What was so rewarding?
I found myself reverting to habits that I really hadn’t done in quite a while. I wrote plays, I’d occasionally change a line or two, but I knew just what I was doing. This one I didn’t know quite what I was doing, and as the play developed, I changed the nature of it. We added characters—I felt like a kid starting out again, and thank God for [Westport artistic director] Mark Lamos’s tolerance of me, and thank God we still have time at Westport where we can fool with it a little bit.

I noticed a lot of references in Love and Money, both explicit and subtle, to other plays of yours. Does it help if an audience knows your other work?
I found I was footnoting myself as I went along. If the audience wants to make those connections, I’m delighted, but I hope the play isn’t dependent on it. I’m trying to think of other examples in drama and elsewhere where writers have done that, alluded to themselves. Faulkner does it, but I’m no Faulkner.

In 1982, when The Dining Room became your most widely produced play to date, you were already over 50, but you’d been writing since the 1960s. In that sense, you’d been an emerging playwright for an awfully long time.
The Dining Room was an experience full of luck. There just happened to be a slot open in the 60-seat upstairs theatre at Playwrights Horizons, and I had just happened to meet David Trainer, who was looking for something to direct. The play was successful artistically and we managed, with luck, to get some excellent actors in it.

But then there was much more luck involved. The downstairs theatre at Playwrights Horizons opened up. I said to André [Bishop, then-artistic director of the company], “I just don’t think we can move downstairs, 120 seats—I don’t think we can do it.” But one thing led to another. Roger Stevens happened to see it and wanted to put it on at the Kennedy Center, so there was luck in availability of space, and coincidence in availability of actors.

It wasn’t a play that just knocked everyone off their feet—some people didn’t like it at all. If you look at the original review of The Dining Room, it was way in the back of the Times. If that was a breakthrough, it was on rather unusual terms. On the other hand, I enjoyed the experience so much, of writing it, of doing it, and because it was beginning to make a little money, I decided I could leave teaching alone.

You taught literature at MIT, not a liberal arts college and certainly not an arts school. Besides an income, what did teaching give you?
In the end, I learned a lot. I was an English major at Williams College, and it was a very narrow major—I didn’t read around a lot. At MIT I was forced to read classical literature, philosophical argument, Pascal and Descartes, and I had to talk about it with extremely bright students.

So what was the appeal? Just the sense that I was learning a lot in the course of teaching, and performing a lot. As a teacher at MIT, your classes don’t pretend, and they’re eager to learn, or at least I felt they were. But you have to keep them interested. They’ve all been up to the wee hours of the morning doing their problem sets and experiments. You have to become a good theatrical teacher in order to survive.

In your work, you often take off from other literature—the Bible, the classics, Shakespeare. What’s the affinity?
In the first place, most of the stories, whether from the classics or from the Bible, were pretty good stories. What I didn’t realize was that these were at the heart of the traditional WASP culture, these things we had to learn in Sunday school, these plays we had to read at school. As I continued to write, I came to realize that I’m not just trying to swipe a plot that seemed important in the past, but that I’m really writing about Western culture as it was embraced by the WASP culture.

Maybe I was trying to hit common denominators. I felt in order to speak to another human, you have to put your arm around them and say, “We all agree on this story, we’ll agree on this plot, so let’s all work together.” The Golden Fleece really dealt with suburban culture, and what was going on was that men and women were waking up to their responsibilities as parents and their dreams of being more than just parents.

While you were tagged as the great chronicler of WASP culture, you weren’t necessarily celebrating it. You were writing about its downfall and perhaps not regretting that.
Even at the end of Love and Money, I celebrate aspects of WASP culture that I hate to see go—but yes, that’s why my parents really didn’t like what I was doing. They felt I was just poking fun at things they took very seriously. I’d always been the wise guy in the family. I’d always been the outsider making wisecracks at the dinner table, and I found I could do that better on the stage. I didn’t realize to what degree the WASP culture was bankrupt, and I think it is—culturally bankrupt, not financially bankrupt—until really the past three, four, five years. I was just trying to write about what it was and how silly it was in some ways, and one thing led to another.

There are characters in your plays who seem like they might be you—a young man or grown man from Buffalo, N.Y. Were you ever writing veiled autobiography?
I was not absolutely hamstrung by trying to repeat history, but I was aware of some of the characters, such as in Indian Blood or the son in The Cocktail Hour, being like me.

There was a wonderful production of The Cocktail Hour at the Huntington—the character of the young man in that was played by James Waterston, a wonderful actor—and for some reason the play became his story, more than the mother’s or the father’s, maybe because the actors were generous enough to give it to him. His story was extremely moving to me. My son saw the opening and said, “Don’t go near it, Dad, they don’t know what they’re doing.” I went down and saw it anyway and thought they knew exactly what they were doing.

So many of your plays are set in Buffalo. Is it the real Buffalo, or the Buffalo of your mind?
It was my home, although it’s like Dante’s Florence. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy not while living in Florence—he was banished from Florence—but he grew up there, and it was at the heart of his thinking, and he used it as a way of saying very general things about the world. Well, Buffalo, for many reasons, was very influential in my life. My parents, my grandparents, in some cases my great- grandparents, were born there. My great- great-grandfather was one of the first mayors of Buffalo. My wife comes from Buffalo and her family comes from there. So there’s a tribal pressure there, and the story of Buffalo as it changed from an aggressive, vibrant town to a town which is trying to decide what it’s going to be and do next is a general story.

You have worked often with a relatively small core of directors: Daniel Sullivan, Jack O’Brien, Joey Tillinger, Mark Lamos, Jim Simpson, David Saint, and David Trainer. Is there a benefit to that?
We knew each other so well that we could talk easily with one another. But I’ve had very good experiences with other directors. Lila Neugebauer, who directed [Signature’s] Wayside Motor Inn, which had been a real loser of a play—she just brought it to life. I worked with Kim Rubenstein on The Cocktail Hour at Long Wharf, and she was terrific, but she had a very different slant. So I don’t think it’s always important that you work with someone who’s in the same world that you are or who knows what your work should be like. I think Arthur Miller would say the same thing.

What did you think of Jim Simpson’s deconstruction of What I Did Last Summer this past spring at Signature?
When Jim decided to have a drummer onstage and when Michael Yeargan said, “We just want rear-screen projection on paper, the paper of the script,” I said, “Oh, God, that’s not what I had in mind at all.” But I didn’t say, “Knock it off.” I went to a rehearsal and looked at it and thought, “It’s sort of interesting. I’m sort of taken up by this.”

I hope I’m not so old that I can’t respond to change if somebody else wants to do it. But I can’t suddenly change the way a play should be done. That’s the director’s job. And if there’s any kind of argument in its favor, the director has to make it and I’ll try to go along with it.

Take Mark Lamos’s recent production of The Dining Room [at Westport]. When I first saw a rehearsal I said, “It’s a terrific cast, Mark, but it’s not the way I envision it. The dining room table and the scenery is all powder blue. What’s going on? I assume it’s just a rehearsal table.” And he said, “No. What you see is what you get.” Under lights, the way people entered and exited without giving a hint of what the world outside is like, it all worked beautifully. I never would have thought of it myself. But I hope I’m smart enough to know that there are many ways to skin a cat.

Sylvia is only your fourth play to reach Broadway, but your plays have had such success in smaller venues. Was Broadway ever something you wanted?
I’ve never had much luck on Broadway. Lord knows I’d be a fool if I didn’t want to have a play on Broadway. But with Sweet Sue, for example, without Mary Tyler Moore and Lynn Redgrave selling the tickets, it would have closed after a week.

I do think my subjects are not necessarily what Broadway has traditionally been interested in. The pressures of adjusting the script, as we had to with Sweet Sue and again with The Golden Age, which lasted I think two weeks, it just hasn’t appealed to me.

I have to feel compatible and congenial with the audience. I have to feel that these people are people like me, who have some of the same concerns and interests and that’s why they’re at the theatre. As I look around at a Broadway audience, and I hope this changes in Sylvia, I don’t see that many people of whom I can say, “Oh, I’m glad that person is here, I hope I can speak to him or her.”

Though we’ve talked about Jim Simpson, we haven’t talked about your work at the Flea, which has done eight of your plays, making you, as I’ve said before, the hottest 75-year-old Off-Off-Broadway playwright around. What’s the draw?
You know, a lot of people tease me because I’m always sure I’ve written my last play.

I got a call from Swoosie Kurtz, who was performing in The Guys, and she said, “You’ve got to get down here, it’s a terrific play and the whole Flea Theater situation is very interesting.”

And I liked the play very much, I liked Swoosie very much, and I liked Jim Simpson very much.

So I found myself surrounded by younger people, theatres that were available all around me. A lot was happening politically in our country, mostly bad, and I found myself wanting to write with and for these young actors. It was a very refreshing experience for me.

And before too long, I’ll have another play there.

This interview originally appeared in American Theatre magazine.

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