Summer Play Festival
Playwrights Blog

I’d like to thank Stafford Arima, for being the best director, leader, and friend a playwright could ask for; for helping to make Esther Demsack as good a play as it can be, and for making this production as proper, professional, and polished as I could have ever hoped possible.

I’d like to thank Andrew Palermo, for our Overture, our Entr’acte, for making actors dance and for being not only a great choreographer but also an invaluable set of eyes.

I’d like to thank Donyale Werle for finding us a curtain, and not blinking when we asked her to build us a staircase in no time with no money.  I’d also like to thank her for helping tend to Marin Hinkle’s finger after Plategate 1.0, and for decurtaining the placards on opening night.  And also for the portrait of Joan.

I’d like to thank Ben Stanton for his brash, beautiful, sensitive lighting that bridged the two sides of my play with great style and incredible flair, and for being calm and collected at all times, even when our theater smelled like a stink bomb.

I’d like to thank Barry Doss for making three Dreamgirls dresses, a Dolly dress, an adorable boy’s suit and the most beautiful party dress I’ll ever see on a stage.  And I’d like to thank LaLonnie Lehman for helping us.

I’d like to thank Kathy Fabian, for being a true propstar/superstar/rockstar, and Jen Lutz for helping get this huge endeavor off the ground.

I’d like to thank Danny Erdberg for Esther’s theme, a killer gunshot, patience under pressure and for coming back on Wednesday to iron out the kinks.

I’d like to thank Marin Hinkle for being as great a dramaturg as she was a leading lady, and as great a leader as she is an actress.  I could not have asked for a sweeter Esther or a more heartbreaking Abigail, or a more sensitive, giving, open and caring collaborator.  A playwright could not find a better friend, and an unbreakable plate could not find a more terrifying enemy.

I’d like to thank Noah Galvin, for being the most special little boy in the whole world, and by special I mean gifted.  There are kid actors, and there are great actors, and there are great kid actors, and then there’s Noah.  Amazing timing, real tears, a wicked sense of humor, killer lip-synching.  All that, and he can tap dance too.  He somehow manages to be the kid I wish I’d been and the person I want to be.

I’d like to thank Claudia Shear for being the first person in the theater, six years ago, who said, “Hey, kid, come join us, you can do this too,” and for always treating me like a peer.  Thank you for flying over and for honoring my play and the real Elaine with your presence.

I’d like to thank Paul Fitzgerald for saying yes, for being the sweetest, most handsome screwball leading man in town, and for working his ass off, literally and figuratively, to start my play up every night and put it over to the people.

I’d like to thank Elzbieta Czyzewska for sharing the traditions of the Polish theater, the magical mystery of her craft, and the mysterious magic of her talent.  And I’d like to thank her friend Monica for the Luca Luca suit.

I’d like to thank Erica Jensen and James Calleri for their guidance and patience, quick action and incredible expertise.

I’d like to thank Susan Manikas for managing our at times unmanageable stage and for making me put the Catherine Deneuve-Target-Penelope Cruz line back in.

I’d like to thank Andy Ottoson, for the Demsacklopedia, and most importantly for his perseverance in transition land.

I’d like to thank Eric Louie and Matthew Garrity for tending to all the details that no one wants to deal with but someone has to manage, and for letting us concentrate on the play.

I’d like to thank Andrew, Eric, Jessica, Jamie, Caroline, Heather, Liza, Max and Elizabeth for sweating it out, literally and figuratively, and making our backstage and onstage happen every night and three afternoons.

I’d like to thank Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Harold Arlen, Ted Koehler, Leroy Anderson, Jule Styne, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Jerry Herman, Frank Sinatra, Charles Strouse, Lee Adams, Henry Krieger, Tom Eyen, William Gibson, Arthur Miller, Robert Anderson, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Miss Ethel Merman for making me the gay man I am today.

I’d like to thank Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber for writing “Is That All There Is?”

I’d like to thank everyone at SPF for reading my play, picking my play, doing my play, watching my play, ticketing people for my play, for desmelling and recooling the Shiva, and for starting my career.

I’d like to thank Jackie Leitzes, for offering to get me tonic water.

I’d like to thank my grandmother, for being my Auntie Mame, and for taking me to my first Broadway show, Anything Goes, on December 31,1988.

I’d like to thank all my friends, for coming, and for bringing their friends, and their friends’ friends.

I’d like to thank all the strangers who came up to me in the Public lobby to congratulate me and wish my play well.

I’d like to thank Bogie and De, for all the tickets.

I’d like to thank the real Elaine, for inspiring me.

I’d like to thank my mother, for raising me.

I’d like to thank my sister, for leading me.

I’d like to thank my Don, for saving me.

And I’d just like to say, to anyone and all…

I had a ball…

Billy

TIO PEPE is the second professional production of one of my plays.  The first was two years ago with the World Premiere of THE WHIPPING MAN at Luna Stage.  I have learned a lot about my craft in the last two years.  Perhaps the most important lesson I have learned is when to step back and let the professionals do their work, which is exactly what I’ve done this week.

There comes a time in the life of a new play when the playwright is the most useless person in the room.  You’ve spent the first few rehearsals at the table with the actors. You’ve imparted all the wisdom you can dispense about the characters and the play.  You’ve watched them stage it and made rewrites and cuts throughout.  Then you get to the place we’re at now:  when the actors, the director, the designers take what you’ve been working on for two and a half years and make it their own.  Your job is finished.  It’s their turn to figure out the play.

The old adage that the two things you don’t want to ever watch being made are laws and sausages could be amended to include “first productions of a new play,” particularly if you are the person who wrote that play.  Actors are going to struggle with lines, paraphrase like they wrote it themselves, make mistakes, make more mistakes, get frustrated.  It’s what I call “The Uglies” and every play goes through it, from a new piece to a 400 year-old play. 

The Uglies are not a sign of a production in trouble.  Indeed, they are actually a sign that a production is healthy.  It means that people are wrestling with the text and the characters.  They are taking it seriously.  It isn’t an unfortunate part of the process, it is the process.  It is also, however, not something you should witness if you wrote the play in question.  As the playwright, you are not so much interested in the process, mainly because your process is largely over.  You’re ready for the result, for the party.  It is been sitting in your brain for a long time and they’ve only recently been introduced to it.  In almost every way, their job is infinitely harder than yours.  You have as much time as you want to take to create this play and you only share it when you’re good and ready.  They, on the other hand, are discovering it under the gun, with a clock ticking incessantly in the background.  That any team can find it at all is a testament to their talents.

It’s at this point that you know it’s time for you to let it go and trust that you have chosen the right people to tell your story.  You go to the movies, you go to the beach, you start writing something else.  You let them work it out in that steel cage match we call a rehearsal and you always answer the phone when your director calls.

This is what I have done this week and it wasn’t easy.  But it was necessary and, I believe, helpful.  Caitlin Moon is a smart and sensitive director who is the only person on this planet who knows my play as well as I do.  Greg Graham is an imaginative and tireless choreographer.  Vaniek, Barret, Nathan, April and Benita are deeply gifted actors and dancers who have constantly surprised me with their insights and discoveries.

Every play goes through The Uglies and every team must get to the other side of it by themselves.  I am very fortunate because not every play has the team that my play has.  I can’t wait to see what the other side looks like for these artists.  It’s going to be something wonderful.

So, the first performance has happened, I’m still in one piece (sort of), but our leading lady’s finger is not.  Well, it is, but she has a big gash in it from the heretofore unbreakable plate that broke last night, and she’s been in the emergency room all day.  Ever the trooper though, Marin Hinkle will perform tonight!  They are all troopers, my cast, they and our designers have done me and my play proud and I couldn’t feel luckier to have them.  I am also pleased to report that the two ladies who inspired the characters of Elaine and Rema saw the show last night and loved it.  The real Elaine talked up such a storm to anyone in sight that she gave me enough material for a whole other play.

Stafford has a catchphrase:  “death.” Definition unnecessary.  I have to confess, I suffered many deaths last night.  I witnessed the death of lines, of “business,” of sound cues gone haywire and ideas I thought were so good but just weren’t.  But I also witnessed the birth of my play, a play I thought I knew very well, but one that is actually a little bit different than I imagined.  I also witnessed the death of Billy, the loser unproduced playwright, and while he hasn’t been replaced by Billy, the overnight sensation (and I’m not sure what exactly he’s been replaced by come to think of it), he is still standing, and his play is very much the better for this whole crazy process.  And now I’m talking about m yself in the third person and I’m going to stop before I throw up all over my keyboard.

Okay. So I’m sitting in the Public watching the tech rehearsal (don’t even know if this is the proper phrase) of my show. And I’m hearing the amazing music and seeing the unbelievable set and the lights and I’m like: “I’m at the f-ing Public watching tech of my show!!! This is way too bizarre.” So I need a potty break and I go to the bathroom and on my way back I see Sam Shepard jamming out with the band in Joe’s Pub. I see this quite clearly between the break in the curtain, and I’m like, I can’t f-ing belive it!!!!!! I stand there for a moment and take it in. This is so not my life.

This was all on Monday. I could have stopped there and been done with it. But we had to open. And we did. And the actors were amazing. Stephen Brackett’s direction is spot on. The sound, light and set team were un-fricken-believable. It’s all good.
Thank you, SPF.

When I was a kid I used to get bad motion sickness and did actually turn a pale shade of green from time to time (which is not why the play is called Green Girl, by the way, so don’t read that in). There’s a story my mom likes to tell about two-year old Sarah puking on Papa’s fancy shoes while trapped on a moving sidewalk in a Hong Kong airport. Had mortal fear of roller coasters till age 15. I’ve thrown up on four continents.

I tend to puke less these days but it’s still my first impulse in stressful/exciting situations. Just that easy seasick green. About this time three years ago, I was sitting on a bench in the lobby of the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, knees hugged up to my chest, biting down the vertigo, waiting for my first public reading of Green Girl in a place that wasn’t my hometown or my school, with fellow Bay Area Playwrights Festival playwright Mickey Birnbaum sitting next to me talking me down.

However, the prelude to SPF is so blustery and quick and high-pressure, that there was no time to feel motion sick before we opened, not a second to spare for nerves. I spent the day rushing. The morning of our opening, in a flurry of what-was-she-thinking I dumped my last pair of contacts down the sink. Meanwhile, frenzied, packing a dress and heels-I-never-wear, late for an interview with yahoo broadway, didn’t make it to pick up the last-minute prop I was supposed to pick up, hauled ass to that $99 vision specialist on 42nd street, panicked, explaining “I have my first New York City show opening tonight down at The Public and I need to be able to see it and I kind of blinded myself this morning, uh, can you, uh - ack! – can you help?” Eye doctor’s all “you have a what? what’s a what? what? what?” But he took care of me in a zip, even gave me a secret free pair of lenses in case something went wrong at the show, and it turns out, this crazy cosmic conjunction, the prescription I had been wearing before the sink mishap was the WRONG ONE (I’ve been blinking away double-vision all year but thought that was normal since it’s my first year of contacts), and I actually walked out of that appointment with 20/15 vision, better than before. Good sign, yes? Good karma, not bad. Yes? Yes? And the show was lovely. Couldn’t have asked for more soulful performances from our beautiful ensemble. They left it all out on the floor. Sound of Campion screaming “Attila!!! Attila!!” on her entrance to the climactic scene is going to echo at me in dreams years down the road, and what Will and Keira do with that last scene is flat out electric.

Lucky, grateful, humbled. Happy playwright gets seasick. My stomach’s still turning over from the nerves. Opposite of that reading in San Francisco. Goodness if the vertigo didn’t wait to wallop me until after the show was over this time. I had to hide backstage for five minutes to chill out. I’m still all butterflies. It’ll be August before the moving sidewalk ends. Bring me pepto bismol when you come to the show. Thanks.

I can’t believe how small the world actually is. Here I am in this huge city, and I come to find out there’s another person from Palmetto, Florida, involved in the Summer Play Festival. Sarah Glendening, who was in The Black Suits, grew up in Palmetto. This is amazing because Palmetto only has about 13,000 residents. It’s an agricultural community – the tomato capital of the world. And there are no theaters – not for movies or plays. Thankfully, that didn’t stop Sarah from pursuing her dreams. When she gets rich and famous, maybe that’ll put Palmetto on the map. Or at least make people stop calling it Palm-ghetto. It was fun talking with her Sunday at the week one closing party.
We’re in our second (and last) week of rehearsals. It’s amazing how fast this festival moves. I’m having a great time and, so far, remaining relatively calm. I’m getting the hang of the subway. I haven’t taken the wrong train in a few days. So that’s good. I’m finding out that I actually enjoy dining alone. I’ve become a world-class eavesdropper. But I do it discreetly enough I think. I wonder if the two girls who lost their tickets to the evening performance of South Pacific on July 4th were able to get into the show. I wonder if the one girl forgave the other for losing the tickets. I’ve also been wondering about the girl who told someone on the other end of her cell phone: “It’s over and I don’t want to be around you anymore.” Did she follow through? Or did she give in and allow him back into her life? So many dramas. Guess I should focus on my own.

Tio Pepe is, among other things, about musical theatre and the dreams they encourage in those of us who love the form.  One of the earliest musicals I came to know as a child was South Pacific.  The summer that I was six, my mother taped an airing of the film on HBO (remember VCR’s?) and I watched it every day, over and over, from start to finish and then back again.  There were other musicals that joined the rotation over the course of that summer: Oklahoma! and Carousel chief among them.  But it was South Pacific that I kept returning to.  I listened to original cast recording on my record player (remember record players?) in my room and pretended I was Emile de Becque, Joe Cable or, my favorite, Luther Billis.

That was a practice that I assumed was particular only to myself and was, therefore, to be kept secret.  Of course, when I went to school to study theatre and moved to New York to work in it, I realized that I was hardly the only kid giving bedroom performances of shows from the canon.  There is something about musicals in particular that sparks the imagination of those of us who love them.  Few people put down Madame Bovary and pretend to be the doomed doctor’s wife.  Yet so many kids, both boys and girls, secretly believed that their version of “Rose’s Turn” was one for the ages.  (Complete disclosure: I finally retired those fantasies once I saw Patti LuPone’s volcanic performance in Gypsy. I bow to my better.)

The family in Tio Pepe does what everyone else of their ilk does: they internalize those moments and make them deeply personal, as if they created them, themselves.  It is, of course, the Candelaria’s good fortune that they get to see Ethel Merman play Rose and get to usher at the Winter Garden Theatre, which, when the play is set is currently housing West Side Story.  They live in a time that we now mythologize.  On several occasions, I have had the odd sensation of being supremely jealous of my characters.

I was recently reminded of how powerful those moments can be when I took my parents to see the revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center.  From the moment the Overture started, the three of us were transported back to our childhoods: my parents, who were born just before the show premiered on Broadway and my own, to the days of our VHS copy of the movie and the crackling LP playing on the stereo.  It was tremendously moving sharing this experience with them.  As Paolo Szot sang “Some Enchanted Evening,” I looked over to my parents (lump in throat) and saw my father reaching over to take my mother’s hand in his.  Tears were rolling down her face.  Then they quickly started rolling down mine. And as we settled in for the rest of the evening, I thought, “if only Inez Candelaria could have seen this production.”

CAN’T.  WRITE.  BLOG.  MUST.  GET.  SLEEP.

It’s 2:57am on Sunday night and I just finished the script changes for tomorrow and emailed them to our dear sweet Andrew Maillet whose birthday it is today!  I mean, tomorrow.  I mean today when you’re reading this but tomorrow when I’m writing this.  Although, actually, it already IS tomorrow, since it’s 2:57am… I know what time it is, but I don’t know what day it is.  I spent the whole day thinking it was Monday.  But now it IS Monday.  Coincidence? 

Happy birthday, Andrew!

In the time since my last blog, I have attended:

• 1 cast replacement audition
• 6 Tio Pepe rehearsals
• 1 lunch with a fellow SPF playwright
• 1 SPF first-week show
• 3 SPF parties
• 2 screenings of Wall*E

It could be argued that the time spent at the extra Wall*E screening could have been better used by, say, turning in my blog posting on time.  But that little guy is so adorable!

As I mentioned in my last posting, we had an actor drop out right before rehearsals were to begin.  We went back to Chelsea studios to search for a new “Jamie” and we are very fortunate to have the ridiculously talented Barrett Foa join our cast along with the phalanx of Barrett Foa fan-club-members who line the sidewalks outside 440 Studios as if we were shooting an episode of TRL up there. (I kid about the fan club. I mean, they do exist, they just don’t know where we rehearse. Oh, wait…damnit!)

Our cast is complete and I couldn’t be happier.  I know every playwright says they love their cast but in this case, it’s absolutely true.  We started rehearsals last week and it is amazing to watch them all become a family in front of my eyes.  Caitlin, my director, attributes it to good writing.  I attribute it to good casting.  The cast attributes it to good direction. Yes, basically, we spend all of our rehearsal time sitting around, slapping each other on the back and congratulating each other on a job well done.

My cast is made up primarily of Mexican-American actors which, for the uninitiated, wouldn’t seem like that big of a deal, but Mexican Spanish and Puerto Rican Spanish are two very different things.  It has been fun watching the horror in their eyes as I encourage them to drop every “s” at the end of a word, swallow their consonants and shorten their vowels.  The trick, I’ve told them, is not to sing the language but, rather, to bark it.  They’re unlearning a lifetime of proper care and treatment of their ancestral language.  Essentially, they’re becoming Puerto Ricans.

Greg Graham, our choreographer, has created some amazing dances for Barrett and Nathan Mendez and they are learning them with a speed that borders on the frightening. Caitlin and I watch them in complete bewilderment. “Did you get any of that?” she asks me as Greg teaches them a new section. “I think I picked up a shuffle ball-change somewhere,” I reply. “No, I think it was a flap.” I think it might be slightly more advanced than that.  Whatever it is, it looks great and is going to make the audience go stupid with delight.

So that’s where we are.  Chugging along, destroying the Spanish language and dancing our little culos off.  Never a dull moment in Pepe-land.  Now I must run.  I’m expected at yet another SPF party.

The most incredible thing about SPF is feeling like you have stepped into a family.  Cliched I know, but it really feels true.

Everyone wants you to succeed – the team in the office, the team on your play, the teams on the other plays. I have spent time with nearly all the other playwrights and it’s been great getting to know them and through them the NYC theatre scene a little.

Matt Lopez and I spent the day together today and he helped me (the last person on the planet without their own laptop) burn a mix CD for my cast. He has also done one for Tio Pepe. I love that we both had the same thought of gifts! Although I think they will differ quite hugely in musical genre.

Speaking of musical genres, can’t wait to see Black Suits on Saturday.

My Australian producer and I have been fantasizing about the day when the festival will be truly international – I really hope it’s one day soon.