Two Yanks in London

It was the first time Jon Robin Baitz met the people who lived upstairs, and, upon learning that he was a playwright, they remarked that they had just come back from a read-through of Donald Freed’s play “The Quartered Man.”

What are American playwrights trying to do, they asked Baitz. Invade British theater?

These days the London stage appears as enamored of American dramas as the Broadway stage is of British musicals. Not only are revivals like Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” flourishing in the West End, but such important London fringe theaters as the Bush and the Soho Poly are featuring seasons of new American plays this year.

The latest invaders, Freed and Baitz, come from the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Baitz’s “The Film Society” had its world premiere at LATC a year ago, and opened at the Hampstead Theatre here Thursday. Freed’s play, which had its world premiere at LATC in December, 1985, opens Tuesday at London’s Shaw Theatre.

Both plays have impressive British casts and realistic hopes for future lives. Baitz’s play about the British presence in South Africa has already been optioned by Broadway producer Emanuel Azenberg and director Ulu Grosbard, who are hoping to move it first to London’s West End, then to New York.

Freed’s play, “The Quartered Man,” hopes to follow in the footsteps of his “Circe & Bravo,” which, in 1986, starred Faye Dunaway and first played the Hampstead, then moved to the West End. (Another Freed play, “Veterans Day,” is expected to open in the West End next February, and star Jack Lemmon and Harold Pinter.)

Freed, 55, is directing his own play here, while Baitz, 26, spends most of his time writing and grappling with his future. This is the story of their encounter with the British theater.

Pain and Triumph

To Baitz, who came to an interview wearing a black leather jacket, black slacks, black sweat shirt and black scarf, London is a city of great pain.

This is the city where he and his family stopped en route back to America from South Africa 10 years ago. The same alienation that whips through “The Film Society” flashes in his memory now as he is reminded of the four long, unhappy months he spent here a decade ago.

“You don’t want to get too taken in by the pleasant experience of having your play produced in a foreign country,” Baitz said. “You have to remember what the play is about, and the reasons you wrote it. . . . In a way, being back in London 10 years after arriving here, (you) feel all the things that people in the play feel--alienated, isolated, confused and disenfranchised.”

But to Freed, a man so in tune with London that he is never without his weathered pipe and typically British black umbrella, this is a city of triumph. This is the place where he made it on the West End. It’s where Harold Pinter, to whom “Quartered Man” is dedicated, showed him a side of London other American writers only dream of.

“The idea of the patron and mentor is a theatrical tradition that is alive here,” Freed said. “I don’t mean there isn’t a congeniality and friendship among playwrights in America, but it’s rare. In London, it’s something palpable. Harold Pinter, John Osborne, Simon Gray help others who aren’t necessarily younger but, by being American, need help.”

Freed, co-author of “Secret Honor”--a devastating portrait of Richard Nixon that was later made into a film by Robert Altman--as well as many other highly political books and plays, in this play condemns U.S. policy in Central America. Baitz, whose first produced play was about Hollywood, addresses the problems of South Africa in “The Film Society” by using an English boys’ school as a microcosm.

Recalling his own sojourn here as a writer, when he didn’t work long tiring days directing, Freed acknowledged to Baitz during a joint photo session that he envied the younger playwright his freedom here. Aside from occasional dinners at the homes of other writers and political contacts, Freed has barely seen more of London than the rehearsal hall and his hotel room--where he is writing other projects.

But Baitz, too, is usually in front of the typewriter at his Bloomsbury flat. “I’m going to hole up and type the whole month,” Baitz said early on in his visit. “Then I have loads of friends coming. Conway Street (where he lives) is going to turn into New York Actors Equity.”

The Place: Camden

The Shaw and Hampstead theaters are in Camden, among the most economically diverse of London’s 32 boroughs, and the luxurious homes near the Hampstead Theatre contrast with a subsidized housing project just behind the Shaw. Freed is living in a commercial hotel near the Shaw and just behind the King’s Cross Underground station where 30 people died in a fire in November. It’s a far cry from London’s cushier neighborhoods, and Freed’s wife, Patty, early on purchased a big umbrella here, in part for protection.

The Shaw is housed in a public library building, and both library and theater face as much as a 45% budget cut this year. The library is already closing on Wednesdays to make ends meet, and the Shaw has been laying off staff. The Shaw produces few of its own shows anyway, instead booking everything from political and gay theater to dance and community theater. The Shaw’s artistic director, Ian Bowalter, recently told the local press that “Quartered Man” may be the 500-seat theater’s last production.

The Hampstead Theatre is about 15 minutes away in the affluent suburb of Swiss Cottage, just blocks from where Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, lived and worked until her death a few years ago. A few steps from a Tube stop, on a busy city street, the 174-seat theater is nestled next to a new office building with an upscale Benihana restaurant.

In the lobby, sheltered from the cold and wind outside, a half-dozen volunteers are stuffing brochures for “Film Society” into addressed envelopes. The Hampstead, which is well known for launching many West End shows, has also won a considerable number of awards over the years. Among the posters lining its walls are those for Freed’s “Circe & Bravo”: one from the Hampstead production, the other from the production that followed at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End.

Visit With the Director

Before he went to London for Hampstead’s production of “Circe & Bravo,” his tale of a sequestered First Lady (Circe) and her guard (Bravo), Freed had never been out of the United States for more than 24 hours. Pinter had called Freed after reading the “Circe” script, saying that he wanted to direct it in London. Recalled Patty Freed, who teaches psychology at Los Angeles’ Mount St. Mary’s College: “I remember taking the stairs four at a time. (That call) changed our lives.”

Pinter “opened his home and his community to us,” said Patty. “He insisted on having Donald with him for six weeks. His generosity was both personal and professional . . . it never stopped, long after the play closed. The theater has such instant intimacy and it all closes when they strike the set. But it wasn’t like that with Harold.”

The Freeds’ warm, open house on Los Angeles’ Westside is filled with Pinter memorabilia. Just down the hall from Freed’s framed Los Angeles theater awards, for instance, is a copy of the special menu Pinter designed for London’s Groucho Club to honor “Circe & Bravo.” (Among its selections: “Nixon” vegetables and a “Truman” side salad.) So close have they become that Patty Freed’s mother even sent her homemade lemon-orange marmalade for the Pinters on this latest trip.

Before leaving for London at year-end to direct “Quartered Man,” Freed said that he expected this time away to be “torturous on my family and work life,” particularly given the fact there were two teen-age children at home. But Patty encouraged him to do it, both Freeds said. Recalling the “Circe” experience in London and what it meant to Freed personally as well as professionally, Patty said: “Donald was in a place where theater was a priority and not a stepchild like in Hollywood.”

Freed’s London odyssey began with a pre-rehearsal lunch and read-through on the Shaw stage. Actors, directors and other Freed acquaintances, not to mention the deputy mayor of Camden, mingled over wines and finger sandwiches in the shadow of a set for a musical version of “Cinderella” then doing sell-out business.

The play next moved to a temporary rehearsal hall in the nearby Holborn Library’s stark fourth-floor assembly rooms. By group decision, the company traded lunch breaks for an earlier finishing time. But there were frequent forays out of the cavernous room to the “tea bar” out in the hall with its Tetley tea bags, Nescafe, cookies and conversation.

Despite the casualness of his cords, turtleneck and tennis shoes, Freed set the stage for his controversial and blunt play at the very first rehearsal: “We’re in the cockpit here,” Freed shouted at his cast. “We’re not living in the village outside Buchenwald. We’re inside--we’re in the center.”

Freed’s rhetoric was delivered to a cast as international as his play, a tale whose characters speak French, Spanish and English. Shelley King, an Anglo-Indian who is playing the Vietnamese wife of central character George O’Connor, learned French at school in Calcutta, where she lived as a child. The British and Greek actors playing the two Central American aides work in the hall with a Spanish coach, and Patricia Bain, who plays a Spanish-speaking prostitute, is from Scotland.

The script, however, is decidedly American, full of references to Vietnam and the CIA, to Notre Dame and Daniel Ellsberg. At one point, Freed even had to explain to one young British actor what he meant by the line that someone who worked for J.F.K. was “a spear carrier in Camelot.” (Barry Foster, who plays O’Connor and was recently featured in the films “Maurice” and “The Whistle Blower,” knew such things. He played on Broadway in 1963-64 in Peter Shaffer’s “The Private Ear and the Public Eye.”)

The LATC production of “Quartered Man” fared poorly with local critics, so as both playwright and director, Freed has recast his play differently. Bowalter remarked at one point that they should call it a world premiere rather than a British premiere. Scenes have been trimmed and altered, and Bowalter and Freed agreed at the outset to scrap most of the platforms and many of the multimedia aspects of the LATC production.

Patty Freed refers to 39-year-old Bowalter as Freed’s “soul son,” and Bowalter’s attraction to the play clearly came as much from political sympathies as artistic ones. Bowalter has been to Nicaragua, as had actor/playwright Andy de la Tour, an official in Britain’s Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, who portrays a loathsome CIA man in this play.

A March staged reading of “Quartered Man” at the Shaw raised 700 for a Nicaraguan health project, Bowalter said. He added that the current production here has received encouragement and marketing assistance from London’s Nicaraguan embassy and its ambassador, Francisco D’escoto, whose brother is Miguel D’escoto, Nicaragua’s foreign minister. There are several benefit performances for Nicaragua, including one for the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, and the Nicaraguan ambassador reportedly asked for 219 tickets.

Baitz--Time to Write

It’s about 20 minutes and one transfer uptown on the Tube from Baitz’s Bloomsbury flat to the Swiss Cottage neighborhood for breakfast at the old-world Cosmo cafe across the street from the Hampstead Theatre. Baitz calls the Cosmos stop the high point of his day, admitting that “I really miss my routine at home. I miss the papers. I miss my buddies. It’s relatively solitary.”

To keep in touch, he calls home a lot, joking that he expects to win a “distinguished consumerism award” from the phone company. “I’m having a slight sleeping disorder,” he quipped, referring to his persistent jet lag. “So I wake up at 4 a.m. here, which is five hours earlier in New York, eight hours earlier in Los Angeles, and call friends.”

But he is also using the “relative quiet to think about what I want to do as a writer, what the next few years mean and what kind of writer I want to be. I feel I’ve been at a crossroads this past year, which is demanding that I make choices about the things I write about.”

His typewriter, brought from home, is on the dining room table, nearly lost among the pages from “Mizlansky/Zilinsky,” which he is readying for a probable New York production. Mingled with it are sheets of paper from the script of “Jack and Jill,” a film he is writing for HBO about “a reconciliation between a very screwed-up, confused, alienated brother and sister in their 20s.”

(He has also written another play, currently titled “Dutch Landscape,” which deals with personal and political exile and was commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum. Coming up next is a commissioned play for LATC “about people who, faced with the weight of history, don’t have a laugh left in them.”)

“Being away enforces the feelings of loneliness that a writer has to deal with,” he said. “At a certain point, this essentially solitary task either becomes a furthering and a deepening of introspection and self-awareness or it becomes a retreat from the world. And I think I’m using the time to examine the balance between the two.”

“The Film Society” is set at the Blenheim School for Boys in Durban, South Africa, the city where Baitz lived with his family from age 10 to 16. The play’s central character, 45-year-old schoolmaster Jonathon Balton, seeks escape in vintage films from the world of the school (and, metaphorically, from the British presence in South Africa) and is a sad, weak figure whom Baitz repeatedly referred to in interviews as “the worst-case scenario” of himself.

Baitz’s play, which drew almost uniformly rave reviews in Los Angeles, is based on a time in the playwright’s life that he has summarized as “a coarsening experience.” The mere fact of living in South Africa, he told one interviewer, “makes me culpable as a participant in that society.”

While engaging and affable, the writer is simultaneously obsessed with alienation. He talks about it, writes about it and drapes it around himself as an aura. He may be having a good time but he is always reminding himself, and the interviewer, that this London experience is grounded in the hard work of deciphering and fictionalizing his feelings as the privileged son of an international executive in white-controlled South Africa.

So Baitz doesn’t dwell long on the Friday afternoon teas at writer John Lahr’s flat, the chance to meet British writers he admires, or even the excitement of watching his play about the English being done in England. “Although the atmosphere of the rehearsal process is genteel and civilized, I want to make sure the actors connect to the real pain at the core of this play,” he said early in the rehearsal process. “Not that I have a market on pain, but I didn’t want them to have such a good time.”

At the Hampstead Theatre, director Michael Attenborough said he was attracted to not just “Film Society’s” language and subject matter but also to what he calls the “relevance for an English audience of a play about the English legacy, tradition and imperialism in South Africa.”

The first week of rehearsals, Baitz said, he sat around a table with the actors answering questions about his play and correcting Americanisms. Characters began to ask for rises instead of raises, to refer to the two of us instead of both of us, got instead of gotten. It was, he said, “the usual kind of actor shuffle--’Would it be better if I say don’t instead of do not ?’--I never argue on the little ones.”

Next came what Baitz calls a “terribly long argument about accents.” Baitz wanted the actors to sound more British than South African because of the colonial British society he was creating, and felt that the accents were so stilted at first that it was “like watching (South African Prime Minister Pieter W.) Botha on TV. They couldn’t get into the humor of the play because they were doing South African accents. . . . But the very next day, they integrated the accent. So an Anglo-American feud was averted.”

Although only 26, Baitz has already had one other success--L.A. Theatre Works’ 1985 production of “Mizlansky/Zilinsky,” his play about Hollywood producers--and he has also been playwright-in-residence at Vassar College and the Double Image Theatre in New York. “One of the good things about him, and surprising because of his age, is that he is very contained and looks like he’s been writing plays and been in rehearsals for many years,” said actor Denis Lawson (“Local Hero”), who is playing schoolmaster Balton. “He’s at home there.”

It took time, however. A few days before his show opened, Baitz talked of reaching an understanding of “how English actors work. While American actors have a tendency to work from the inside out, the English actors tend to work from the outside in. The process of watching the English cast rehearse ‘The Film Society’ has been roughly akin to watching a photograph being developed, watching the image coalescing. Maybe the chemicals here are weaker and it takes longer. But it holds.”

The American Influx

Freed and Baitz have plenty of American company these days.

On the West End, such musicals as “42nd Street,” “Kiss Me Kate” and “Follies” have been running for months, while “South Pacific” opened late last month. “The Rink” starts previews Monday and “Nite Club Confidential” opens at the end of the month. And the National Theatre, which last year sent “A View From the Bridge” to the West End, last week opened a new production of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

The Soho Poly and Bush theaters, two prominent fringe houses, plan seasons this year of new American plays. The Bush season, which is being assembled for next summer, follows a successful American season of a few years ago. That theater’s co-director Jenny Topper was in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles last year talking with writers and agents.

While the 100-seat Bush hasn’t announced the plays for its American season, the 55-seat Soho Poly kicked off its first American season last week with “Children of the Dust,” a play by New Mexico novelist Anne Aylor about a disabled Vietnam War vet bringing his Amerasian child over from Vietnam. And artistic director Sue Dunderdale estimates that one third of the people in their writers’ workshops are Americans.

Soho Poly will also feature new American plays in its play-reading series, including several gathered together during Dunderdale’s recent visit to the East Coast. During her 2-month stay, which was financed by the British Arts Council, Dunderdale estimated that she talked with 20 to 25 directors, writers, actors and literary agents and came back with a dozen scripts.

The Hampstead’s Attenborough, son of film-maker Richard Attenborough, estimates that during his five years at the Hampstead, nearly half of the playwrights he has produced have been American, including revivals and European premieres as well as world premieres. Baitz’s play will be followed, for instance, by “Danger: Memory,” two one-acts by Arthur Miller, whose plays have been revived on many London stages in recent years.

What Happens Next?

What next for “The Quartered Man” and “The Film Society”?

On “Quartered Man,” the Shaw’s Ian Bowalter said that West End producers will be in the audience, and a possible move has apparently been discussed with the actors. Bowalter said they’ve also spoken with a couple of film producers--”It is very cinematic”--but want to get the play up before having any further discussions.

Bowalter and Freed indicate they expect to work together again on “The White Crow: Eichmann in Jerusalem,” a play that had its world premiere at LATC in 1984. Bowalter, who would direct, said they have talked with Julie Harris and Tim Pigott-Smith--the latter attended the lunch launching “Quartered Man” in early January--and are planning a production early next year that would begin out-of-town and then move to the West End. (Director Irvin Kershner confirmed in Los Angeles that a film version of “White Crow” is also in the works, saying, “The script is ready, the money is in place and we’re trying to cast it so that we can start shooting next fall.”)

And “The Film Society”?

Reached in New York at press time, producer Azenberg said that even if the show isn’t enough of a hit to move to the West End, he still wants to take it to New York, adding that that could mean anything from regional theater there to Broadway. Talking of a production as early as next fall, Azenberg said, “If it isn’t successful in London, and we think it has to do with a bad production or not a great cast or things we can resolve, we will go ahead and do it in New York anyway.”

Azenberg said he and Grosbard also hope later to produce “Mizlansky/Zilinsky,” which Grosbard would direct. “We want Robbie Baitz to make a living as a playwright. If he can make a living as a playwright, he’ll write more plays, and we believe he’s very talented. If he can’t make a living as a playwright, he’ll wind up doing movies and we’ll have lost yet another writer to another media.”

Baitz, meanwhile, said he didn’t find working with an English theater particularly different from working in Los Angeles. “It seems to me that I could be doing it at the Taper. The way the theater operates, the rituals are the same. The process is the same. I think finally there’s a certain way in which you work. And it doesn’t matter where you are, unless you’re Arthur Miller and you’re going to China. It’s not dependent on geography unless you’re doing ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Peking.”

The playwright has also decided to stay on here for three weeks longer than he had planned. “Being out of town, I’m getting more work done than I tend to get done at home. And it will be fun to walk into the theater and see my play on the boards. It seems too Spartan to put my play up, go back home and let it be.”