Red Ryder Coming Back This Weekend

Mark Medoff didn’t necessarily plan to write a sequel to “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?”

“A couple of years ago I was on a safari and Steven Ryder started talking to me,” Medoff said of the play’s anti-hero, an angry Vietnam veteran who terrorizes a group of travelers at a diner. “Of all the people that’ve come out of my head, Steven and (waitress) Angel were the least like me--and the most interesting. Also, the play has been done so much, in so many places. People are always inquiring about those characters, wanting to know what happened to them.”

The answers are on display in “The Heart Outright,” opening this weekend at A Directors’ Theatre in Hollywood. “It’s actually made up of two pieces, ‘The Dirty Picture Man’ and ‘Terminal,’ ” Medoff noted. “I think each play stands on its own. The central theme is coming to a place where you resolve something terrible in your past.

“The first piece, which is a 25-minute monologue, takes place eight years after Steven’s walked out of the diner and Angel’s been left eating the remains of a doughnut. The character here is a young man who runs a porno theater, coming to grips with his feelings about women, men’s treatment of women, and getting a view that’s realistic--after growing up under the aegis of the romanticized American myth of the male hero.”

Set two years later, on the day of his mother’s funeral, “Terminal” reunites Steven and Angel (now an ex-waitress). Also on hand are a bus terminal manager and Steven’s stepfather. But the saga doesn’t end there. Medoff has just finished the third installment of his “Red Ryder” series. Entitled “Stumps,” it features Steven and another Vietnam veteran, Steven’s Vietnamese wife, an 18-year-old porno star and her “manager.”

Meanwhile, the New Mexico-based writer has a lot of Hollywood projects keeping him busy: An adaptation for director Roland Joffe, an animated feature for Disney based on “The Wild Swans,” an “arrangement” with Paramount to write and direct “Final Appeal,” and a 1 1/2-year collaboration with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell on the screen adaptation of Betty Rollin’s “Last Wish.”

Medoff (a 1980 Tony Award winner for “Children of a Lesser God”) seems to enjoy keeping several irons in the fire. “I always have three or four things in my head; everything I write goes through a long gestation period,” he said. “It’s like childbirth--except that when (the play) comes out, it’s not nearly as attractive.”

MUSIC MAN: It’s the words and music of composer/lyricist Jerry Herman in the revue “Tune the Grand Up,” opening Tuesday at the Back Alley Theatre in Van Nuys.

“Unlike ‘Bittersuite,’ this is pure entertainment,” said director Rick Roemer, whose staging of “Bittersuite” (also at the Back Alley) recently closed after an eight-month run. Here the challenge was to make 30-plus songs, written for specific musicals (such as “Hello, Dolly!” “Mame”and “La Cage aux Folles,”as well as the lesser known “Dear World” and “Mack and Mabel”) work out of that context--and within the new revue format.

“The arrangement was set from (an earlier) San Francisco production,” added the actor/director. “But it was done in a little cabaret there--with no sets or lights. So I had to make it into a theater piece. We’ve got four times the stage space that they did. It also means taking the arrangements and making them fit together in a different way: finding links and making transitions. When a show is just music, there’s no throughline. So you just have to make one up.”

PLAY MONEY: Twenty-five public and private Los Angeles county high schools have been invited to participate in the first annual Young Playwrights Competition, sponsored by A Directors’ Theatre. Three teen-agers will receive a $1,000 savings bond and have their plays mounted as part of ADT’s 1989 season. In addition, the winners’ schools will be awarded $500 for “program enhancement.” Submissions (which must be received by April 15) should be mailed to 6404 Hollywood Blvd., Suite 329, Hollywood, Calif. 90028. Information: (213) 465-8431.

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: Ongoing at the Los Angeles Theatre Center is “Demon Wine,” Thomas Babe’s New York City-set tale of corruption and seduction. David Schweizer directs Bud Cort, Philip Baker Hall, Carol Kane, Vanessa Marquez, Bill Pullman and Tom Waits.

Said The Times’ Sylvie Drake: “Babe is good at wrapping his medium around his message, creating a real entertainment whose layers must be unpeeled if one is to find its heart. In this passion for disguise, he’s had fine support from Schweizer, who keeps intentional comedy at a minimum, preferring to let the slyness emerge slowly.”

From Tom Jacobs in the Daily News: “It’s a play in which people’s pasts catch up with them, and they pay dearly for their transgressions. It’s also a play that utilizes stylized acting, cryptic dialogue and, in its most hilarious scene, even song and dance. Think of it as a step beyond Brecht. Better yet, just enjoy it.”

In Drama-Logue, Bruce Feld was unimpressed: “Cloaked in the guise of gangster melodrama, ‘Demon Wine’ aims for heights explored by the Big Boys--Shakespeare and Beckett--but succeeds only fitfully as a kind of mean, updated Damon Runyon. . . . By the time the curtain falls, the audience has been talked to death.”

The Herald Examiner’s Richard Stayton credited “an extraordinary cast, a dazzling director, a gifted designer (Timian Alsaker). There’s ultimately too much of everything in this over-proof ‘Demon Wine.’ Still, even in its unblended, under-aged state, there’s something for everyone’s palate.”

From Thomas O’Connor in the Orange County Register: “Between Babe’s luxuriant, surreal rhapsodizing and Schweizer’s parodical lurid staging, ‘Wine’ gets fat on its own cooking and loses its edge. By the second act, playwright and director seem more in competition than collaboration; the production becomes a triumph of stylization over style.”

Said Daily Variety’s Amy Dawes: “In ambitious, fanciful and off-kilter style, Babe confronts the growing and painful chasm between America’s haves and have-nots and the morally ambiguous basis by which sides are chosen . . . (It’s) a resounding, larger-than-life affair, with all of its elements raging brassily along at the cutting edge.”

The Santa Monica Outlook’s Willard Manus found much of the play “seems like a ‘Show of Shows’ takeoff of Warner Bros. gangster films. . . . Fortunately, Babe is too much of an artist to be content merely with satire. In the end, he manages to go deep with ‘Wine,’ paint a scabrous yet compassionate portrait of the moral landscape of our times.”