Steven Dietz: A Playwright, Sink or Swim : His ‘Ten November’ centers on 1975 ship disappearance

Steven Dietz is rarely without an opinion. He’s also rarely without some project in hand--usually writing a play or directing one, very often his own.

Despite about 20 theater pieces to his name, that name still rings few bells outside theatrical circles. The blond and boyish 31-year-old, who looks as if he’s spent the last 10 years racking up innings on some college baseball team, has instead spent them forging and staging scripts on the less visible resident theater circuit. Sports activity has been confined to friendly softball games with fellow playwrights.

In Los Angeles, Dietz also may be remembered as the author of “Foolin’ Around With Infinity,” favorably received at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1987. On Friday, he returns as author and director of “Ten November,” a piece inspired by the mysterious sinking of an ore carrier, the Edmund Fitzgerald, on Lake Superior in 1975.

His partner in the venture is Eric Peltoniemi, a Finnish songwriter for the theater in the Twin Cities who contributed music and lyrics for several songs that form the play’s key lyrical backdrop. The LATC production will be the first one mounted outside the Great Lakes region.

Dietz and Peltoniemi were introduced to each other and commissioned to come up with a piece by the Actors Theatre of St. Paul.

Though the two were happy to work together, they had a devil of a time coming up with a project. On the day they needed to deliver an idea for one, Dietz heard Gordon Lightfoot’s song about the Edmund Fitzgerald.

“I noted it at the bottom of my legal pad,” he said in a recent conversation at The Times. “So after we’d talked through all the other possibilities I said, ‘Well, something that seems completely impossible to me, and therefore, naturally appealing, is to do something about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’ Eric’s eyes lit up and I knew we had something.

“It turned out that Eric’s from Minnesota’s North Shore. I, of course, knew nothing. I mean, I’m a landlocked Colorado boy. But it seemed completely impossible to try and convey (the idea of) a boat larger than most of downtown disappearing in a lake that has 6,000 ships at the bottom of it. So I started researching it like mad.”

The story of the Fitzgerald is made eerie by the fact that while the boat’s wreckage was found, they never recovered any of the 29 men who made up its crew.

“In the history of Lake Superior, no body has ever washed up on its shores,” Dietz explained. “They didn’t come up with the technology to go to the bottom of it until 15 years after they had the technology to go to the moon. I was seduced by this at once. My nautical voyeurism took over.”

When Dietz had first heard the Lightfoot song, he thought it referred to some ancient maritime disaster. “To realize that it happened the week after Squeaky Fromme shot at Gerald Ford and when the Pet Rocks were out, placed it in an amazing context.

“It’s also the most recent tragedy on the Great Lakes. The last 15 minutes of the voyage itself, because the ship had lost radio contact, are of necessity fiction. We made the decision not to try and impersonate any of these 29 men, because we know them only as a group, and they disappeared--were taken--as a group.”

“Ten November” has nine male actors, three female singers and a couple of musicians. As the piece developed, the women became increasingly important.

“The play turned out to be more our response to their loss, in terms of the music and the singers who function as a sort of environment--people who not only convey the story, but go off on other tangents, regarding loss in general, the myth of invincibility.”

And there was another resonance: “The Challenger tragedy happened while we were writing this. It was a lightning rod.”

The Denver-born Dietz lays no claim to an early education in theater, describing himself as “a railroader’s kid” whose dad was a conductor and brakeman on the old Colorado and Southern Railroad.

“We had the Bible, the World Book Encyclopedia and a Perry Como record. I saw my first theater in high school and didn’t have any inkling how to attempt it until I went to college (the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley).”

What drew him to the theater?

“Obsessive curiosity. I liked writing--bad poetry, song lyrics, stuff like that. But primarily I was fascinated by people and situations. Piano tuners, restaurant critics, chimney sweeps, weather men. I have no interest in writing a play in which the architect comes home and makes a martini for his wife.”

The morning after graduation, Dietz took off driving randomly around the country vaguely thinking he would like to direct plays. He stopped in Louisville, Washington, New York--and Minneapolis.

“I had a friend there,” he explained. It was March and when the fan belt on his car broke in the middle of a snowstorm, Dietz walked up to an old church to use the telephone.

“I thought it was a church,” he said. “This huge man came up to me when I was on the phone and handed me some literature. It was Tom Dunn (of New Dramatists).

“He said, ‘We work on new plays here, we have actors and directors, these are our writers.’ I drove back to Denver, got my stuff and moved up there.”

That was nine years ago. Dietz is now the artistic director of the Midwest Playwrights Lab, for which the Playwrights’ Center is an umbrella organization.

“It’s been a wonderful breeding ground for me and others. It’s also my touchdown, the place to return to. I’m still in the honeymoon phase with this business. There’s so much I want to do and it gets worse on planes. That’s when all the lists start coming out of me, the plays I have to write.

“I got on the map directing new plays, and I was lucky enough to link up with writers like John Olive (Dietz directed the premiere of Olive’s “The Voice of the Prairie”), Kevin Kling and John Klein. I feel a huge responsibility to this strange alchemy (known as) making plays in this culture, because it has nurtured and enabled me to do my own work.”

But what Dietz began to note in the dramaturg-playwright relationship after a while was that “for the sake of fairness, passion was being lost. For the sake of logic, which has never been the theater’s strong suit, amazing voices were being rendered quiet or normal or mediocre.”

He became a proselytizer for fairer practices.

“It’s important to respect the notion of mentors, to make stabs at stealing the magic of writers you admire early on,” he extrapolated. “If you’re in Minnesota, you write your August Wilson play, your Lee Blessing play, and you don’t do it as well as they do. It’s part of your apprenticeship.

“Lee Blessing plays first base on our softball team. August Wilson used to play third base. Now he’s never around. I love to tell the story about how, when August won the Pulitzer and Lee was the runner-up, everybody wanted to be in the infield. It had to be the place to be--right?

“Finding writers that you admire is an important stage. Beyond that, it’s important to make yourself the primary mover and shaker of your own work. You have to fit into certain niches--deal with finances, with new play programs--but, ultimately, they don’t have to live with what arrives on the page and you do. You have to wake up happy with it the next morning. You have to learn to fight for it.”

One way to do that, Dietz says, is to direct your own plays.

“A lot of playwrights can’t, certainly,” he acknowledged, “but if doing that will enable them to carry out what’s in their heart, it’s something they have to try. The medieval notion that playwrights should not direct their own work has to, if not be abolished, at least be questioned. I was lucky. I had a resume and a background and I had already directed for most of the theaters that I had to talk into letting me stage my own plays.”

The other alternative, he says, is to work with compatible directors.

“My buddy David Goldstein directed the premiere of ‘God’s Country’ in Seattle and it’s sort of the same thing with Richard E.T. White (who staged the premiere of “Ten November” at Chicago’s Wisdom Bridge). They were directors who knew another director was in the room. I didn’t step on their toes, but they respected my input.”

Dietz insists that he never directs any of his own pieces early in the process without an aggressive dramaturg or assistant director, “someone who’s hard on me. I want buddies who understand my goals but will hold my feet to the fire.

“The writers who seem to have been successful are the ones who attempted to do a lot. Everyone else is trying to make it smaller--and I don’t mean cast size. I mean ideas. The issue gets blurry when it comes to specific agendas. All my three- and four-character plays went nowhere. Some of them had up to 15 staged readings. I began to think of them as the plays that could never be memorized. Perennial finalists.

“Then I started writing 10- and 12-character plays with music and strange monologues and facts and--go figure. Those are the plays I’ve been making my living on. I think that at some point I started going beyond my mentors and tried reinventing the theater. I’m not saying any of us are succeeding, but I’m drawn to those (of us) who are attempting it. That’s our job.”

Among those mentors Dietz lists John Guare, Samuel Beckett and “the boys, Shepard and Mamet, probably just for the energy of it. As for my frustrated journalistic impulses, certainly that mentor is Emily Mann. She was very supportive when I worked with her in the Twin Cities. And then I have the writers whose work I direct who teach me enormously: Kevin Kling, Jaime Meyer, John Klein.”

At 31, Dietz has five plays “on the circuit” (“More Fun Than Bowling,” “Foolin’ Around With Infinity,” “Ten November,” “God’s Country,” and “Painting It Red”). All five are about to be published by Samuel French. “That cracks me up,” Dietz says with a grin. “It saves a lot of copying.”

When not rehearsing “Ten November,” he’s working on a new piece with Peltoniemi called “Happenstance,” which opens at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre this summer. And the Denver Center Theatre Company has an eye on “God’s Country,” fittingly a play about the murder of Denver radio announcer Alan Berg by white supremacists.

But Minneapolis is home base. “The key thing there is the work,” he said, “not the hype of the work. It’s a springboard in the sense that some of us have had our plays done locally and seen them go on to national theaters, but the springboard is (contained) within the realm of improving the theatrical art form. It’s not about dabbling.

“We have an organization in the Playwrights Center that exists solely to allow writers to work at their craft. A producing theater can seldom afford the luxury to do that on such an ongoing basis. I can finish ‘God’s Country,’ on a Wednesday night, make a call and say I need 10 Equity actors Saturday to read it and boom--they’re there. I hear it a couple days after it’s written with some of the best actors in the Twin Cities.

“Sure, at times we might wish for greater visibility,” he conceded. “We wrestle with that. But there is also the sense that, when you work in theater in the Twin Cities you’re in it for the long haul.”

Does film attract him?

“I’ve been offered some things, which I’ve sort of turned down. I’m still madly in love with the theater and right now it would be foolish of me to not pursue it. Film, to me, is like New York productions. If you shoot for it, it’s unbelievably elusive. You can only do your work.

“And if that sort of gravy gets dumped on your plate later on--well, that’s all right too.”