Challenger Disaster Led Director to Stage ‘Home’ : Michael Peretzian confronts his fear and helplessness with making of David Storey’s play

If you visit Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills sometime between now and Dec. 17, you can watch a play that critic John J. O’Connor labeled “the most extraordinary piece of theater in years,” involving two middle-aged men, whiling away the time talking with each other, until two middle-aged women interrupt their somewhat confused tete a tete . They enjoy each other’s company, but as the day wanes so it seems do these four people’s lives. This describes the surface of a very deep lake of a play called “Home,” by the British playright/novelist David Storey.

It’s not a description likely to bring to mind the Challenger catastrophe.

Yet that 1986 disaster is precisely what led director Michael Peretzian to “Home.” “I felt awful, helpless after Challenger,” he said, letting out an audible sigh as he sat in a Beverly Hills hotel lounge. “It triggered a state of mind in me that I had to respond to.”

The only way he knew how to respond, he said, was to direct a play. As the 48-year-old Peretzian combed a list of titles, “Home” stood out. He had been very impressed by Lindsay Anderson’s original 1970 production with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. “Somehow ‘Home’ matched my feelings and addressed them. The sense of the characters’ alienation and helplessness, the mystery surrounding that, made me want to do it, even though I knew how difficult staging it would be.”

So the decision wasn’t easy to come to, and after he had decided, it wasn’t easy to convince others to go along with it. “Ever since Gielgud and Richardson had done it, and then their TV staging, well, that was what people had firmly in their heads about the play. Following them, I wondered, could I really do this?”

At the time, the Theatre 40 management didn’t think so. “They wanted comedies for their subscribers. Each time the management changed, they turned me down. But when Charles Arthur took over as artistic director, he asked me when I wanted to do it.”

The way was made easier thanks to Peretzian’s glittering track record at Theatre 40, located on the Beverly Hills High School campus. His richly felt 1979 production of Michael Cristofer’s “The Shadow Box” later garnered him an assignment at the Mark Taper Forum’s Taper, Too, in 1984 directing Jane Warner’s “Talking With.” He followed up a Theatre 40 production of Hugh Leonard’s “Summer” (1982) with a beautiful realization of Leonard’s “A Life,” for which Peretzian won a 1983 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award for direction.

He has kept a sense of continuity from those past achievements by casting “Home” with actors he worked with on the Leonard plays.

“We all know each other by now--our prejudices, our habits. But what I didn’t know ahead of time was how fully they followed me on blind faith and trust. I’m not very good at articulating what I like or want. The cast would hear me mumbling and stumbling through some idea or other I wanted them to convey, and somehow, they got it. They gave me everything I wanted, which is amazing in a play that’s extremely difficult to make work.”

Storey builds his play on suggestions--that all the characters might be mentally disturbed, that they might be in either an asylum or convalescent home, that the end of the world could be at hand. “There’s this sense that Harry and Jack have done something wrong,” Peretzian said. “Jack may have had a nervous breakdown, and Harry’s wife doesn’t want him back. Marjorie has a morbid death wish, while Kathleen wets her pants as a distraction.

“Yet they can bond with each other, even if they don’t complete sentences. Harry’s words are socially designed to keep the lid on feelings, but the women blow it off. They figure that these men are as good as what they’ll get around this place. They reminded me of how my mother at her convalescent hospital would climb into the bed of a man she didn’t even know. That desire to be with someone never leaves.”

Peretzian paused, as if facing the play’s most unpalatable truth for the first time. “But even though Jack and Harry seem to have kindred souls and connect, they ultimately realize that they have to face the end alone.”

Unlike most plays, this end isn’t stated, but conveyed in the way a string quartet can convey an ending--without words. The actors’ and director’s task was to hook this musical notion to actual fears and concerns the actors had experienced in their own lives. For Peretzian, it meant returning to his feelings about the Challenger. For the actors, it might have been a loved one’s death or the greenhouse effect.

It surprised Peretzian how well it worked, just as he was surprised at how his original conception for “Home” changed. “I contacted Storey through Karel Reisz, who had given David his first break. When I told him that I wanted to do the play abstractly, and Karel told me that David saw the play as quite naturalistic, and I decided that maybe I shouldn’t talk to them anymore and just do it. And my original ideas were stripped away. An idea I had for the big backdrop of sky showing the Challenger smoke trail was dropped. Then scenery was slowly stripped away, and I felt we were getting to the core of it.”

He also directs infrequently, due to his time-consuming work as a literary agent. So Peretzian is in the unusual spot of immediately following “Home” with a Mark Taper mainstage production of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” which he originally directed for the Taper’s literary series at the Itchey Foot restaurant in 1981. The restaging will be presented free to the public as part of the Music Center’s 25th anniversary celebration. It will be performed once only, at 3 p.m. on Dec. 6.

“The Taper is a much bigger stage than I’m used to, but I’ve always dreamed of working there. This directing business messes up my life so much, though, that I’m not going to do it unless I’m passionate about the play. I have to be driven.”