Writer Purges Himself of Some Demons

What drives a playwright to write about a particular subject? It’s a tough question. Sometimes to explain something to themselves, sometimes to explain something to an audience, sometimes to purge the devils that often haunt writers.

An even tougher question: What makes a playwright want to direct his own plays, when an old theater axiom equates that to an attorney defending himself--he has a fool for a client.

The first question is easily answered by playwright Dennis Clontz. He smiles shyly as he answers the second.

Clontz, 36, has had a good bit of experience watching his plays unfold under other directors, and is now director of programs and dramaturge for the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre, which is dedicated to new plays and playwrights. He also has two one-acts--for the first time under his direction--running under the umbrella title “Interfusion” at Burbage Theatre Ensemble.

Clontz said he wouldn’t have been unhappy turning “Peggy Sue,” the first of the two plays in “Interfusion,” over to another director. “I call ‘Peggy Sue’ a romp into the psychosexual mythology of innocence lost,” he said. “It’s a play of primary colors. It uses three different environments, three time frames, three different stories, with the true story, the fourth one, being told by the juxtaposition of the other three. It’s very poetic, more of a language piece than an action piece.” Under other circumstances, he could let this one go, to be molded by other hands.

“Night Watch,” the second play, is a different story, and its history and shape give a lucid answer to both questions. The germ of the play was in a recent moment of tragedy in the playwright’s life.

“Part of the play, to be candid, is me getting rid of some personal demons,” he said. “My mom died in September, of cancer. I was with her the last four weeks. It was a hellish battleground, day in, day out. But this isn’t a play about my mom.”

It is a play about that moment at the very end, the moment of transition. His mother was in a hospice at the end, and there he was given an information sheet about the signs of death and what to expect. “One of the paragraphs was about the upper cortex, about the brain cells dying, and the functioning of the human body and the personality as we know it, diminishing correspondingly. That had a strong impact on me, just that dimming of the light, so to speak. My question in the aftermath is, ‘What was there in that last moment?’ ”

The play, he said, is a departure of sorts from his previous styles. “There’s more exploration. I’m using a lot of aspects of theater that I’ve wanted to work with for a long time. In order to actually work with them I needed to gather together a group of actors as I was going through the writing process. One of the elements is the use of a chorus, patterned after the way a chorus is used in Chinese Noh drama. Its function is not the same, but it’s there, along with a lot of primitive percussion instruments and the use of shadow theater. It’s not a linear piece. Anything but. It ricochets all over the place.

“The framework is that it takes place in one second, the one second prior to death, in the upper cortex of the brain. It’s the dance between light and dark.”

Clontz is fascinated with the unusual, the offbeat. His first produced play, after leaving UC Santa Cruz in 1983, was “Fire/Photograph,” which was produced by Actors Alley Repertory Theatre in North Hollywood. It was a kinky, inventive piece that got good reviews, a Drama-Logue award for writing, and caused AART to take him on as playwright-in-residence. He then went after his master of fine arts in UCLA’s playwriting program, which led to his winning a screenwriting fellowship. After that, he said with a little embarrassment, he wrote a couple of screenplays “that were actually produced, and they’re in your local video store.” He admits happily that they don’t have his name on them.

“They’re horrendous, low-budget slasher movies I’d crank out in a week when I was really desperate to pay the rent. I didn’t even make that much money.” With a slasher-murder every three pages, he admits it was gory work. He did learn that different versions of the films were made for different countries. “For England, you do it without blood. For South American audiences, you do it with a lot of blood, and for the Japanese you put in a bit of mysticism.”

He’s still writing screenplays. One of three in the works is an adaptation of his play “Generations,” which was produced a couple of years ago at The Colony in Silver Lake. Because of that production, the play was excerpted in “Burns Mantle’s Best Plays of the Year” for 1988-89 as one of the three best plays produced outside New York that year, selected by the American Theatre Critics Assn.

“I think Dennis is a marvelous writer,” said actress Barbara Beckley, artistic director of The Colony. “ ‘Generations’ was a very important play for us. We couldn’t have paid for better reviews. The problems in the play are universal and his enormous skill and artistry in presenting them really struck a chord with our audiences. It sent the audience out with hope instead of the despair that is a current trend in theater, that I personally deplore.”

Although it’s an adaptation of his play, screenwriting for a playwright is not the same. “I wrote these two plays for myself, without thinking about getting a production. I needed to write them partly because I’ve been working on screenplays for a while, and part of me was just screaming to break out and do something that is really theatrical, ‘linear narrative be damned . I want language, I want character.’ ”

Clontz had a private reading of the plays for his own purposes. Burbage producer Andy Griggs saw it and offered Clontz the production slot. The playwright had to direct “Night Watch” himself. “It’s still a very malleable piece,” he said. “I’m constructing the play as I discover possibilities and potentials. After it’s done, and the chorus is utilized as I want, and the shadow theater and the different instruments, and the poetics and the whole nine yards, then it can be passed on to anyone else, and they’ll do their own version.”

His other current passion is his involvement with the Skirball-Kenis Theatre. “I’m having a lot of fun there. This way I get to pretend I have an influence on play development. We’re talking about a nonprofit organization operating with a $1-million endowment, with very altruistic motives. There’s no other organization in a similar vein so well-funded here on the West Coast. Our catch phrase is ‘Dedicated to serve and nurture new plays and playwrights.’ We do that in a number of ways.”

The organization has staged readings, three workshop productions a year, and a symposium series. It also helps fund other programs, including the UCLA master of fine arts playwriting program. In the future, it will be funding the Mark Taper New Works Festival.

“We’re taking a very active role in that in terms of the planning and execution of the festival.” For playwrights, the group also offers dramaturgical services--a program of critical advice to writers on the shape and construction of their work--”but we don’t force it on the playwrights.”

Playwrights are most often better off left to their own devices, as Clontz well knows. He bridles, but with a broad grin, at frequently being quoted on the subject. “The focus, the concentration on new plays development which began in the mid-’70s and through the ‘80s, at the regional theater level, while initially such a very, very good thing, generating new writers, has reached a point that is quite often more of a detriment than it is an opportunity--the creation of a very elaborate developmental artistic staff that has to validate its existence by sticking its fingers into the pie and stirring it up a tiny bit,” he said. “You know, it’s everyone’s pie except the playwright’s. That’s a real danger.”