In ‘The Wake,’ Allen Recalls Tragicomic Rites of Family Squabbling

Steve Allen is running his fingers over the keyboard of the small grand piano squeezed into one of his Van Nuys offices, and he is talking about one of his closest friends--his brain.

“How do I play? Oh, I just make it up,” he says. “My brain takes over. There’s the common image of the musician sweating it out over the piano, breaking pencils and all the rest. But it’s not the way my brain writes music. I say ‘my brain,’ rather than ‘I,’ because I’m conscious of a difference between the two.”

As he talks, the evidence of a fertile mind is all around him: more than 40 years’ worth of audiotapes and videotapes of Alleniana--from the original “Tonight” show through the acclaimed PBS series “Meeting of the Minds.” Adjacent rooms are filled with file cabinets stuffed with the sheet music of Allen’s 4,000-plus songs.

A conversation with Steve Allen is always an exercise in consciousness, whether the topic is jazz or the art of comedy or the background of “The Wake,” one of his two full-length plays and his only autobiographical drama. Twenty-one years after it premiered at the now-defunct Masquers Theatre, Allen’s drama of his raucous Irish-American family is playing in a revival production at the Celtic Arts Center.

As opposed to the intensely personal material Allen forged into “The Wake” as a play and novel, he loves discoursing down cerebral pathways, talking in complex compound sentences filigreed with mid-sentence asides and interruptions.

For him, audience-pleasing emotionalism and serious intellectualism are not mutually exclusive. It follows, for a man who has created: the original TV talk-show; a table game (with Robert Allen, no relation) called “Strange Bedfellows”; “Meeting of the Minds,” starring his actress-wife, Jayne Meadows; 38 books, and counting. The books cover an astonishing range, from several volumes on comedy and comics, to three volumes of poetry, to several mystery novels, to tomes on the Bible, China, the collapse of intelligence, migrant farm workers, nuclear war, American politics, morality and religious cults.

We should add that Steverino, at 70, continues to tour, acting with Meadows (most recently in “Love Letters”) or annually playing 10 symphony concerts and “five or six” jazz gigs, he says, with small groups or big bands.

Considering the vast Allen opus, he admits that it’s curious that he has written so few plays (besides a “couple” of one-acts, he says, his only other full-length is a comedy about the New England summer-theater world, “The Pasqatauqua Playhouse”). “I don’t even recall when it occurred to me to write ‘The Wake’ as a play. But I did, around 1970.”

Set during the late-’20s funeral of the Scanlon family’s mother, who’s laid out in a coffin in the living room, “The Wake” shows a clan at war with itself, battling over how they’re going to take care of young Davy. The kid (directly based on Allen’s memory of himself at 6) can’t stay with his mother, a vaudevillian always on the road.

Allen, who received a playwriting nomination by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle in 1971 for “The Wake,” still sees the play’s main issue as “the family deciding what to do with the boy.”

Los Angeles Times critic Dan Sullivan wrote that it’s “OK if Allen sees it that way. But I found ‘The Wake’ most impressive not as anybody’s story in particular, but as a critical but loving family portrait--first, of the jumpy Scanlons; second, of the generation of American-Irish they represent.”

“I was a witness to the events in my family,” Allen says. “They were characters that made a very great impression on me at 6. We’re talking about American-Irish culture in Chicago, 1929. My grandmother was a typical Irish Mother Machree, with the white hair, and black dress with the lace collar, and rosary beads and rocking chair.

“It was a blessing for her and everyone that she died, and my mother, Belle, came back home for her funeral, as did all the relatives: Aunt Rose and Uncle Bill and Uncle Steve and all these crazy people. The problem was that they couldn’t be under the same roof for 10 minutes without trying to kill each other.”

Actress Anne Gee Byrd, tackling the role of Belle in the Celtic Arts production, remarks that what Allen has written “is very true and funny. I mean, families can do real cruelties to each other. Do you know anyone who has survived their family without scars?”

Allen comments: “One of the odd things about the play--which I didn’t even realize, although I had written and lived it--concerns the fact that in writing the account, I thought that I was writing a play about the Irish.

“I would be in an office in the back of the Masquers during the first days of the run. I would be making notes and small changes. Friends of mine who knew I was there would seek me out. One was Cuban, some were Jewish, some were Italian--a rainbow coalition, so to speak, of races and social types from upper to lower classes--bawling their eyes out and saying, ‘That’s just like my family!’ I realized after about seven or eight of them, that I had been writing about the human race.”

Isn’t this just like a good playwright, to give everyone their due? “That’s never occurred to me before,” he muses. “Come to think of it, I always do try to be fair--I never realized before now that this may be a common theme in my activity and living--though I have damn strong feelings about certain things. But I know enough about my own ignorance, and the fact that from time to time I’ve changed my mind--that simply because I feel strongly about an issue does not mean that I am right and that anyone who differs is wrong.

“All the characters have a point, and you find that in a marriage,” Allen says, speaking from the experience of his 37 years with Meadows. “All married couples argue, and yet each side can often make out a pretty fair case for itself--maybe not if they’re a junkie and say, ‘I happen to think that heroin is great!’ ”

Allen views his family feud play “as a tragedy with some big laughs. I always refer--generally in the context of my solo comedy work or my sketch work with others--to laughs and individual jokes in terms of what degree of response they deserve. Not every joke gets 100% laughs, nor do they deserve it. I know that about jokes I write.

“I discussed this with the cast of ‘The Wake’ (at another production at Milwaukee’s Irish Fest Theatre), who I visited a couple of weeks ago. I said, ‘You’re all marvelous’--I think I did about eight minutes of compliments, almost all well-deserved--’however, on the laugh lines, some of you are trying to hit a home run, when some of them are intended as singles, and a few are just bunts.’ ”

Allen has just had the unusual experience of watching two different “Wake” productions in action--the Milwaukee version in a full staging, the L.A. version in early rehearsal. “It was like this fantasy I’ve had, where I write a film script, ship it off to Scorsese and Lumet and a few other directors, give them the cash, and tell them to make their own film version of the script. That would be thrilling for me.”

And then, he unhesitatingly launches into a critical judgment of the two casts: “It did seem that some of the Milwaukee actors were a little better--an unfair comparison since the L.A. cast had only rehearsed for two days--but only some of them. By and large, the L.A. cast is stronger, and hurray for that.”

He had played rough and tough Uncle Mike in the second staging of “The Wake” in the mid-’70s--one of several straight roles in one of Allen’s lesser-known pursuits as a stage and film actor.

“Somehow, I survived my growing up. Jayne has often said that it’s a wonder that I’m not either dead or in jail or divorced 19 times. But now, my life is nothing but fun and poetry and jazz and laughing and playing with my grandchildren. What the hell do I need a vacation for? They could sentence me to a vacation, and it would really bug me. ‘How dare you, your honor!’ ”

“The Wake” plays at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays at the Celtic Arts Center, 5651 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, until May 31. Tickets: $12. Call (213) 660-8587.