O.C. THEATER : Gelbart’s ‘Mastergate’ at UCI Is Satire That’s All Too Real

In a season when voters are being asked to decide on candidates for every office from president to dogcatcher, Larry Gelbart can’t help noting how little difference there is between political satire and political reality.

“There was a time when Will Rogers would comment on politicians, and the only time you ever saw a politician was maybe on a Saturday,” he says. “You might hear a speech on the radio. You never saw politicians at work. You never saw a Senate hearing.

“Now we see them all the time, on C-SPAN, on CNN, all the channels. Politicians are no mystery any more. We see how ludicrous they are. Can you make up better characters than (Utah Sen.) Orrin Hatch and (Wyoming Sen.) Alan Simpson? Can you be more ridiculous than Dan Quayle?”

His own scathing Iran-Contra parody, “Mastergate”--which premiered in 1989 at the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University, then flopped on Broadway and is being revived Thursday at UC Irvine’s Fine Arts Village Theatre--illustrates the point with a parade of outrageous caricatures modeled on well-known public figures.

“As a matter of fact,” said Gelbart, “stuff in ‘Mastergate’ that I think is genuinely funny very often doesn’t get laughs because it’s so close to what politicians really sound like.”

If Gelbart can speak with apparent ease of lines not getting laughs in a sendup he subtitled “A Play on Words,” perhaps it’s because, at 67, he has long been one of Hollywood’s most successful comedy writers, not to say one of its wealthiest.

Dressed in a sports shirt and checked pants, he is sitting on a cream-colored sofa in his spacious, cream-colored writing studio. It doubles as a screening room on the second floor of an airy bungalow, which overlooks the kidney-shaped pool behind his palatial house. Everything--house, pool and bungalow--is surrounded by dark foliage and tall pines, creating an enclave of luxurious privacy a stone’s throw from the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Gelbart’s remarkable track record includes writing for comedian Sid Caesar in the golden years of ‘50s television (along with Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Mel Brooks and a teen-aged Woody Allen); writing, co-writing and co-producing the first four seasons of TV’s Emmy-winning “MASH” in the early 1970s; writing the Oscar-nominated screenplay for “Oh, God!” (1977) and co-writing the Oscar-nominated screenplay for “Tootsie” (1982).

Gelbart also has what few Hollywood scribes of his stature can claim: Tony-winning theater credits as the co-creator of two Broadway musicals, both of them hits, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” in 1962 and “City of Angels” in 1989.

“The only way anybody in Hollywood will ever think of New York theater--that it’s even there--is if you build an off-ramp,” he said, mindful though he is of the unusual migration of movie stars to Broadway this season. “Hollywood doesn’t really care about New York. I’ve seen that now on at least three occasions in my life when I was lucky enough to have successful shows there. They’d care more if you signed a development deal, which gets you one line in the (Hollywood) Reporter or Variety.”

But for Gelbart, a Chicago native who started out in radio during the ‘40s as a 16-year-old gag writer for Danny Thomas, the stage has held a surprisingly strong fascination.

In addition to collaborating on “Forum” and “Angels” and several other musicals (including one based on “Gulliver’s Travels”), Gelbart has written four plays: “Jump,” a comedy about a man trying to commit suicide, which flopped in London’s West End during the ‘60s; “Sly Fox,” a successful satire about greed that starred George C. Scott on Broadway in 1976 and is based on Ben Jonson’s 17th-Century “Volpone;” “Power Failure,” a social comedy about high-level people going wrong, which premiered at American Rep in 1991, and, of course, “Mastergate.”

Gelbart said “Mastergate” came about through an invitation from Robert Brustein, the noted theater critic and artistic director of American Rep, to adapt an ancient Greek political play called “Peace.”

“We’d talked on a number of occasions of my possibly writing something for his company,” Gelbart said. “He knew ‘Forum’ was based on Plautus (the Roman playwright) and ‘Sly Fox’ was an update of ‘Volpone.’ But I couldn’t understand the play he sent me.”

In the meantime, Gelbart had an idea for a movie about the federal government taking over a major Hollywood studio in tax trouble and using it to launder money for military aid to right-wing guerrillas in Central America.

“It was kind of Washington show business meets Hollywood show business,” he said. “But then I thought, ‘It’s so difficult to get a movie made.’ There are all sorts of unpleasant traps in store for a screenwriter. I felt, ‘Why not (stage) a hearing in which we’ll discuss rather than dramatize the events the way I would have for a screenplay?’ And the result was ‘Mastergate.’ ”

Despite some tinkering for the UCI revival, which is being billed as the play’s Southern California premiere, Gelbart has left “Mastergate” essentially untouched from the original, according to UCI drama professor Dudley Knight, who is directing the production.

Knight, who also directed a professional public-radio reading of the script on Santa Monica’s KCRW-FM recently with Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, Joe Spano, Charles Durning and others, believes that “Mastergate” remains timely despite being highly topical. It not only skewers recognizable figures, many of whom are still strutting in the public arena, but parodies the corruption of language that has seeped into our collective consciousness over decades.

Indeed, whether it is Major Manley Battle (read: Oliver North) or Wylie Slaughter (CIA director William Casey) or Vice President Burden (George Bush) or any of their minions, let alone their congressional inquisitors, each speaks an obfuscating jargon of bureaucratic euphemisms meant to demolish the truth.

“I don’t think you really invent anything,” Gelbart said. “Most of the language you hear in ‘Mastergate’ has been around for a long time. The politicians have just upgraded the garbage. Basically it’s been double-talk all along, as far back as the Army-McCarthy hearings, which is as far back as I can remember. I think everything I ever heard somehow lodged in my brain.”

One thing that has not lodged there, however, is a belief that Hollywood has any significant influence on Washington (Oliver Stone’s “JFK” notwithstanding).

“I don’t think Washington cares,” said Gelbart. “I think it cares about Hollywood only as a place to get money and to get laid--I’m being very serious--and it uses Hollywood that way. But influenced by it?”

He shakes his head, mulling the question.

“I’d say Hollywood tries to influence Washington. I mean the money in Hollywood--the real money, not the players . . . the corporate entities. They spend millions in lobbying. That Hollywood cares very much about Washington.”

At this point the cream-colored telephone, which he’d ignored when it rang earlier, rings again.

“This one I have to take,” Gelbart said apologetically.

The call is from the New York set where his screenplay of “Barbarians at the Gate” is being filmed for an HBO movie. Adapted from the 1990 bestseller by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, “Barbarians” chronicles the $26-billion leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, a corporate takeover that epitomized Wall Street viciousness of the 1980s.

“Yes. Fine. . . . That’s why I put those quotations marks in there. . . . I’ll get the script if you want. . . . OK. Great. . . . Talk to you later.”

Gelbart hangs up.

“That was the director,” he said. “They’ve got crazy weather there. Hot. Cold. It’s making the shoot difficult.”

He pauses, as if remembering something he wanted to say, then shrugs.

“You know,” he added, “writing out here is the one business where being unemployed is not a stigma. Somebody’s reading your script. Or you’re expecting a call. Or somebody is typing the next draft. You can be industrious without having employment.”

The most important thing to remember, he said, is to keep tuned to one’s feelings. In that sense, being a writer in Hollywood is like being a writer anywhere else.

“If you’re trying to hear what’s out there, it’s too far away. If you’re trying to hear what’s in here,” said Gelbart, tapping his chest with his finger, “that’s something else. The only voice I care about is an inner one.”