Capote, Wilde Meet in Literary Hell

As far as some people are concerned, Oscar Wilde and Truman Capote deserve to be in hell. Both authors were either heard impugning others or being impugned themselves. Victorian society condemned Wilde’s homosexuality, and Capote’s great literary reputation nearly imploded with his penultimate book, “Answered Prayers,” which was quickly dismissed as a crude tell-it-all besmirching the jet set that had befriended him.

Reduced to a high-concept single sentence, Kenneth Girard’s play, “Dark Angels,” opening Thursday at the Tiffany Theatre, hints that Wilde’s and Capote’s detractors may at last be getting their wish fulfilled.

“Here it is,” the pitch might go, “Oscar Wilde and Truman Capote in hell.”

Chris Daniels, 27, the late Girard’s son and the play’s producer, laughs at the notion, since--high concept or no--he couldn’t sell anyone in New York on a production.

“No offense against Los Angeles,” Daniels says, sitting inside the Tiffany’s South Stage with “Dark Angels” director, Robert W. Foster, “but I thought that New York was a more literate town. But I couldn’t drum up any support for it, and the off-off Broadway theaters I checked out were in really decrepit condition. Nothing like this,” he says, waving his arm around the plush Tiffany surroundings. “A theater like this doesn’t exist in New York. And I always thought that Kenny’s play deserved a dignified presentation.”

Daniels says that for two reasons. Reason One is that, while Wilde and Capote are indeed in a kind of hell, it’s a metaphoric hell, “a writer’s hell,” as Daniels recalls his father describing it.

Says Foster, who announces his age as “senior citizen”: “When we’ve described this play to some people, they just don’t understand. I mean, someone said to me, ‘Is this some kind of moralistic drama, with misbehaving writers getting punished for their bad lives?’ Ridiculous!”

Think instead of the civilized, well-dressed hell of George Bernard Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell” section from his massive play, “Man and Superman.”

Reason Two, Daniels notes, is that “this is a tribute to Kenny.” Girard--whose eclectic writing output included a Writers Guild award-winning Bob Hope radio special, a series of novels in the psychological thriller vein and a romantic stage comedy, “Always the Bride”--died in November from complications from a stroke brought on by lupus, a debilitating disease he contracted in 1988.

A year before that, the idea came to Girard to concoct a timeless nether world in which a conformist Wilde meets a resistant Capote to urge him to adhere to the dictates of those in charge of hell.

“They actually live in alphabetized areas,” Foster says. “Wilde has to live with James Whistler and Andy Warhol, whom he despises.” Daniels immediately adds, as if recalling his father’s own life: “Writers vicariously live through others. They don’t really live . The worst thing for them to have to do is reveal their own agonies. Yet that is exactly what Wilde and Capote must do here.”

Foster notes that Girard’s imagined encounter “isn’t a scathing critique of the men, but a kind of bemused, witty speculation. Ultimately, they create a sense of peace in hell, with Wilde vicariously getting fulfillment out of urging Capote--who at least still has writing powers Wilde long ago disposed of--to write the way he used to.”

The way Capote once wrote--before his epic nonfiction novel, “In Cold Blood”--was in the stylish, spare elegance of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” It is far from the embittered but self-deprecating man actor Robert Morse embodied in “Tru.”

“Morse was wonderful and magnetic, but ‘Tru’ is really a caricature of Capote,” Daniels says. “Kenny was more interested in . . . .”

”. . . Getting at his work, his thinking, his creative demons,” interrupts Foster. “Kenny found a way to examine Capote, by using Wilde as a kind of examiner and critic. During one passage, Wilde asks Capote what brought him to write ‘Answered Prayers,’ and Capote says he was going for the truth. ‘Truth?!’ Wilde exclaims, ‘that wasn’t truth!’ ”

Truth-telling, however, almost became history as Girard, inching closer and closer last year to a full production of “Dark Angels” at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, suddenly had the stroke. He had already put the play through several readings, and had decided in June on actor Emile Hamaty for Capote.

By the time Girard had settled on the Beverly Hills Playhouse, he had cast Ross Evans as Wilde, with Foster as director. His sudden death threw the production into chaos.

Daniels stopped the Beverly Hills Playhouse production from proceeding, and returned to Los Angeles after finding no New York home for “Dark Angels.” He put up the production money with his mother, Pamela.

“Pamela met Kenny on May 6, 1970,” Daniels says, “so we thought we’d open it on a lucky, commemorative day. I’m a neophyte producer, but I guess I’ve been driven to do this because of one thing--the script, the language. One never really pays close attention to what one’s father does for a living, and I had never kept a close eye on Kenny’s work until ‘Dark Angels.’ When I read it, it opened up a whole new view of my father.”

“Dark Angels” runs at the Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 8 p.m., until May 30. Tickets: $15 to $19. Information: (310) 289-2999.