A Big Move to a Smaller Scale

‘Drama speaks more powerfully when love shows through in the small victories. You don’t get any big victories,” playwright Kevin Arkadie explains, revealing a pivotal theory underlying his play “Up the Mountain,” which just moved to the Stella Adler Theatre.

“I was thinking of Chekhov when I was writing this play. Chekhov’s idea was to focus his drama on the little moments--the itty-bitty moments where someone makes the decision that dramatically changes his life. When we can do that, the drama speaks for itself.”

Arkadie concludes his remarks with the shrug of a man affirming the obvious. He is seated at a table in one of those quaint, well-lit little industry nooks on Beverly Boulevard, distractedly nibbling at bowls of fruit and sliced turkey sausages while the dozen or so patrons around him chat or work and read and snack amid the musical, isolating cacophony of brunch. He is dressed in the outfit of an urban cowboy--finely tailored brown leather vest, dark blue jeans, black boots. Clean shaven from chin to crown, his dark brown skin contrasts handsomely with his stark-white, uncollared dress shirt. He is 39, but his medium frame, athletic build, mischievous expression and large, inquisitive brown eyes make him appear at least a decade younger.

He describes “Up the Mountain” as a tribute to his mother--and two of her sisters, specifically, to their Pyrrhic triumphs over their own pasts and over the memories of their father, a West Virginia coal miner. “I wrote this play for my mom, for my crazy aunt, for my grandfather, all of them, because I’m looking at them and I’m going, ‘Out of all this madness, out of all this craziness and anger, good things came.’ But I don’t understand how, with all the crap life deals us. So my answer is: It’s the small victories. The small victories keep this play moving. They are what we take home with us, that little moment where you are happy right then, happy to see your wife, your daughters, happy just to be there. That’s the victory.”

Arkadie, who began his theatrical career 20 years ago as an actor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, has written a play with plenty of dialogue and a wide range of emotional colors in which his actors can mine their little victories. The two-act play is complete with ghosts, traps, slaps, deceptions, fights, shocking turns and virtuoso performances from the veteran ensemble, headed by Hattie Winston (playing a character based on Arkadie’s mother), Veronica Reddforrest, and Joan Pringle as the three sisters, with Willie C. Carpenter and Iona Morris as the siblings’ deceased parents. “Up the Mountain” recounts a weekend reunion, in West Virginia, in the sisters’ dilapidated childhood home. Each is now grown, hobbled by memories and grave emotional scars.

“Up the Mountain” slowly found its audience during an initial five-week run at Theatre Geo. It is the first of Arkadie’s stage plays to be produced, and he is visibly elated. “L.A. is not a theater town, and I have been very fortunate that we’ve gotten favorable reviews and favorable word of mouth. You’ve got to make this a theater town every time out by generating interest. And even though I’m a fairly high-profile black man, I’m just not out there like I needed to be, so my producer, Leigh Fortier, helped make it happen. She knew the artists, the reviewers, the breakdown, the designers. But I was ready to lose everything on this play,” Arkadie says. “Every single dime.”

If the “high-profile” Arkadie keeps his day job, he should have more than enough dimes to keep the stage lights burning for his night gig. After all, Kevin Arkadie the budding playwright is the same individual who is esteemed as one of the hottest dramatists in television today. A story editor, writer and producer with a formidable reputation and experience, he joined the staff of Steven Bochco’s highly rated ABC crime drama “NYPD Blue” just three weeks ago as a supervising producer and writer--and this is just the most recent achievement, crowning a decade of increasingly higher-visibility assignments and critical successes. He has been either a writer, producer, story editor or a combination of all three for series as diverse as “I’ll Fly Away,” “High Incident,” “Chicago Hope,” “Law and Order” and “Homicide: Life on the Street.” Arkadie is also co-creator of the stylish hip-hop crime drama for Fox “New York Undercover.” His scripts for “I’ll Fly Away” and “Chicago Hope” have been nominated for top Writers Guild and Humanitas prizes.

His professional career is, in a word, red-hot. But Arkadie, who uses television to explore big, dramatic themes in settings that are both intimate and ordinary, hankers for the comprehensive, soul-plumbing depths of the legitimate stage. And although he has established himself as a writer of considerable efficacy and repute, it is a curiosity of the television medium that even its greatest writers sometimes value their theater writing more than their most brilliant teleplays, even when that theatrical output is slight. Paddy Chayefsky, the late master of the television drama, in 1954, after the triumph of his pioneering teleplays “Marty,” “The Bachelor Party” and “A Catered Affair” (each rescripted successfully for the big screen), wrote, “I came out of the legitimate theater, and I want to go back again.”

And now Arkadie has made his longing leap back to the theater, where he started his professional career almost 20 years ago.

Early in life, Arkadie began observing the little moments that would later inform his craft as a storyteller. He was raised in Washington, where his mother had a government job. “My mom [also] did hair, every Saturday and Sunday afternoon, when I was growing up,” he says. “So our house was full of women all the time. I’d just come in and I had a quiet place in the kitchen where I’d sit. I was a smart kid and my mother’s friends liked me because I could hold conversations. All that helped with my writing.” Long stays in Texas and West Virginia further deepened his interest in life’s little dramas. “When I was 13, we moved to Texas. I had a rough time in Texas. I got sick of looking down the barrel of cops’ guns, sick of getting pulled over and shook down. I could see what the hell was going on. But every summer we went back to my grandparents’ home in West Virginia. That was great. My cousins never wore shoes. I could get out in the wilderness. It was heaven as long as we stayed out of my grandfather’s way.”

His observations of the relationship between his grandparents were seminal for the creative life of the young writer and for the life of his current play. “My grandfather was a coal miner, and he worked his whole life in the mines. He died of black lung disease. My grandmom took care of the house, played the numbers, fought with my grandfather, and raised seven kids--that was her life.” On one occasion, the clash of wills between the grandparents turned shockingly tragic, and Arkadie’s play turns on a similar incident--and its aftermath. Capturing that moment was elusive. “I would stay late after work at 20th Century Fox and work on the play. I’ve been writing “Up the Mountain” for at least six years. It was a monstrously long play, and I realized I had to find the heart.”

Arkadie estimates that he’s done perhaps 30 rewrites on it over the past six years. He may have a way to go before he mounts a play as marvelous as “Uncle Vanya,” or even “Marty,” but talented and ambitious fellow that he is, he doesn’t appear a bit worried.

“I’m confident and I don’t have to prove a damn thing. I go out and I do the best I can do, and if it works, it works,” Arkadie says. “I had no vacation this year, just a window between ‘High Incident’ and the start of ‘NYPD Blue,’ and so I did ‘Up the Mountain.’

“Now here’s the thing about writing a play. I think I can vastly mature during the course of writing a play. And I can come to some deep understanding. In television you only have a certain amount of time to tell your story--just 44 minutes. But in theater, no matter what position you take, or what argument you have, somewhere in the foundation of the play you must establish a basis for a counter-argument.

“Unlike the fixed medium of series television,” Arkadie adds, “theater changes every night. The audience affects how the actors perform and there are always new discoveries. I see little changes that I want to make, and I can go back and change the play.”

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“UP THE MOUNTAIN,” Stella Adler Theatre, 6773 Hollywood Blvd. Dates: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 3. Price: $20. Phone: (213) 466-1767.