Taking a Wild Ride

It’s thrilling to be in the spotlight, but hot and blinding, too.

Jonathan Tolins found that out in 1993, when his play “The Twilight of the Golds” premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse. He was just 26, with only a few small plays under his belt, when “Twilight of the Golds” suddenly became the topic of impassioned conversation everywhere. A movie deal quickly followed, and the play headed for Broadway.

He had spun the play from news of a possible biological link to homosexuality, discovered in a difference in the hypothalamus of gay men. During a pre-Broadway engagement in Washington, D.C., headlines announced the additional find of a possible X-chromosome marker for male homosexuality. ABC’s “Nightline” included the play in its coverage, and Time magazine asked Tolins to write an essay.

In New York, however, the critics used Tolins for target practice, and the show closed just 29 performances after opening. Then the movie got sidelined.

“There’s always that feeling of: That was your chance; that was it and it’s over now,” Tolins recalls. “It was such a roller-coaster ride, and when it was over, I felt completely removed from the world of the theater.”

His new play, “If Memory Serves,” reflects the tumult of that time. Opening today at the Pasadena Playhouse, it tells the story of a fading sitcom star and her grown son, as a repressed memory comes to light and thrusts them under the media microscope.

Tolins says there’s a bit of himself in both characters, particularly in their struggles to regain control of their lives. They’re both trying “to get back to a sense of joy in their lives,” he says. “They have some vague sense of a time in which things seemed less complicated and freer--more openly emotional, more loving.”

It is an afternoon in late August when Tolins, 31, settles onto a couch in a Pasadena Playhouse office to talk about his show. Elsewhere in the building, director Leonard Foglia (“Master Class”) is rehearsing a cast that includes Brooke Adams (the national tour of “Lost in Yonkers,” the film “Gas Food Lodging”), playing the sitcom star; newcomer Michael Landes, portraying her son; and Bill Brochtrup (the gay office assistant on “NYPD Blue”), portraying her gay personal assistant.

Tolins is open and friendly, a shy half-smile never far from his lips. Yet, after all he’s been through, he’s careful about what he says and how he says it. Anxious not to sound too full of himself, he sprinkles his conversation with self-deprecating asides--describing himself at one point as “just another gay Jewish playwright,” and adding dryly, “just what the world needs.”

He began writing “If Memory Serves” shortly after “Twilight’s” Broadway demise in November 1993. His self-doubt at the time shows up in ‘70s sitcom icon Diane Barrow and, to a larger degree, in the younger of her two sons, Russell. In his mid-20s, Russell has dropped out of graduate school after losing sight of where he’s headed.

He’s wondering, “What does he want to do with his life as an artist? Can he be one?” Tolins says.

“That’s where I was when I started writing,” Tolins says. “I’ve calmed down a little bit since then, but I think that’s something I’ll be dealing with forever.”

While Tolins inserted bits of himself throughout the play, he imagined its central action from articles he had read about repressed memory--abuses or other traumas pushed so far to the back of the mind that they don’t register in conscious thought. This became the launching point for an investigation into memory, identity, television culture, celebrity scandal and more.

“It has a lot to do with narrative and the way people put together stories of their lives that make sense to them and please them,” Tolins says.

“Everyone in the play has a different agenda, a different use of memory--when to use it, when not to use it--and how to manipulate it. They’re seeing if memory serves their purpose.”

Russell prompts all of this when, having returned home to Los Angeles, he stumbles upon childhood instances of what may have been abuse. But just what constitutes “abuse”?

“Diane says at one point, ‘What seemed so right at the time can suddenly look so wrong.’ Standards change; right and wrong changes. . . .

“We’re at it right now. The night before we went into rehearsal was the night Bill Clinton went on television and said, ‘I had an inappropriate relationship’--and that’s really what this play is about: What is appropriate and what is inappropriate? And what is lost when those boundaries become so rigid?”

Having graduated from Harvard (where he’d won a prestigious in-school playwriting prize), Tolins moved to Los Angeles in 1988 to write questions for the short-lived game show “Wipeout.” He then landed a brief writing gig with HBO and held a succession of temp jobs while delving into Hollywood’s small-theater scene. He began to make a name for himself with “The Climate,” about twentysomethings sweating through life in the ‘90s, which he’d written as an acting vehicle for himself and an actress friend.

Then came “The Twilight of the Golds,” set in an imagined future in which prenatal testing can determine whether a fetus is predisposed to homosexuality. This capability has unsettling repercussions for a New York Jewish family with a gay son and a married, pregnant daughter.

Reviewing the Pasadena debut in The Times, Sylvie Drake found fault with some of the construction and characterization but concluded: “Tolins has unhesitatingly combined knotty questions without backing away from painful answers. Flaws and all, this is a rich, intelligent, articulate piece of work.”

The Broadway critics went for the jugular, however. Newsday’s Jan Stuart echoed an opinion prevalent among colleagues with the comment: “This is heady stuff for Broadway, but Tolins has neither the sophistication, the verbal eloquence nor, most importantly, the compassion to do his loaded setup justice.”

“I’m not going to get into why I think the reviews went here or there,” Tolins says, “because anything I say is going to sound like sour grapes. I was very, very proud of the show we brought to New York, and I’m very sad that it didn’t get the reception that I had hoped it would.”

Hollywood Pictures, a division of Disney, had bought the film rights to “Twilight” before the play closed in Pasadena (coincidentally, Tolins had once worked as a temp secretary for Disney). Tolins and Seth Bass, the screenwriting partner he’d met at “Wipeout,” wrote two screenplay drafts, and Garry Marshall (“Pretty Woman”) was attached as director. Then, as often happens in Hollywood, “all the people who were there [at the studio] when we started were gone.”

The project languished until Ross Marks, a buddy of Marshall, got hold of the script and became excited about directing it himself. Marshall decided to executive-produce. Marks and Marshall caught the attention of the Showtime cable network, which stepped in to make the movie. Marks directed a cast that included Brendan Frasier as the gay son, Jennifer Beals as the sister and Faye Dunaway and Marshall as their parents. The movie premiered on Showtime in March 1997.

In its transition to the screen, the play’s pessimistic ending turned sunny. Some reviews speculated that the studio had ordered a rewrite, but Tolins says that he and Bass agreed that the original ending didn’t work on film because there was no way to relieve its gloom. What’s more, Tolins says: “By that point, my life had changed, and my relationship with my family had changed. When I wrote the play, I had trouble picturing my family accepting parts of my life. But Mark [Pinto, his boyfriend] is now part of our family.”

Tolins, a Long Island native, and Pinto moved back to New York two years ago when Pinto decided to train for a new career as a genetic counselor. The couple, who have now been together for seven years, live in the West Village.

Though both “Twilight” and “If Memory Serves” touch upon hot-button issues, Tolins resists being labeled as someone who writes about issues.

“I don’t want people to think this play is about headlines. When you’re watching it, you shouldn’t be thinking about that at all,” he says. “Maybe on the drive home you can start to draw parallels. . . . I don’t sit down and try to come up with what’s a hot topic.

“That said, I do like to write about things that I find very interesting and that my friends talk about. I like to write about things that can completely divert a dinner-party conversation and make people crazy for a few hours. I think that’s a good place for theater to start.”

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“IF MEMORY SERVES,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Dates: Opens today, 2 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Oct. 25. Prices: $13.50-$42.50. Phone: (800) 233-3123.