The Melodies Haunt His Memories

On July 26, 1997, writer Warren Leight was waiting to make a left-hand turn on a two-lane road in the Hamptons when he looked into his rearview mirror. What he saw was an 18-wheeler traveling at 50 mph about to plow into the rear end of his car. In the nanosecond before impact, he thought, “I’m either about to die or to be in a major accident. Now maybe they’ll produce my play.”

Eight months later, Leight’s play, “Side Man,” was indeed produced in an off-Broadway showcase, earning rave reviews that would propel it to Broadway, first in a nonprofit limited engagement last summer, then officially reopening in its commercial run last November, with Christian Slater in the role of the narrator. Directed by Michael Mayer, the autobiographical play about a young man’s coming of age in the chaotic world of jazz musicians has been hailed as one of the best new American dramas in years.

Reviewing the show in the New York Times, Peter Marks compared it to vintage Tennessee Williams and William Inge. In the New Yorker, John Lahr called the play “astute and elegiac--a son’s bittersweet homage to his crazy warring parents and the mysteries of the jazz life that divided them.”

Happily, the acclaim for the 42-year-old writer has not been posthumous, though the devastating accident sent him to the hospital for three months. It’s not difficult, however, to imagine why Leight feared he could have become the next Jonathan Larson, the creator of “Rent,” who died before he could witness the enormous success of his swan song. As Larson did in “Rent,” Leight uses his memory play to highlight the emotional toll of life and the fragility of art. This breakthrough work is a haunting and poetic evocation of the lost world of “sidemen”--jazz parlance for musicians who, like the playwright’s father, worked for hire in the big bands of the 1940s and ‘50s, sacrificing family, fame and a steady paycheck to play gigs where more often that not their virtuoso turns were appreciated only by themselves and a few passionate aficionados, particularly after the advent of Elvis Presley sounded the death knell of their kind of music.

Nowhere is this more lyrically expressed in “Side Man” than in a scene in which the protagonist, Clifford, looks on as his father, Gene (Frank Wood), and his ragtag clique of musician friends listen to a bootleg tape of a Clifford Brown solo on “Night in Tunisia,” recorded during an impromptu jazz session in Philadelphia on June 25, 1956, hours before the legendary trumpeter died in a car accident at the age of 25. Amid the stink of failure after a poorly received gig, the men are lifted to transcendental bliss through Brown’s eerie valedictory.

“There are a lot of people in jazz who think of the night Clifford Brown died the way others think of JFK’s assassination,” Leight says. “That’s when the heart went out of jazz. I remember my father’s friends telling me that when they heard that he’d died, nobody wanted to go on that night. Brownie was doing things on trumpet no one thought possible. Fans followed him around, recording him, and that is how this solo happened to be caught on tape. If that was the last trumpet solo he ever played, that was enough of a legacy to have left. When I was a kid, the tape was passed around like something to be revered and remembered.”

Leight says that he is pleased that his play has now become an agent in helping to keep Brown’s legacy alive, and he recounts with special relish a visit to the play by the musician’s widow, LaRue Brown, who told him afterward, “How could you know so much?” It is one of the rare self-congratulatory moments Leight allows himself in the course of a two-hour interview in a Greenwich Village restaurant near his apartment.

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As jazz saxophonist John Coltrane’s soothing riffs play over the sound system, Leight, dressed in jeans and a sweater, speaks of his life and career with the tentative, cautious air of a person who has been chastened, more than once, by life’s reversals of fortune. As in “Side Man,” the playwright’s armor against the shifting compass points is a blend of innocence and cynicism, sentiment and sarcasm, promise and disappointment. Not for him the bromides of Frank Capra. Give him the edgier lyricism of the Italian neo-realists like Vittoria de Sica.

“So many times, before this, people said to me, ‘This is the next big thing,’ about one or the other of my projects, and then that was usually followed by unemployment, unreturned phone calls and my losing my health insurance or my apartment,” he says.

Like his father, Donald Leight, now 75, Leight was for a long time something of a sideman himself, booking jobs as a self-described “writer for hire,” which over the last two decades has meant hustling around New York as a freelance journalist, a scripter of horror films, a joke writer for corporate speeches, a stand-up comic and the screenwriter for such mainstream films as the 1993 “The Night We Never Met” (which he also directed), starring Matthew Broderick and Annabella Sciorra, and the 1996 Christmas release “Dear God,” starring Greg Kinnear.

He is still booking jobs, albeit with more clout. He has completed a new play, “Glimmer Brothers,” tangentially related to “Side Man” insofar as it involves twin brothers who were once big-band musicians in the 1950s and follow wildly divergent paths. And he is writing the book to a new Alan Menken musical based on the Damon Runyon short story “Little Pinks,” about a crippled chorus girl and the moony-eyed busboy who is obsessed with her. “It’s the most extended dysfunctional love story you could imagine,” Leight says.

But then the playwright knows something about “dysfunctional love,” as “Side Man” makes compellingly clear. As much as the drama is a portrait of a disintegrating world, it is also about a disintegrating marriage. Set in 1985, the 29-year-old Clifford takes the audience back in a series of flashbacks to “the Zip Code of my youth,” not only to the gin joints his father played, but also the claustrophobic threadbare apartment on the Upper West Side where he acts as referee to the escalating battle between a couple as incapable of coping with each other as they are with the world at large.

Gene is adrift when he lays down his horn, oblivious to the emotional needs of his increasingly needy wife. “I used to wonder how he could sense everything when he was blowing and almost nothing when he wasn’t,” says Clifford, his neglected son. Gene’s wife Terry (Edie Falco), meanwhile, succumbs to alcohol, pills and nervous breakdowns, leaving the young Clifford, in the inverted relationship of caretaker and nurturer, to clean up the mess. “You’re the Red Cross; you’ll figure out something,” Gene says to him after one of Terry’s flip-outs. At one point, Clifford forces his father out of the house to protect his mother. “I don’t think he had any idea what was going on,” says the narrator. “It was like moving a cat.”

Leight says that his youth was pretty much as it appears in “Side Man,” except for the compression of time and events for dramatic effect. When the play had a workshop in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in the summer of 1996, Leight’s father found out about it by chance and made a trip with his buddy to see it--”an undertaking on the par of Magellan for him,” Leight says.

The playwright was understandably nervous about his father’s reaction, especially when he told his son the next day that he had been up all night because of the play. “He said he was trying to figure out whose recording the production had used for Gene’s solo [in the nightclub scene in which he plays] ‘I Remember Clifford,’ ” says Leight, noting it was Lee Morgan’s rendition. He says his father has since seen the show another three times. “I think he’s beginning to get it,” he says.

Leight’s Italian American mother, Timmy, now 70 and still living in the same Upper West Side apartment where Leight grew up, has thus far avoided the play, taking her son’s advice that the second act, which chronicles her downward spiral, might be difficult for her to sit through. “She told me, ‘I’ll let your father go. Nothing embarrasses him,’ ” recalls the playwright, adding that Timmy is proud “that all her doctors and nurses, and their assistants and secretaries, have seen it.”

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Unlike most playwrights who write their memory plays in their early 20s, Leight was 38 when he finished the first draft of “Side Man,” the intervening years allowing him to slip from anger to understanding. “I never knew who was right, who was wrong. I could listen to either my mother’s or my father’s story, and they made sense individually,” he recalls. “But put them in the room together and reason went right out the window.”

Still, in between the tensions, there were advantages to being the “hero child” of bohemian neurotics living in near-poverty: Sunday afternoons spent devouring Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner while his parents read the papers; impressing his high school buddies by being able to drink screwdrivers--at 13--at the bars where Donald Leight played; winning a full scholarship to Stanford, where he majored in journalism.

The emotional wounds, however, still leached out. “I had a chip on my shoulder toward people with easier circumstances at Stanford. I could be a real smartass,” Leight says. “Until recently, I had never been in a good long-term relationship. I tended to botch anything up that was approaching intimacy. If someone healthy was attracted to me, I didn’t notice. But if they were a day away from killing themselves, they’d walk across eight lanes of highway to meet me and I would fall for them.”

After graduating from Stanford in 1977--”along with 30,000 other journalism majors”--Leight spent four months painting houses in Northern California, until one of Timmy’s illnesses brought him back East. Feeling pressured to financially support his parents, he took all sorts of odd jobs, including writing freelance articles for the Village Voice, such as one on where to find the best bathrooms in New York: “If you carry a loaded bladder in this town, you’re an outlaw.” (Years later, Leight’s “I Hate New York Guide Book” became partly the basis for the 1985 off-Broadway musical revue “Mayor!” at the Village Gate.)

Leight’s film career started by chance when a neighbor asked if he could write the script for a horror picture, and by the way, could he also hold the boom as they were short-staffed and low-budget? Written in eight days, Leight’s screenplay for “Mother’s Day” was an inauspicious beginning. “I was teaching English in China when the movie came out and I kept writing, asking them to send me the New York Times review,” Leight says. “Nobody did.” For good reason. The paper called the movie “the work of anti-talent.”

Leight says that working “for thugs who throw hot coffee at you” in the exploitation movie industry (“Waitress!,” “The Toxic Avengers”) centered in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen was a good training ground for his Hollywood period: 20 to 25 scripts which he either originated, rewrote or doctored, including “Me and Him,” “the penis movie” directed by Doris Dorrie, the German auteur who turned down Robin Williams as the “talking head” because she had never heard of him, and culminating in his writing and directing “The Night We Never Met” for Harvey Weinstein when the original director, Susan Seidelman, bowed out. It was not the best of experiences.

“I don’t do well if people shout at me, and Harvey shouts,” says Leight about his daily combat with the brilliant and mercurial head of Miramax who the writer says kept pressuring for big-name stars and to impose his own cut on the movie. “Unless it’s a four-star Academy Award movie, I think Harvey feels really shamed by a B-plus effort. It’s like you have a kid, OK, he’s not going to go to Harvard and he’ll get in to UC Santa Cruz. That’s fine. But Harvey’s like, ‘No, let’s send him back to preschool, no, let’s get him a new suit, let’s send him to military school, let’s kill him.’ I figure I grew up in an abusive household, I didn’t want to work in one.”

Leight says the debacle of “Dear God” in 1996 (11 writers tag-teamed on the screenplay after he had finished his work on it) sent him scurrying back to the theater, where the integrity of the writer’s work is protected--that is, if the work ever gets to the boards. He was not exactly welcomed back with open arms. For a couple of years at least, “Side Man” was the play that “everybody wanted someone else to produce,” Leight says. “Nobody could understand why I wasn’t getting a production.” He adds that “a major American regional theater,” accused of not doing enough plays by people of color, wanted him to change the characters to African Americans “ ‘cause all jazz musicians are black, aren’t they?”

“I really resented when the head of the theater said that she’d never heard of white jazz musicians,” he says. “I told her, ‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?’ Would she ever tell a black playwright that he had to change his play about black corporate lawyers to accommodate white actors ‘because all corporate lawyers are white, aren’t they?’ I pretty well burned the bridge to that theater.”

“Side Man” was eventually presented in early 1998 at a small off-Broadway theater. But even after earning rave reviews, producers were skittish about moving it to a commercial run without the benefit of “name stars” and director Michael Mayer had yet to establish himself as one of Broadway’s hottest talents.

It could have foundered then and there, but suddenly the Roundabout had a summer opening, after the nonprofit theater decided to forgo presenting a Burt Bacharach-Hal David musical, “What the World Needs Now,” that had been clobbered critically in its spring premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse. The momentum from the summer run provided the springboard to Broadway. In the same week that Robert Sella, who created the role of Clifford, announced that he had a previous engagement, Christian Slater called out of the blue to say that he was interested in taking on the role. The history of the play, says Leight, is filled with such serendipitous blessings from his cast, which, in addition to Slater, Wood and Falco, includes Michael Mastro, Angelica Torn, Kevin Geer and Joseph Lyle Taylor.

“From the beginning, working with this group of actors has been a special experience,” he says. “These actors really understand what it means to be a sideman. They’re wonderfully talented people who were not very successful, but everybody in the business knows who they are and respects them. They’re actors’ actors, the way my father was a musician’s musician, and they’ve made huge sacrifices in their lives to pour themselves into these characters. You clobber your life to do this stuff.”

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Leight says that he’s not too worried that his next play “might be a disaster,” as everybody these days is now warning him. “This is really an un-American thing to say, but if this turns out to be the best thing I write, that’s not a bad thing, that’s fine with me.”

Does that mean that if he had died in the accident in the Hamptons, his “Side Man” might be comparable to that bootleg recording of “Night in Tunisia” by Clifford Brown?

“Do you mean, would I have played my solo?” he asks, suddenly getting emotional. “Yeah. I think of all those nights my father played beautiful solos but they’re not recorded. But he played ‘em.”

Indeed, his homage to his father and to the cast of “Side Man” recalls the moment in the play when Clifford talks about his father and his crazy, music-drunk cronies: “They played not for fame, and certainly not for money. They played for each other. To swing. To blow. Night after night, they were just burning brass. Oblivious.”

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“Side Man,” Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St., New York. Telecharge: (212) 239-6200.