The Kiss Heard ‘Round the World

If a playwright sat down to create the character of a writer, that character would most likely be nothing like Joe DiPietro. There’s no drama, no basis for conflict. The guy is just too well adjusted, too . . . too normal.

Playwright DiPietro, 38, describes himself as a fairly ordinary Joe--the antithesis of the neurotic, tortured scribe often depicted on stage and screen. Maybe that’s why his work has struck such a chord with the mass audience--so much so that DiPietro often finds himself hailed as the “new Neil Simon.”

“I get called young Neil Simon, the Italian Neil Simon--if there’s a new one, that’s me!” joked DiPietro during a recent conversation at the business offices of the Pasadena Playhouse. The West Coast premiere of DiPietro’s play “The Kiss at City Hall” opens today. His romantic comedy is inspired by a controversial court case involving French photographer Robert Doisneau’s famous 1950 photograph of an oblivious young couple locked in a kiss on a busy Paris street, “Le Baiser de L’Hotel de Ville.”

In his short career as a playwright, DiPietro, a former sports promotion writer, seems bent on challenging Simon for sheer productivity. He is the author of the musical comedy revue about love and relationships “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” which played at the Coronet Theater in 1998 and is now in its fourth year off-Broadway. “Over the River and Through the Woods,” his comedic valentine to DiPietro’s grandparents taking place over a hearty pasta dinner, opened Friday on the main stage of the newly renovated El Portal Center in North Hollywood and has been running off-Broadway for two years. And DiPietro has written the book for a new musical take on Gershwin, “They All Laughed,” slated to premiere next season.

DiPietro, an ebullient sort who talks just under a mile a minute, notes that he has no personal insight into his own popularity.

“I write comedies, which certainly helps,” he says. “I think that theater recently has taken a darker, cynical view of life, which I don’t necessarily agree with--but I don’t know. I wish I had a very succinct, good answer for you, because then I could sell it!

“I come from a very happy childhood; things have gone well for me, so I don’t have a dark view of things,” DiPietro continues.

That said, DiPietro adds that he wrote “Kiss” in an effort to take his exploration of relationships to a new level--not darker, but deeper, than before.

“I wrote ‘I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change’ pretty much when I was in my late 20s, and one of the reasons I think that show has been successful is that it has a lightness of youth to it,” he says. “But there’s a certain tone to these observations, this sort of wise-ass guy in his 20s. This, to me, is a more sober, mature look at the same issues--hopefully, still funny.”

In 1993, DiPietro read an article in the New York Times about a court case causing a sensation in France. Photographer Doisneau was sued by a middle-aged man and woman for residual fees for the use of their images. They claimed that they were not young lovers swept up in the passion of the moment, but models hired to pose for the photo.

The question of whether the kiss heard ‘round the world is real or fake becomes the theme of DiPietro’s play, in which two modern couples teeter on the brink of commitment.

“I fashioned a very modern-day romantic comedy around the court case surrounding this marvelous photograph,” DiPietro says. “I thought, what a great metaphor for love, and what is real and what is not, and does it matter?”

DiPietro was raised in the small town of Oradell, N.J., just outside New York City. In the late 1960s, his parents, a banker and a homemaker, began taking DiPietro and his two sisters to Broadway.

“The first show I saw was ‘1776,’ and I still remember where I was sitting when the curtain went up,” DiPietro recalls. “Probably when I was a young teenager, I started going to my local library and taking plays out and reading them, which is probably unusual for a kid. But I was so interested in the form and found them so entertaining, I think I educated myself without even realizing it.”

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As a high school junior, DiPietro wrote a short play for a creative writing class, and entered it in a national contest called the Scholastic Writing Awards. Not only did he get an A on the play--but he also won the contest. “That put the thought in the back of my little mind: ‘Maybe you can do this,’ ” DiPietro says.

Although DiPietro went on to graduate with an English degree from Rutgers University, he found that as a young college graduate he lacked the patience to sit isolated at home all day writing plays. Instead, he took a job writing and producing on-air promotions for CBS Sports, and he did his playwriting at night.

DiPietro tried out his work in New York’s basement theaters, and through that experience met director Joel Bishoff, who encouraged DiPietro to write full-length plays. In 1994, everything clicked: “I Love You, You’re Perfect” got picked up by a theater, DiPietro got an agent, and he was accepted in the prestigious Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference. Bishoff went on to direct “I Love You, You’re Perfect,” and directs the Pasadena Playhouse production of “Kiss.”

DiPietro notes that he at first felt a little out of place arriving at the O’Neill’s Waterford, Conn., headquarters bearing his lighthearted commercial comedy “Over the River and Through the Woods.” But he discovered O’Neill founder Lloyd Richards, former director of Yale Repertory Theatre, to be supportive (Richards has since retired as director of the O’Neill).

“I get up there, and sure enough, all the plays are about [subjects like] incest--I thought, oh, my God! I was terrified,” DiPietro says. “But the theater people took to it in a way that I never thought they would.

“I’m a firm believer that there should be room, and is room, for a wide variety of plays and musicals. And some can be dark, and some can be light, and some can be in between.”

As with the old Neil Simon, the “new Neil Simon” is not the darling of big-city critics. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby, for example, dismissed “I Love You, You’re Perfect” as a show that “focuses on the stereotypical mating rituals of the middle class.”

But another New York Times critic, Alvin Klein, threw “Over the River and Through the Woods” a little backhanded praise. “There are audience shows and then there are audience shows,” he wrote. “Specimens of the first kind . . . are immune to critical opinion in defiance of rationality. And then there is the audience show, it seems safe to say, of the caring kind. It even cares what the critics think. It wants to please everybody, and it wants everybody to eat. ‘Over the River and Through the Woods’ is like that.”

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DiPietro fields the critics in his typically well-adjusted manner. “Critics don’t give a lot of credence to being able to make people laugh,” he says. “I personally find that the dramatic moments that I do are easier than the comic moments. When people call me the new Neil Simon, I’m quite flattered; I think he’s totally underrated.

“I think something very interesting has happened in playwriting over the last couple of years. If you look at straight dramas, like ‘Angels in America’ or ‘Wit,’ there are a lot of funny moments,” DiPietro says. “Look at ‘Death of a Salesman,’ or ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’--you can’t wring a laugh out of that thing. Certainly someone like Neil Simon has changed what you expect of a play, and what a play can give you.

“I’ve only been doing this for about four years, and I must have been reviewed 400 times now,” he adds. “Bad reviews hurt. I’m not happy when I read them, but if you are going to play with the big guys, you have to take the punches. It’s part of the deal.”

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“The Kiss at City Hall,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Opens today, 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays 8 p.m., Saturdays 5 and 9 p.m. Ends Feb. 20. $13.50-$42.50. (800) 233-3123.

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“Over the River and Through the Woods,” El Portal Center, main stage, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Tuesdays-Wednesdays, Sundays, 7 p.m.; Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 9. $35-$42. (818) 508-4200; (800) 233-3123.