Thunders Enlightening

It would take some digging to unearth a sorrier, grimier, more pathetic rock ‘n’ roll story than that of Johnny Thunders, a punk rock primogenitor who spent most of his career so addled by heroin addiction that even his fans pegged him as a walking dead man. He lived up to expectations with a fatal injection at age 38.

But there was a pure, vital and bighearted side to the runty, street-smart New York City rocker, and that is what William Mittler was lucky enough to experience when he first saw Thunders--born John Genzale--perform in 1986.

Thunders’ obit already had been written and recorded--”Johnny’s Gonna Die” was the name of a 1981 lament by the influential Minneapolis alternative-rock band, the Replacements. But Mittler didn’t know that. He came to Thunders’ show at the Roxy in West Hollywood as a blank slate, and left as a fan.

Of course, as a fan, Mittler soon became acquainted with the whole saga. There was the rise and pratfall of Thunders’ first band, the New York Dolls, who tried to rekindle the spirit of raunchy, elemental, crudely played rock ‘n’ roll during the early-to-mid-1970s, when most of the public wanted the hi-fi sheen of Pink Floyd, the Eagles and Steely Dan.

There was Thunders’ reemergence with the Heartbreakers, who found vindication, if not success, in the rising punk-rock movement of the late 1970s. And there was always, as one of Thunders’ signature songs put it, “Too Much Junkie Business,” culminating in his final, fatal transaction with a needle in a New Orleans apartment in 1991.

It is a story Mittler has brought to the stage with affection but no sugarcoating in his rock musical, “So Alone.” The astonishingly prolific Orange County playwright’s script is mainly factual, but takes some dramatic liberties. The show’s 15 songs are faithfully re-created samplings from Thunders’ catalog and that of his Dolls associate, David Johanson.

The cast at Stages, the grass-roots, cutting-edge Fullerton theater that is Mittler’s artistic home, is made up not of rock pros, but of theater people who happen to be able to sing and play. “So Alone” had its first brief run at Stages in 1995. Now it is back after a good deal of revision.

His first version of the play “was more preachy, too anti-drug,” says Mittler, a quietly friendly sort who is disarmingly self-deprecating about his work.

“I don’t use drugs, and I really think writers shouldn’t, but I realized the way to reach the audience is to tell the story and let them reach their own conclusions.”

When he first got the idea of turning Thunders’ life into theater, the rocker was still alive and Mittler was not yet a playwright. “So Alone” came together rapidly in 1994.

“I saw a lot of humor in Johnny,” Mittler said during a recent interview in Stages’ small office, while the cast warmed up loudly for its first full run-through rehearsal. “I saw him as a lost child out there, and maybe his own worst enemy, too.”

Mittler, who likes to dramatize subjects from history and pop culture, thought Thunders’ tale was colorful and meaningful enough to deserve its own chapter, not just a cult-hero’s footnote. He also had a personal motive for exploring the theme of heroin use and its seductive, unrelenting pull: a close friend of his, an actress at UCLA where he was studying playwriting, had become addicted.

Mittler, who is also the director of “So Alone,” has tried to capture Thunders as a funny, acerbic, New York City dead-end kid whose charm comes through, despite his unrelenting sexism and cheeky lip.

At 34, the playwright seems to be as enslaved to his pen--he writes his first drafts longhand on legal pads--as junkies are to their needles.

He says that Lloyd Richards, one of the nation’s leading theater directors, planted the idea that a playwright needed to be prolific. Mittler was just starting to write in 1992 when they met at a college theater festival in Las Vegas.

“I said, ‘I’m a playwright.’ He said, ‘How many plays have you written?’ ” Mittler’s answer was two. “He said, ‘Come back to me when you’ve written 15. Then you’ll be a playwright.’ ”

Now Mittler has written 27, with more in progress, and he figures that perhaps 10 of them have merit. Having concentrated on cranking them out over the past eight years--sometimes writing a full-length draft in one night--he is beginning to put some effort into getting his favorite ones published or produced beyond Stages.

Mittler says his first produced play, a Sam Shepard knockoff called “Mother’s Daughter,” was so bad that he worried it might sink the theater company when Stages mounted it during its inaugural season of 1993.

“It’s been a running joke here for eight years, because it was absolutely horrible,” said Brian Kojac, the producing artistic director at Stages since its inception. Kojac programs mainly new, original work, and his philosophy is to let emerging dramatists learn from their mistakes.

“I knew Bill had potential and I knew he was passionate. He was still trying to figure out how to be a writer.” Kojac has gone on to produce 20 of Mittler’s plays at Stages.

Mittler, tall and solidly built, with small-lensed glasses that add a studious touch, works as a motel manager to earn a living; over the years, his shifts at the front desk have given him ample time to write. Among the plays he is proudest of are “Tickle Pants,” inspired by the story of the Marx Brothers, and “Paradise,” which imagines what might have happened had the poet, Hart Crane, survived his suicidal leap from a ship into the Caribbean and, instead, been washed up on a secluded island occupied by a honeymooning couple.

Catching the Spirit Is Actor’s Quest

“So Alone” stands as the closest thing Mittler has had to a box-office hit, having virtually sold out its two-week run five years ago.

Kojac says company members who acted in the first production were interested in doing it again, and he sees “So Alone” as a good way of reaching out to rock fans who typically don’t go to plays.

“If we don’t invest in a new audience, theater is going to dwindle and die,” he said.

For the actors, the musical challenge isn’t to be technically slick, but to muster the spirit and fire needed to turn simple, three-chord garage rock into something bracing and free.

Robert Dean Nunez, the small, dark-haired, sharp-featured actor who has played Thunders in both productions, has the right look for the part; Mittler pegged him as a Dustin Hoffman type who could do justice to the role.

When he first took the part, Nunez already played guitar as a sidelight. But his influences were from such technically accomplished players as Steve Howe of Yes and Alex Lifeson of Rush. Nunez knew nothing about Thunders when he began studying albums and concert videos that Mittler supplied from his collection.

“[Thunders] played from the heart and soul. It could be as sloppy as hell, but the spirit is just penetrating,” Nunez said during a rehearsal break.

Mittler, who saw Thunders perform six or seven times, thinks his leading man has Thunders down perfectly. During one listening session, he says, he went back and forth between recordings of Nunez and Thunders singing “So Alone,” the anguished dirge that provides an emotional climax.

“At one point, I couldn’t tell which was Robert and which was Johnny.”

Matt Tully, who plays Walter Lure, Thunders’ college-educated, pseudo-intellectual foil in the Heartbreakers, had three years’ experience on acoustic guitar when he got the part. A “crash course” in electric guitar has him pumping out meaty garage-rock chords. Johnny Greco, also an actor first, is drumming for the first time since high school.

Mitch Faris, the show’s musical director, plays in the Mo Evans Band, a blues group on the local club circuit, but he also is a playwright and company member at Stages. His advice to the other actor-musicians has been to avoid perfectionism.

“The last time we did the show, the Heartbreakers band rehearsed so much they were sounding really good. We had to make them back off” to get a properly anarchic sound, Farris said.

Mittler’s toughest task as director is to keep the show moving seamlessly between spoken scenes and concert sequences. Thunders’ story poses one obvious, monumental theatrical challenge: how to build sympathy and dramatic tension into a script about a pathetic loser.

“It’s hard to tell the story of somebody who screws up every chance he gets and goes from failure to failure,” Mittler acknowledges. “We had to give him a shot at redemption.”

*

The play imagines Patty Palladin, a real-life rocker who collaborated with Thunders, as a no-nonsense, would-be savior, committed to getting Thunders off smack. Her rival, Angel, is a fictional character who embodies the sex-and-drugs swamp that often engulfs musicians who start out with just an innocent love of rock ‘n’ roll.

“I just wanna play,” the Thunders’ character says at one point.

“Dead junkies don’t play much guitar,” Palladin notes dryly.

Mittler’s script also broaches the theme of artistic purity versus the sales machinery that drives commercial music. Thunders comes across as a scarred holdout against image-conscious packaging, although Mittler has some doubts on that score: “I think he would have sold out if he had the chance.”

Indeed, Thunders played the image game to the hilt in real life. Sadly, the image he exploited, until his time ran out was that of a doomed addict.

“Hey, they’re paying to watch me die up there, hoping I’ll take the big fall right in front of them,” he tells his bandmates at one point.

With “So Alone,” fans and novices can encounter a vital chapter in the history of underground rock and decide for themselves whether Thunders was a tragic figure or just a sad clown.

* “So Alone,” by William Mittler, with songs from the New York Dolls, the Heartbreakers, Johnny Thunders and Buster Poindexter. At Stages, 400 E. Commonwealth Ave., No. 4, Fullerton. Fridays through Sundays, 8 p.m. Through Aug. 19. $15. (714) 525-4484.