Craftsmen of the Stage

There are annual plants and perennial plants. Annual plants blossom beautifully ... once. Then they need to be replaced. Perennial plants might not bloom as spectacularly, but they return season after season.

As it is with botany, so it can be with playwrights.

The perfect playwriting example of the annual variety is Margaret Edson, who wrote the stunning “Wit,” took home the Pulitzer Prize, and decided that she would write another play only when she felt it was in her, when there was something she was driven to write. Until then, she happily returned to teaching kindergarten in Atlanta.

Then there are the stalwarts, the playwrights who, against all odds, keep delivering plays over the course of decades, but because of their ubiquity can often be taken for granted. It’s time to stop and smell the roses of a few representatives of this variety, who’ve been around an awfully long time, have gone in and out of fashion, and, if one cares to notice, have been populating the local theater scene of late: Horton Foote, A.R. Gurney Jr. and Terrence McNally.

Let’s call them the perennial American playwrights.

International perennials--the Athol Fugards, the David Hares--are plentiful; domestic ones rarer. It’s not really hard to understand, given the big-time temptations (or, depending on one’s point of view, opportunities) that face playwrights who achieve fame in America.

Arguably, America’s two leading playwrights of the ‘70s and ‘80s are busy now primarily with other endeavors. Sam Shepard, the off-Broadway artiste, has become a film actor, appearing frequently in TV movies, turning out a short play every five years or so--if we’re lucky. David Mamet has become a Hollywood auteur writer-director and screenplay surgeon. He most recently wrote and directed the films “State and Main” and “The Heist.” Before his play “Boston Marriage,” which premiered in Cambridge, Mass., in 1999, his last stage work was ... could it have been “The Cryptogram,” a one-act from way back in 1994?

Now, I’m an admirer of both writers, and they can hardly be blamed for being drawn to forms with larger audiences, or in Shepard’s case, less wearing occupations. But they serve to demonstrate how rare the perennial really is.

The writers who’ve never stopped regularly, almost rhythmically, writing plays, even if--especially if--they never achieved quite the same degree of fame as Mamet or other perennials like Neil Simon, August Wilson or Edward Albee, deserve serious credit. For not being distracted more than momentarily by film and television. For not even being distracted by a need to direct their own plays. For being playwrights in a culture that treats the profession most often as a steppingstone to something else. For defining their careers--and their lives--by the fact that they write plays.

That’s what they do--that’s who they are. That’s why they define the perennial playwright in the U.S.

Foote, Gurney and McNally have all been around a long time, but they’re hardly household names. They’re the playwriting equivalent of the character actor one sees in the supermarket--they seem familiar, but what did they write?

So one might be surprised that each has been produced at least twice at prominent institutions in Southern California in the last year. “Pete” Gurney’s “Far East” was just staged at Laguna Playhouse, and his “Ancestral Voices” was recorded by L.A. Theatre Works about 18 months after it was performed by a name cast at the Falcon Theatre in Burbank.

McNally has been represented by his librettos for “The Full Monty” at the Ahmanson and for the opera version of “Dead Man Walking” in Orange County.

Foote’s recently staged work in Southern California includes the South Coast Repertory world premiere run of “Getting Frankie Married--and Afterwards,” as well as a revival at El Portal of his 1995 Pulitzer-winning “The Young Man From Atlanta.”

Taken together, these three writers have composed well over 100 plays--if you count their early, short plays, probably more than 150. They’ve had hits ... and misses. They didn’t arrive at theatrical prominence from Day One, but came to be known after writing many plays.

Gurney wrote his first full-length, “Scenes From American Life,” in 1970, but assured a career with “The Dining Room” in 1982, which ran off-Broadway for a year and a half. (In the middle of that time, his 1977 play “The Middle Ages” received its premiere at the Taper Lab.) McNally had been writing plays for more than 20 years before “Frankie and Johnnie at the Claire de Lune” in 1987 made him a known quantity.

Foote is the standard bearer of the perennials. A native of Wharton, Texas--the inspiration for the fictional town of Harrison where he sets most of his work--Foote was an aspiring actor who studied at the Pasadena Playhouse in its Depression-era heyday before turning his attention to writing. He won an Oscar for his 1962 adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and he’s returned on occasion to screenwriting--he won another Oscar for “Tender Mercies” in 1983, and in 1997, adapted Faulkner’s “Old Man” for Hallmark and CBS.

Foote’s a man whose plays emanate a simple wisdom, and when he’s interviewed, he never makes broad, abstract comments, but straightforward ones that seem overly obvious but really aren’t. “Keeping an unpublished manuscript in a drawer,” Foote has said, “and not sharing it with an audience, even if it is a small audience of friends and acquaintances, is a mistake.” He seems to enjoy spreading his seeds around the American theater, allowing obscure houses like the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, N.Y., or the Silver Spring Stage in Maryland, to mount premiere productions of “A Coffin in Egypt” and “The Day Emily Married,” respectively.

At 86, he’s only a year younger than Arthur Miller, who stopped sprouting plays a long time ago--and still, South Coast Rep’s artistic director, Martin Benson, admitted that he had “overlooked” Foote until he got a copy of “Getting Frankie Married.”

Why are these writers sometimes overlooked? Because, to be frank, they’re not “important” playwrights. Let’s face it: These are not the first writers chosen for college curricula on 20th century drama, or even American drama. They are unafraid of the sentimental and ill-disposed to the cynical--a combination that makes them highly un-hip. They tend not to write about “big ideas.” They generally aren’t formally innovative. They don’t redefine what the theater is or can be, or experiment with lingual gymnastics.

Gurney is the most playful of them, looking for different types of theatricality in which to express his stories. For “Far East,” he incorporates Asian theatrical devices into his tale; in “The Dining Room,” a small cast plays a host of characters; “Sweet Sue” uses two actors for each role. Still, though, there’s often something self-conscious about the effort. It’s the simplicity of his storytelling that saves the day from his labored formal premises.

Foote and McNally are almost always straightforward--realistic, with touches, rather than flourishes, of theatricality. McNally likes to create visual tableaux, at the beginning and end of “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” for example, that create an emotional chord in lieu of a traditional climax. Foote’s language is so basic it’s beautiful; his characters reminisce abundantly, and his most theatrical tool is the long monologue.

Such writers deserve praise not because they’re visionary architects, but because they are skilled, intricate bricklayers. They’re craftsmen, first and foremost. They plug away at their work with good days and bad days, good plays and bad plays. And when a craftsman does that over a period of years, something happens. Even his least inspired work develops a refined polish that the flashiest of annual playwrights can’t touch.

We can see the elegant ease of the craftsman in the way “Far East” and “Getting Frankie Married” move from scene to scene. “Ancestral Voices” provides a smooth example of this skill in the subtle way Gurney keeps track of time: World War II, at the start of the play a far-away conflict in Europe, gradually intrudes more and more into the conversation even though it has little direct effect on the plot.

And notice what McNally has done with “The Full Monty.” He took a screenplay that was the essence of English independent film sensibility and transformed it into pure American musical comedy. It’s broad and brash--the tone and the style are wholly different from the film, and yet the story remains fundamentally intact. That’s a difficult type of craft--to change something utterly while also leaving it the same.

As skilled craftsmen, these writers also know it’s not enough to write characters--one must write roles. Great roles make for great performances. Robert Duvall won an Oscar for “Tender Mercies” (1983), and Geraldine Page won one for Foote’s 1985 film adaptation of his play “The Trip to Bountiful.”

Neither of these characters could match the sheer bravado of McNally’s bold Maria Callas in 1995’s “Master Class,” played to the Tony-winning hilt by Zoe Caldwell in a production that broke box office records at the Mark Taper Forum on its way to Broadway. With Gurney’s “Sylvia,” what actress worth her salt wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to give voice to a friendly canine? In 1995, a vintage year for the perennials, Sarah Jessica Parker played the role in New York. There wouldn’t be room to list the famous thespians who’ve played in Gurney’s epistolary “Love Letters,” which allowed for rotating celebrity casts.

Even roles, though, are insufficient. Characters can’t operate in a vacuum. They need relationships, and so many of the perennials’ plays derive their plots not from big events, but from small changes in relationships

The biggest challenge of being a perennial playwright: finding material. For the first dozen plays, that might be easy enough, but how about the third dozen? While all of these writers have done literary adaptations at one time or another, they have mostly mined highly personal territory for their work.

Taking all of Foote’s plays about Harrison together, we have a complete picture of small-town Texas, from the influenza epidemic to the age of Ronald Reagan. Gurney has given voice to the fading WASP culture of Buffalo throughout his career, writing small romantic comedies or light family sagas all set in this milieu. Even “Far East,” which takes place in 1950s Japan, is really about the values of the WASP culture, particularly its racial bigotry.

McNally’s passion for opera has inspired plenty of material. In “The Lisbon Traviata,” he crafted a character defined by his adoration of Maria Callas, later portraying Callas herself in “Master Class.” His way with show-biz types infuses “The Full Monty” too: He added the jokey pianist, played by Carol Woods at the Ahmanson, a character who becomes an instant audience favorite.

It’s the way they are able to explore their lives, their upbringing, their ancestors and contemporaries from endless angles that makes the perennials’ prolific writing possible. They don’t write about themselves so much as they write from themselves.

One could select a play or two from each of these writers to get a sense of his talent, but it’s not talent that truly sets them apart. In the end, what makes these playwrights so invaluable is the very fact that they perennate despite the commercial climate or the often rocky condition of the theatrical soil.

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Steven Oxman reviews theater and television for Variety.