Travels in Drama History

Jeffrey Hatcher is your basic Midwesterner, but you wouldn’t know that to hear him speak.

“I have the same splintered syntax as most Americans,” he says, “but I do prefer a level of articulation, rhetorical flourish, even baroque phrasing on occasion. It’s a little old-fashioned.”

Hatcher may be a bit baroque-friendly for a guy from Steubenville, Ohio, but his border-crossing sensibility has helped him carve out an unusual niche as a playwright: He’s the rare go-to American who’s called on to write period dramas set in Europe. Not that there’s a lot of competition for the job.

“I think Americans aren’t as good at period dramas for a number of reasons,” Hatcher said by telephone from his home in Minneapolis. “I think we’re embarrassed by it. When we grow up in grammar school, we do these awful pageants about Ben Franklin, and we don’t have a good history of plays and films about historical characters. If you said to somebody, ‘I want to do a movie about John Adams,’ they’d go, ‘Oh, my God’ and run out the door. But if you say in England you want to do ‘The Madness of King George,’ they say, ‘Great.’”

Edward Kynaston makes King George seem tame by comparison. Kynaston, a famous Shakespearean actor during the English Restoration, is the eponymous dazzler of Hatcher’s bawdy play, “Compleat Female Stage Beauty,” which is running at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego through April 27. And yes, the real female stage beauty went by the name Edward offstage: Kynaston was the last and most famous actor to play women’s roles in Shakespeare’s plays.

He was knocked off that perch by Charles II when the king made the revolutionary declaration that only women could play women in the theater. (Charles changed the rule to appease his mistress Nell Gwynn, possibly becoming the first guy with clout to help his girlfriend get roles.) The adversaries are played by Tom Hewitt as Charles II and Robert Petkoff as Kynaston.

“The rules are switched overnight,” says Hatcher, 44, the Globe’s first Shiley Playwright-in-Residence. “In December 1661, men were playing women. By January 1662, men were no longer allowed to play women. The Restoration saw a great flowering of art and culture and theater, but Kynaston is one of those characters who gets lost in the flood. He became a freak within weeks. Suddenly he was a peculiar thing, not fully a man or a woman. But what I find interesting is he picked up the pieces and went on.”

Hatcher isn’t the only one to find Kynaston’s peculiar story compelling, judging from the serious interest it has elicited from theater and film producers. (Hatcher says he tweaked the play after a lackluster run in Philadelphia in October 2000; the Philadelphia Inquirer complained that the play’s “humor tends to be arch and precious rather than truly funny.”) In addition, the playwright’s witty take on issues the actor grappled with may have a familiar ring for contemporary audiences.

“I think it hits so many bases,” Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien said. “I just did a piece about out-of-work steelworkers, and here’s an out-of-work female impersonator. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. [The more things change, the more they stay the same.]

“It also [asks], ‘Do I keep doing what I’ve always done, or am I allowed to change?’ Change is the single scariest event in a human life. Here’s a character who stands on the precipice of so much change, who’s a fascinating subject to explore in the distance as well as comment on mores and gender politics. It’s a curiously modern play couched in curiously classical language. I think it’s funny, it’s true, it’s moving, it’s surprising. It’s all the reasons you want to do theater.”

And film too, apparently. Artisan Entertainment and Tribeca Films are searching for a director for an independent production based on Hatcher’s screenplay. “Artisan is very serious about this,” said Rachel Cohen, Artisan’s senior vice president, acquisitions and productions. “I think we realize we have a piece of gold here. It’s very tenacious and trenchant, funny and tragic. And we want to make that kind of movie.”

Hatcher, who has written “Columbo” movies for television, considers his highly structured playwriting style particularly adaptable to film. “I love narrative, I love story, I love plot,” he said. “Every night when my son goes to bed, we have a ‘book story,’ which I read to him, and then we have what he calls an ‘invisible story,’ making one up. The theater is a little less plot-driven than it used to be, but I always know I have to have a beginning, middle and end.”

“Compleat Female Stage Beauty” kicks off Hatcher’s residency at the Globe, which will also stage “Smash”--his adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s “An Unsocial Socialist,” about a millionaire socialist. The Globe will also present a reading of “Work Song,” co-written with Eric Simonson, based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. (The theater produced Hatcher’s play “Scotland Road,” about a supposed survivor of the Titanic discovered on an ice floe in the Atlantic, in 1998.) Hatcher and O’Brien are also talking about a new commission for the Globe.

O’Brien chose “Complete Female Stage Beauty” as the first production of the residency because the timing works for opera and theater director Mark Lamos. But given the Globe’s heritage, there’s a certain symmetry to launching the program with a new play about that longtime Globe favorite, the Bard. The residency, bankrolled with a $1-million gift from longtime Globe supporters Donald and Darlene Shiley, is designed to help the theater nurture living playwrights.

“For 60 years, this has been an organization whose playwright-in-residence has basically been Shakespeare,” O’Brien said. “My predecessor, Craig Noel, has often said that any theater that spends that much time with a dead playwright should invest in a living one. We have done a plethora of new plays here. It’s not that we’re not dedicated to doing new plays, but we’ve never really as an institution focused on the work of one writer in a season. So the whole idea is to find somebody who’s singing in different keys so it isn’t just a series of the same thing, but a real range of creative output.”

Hatcher’s imagination took root in Ohio soil, much to the surprise of his construction company manager father and homemaker mother. “I was the classic only child doing plays in his bedroom, in the womb,” Hatcher said. “I probably came out with a cape on. I have a 6-year-old, and he’s already got 13 alter egos.”

As a child, Hatcher recorded the play “Sleuth” and performed both parts for his parents, complete with sound effects--gunshots and doors opening. He cut a dramatic figure in elementary school in his deerstalker cap, the mark of an incipient Anglophile. When his fifth-grade teacher asked for suggestions for the school play, Hatcher, who’d just seen Laurence Olivier in the movie version of “Hamlet” on television, suggested that he star in Shakespeare’s greatest hit. “She said, ‘All right, you can do it, but you have to do it in 45 minutes in class,’” Hatcher recalls. “So I got the ‘Classics Illustrated’ version, and my mother typed it up.”

His acting career in New York wasn’t much more distinguished than his stage debut at Starkdale Elementary School. By the time Hatcher started trolling for parts in New York in his 20s, he was already being passed over as leading man material.

“I started balding early on,” he said. “I have one of those Nixon widow’s peak things. I was one of those kids in high school and college who always played older characters with a cocktail in his hand. They were always off-off Broadway, and I never played a character in the 20th century.”

Hatcher switched to writing, and when he moved his family to Minneapolis in 1989, he forged a close relationship with the prestigious Guthrie Theater that was unusual for someone in the local talent pool. Again, Hatcher’s work had transcended locale as well as medium. His plays are widely produced in regional theater, thanks in part to an acclaimed, 1994 Manhattan Theatre Club production of his play “Three Viewings” set in a funeral parlor.

More recently, the busy playwright has written a screenplay based on Amanda Foreman’s 2000 biography, “Georgiana: The Duchess of Devonshire,” about the great-great-great-great-aunt of the late Princess Diana, for Working Title Films, which produced “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” He’s also written the book for the Broadway-bound Jerome Kern musical “Never Gonna Dance,” based on the 1936 film starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

Perhaps ironically, Hatcher’s limitations as an otherworldly actor may have expanded his possibilities as a writer, helping him take his audiences to unfamiliar places. “He’s not afraid to cross the water,” O’Brien said. “He’s not afraid to go to another time zone, another century and look around. He’s curiously fearless, and I think that’s both a strength and a danger for him, because he could be playing it safer and probably do as well if not better.

“Ours is a society that wants you to do what you did before, and when we like a performance or an opera, we want the composer to do it again. It’s a great problem because it may not be the best thing for the artist in question.”

As for Hatcher, he’s not worried. “We all figure that if we can stay afloat for five, six, seven years, we have a shot at staying afloat until we die. For me, it’s been five or six years. There’s this old Robert Sherwood line, ‘You can’t make a living in the theater, but you can make a killing.’ It’s either poverty row or you write a huge hit. I know tons of writers who make a living in the theater. We’re not millionaires, but we do perfectly fine. People are saying theater is on its last legs. It’s fine.”

*

“COMPLEAT FEMALE STAGE BEAUTY,” Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Dates: Opens April 6. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends April 27. Prices: $25-$50. Phone: (619) 239-2255.

*

Irene Lacher is a regular contributor to Calendar.