Creating Poetry From Cluttered Lives

One night in 1996, playwright Richard Greenberg made his way uptown from his lower Manhattan apartment to a production of “Holiday,” Philip Barry’s 1928-vintage play about a self-made man who woos two daughters from an upper-crust family. He had no desire to revisit a show he remembered as nothing more than “bright chat,” but he went out of a “friendship duty” to the director, David Warren.

Expecting shallowness, Greenberg came away startled by the play’s poignancy. He raved to Warren about the performance of Reg Rogers in a secondary role as the drunken son of a rich and controlling father. Warren asked Greenberg to write a play for Rogers and Peter Frechette, another actor the playwright and director had worked with before. Let them play brothers, Warren suggested.

That set Greenberg thinking about the Collyer brothers. And about his parents yelling at him to clean up his room when he was a kid on Long Island.

The Collyer brothers, Langley and Homer, were a national sensation in 1947. Scions of an old and respectable New York family, they were eccentric recluses who spent years holed up inside their Harlem brownstone. When police got a tip that somebody had died inside, they found the brothers’ corpses amid a labyrinth of junk. There was no sign of suicide or foul play. Tons of worthless stuff was taken out of the house, including mountains of old newspapers and 10 grand pianos.

Out of the story’s bare bones, and a mood he took away from “Holiday,” Greenberg began to fashion “The Dazzle.” It is currently playing in New York in a production by the Roundabout Theatre Company, directed by Warren and starring Rogers and Frechette. Now, comes the West Coast premiere, with a different cast and director. “The Dazzle” is the sixth play by Greenberg that South Coast Repertory has produced since 1991. A seventh, “The Violet Hour,” will launch South Coast’s new, secondary 336-seat theater in the fall--and vault Greenberg past Harold Pinter and Alan Ayckbourn as the living writer with the most plays produced at South Coast.

As a kid, Greenberg said, he used to keep newspapers piled in his room. The stacks were neat, but they nevertheless drew parental heat. “They would say, ‘It looks like the Collyer brothers in here,’” Greenberg recalled recently from New York.

Greenberg, 44, said his father helped in another way: At his son’s request, he got on the Internet and tracked down 1940s news accounts of the Collyers. An author’s note in the program advises audiences the play is “based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, about whom I know almost nothing.”

“Some facts are absolutely accurate and true, but I’ve imagined it more than researched it,” Greenberg said. His goal was not to represent the Collyers as historical figures but to use them to pose what the Bible tells us was the first, most primal question one sibling asked about another: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

In “The Dazzle,” Langley is an eccentric fixated on life’s minutiae. A concert pianist, he can hear--and be thrown into a tizzy by--the tiniest discordance between musical notes. He collects stuff because he is consumed with the sheer sensory fascination--the dazzle--of looking at things and reveling in their smallest detail. He is utterly unfit to function in society or to have any semblance of a normal, workaday life.

Homer, the older brother, has been deputized from childhood as his brother’s keeper. “I have lived my life under a mother’s curse: ‘You are for your brother.’ But you see, I wanted my own life,” he tells the play’s only other character, a fictitious heiress who, like one of the characters in “Holiday,” is rebelling against her wealthy family. She falls for Langley--a prospective husband mommy and daddy won’t be able to abide.

Greenberg envisions Homer, an attorney, as a magnificent verbal wit who levels many a barb at his brother. And yet, Homer makes his sacrifice, loyal to his brother in a way that may, for some playgoers, defy belief. Why does Homer stay?

Greenberg sees his job as posing the question and supplying a context for thought, not giving a clear, psychologically detailed answer.

“Why do people stay together? They are condemned to each other or destined to each other. If you spell it out [further], you’re lying. I get bored when everything is explained to me, and I just don’t buy it. Human nature is too variable and deep.”

One constant in Greenberg’s plays is the uncommon wit and articulateness of his characters. He is a product of a Princeton-Yale education (with a brief stop at Harvard as well), and it is typical for his characters to talk as if they were verbally adept graduates of the best schools.

“Maybe that’s my default setting,” he said. “People are always bringing it up to me.” There are exceptions, he notes--among them the Lower East Side Jews of “Everett Beekin,” which premiered at South Coast two years ago, and the ballplayers of his next play, “Take Me Out,” which concerns the fictitious New York Empires. “The Dazzle” offers some prime turns of wit. There is also a touch of poetry--especially in a long, broken and poignant speech in which Langley talks about watching from his window at dusk as businessmen return from a day of work--emissaries of a normal, everyday world he can never join. “Sometimes they catch my eye--and nod to me!--as if we were the neighbors that we are ... as if this were my 7 p.m. too--a little nod--and I’m swung into the circle of their hour--but then that stops--and the next hour is smashed to smithereens.”

Greenberg said the only time he has written poems was a six-month period during 1996 when 200 of them poured out. He was also working on “The Dazzle” at the time (he put the play aside for a while and finished it in 1998). His first crack at the Collyer brothers came in a five-page poem; some of its lines are in the play.

Greenberg showed some of his verse to friends. Otherwise, he is keeping the poems to himself. Greenberg, who fervently avoids reading the articles and reviews that are written about him, said of the poems, “I wrote them for me. Some sort of work I can never be punished for.”

*

“The Dazzle,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Previews begin today; regular performances start Friday. Tuesdays-Fridays, 7:45 p.m., Saturdays-Sundays, 2 and 7:45 p.m. Ends April 28. $19-$51. (714) 708-5555.