THE GOD GAFFE: Will A Christian Conservative TV Talk Show Personality Survive Her Controversial On-Air Remarks?

Reality and creative imagination cross paths in the theater when a play draws its inspiration from actual people or events. The writer begins with a topic that is worthy of digging into and then helps us to look at things in ways we hadn’t considered, or, alternatively, turns the situation into a springboard for lampooning. 

So partial thumbs up to John William Schiffbauer, whose play The God Gaffe takes on the very “now” issue of the high-profile clashes that occur between liberals and conservatives when they are given a chunk of media time, an audience in the millions, and a spotlight in which to have at each other. There is lots of fodder here that could provide food for thought or that could be exaggerated into a sharp satire.  As it stands, however, the play feels very much like an early draft, and it falls flat by following an exposition-heavy middle ground. 

The catalyst for The God Gaffe, one of the entries in the New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC), is the television talk show The View and the often-testy on-air disagreements that arise among its panelists. We’re talking specifically about Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a Christian conservative who frequently found herself locking horns with her co-panelists and guests on the show during her 10-year stint, before she finally left (or was pushed out) in 2013 and made her way over to the more receptive Fox Broadcasting. 

Hannah Beck plays Patricia, the Hasselbeck-like character whose job is on the line when she says something the network execs deem to be unacceptably offensive. 

Rather than letting us see the actual on-air incident as it happens, however, the playwright gives us a second-hand account of it during a meeting between Patricia and her executive producer Jeremy (Vincent Torres). The two of them have been on friendly terms during her time with the network, and she has been quite successful at pulling in a conservative demographic that feeds the ratings numbers, but without alienating the more liberal viewers. But her anti-gay remarks during an interview with a young guest have raised hackles in the front office. She must make a public apology or go on an immediate hiatus. 

The play’s strength lies in the depiction of Patricia as someone who is not an in-your-face wacko, the sort of self-identified Christian conservative whose extreme views are usually the only ones the public gets to hear. It is significant that she and Jeremy have had a positive and friendly office association, particularly since Jeremy is gay himself and in a long-term relationship that may be heading toward marriage. (His boyfriend Brett, played by Tom Giordano, shows up on a couple of occasions, though he mostly serves as a mouthpiece for the complaints aimed at Patricia). 

The potential is there for a very interesting play that could allow for an airing of reasoned views on both the right and left.  What happens to "moderation" when neither side is willing to budge on issues they both feel strongly about?  

But if Patricia feels bullied by her talk show colleagues, as she says, then let us have scenes that depict this. If her professional behavior has been affected by events in her personal life, as Jeremy suggests, then let us see some of that.  And if we are going to be able to judge for ourselves whether her on-air remarks were, indeed, beyond the pale, then let us see it, not just hear about it.  

This is the basic problem with The God Gaffe. The playwright fails to heed one of the basic tenets of the profession: Show, don’t tell. With such an interesting concept to work with, here’s hoping he will go back to the drawing board and start to flesh out his ideas for a future production. 

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SCHOOLED and THE SCREENWRITER DIES OF HIS OWN FREE WILL: Two Smart and Funny Complementary Plays Stand Out at FringeNYC

Jim Shankman and Steven Mark Friedman
in THE SCREENWRITER DIES OF HIS OWN FREE WILL
Photo by Hunter Canning

In the past few days, as I have sampled some of the entries that make up the head-spinning summer theater circus known as FringeNYC (200 shows, 1,100 performances, 16 days!), I happened upon two excellent plays that deal with the highly competitive and risky world of the professional screenwriter.

One of these, Schooled, by Lisa Lewis, is about two young and ambitious budding screenwriters — Claire and her boyfriend Jake — both students in an elite New York college writing program. The two are vying for the attention of their instructor, who holds the key to a grant that will fund only one of their potentially career-launching projects. Directed by James Kautz, the play is smart and often savagely funny (and well performed by Lilli Stein and Stephen Friedrich as the young couple and by Quentin Maré as their cynical instructor) as it skewers the manipulative gamesmanship and misogyny that mark the territory of those who would be players in the film industry.   

At one point during Schooled, the instructor, Andrew, has a few choice words to say about screenwriters who eschew formulaic writing in order to offer up works of greater depth and substance.  “You know who makes art?” says Andrew.  “Retarded people. Really. It’s called outsider art. People who have extreme mental disabilities; they draw because they can’t help themselves. Everything else is about fame, getting paid and getting laid.”

I bring up this short, cutting speech from Schooled by way of introduction to another smart and funny play that is also having a brief run in the Fringe, called The Screenwriter Dies Of His Own Free Will. Written by Jim Shankman, it relates the story of a successful screenwriter named Willy (performed by the playwright), who is dying of cancer. He meets up with Gabe (Steven Mark Friedman), a studio head and an old friend from their Princeton days, in order to pitch his final screenplay, one that is exactly the kind of piece that Andrew is mocking in Schooled.  It is Willy’s artful farewell to the world.    

Willy is a mess as he enters Gabe’s office. He is “one toke over the line” on medical marijuana, and can barely complete a coherent sentence as he offers up his script. The play, well acted by its co-stars and nimbly directed by Craig J. George (who also provides the very clever audio design), deals with the mostly-out-of-control conversation between the two. Is Gabe really interested, or is he merely being polite to his former friend, whose obviously declining health scares him?  And is Willy really eager to turn over his final and most significant work to someone he views as an unimaginative studio hack? 

One of the things that make the play work so well as the pair hash things out is the way that Willy (or perhaps the playwright who is looking over his shoulder) manages to manipulate the conversation so that Gabe says things he does not mean to speak aloud, and is occasionally prevented from being heard when Willy is caught up in his own thoughts.  Viewing it in this light, you could say that The Screenwriter Dies Of His Own Free Will is an act of revenge by a real screenwriter/playwright who has an axe to grind with some of the Hollywood types he’s had to deal with during his career. Until he turns over his work to others, he is in complete control.  

The Screenwriter Dies Of His Own Free Will, which runs but 40 minutes, resembles the kind of short works that David Mamet excels at — literate, smart, and filled with rapid-fire and frequently laugh-out-loud-funny dialogue.

Mr. Shankman, the playwright, says that the version of the play being offered to Fringe audiences has been expanded into a full-length work that he hopes to have produced down the road. I can’t comment on the lengthier version, since I’ve not read it.  But I will say that, as it stands, this is a damn good one-act that is exactly the right length for the story it tells and the way in which Shankman tells it. So, let me try my hand at a little matchmaking.

Instead of stretching out the story, and thereby risking the loss of its perfect pacing, how about pairing it with Schooled?  That would make for a very interesting full evening of theater.  Think of the PR: “They met at the Fringe!”  Mr. Shankman?  Ms. Lewis?  Their agents?  

(How’s that for the art of the pitch?!!)

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'En Avant!': A Companionable Evening With Tennessee Williams

Here’s a question for playwright/performer William Shuman: What’s a genteel little play like yours doing in a place like the New York International Fringe Festival?

The play in question is a one-man show called En Avant!  An Evening With Tennessee Williams. It is a loving tribute to the great playwright, with none of the quirkiness or metaphysical meanderings associated with many of the Fringe offerings.

Fans of Mr. Williams will find much to admire in this 75-minute monolog (directed by Ruis Woertendyke)—in turns informative, insightful, gossipy, and introspective—as Mr. Shuman takes on the persona of Mr. Williams, who, according to the program, is joining us from a world he inhabits somewhere “between here and heaven” three decades after his death.

The set is simple:  A wicker chair, a table with a decanter of liquor that gradually diminishes in volume during the course of the play, and another table holding a typewriter and copies of some of Mr. Williams’s work. 

When first he appears, dressed in a white suit and blue shirt, Mr. Shuman as Mr. Williams is somewhat diffident, seemingly surprised to see us and even more surprised to learn that we still remember him.  “I’m gonna fix myself a little drink, then we can spend some time together,” he says, and then proceeds to pour the first of many such little drinks that will fuel the conversation. 

He starts with the safe stuff: something about his early life, a tidbit about an ancestor named Preserved Fish Dakin, how he underwent the name change from Tom to Tennessee, his early writing efforts and successes.  This all feels like well-honed audience material, something for the talk shows and public speaking engagements. 

But as he warms to the task (and as the alcohol begins to provide that famous “click” he talks about in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof), he opens up about his difficult father (“the man in the overstuff chair”), whom he says treated him contemptibly and referred to him as “Miss Nancy.”   He also speaks of some of the other men in his life—Kip, his first love, and Frank, whom he walked away from. He admits that he was not able to commit himself to any relationship for very long (“We fucked and we fought for a year and a half, and then I couldn’t take it.”)

He talks of the actress Laurette Taylor, struggling to overcome a 15-year drinking binge (“the longest wake in history”) to take on the role of Amanda in the original production of The Glass Menagerie.  She was, he says, “constantly ad-libbing in an accent I’ve yet to identify.”  Yet, in the end, of course, she gave a performance that has become the stuff of legends. 

     

He regrets the lack of public and critical appreciation for his later plays, which were sometimes experimental in nature and served to move him forward as a writer.  Interestingly enough, some of these are receiving a new hearing (e.g. the current revelatory production of The Two Character Play, starring Amanda Plummer and Brad Dourif). 

But, in the end, nothing matters to him so much as the writing.  Through all of the ups and downs of his life, the struggles with failure and with success—and with the booze, the barbiturates, and the boys—it is the writing that kept him going.

“If I could not write, I’d cease to exist,” he says, leaving his posthumous appearance before us as evidence of the truth of this statement. 

En Avant! (the phrase, meaning “onward,” was Mr. Williams’s motto) makes for a most companionable and intimate theatrical evening at its Fringe venue, the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in the Lower East Side.  I’m guessing that, like his subject, Mr. Shuman will continue to tinker with both the work and his performance of it over time, but hopefully he will keep the tone conversational and relaxed as it is now. 

On a sad note, I would like to express my condolences on the passing of Shirley Herz, the well-known theatrical press agent, whose firm Shirley Herz Associates serves as publicist for En Avant! An Evening With Tennessee Williams. Broadway recognized her many years of contributions earlier this week by dimming its lights.  We join in saluting her.

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FringeNYC, Week 1: "I Heart Revolution" and "Hadrian's Wall"

FringeNYC Begins:  187 Shows in 16 Days

Are you suffering from Olympics withdrawal? 

Here’s a cure for you:  Tackle the theater marathon that is FringeNYC, the International Fringe Festival.  187 shows, 19 venues, 16 days. Winner take all!

There is no way this couch potato is going to even try to see more than a few of the offerings (for one thing, my fulltime day job tends to get annoyingly in the way), but I did get to see a couple of the shows during the opening week.

Let’s begin with an offbeat comedy called I Heart Revolution, on view at the Living Theatre, with several more performances scheduled up to the festival’s final day, August 26.

I Heart Revolution is a gentle satire that takes aim at the “Occupy” movement; young revolutionaries, it would seem, have short attention spans and are easily distracted. 

In this case, the young revolutionaries are three BFFs—20-something children of privilege named Alexandra (the ditzy one), Tara (the belligerent one), and Alice (the sometime-peacemaker, sometime-pouty member of the triumvirate).  Back in the 1960s, we used to call them “Bonwit Teller hippies,” engaging in anti-war demonstrations and railing against the government during the week, while living off their trust funds and spending weekends with their families in the Hamptons. 

In I Heart Revolution, we are the proverbial “captive audience,” being held hostage by the trio. They surround us with police tape and hold us at bay with staple guns while they fill our heads with the not-quite-coherent beliefs they latched onto as students of a feminist professor at Brown University, a woman they refer to reverently as “Mother.”  

In what appears to be a semi-improvised event (though I Heart Revolution dates to 2008 and the aforementioned Brown University), the trio launches into a combination of diatribe, Power-Point presentations, threats, and New Age rituals aimed at getting us to succumb to Stockholm Syndrome.  That’s the phenomenon that occurs when hostages begin to empathize with their captors (à la Patty Hearst, the heiress and socialite who turned bank-robber after being taken hostage—a very real and non-satirical event). 

The (possibly unintended) irony is, you probably can empathize with the anger and frustration, of which there is a lot going around these days.  But, like a character in a Samuel Beckett play, the rage dissipates when our captors—given a forum to air their grievances—are unable to articulate exactly what it is they are enraged about or what they want to see happen. 

This is the point, it would seem, of I Heart Revolution, and, in the end, it is not surprising that things fall apart over an argument in which one of the characters is deeply offended at an off-hand remark about the singer Beyoncé.

Throughout the performance, the trio is aided and abetted in their efforts by a game Chris Lowell (“dumb as a bag of bricks but cute in shorts,” as one of the women describes him).  Lowell plays Michael, their put-upon gofer who is just happy to have even a tiny moment before an audience, even a captive one.  (In a funny bit that occurs when the three women have momentarily left the room, Michael auditions for us as Biff in a scene from Death Of A Salesman).

The tacky staging and cheap props are most appropriate for a fringe production, and the three playwright/performers—Alexandra Panzer, Tara Schuster, and Alice Winslow—are on to something here.  With a bit more satirical bite, more in-your-face scariness aimed at the audience (hey, they are performing at The Living Theatre after all), and perhaps the excising of 15 minutes or so, I Heart Revolution could very well have an afterlife. 

                        *                      *                                           

The second fringe show I saw last week is called Hadrian’s Wall (playing at the Connelly Theatre, with a last performance scheduled for this Sunday).  Unlike I Heart Revolution, this is a more fully realized play, written by Dani Vetere and directed by Stephen Cedars. 

Hadrian’s Wall is a three-character study about a brilliant yet reclusive archeologist named Ramona (Laura Siner).  Ramona has spent the last fifteen years holed up in her apartment after being accused of stealing an important artifact—a block of stone containing a tantalizing yet nearly indecipherable inscription she believes will lead to a significant breakthrough regarding the very real Roman Ninth Legion, about which a mystery remains to this day. 

Ramona is somewhat of a mystery herself, and the playwright slowly and carefully unearths fragments of her story and reveals them to us as an archeologist might, by dusting off the past and allowing us to learn about her life through her interactions with David (Eric Rolland), her attorney, friend, and former lover, and with a student at the university, Amy (Rebecca White), who is gradually supplanting David in Ramona's life.  

This is an intriguing play that leaves many questions unanswered, challenging us to interpret events for ourselves.  Taken at face value, Hadrian’s Wall is a straight-forward psychological mystery.  But its real strength is in what is left unrevealed.  There is more than a bit of Harold Pinter in the script; we are not meant to know everything, but we are invited to interpret. 

Perhaps the title is meant to suggest the self-protective wall that Ramona has built around herself since leaving the university.  Perhaps David and Amy exist only in Ramona’s memory, or perhaps she has invented one or both of them to keep her company in her self-imposed solitude.  One thing for sure, there is something about her that sticks in the mind and leaves you wanting to know more. 

I suspect that Hadrian’s Wall will have a further life, and that Dani Vetere will have an interesting future as a playwright.  But if you want to catch it now, you’ve only got until this Sunday. FringeNYC waits for no one!

If you crave more of ProfMiller, check out ProfMiller@The Theater at BroadwayShowBiz.com.  Most recent review posted there:  "Richard III."