I began reading plays at age 11. I was accepted to the Alabama School of Fine Arts and reading a certain number of plays a semester was a requirement. I could read since I was six and always insisted on having books around me, but my reading comprehension skills were abysmal and I had trouble reading through even smallish books and keeping engaged. No doubt today I would have been medicated to the hilt.
Once I found writers and stories I liked, however, plays were not all that hard to read. They were short, could be read in one or two sittings. I could speak the lines out loud and that would keep my attention on the page, etc. Two early writers I found I enjoyed were playwrights who found their first success in the 1980s: the preeminent Asian American playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly, Golden Child, Yellow Face) and Craig Lucas, a writer who began as an actor in New York.
There were fewer of Lucas’ plays around my high school theatre library (I could see why later), but the ones that were around were utterly charming. After acting in a few shows on and off Broadway, Lucas first made a name for himself as the co-author of the continuity for a Stephen Sondheim revue called Marry Me a Little. Lucas was in the original Chorus of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and asked Sondheim if he had a treasure trove of unused and cut songs from his shows. He did.
Marry Me started a tradition of combing through unsung Sondheim. The show was conceived by Lucas and director Norman René. They collaborated on a silent book—two characters sharing one set though in two respective apartments. The show moved from Off-Off to Off-Broadway and has inspired countless performers since.
Lucas’ original plays began with Missing Persons, Reckless, and Blue Window, early Off-Broadway successes that explored, through magical realism, love, fantasy—the cockeyed nature of the world. Reckless, in particular, was a breakthrough work. Written in short, cinematic scenes and spanning a nation in setting, the Christmas adventures of a woman who escapes her husband’s hired hitman, the play has been revived often and was made into a film with Mia Farrow in 1995.
Lucas’ biggest acknowledged success is Prelude to a Kiss, the play which turns the Frog Prince story into an adult fairy tale on the stage which is at once a delightful romantic comedy for a universal audience and a play that quietly spoke of the horrors of HIV/AIDS. An old, dying man interrupts the wedding of a chic New York couple and, through a kiss with the bride, switches bodies. Now, young Rita is an old man trying to enjoy life to the fullest and the old man tries to find Peter to show him he’s the real Rita.
Some find the play quaint—precious and commercial for Broadway in the ‘90s, but not revivable. Others think of the play as a way of bridging two cultures. Others may read it and see it and not know it has anything to do with HIV/AIDS at all.
I was in that latter camp. Being born in 1983 and raised with many people who were like me, I had only a faint sense of the horror happening around me as a child and young teenager. But that meaning is somewhat hidden in the text (at least for the adolescent brain of that time). In black and white, it’s a fantastical romantic comedy with a bit of an existentialist edge.
That was about where my knowledge of Lucas stopped around 2002. I never knew there was a whole other career within his career in which he wrote brutally and frankly about gay experiences in America. The screenplay for Longtime Companion was perhaps the first in this mode. A seminal film on HIS/AIDS, it is moving and quiet—superbly acted, touching beyond words. But as the epidemic continued, Lucas’ plays in this vein became increasingly angry as he lost loved ones.
God’s Heart came almost seven years after Prelude. It is a ensemble piece with vitriol that largely offended New Yorkers in the late 1990s. It was a side of Lucas the public didn’t seem to ache for. But this did not stop him. The next two plays, no less brutal, were on different subjects. The Dying Gaul, perhaps his best play, and Stranger, perhaps his second best. The Dying Gaul is a meditation on Hollywood after Lucas’ turn adapting plays for the screen.
So, I arrived in New York in the dead winter of 2002, six months after 9/11, for my first Field Work Term for Bennington College. The school doesn’t like to heat all the buildings in January and February, so it has a built-in mini term in which students hold down a job or internship for six weeks related to their study. I had heard the year before I arrived a student had worked for the Edward Albee Foundation and I liked the idea of “shadowing” a playwright—not sitting behind them when they worked—but seeing the way the business side of things ran. Perhaps my favorite playwright would work with me on something of this nature?
After contacting D. H. Hwang’s agent, he agreed to “shadow” me and we spent six weeks going to plays and musicals, meeting directors, designers, publishers. It was a magical time. He even offered to introduce me to other playwrights whose work I admired. I told him two I definitely wanted to meet: librettist John Weidman and Mr. Lucas.
I met Mr. Weidman at a sidewalk bistro. He bought me some crab cakes and a Coke and we talked a bit about his career. I told him I admired Pacific Overtures and had even bought a pirated VHS of it on eBay (I admitted this before I realized he didn’t receive royalties from that transaction—embarrassment).
I told him I even admired his adaptation of the movie Big as I had been a PA on a regional production of it. The meeting was pleasant. I don’t know what I wanted from that one, except to meet someone who had worked with Sondheim, but I find Mr. Weidman a great craftsman, though I disliked the final Sondheim musical for which he wrote the book.
One night in the apartment I shared with two Alabama kids who went off to NYU, I got a call from Mr. Lucas. With David, I had spent time in the Performing Arts library reading every clipping on him to augment my already sizable knowledge about his career. With Craig, I had done of that. I knew him principally as the author of Prelude to a Kiss, a play I first loved as a stupid twelve-year-old who thought the play was great and the movie slowed everything down. I was in for a surprise. Lucas was funny, a bit sultry on the phone, and a little silly. He told me to meet him and his husband at the Oyster Bar at Penn Station.
I arrived not even knowing what his face looked like. Headshots are not typical on acting editions. I had brought lots of things for David to sign, but I had brought nothing for Craig. I had a movie tie-in edition of Prelude back home, but that was all. For the last two weeks of my NY trip, I had run out of money and I started taking quarters from the quarter jar. I never asked if I had permission to take these quarters. All I cared about was bologna for the apartment and a copy of Prelude for Craig to sign. I headed to a drama book shop and found a terrible acting edition of the play from Broadway Play Publishing. But it had the original Broadway logo on it and it was all I could afford. Boy, I wish I would have had a few more quarters to buy The Dying Gaul. If I had had time, I would have read it and I might have known the author sitting adjacent to me.
He made me eat oysters. I didn’t like them. The rest of the conversation generally eludes me. I do remember pointing out to him that Prelude and Reckless had both been broadcast on TV recently and he was excited about the royalty checks. If I had known more about him, perhaps I would’ve asked him more about the plotting of Gaul or the reaction to God’s Heart. Perhaps I would’ve asked more about his adventures in Hollywood or asked his husband about his career as a costume designer (I believe that’s what he was).
At any rate, the time had come for me to see if he would sign my book. I pulled it out from under the table and his husband saw it, saying wryly, “Oh. Did you write that?” An icy sting of embarrassment ran through me.
At the time, I interpreted his lackadaisical signature with resentment toward his most successful play. I had gleaned (perhaps wrongly) that David had some resentment that he was mostly known for M. Butterfly and, even then, people got the title of that wrong most of the time. Years later, in one of his forewords, Lucas acknowledged Prelude as a wonderful play. He just hoped that people would be as open to his other, darker work as they were his lighter comedies. I can understand that. Given Lucas’ oeuvre, Prelude is the weird one, the odd duck, different even from Reckless. In fact, what is most clear is Lucas is difficult to pigeon-hole and you can’t really even neatly slice his plays into gay and straight plays. They are all strange, unusual. They are not all good. One—Savage Light (written with David Schulner)—was deemed even too indecent to be staged by the Actors Theatre of Louisville.
A scene from Prelude-- sorry again, Craig!
Like most playwrights of the last generation, Lucas is writing mostly musical librettos—some for tasteful, but dull affairs like The Light in the Piazza—and some for more boneheaded ventures (an early draft of the King Kong musical). His film work is actually laudable, but that’s a crap-shoot. David had written and screen- and teleplays, some with outstanding casts, but had not had much success. Lucas’ screenplay for The Dying Gaul is an improvement over the already durable play and another screenplay, The Secret Lives of Dentists, is another bona fide work of screen-craft.
Otherwise, Lucas’ career is typical of his generation’s trajectory: early, smart success Off-Broadway, toned-down major play on Broadway (one great success, maybe two), followed by plays that are not great successes, then musicals. Still, Lucas’ work brings it on itself to some degree. Perhaps it is too eclectic, but then we wouldn’t say that about Lanford Wilson’s range. Perhaps it’s not serious enough, perhaps it’s too serious, perhaps it’s violent, perhaps it’s docile. It’s all those things. A closer look at his work would do some theatre people good. He’s capable of outstanding writing and there are more great plays in him. I hope I did him no harm in asking him to sign my ratty little copy of his play. I admired him, even though I knew only one side of him. Still, what does one gain from regretting successes or failures?
Perhaps it is the American stage, its commercialism, its impossibilities, its critics who pigeonhole writers—is this the place where Craig Lucas will be wedged on the bookshelf? Who knows? A toast to him! He has imagination! I wish to God we had more who did writing for the stage.
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