By Simi Horwitz
Received opinion has it that voicing secrets and sharing pain are the first steps towards freeing oneself from personal demons.
Agrees "Side Man" playwright Warren Leight, with whom we meet in a Bleeker Street pastry shop: "You air things out so that the stench doesn't overpower you. By voicing what's been buried, you are able to let it go and move on."
"Side Man," which opened at the Roundabout Theatre Company on June 25, is an intimate, autobiographical family drama spanning 35 years. Beginning in the early 1950s and set in an ur-counter-culture world, "Side Man" tells the story of an impoverished, yet terrifically gifted, horn player, and his beleaguered alcoholic wife. Their son--the central figure and narrator--is the only adult-like character in the household and is constantly cleaning up his parents' messes, literally and figuratively. Side man is the vernacular for a jazz band instrumentalist.
"Of course, I worried about issues like betrayal," Leight comments, "But as my mother said, 'If you can't use your family for material, who can you use?' For my father it's more complicated, but still he's very proud. Eighty-five drafts ago, the play was far more factual than it is now. Many of the characters here [it's a seven-character piece] are composites," Leight says, stressing that the play should be judged as a carefully structured work of fiction. It has already earned Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations.
Still, Leight knows that for many audience members in 1998 the bohemian world he's creating is alien and distasteful. Drug-taking is the norm and nobody has conventional ambitions. "The side men were far more interested in playing for each other than landing gigs in big bands."
In this universe, standing on the unemployment line enjoys a certain cachet. Indeed, to some his father may suggest little more than a bum, admittedly sweet-souled, but oblivious to everything short of his music; and his mother a boozing nut-case, who perhaps should have been institionalized.
Leight acknowledges that those were very real challenges in writing a memory play, especially since his purpose was to create characters who were clearly flawed, but not villainous. This is a compassionate, forgiving view: "I don't have the 24-year-old's rage anymore."
The 40-ish Manhattan native--he is gentle in manner and seems slightly surprised--notes frankly that virtually every theatre company in New York turned the work down. The objections ran the gamut---from "Who are these people?" to "How come we've never seen them before in a play?" to "Aren't jazz musicians black?"
"Those attitudes we call Crow Jim--reverse racism. There was, in fact, a real community of white jazz musicians. The producers were also uncomfortable with a leading figure who is a passive father. The presence of the narrator puzzled them, too. The narrator, my alter-ego, serves as a bridge between the audience and the musicians, as well as a mediator in the family. These are tricky areas."
Leight says that introducing audiences to the side man's world and presenting it realistically were his central goals. And, according to the musicians who have seen the piece, he has succeeded. "I've been told it's a close reflection of their experiences--unlike the Hollywood conception of jazz musicians saying, 'Hey, man,' and 'Cool cat,' but no mention of what a club date is like at three in the morning."
Not unexpectedly, the play also talks to the over-60, nine-to-five crowd, Leight reports, who remember the music and the period, and have deeply personal responses to the passing of an era. More surprising, however, are the kudos from the under-30 cadre, "who think these guys are real cool, wish it were a world they could be part of, and wonder if I've made the whole thing up."
No Overnight Success
Leight's previous credits include: writing the book to the musical "Mayor," (Drama Desk nomination), and books and lyrics to "High Heeled Women," a cabaret act that garnered an Outer Critics Circle Award. For many years he was a steady contributor to the Village Voice. His beat: New York City events seen through a comic lens. He has penned more than 25 movie scripts, most of them low-budget projects.
"Side Man" is, however, Leight's Cinderella story. It was first mounted at New York Stage and Film, in Pougkeepsie, N.Y., two summers ago, and enjoyed a successful run earlier this year in a space rented at Off-Broadway's Classical Stage Company. "The night we were ready to close, Todd Haimes [Roundabout's artistic director] invited us to the Roundabout."
Expressing his beatnik roots Leight stresses, "Obviously, I wanted the play to go on, but I was very happy knowing I could write a serious family drama and see packed houses, just on the basis of word-of-mouth." He adds, "I'm not future-oriented."
The son of an Italian-American mother and a Jewish father ("I assume he was Jewish although it was never mentioned"), Leight was raised as a Unitarian and grew up in an Upper West Side building of musicians and actors "who borrowed money from each other and had no idea what a mortgage was when the building went co-op."
The self-described "white scholarship boy" at the upscale Riverdale-based Fieldston High School, Leight majored in journalism at California's Stanford University--"never took a theatre course," he recalls--and decided that news reporting was not for him.
"I really wanted to be a columnist, I loved to read Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, but no one was in the market for a 22-year-old columnist with no connections."
During the course of his, at moments, Byzantine career Leight was not one for hustling, he makes clear. Honing his writing skills? Yes. Networking? A resounding no. The concept--not to mention the practice--was just off-putting.
"I'd see producer Joe Papp at a party, surrounded by all the aspiring artists sucking up to him. I remember thinking, how un-cool. Teacher's pet behavior just made me uncomfortable. I'd be talking to the caterer. A lot of writers have mentors. Donald Margolies had Papp, John Patrick Shanley had Lynne Meadows [Manhattan Theatre Club's artistic director]. I just didn't know how to put myself in that position."
SUB: And One Thing Led to Another
Leight adds that cultivating contacts or even making pitches--he might send an editor an unsolicited story--has simply not worked for him. Still, Leight was always open to those "bottom-feeder opportunities," as he calls them, that came his way.
Here's a thumbnail sketch of his talent and luck: He sends a piece to the Village Voice, it's bought, he becomes a regular contributor, a book editor sees his articles and offers him a book contract for a compilation. Charles Strouse of "Annie" fame reads his book, "I Hate New York Guide," and invites Leight to write the book and lyrics to "Mayor."
Now consider his foray into the movie world when at a party he meets a four-flusher who claims to be a producer. "So I lied and told him I was a screenwriter. He offered me $600 to write a horror movie. I did it in 10 days, I got the $600, and I was able to live on that for a month."
That assignment led to others, admittedly, for the most part, on the same modest scale. Leight says the majority of the small-time Ninth Avenue movie-makers with whom he worked are low-level mobsters whose checks frequently bounce. "I remember sitting in one office all afternoon to collect $300 in cash."
The turning point was writing "The Night We Never Met," an original screenplay for director Susan Seidelman. Check out the genesis of this project: "I was working out of an office next door to Seidelman's development department. I was on the phone telling someone about my story idea when Susan's script editor passing by in the hall overheard me and commissioned me to write it for Susan. She ultimately turned it down."
But it was a beginning. Leight liked what he had written, and this time he hustled--well, within parameters. He arranged for a reading of the work, got Matthew Broderick to participate--"I ran into him on the street"--and discovered that Harvey Weinstein of Miramax was in the audience the night of the reading. "The next day he bought the script and I was assigned to direct it."
Although the movie was a disappointment, it was a launching pad for Leight, who has now written 10 studio screenplays and is currently writing a comic version of "Martin Guarre" for Disney. The ideal, says Leight, is to write and direct your own screenplays and, of course, to see your stage plays produced. He is now writing a new play--this one is also about jazz musicians of the '40s and '50s. "One pursued his career; the other did not. They meet 30 years later. It's a play about choices."
Leight has ambivalent feelings about the world from which he emerged. "I think it's a terrible loss that people simply cannot live--practice their art and survive--the way my father did. The rents in New York make that impossible." Beyond the economics, sensibilities have changed. "We are result-obsessed now, and that's regrettable. Yet there are options for people who have substance abuse problems today that were not readily available in my parents' day." On a personal note, Leight says that growing up in the home he did, "taught me how to survive--how to keep going no matter what."
ENDIT
"I don't have the 24-year-old's rage anymore."
OR
"It's a terrible loss that people simply cannot live--practice their art
and survive--the way my father did."