Del Shores is an award-winning Los Angeles-based playwright-director who established himself as a local treasure when his sardonic comedies such as Daddy's Dyin'...Who's Got the Will? and Cheatin' premiered in L.A. in the mid-1980s. The semiautobiographical plays that followed (Sordid Lives, Southern Baptist Sissies) are rooted in the Texas Bible Belt area where Shores grew up. The milieu he so engagingly depicts is driven by richly etched characters — high-strung trailer-park denizens and sundry local yokels for whom tragedy is always the flip side of comedy — and wherein scandal constantly lurks behind the façade of an ostensibly conservative, God-fearing community. Though his mix of characters is always diverse, Shores' real-life experiences with the pain and challenges of coming out as a gay man loom large in his themes and story lines. Two of his stage works — Daddy's Dyin' and Sordid Lives — have been adapted into films, and now the Shores legacy finds its way to television, with the July 23 Logo channel debut of Sordid Lives: The Series, executive-produced, directed, and written by Shores.
Many actors from the stage productions of Sordid and/or its film version — Leslie Jordan, Beth Grant, Olivia Newton-John, Rosemary Alexander, Newell Alexander, Ann Walker, Dale Dickey, Robert Lewis Stephenson, Ted Detwiler, Bonnie Bedelia, and more — are joined in the series by Emmy winner Rue McClanahan (The Golden Girls) and Caroline Rhea. Taking the focal role is Shores' life partner, Jason Dottley, president of Del Shores Productions. Dottley re-creates the character of Ty, which he played in a 2006 Sordid Lives revival at the Zephyr Theatre in Hollywood and in its subsequent national tour. Ty is a young aspiring actor, struggling to burst out of the closet amid a storm of family crises that involve his mother (Bedelia), grandmother (McClanahan), wacky aunts (Grant, Walker, Rhea), and cross-dressing uncle Brother Boy (Jordan), who's in a mental institution, where a questionable headshrinker (Rosemary Alexander) is attempting to "dehomosexualize" him.
Says Shores, "Jason challenged me to continue the Sordid characters by writing an online novel. I decided it should be a prequel and wrote 22 chapters, one per week, and called it The Sordid Saga. I then was hired to write and produce Queer as Folk and stopped writing the chapters. When Logo launched, Jason suggested that I take a series version of Sordid Lives to them based on the novel. He had witnessed the craziness with the film and how years later it was still so loved and talked about. I had my then-agent set up a meeting with Dave Mace, senior vice president of television production and development. Dave was a fan of the movie, and I pitched him a prequel to the film and play. Three years later, after a lot of work from so many passionate people, the show is going on the air."
Dottley notes that when Shores adapts his works to new forms and media, it takes time to get the projects off the ground because the works carry too much personal meaning for Shores to give up artistic control. So Shores finds financial backers who allow him to carry out his vision as he sees fit. Sordid Lives was written and performed during Shores' breakup with his wife and his long-suppressed acceptance of his homosexuality. In the heart-wrenching tragicomedy Southern Baptist Sissies, Shores confronted his upbringing in the homophobic Bible Belt culture, the difficulties of his brother's lack of acceptance of Shores' lifestyle, and the mental turmoil Shores worked through in cherishing his religion but seeing the crippling guilt and repression that some elements of the church inflict. In his most recent work, the powerful 2003 tragicomedy The Trials and Tribulations of a Trailer Trash Housewife, Shores delved beyond his direct personal experiences, doing meticulous research to explore spousal abuse in the hinterlands. The play was driven by a knockout performance by Grant in the titular role.
Shores' loyal performers sometimes find their own troubled pasts depicted in the playwright's works. Acclaimed writer-actor Jordan, Emmy winner for Will & Grace, and a recipient of theatre honors--including the Ovations, LA Weekly Awards, Back Stage Garlands, and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards--reluctantly took the role of boy-chasing barfly Peanut in Southern Baptist Sissies after he read it and found it very familiar — almost too close for comfort. Yet, Jordan says playing the role was cathartic. Comparing Sordid Lives with Desperate Housewives, he says, "I believe it will do for Logo what Married...With Children did for the Fox network when it was starting out. It's brilliantly shot. It's beautiful — a tribute to Del Shores. He has taken those characters, and you would not believe the plot twists."
Shores elaborates on the experience of adapting the material: "A television show is a whole different animal from a play or a movie, and this opened up for me a lot structurally. In the movie version, you can literally find 90 percent of the play's dialogue. It really opened up nicely as a series, because I have worked on series TV a lot. I had worked in a serialized story format on Queer as Folk, so that was great training for me prior to doing this series, even though the tones are very different. I felt I was able to keep the outrageousness — the craziness, if you will — and yet ground it all in reality. A lot had to do with being able to assemble and reassemble the incredible cast I worked with before. A lot of the actors who stepped on the stage when L.A. first got to see Sordid Lives in 1996 are in the series."
The 12 episodes that make up the first season were shot in 36 days, due to the tight budgeting. Shores is hopeful that Logo will order a second season after it sees the final cuts of the initial episodes. Dottley remarks, "Getting this series made took every bit of will that we had. There's no greater pride that I get every day than in knowing we actually did it. You have to fight for things you want this bad in life."
Shores concurs: "I was at a point in my life where I had just finished Queer as Folk, which was a fantastic television experience. But it wasn't my show, and I was turning down opportunities to do mine. I thought to myself, 'I'm approaching 50, and it's time right now to have a series or I don't think it's going to happen.' I believe that after everything that happened, without the journey, there would be nothing to appreciate today. It would have been too easy. There's a sense of strong emotion I get when I see each step come forward, like sitting and watching the trailer." Jordan also has high hopes for the show's success. He says, "We sent the first six episodes to my manager. He later told me, 'Leslie, I've watched two, and I don't want to watch more, because I want to see it as it unfolds. I want to get the box set right now." Aaron Spelling in his heyday couldn't have asked for a stronger endorsement.