History as Solace

NEW YORK — Playwright John Guare was worried. He owed the Signature Theatre a play, and he didn’t have one. Just some notes, some scenes and a lot of research. “It all was sort of laying there in disarray,” he says. “I didn’t know how to pull it together.”

Then came Sept. 11. Guare, who lives downtown, not far from the World Trade Center site, says, “I looked out my window and saw the nightmare. I went out on the street and saw people covered with white ash like they’d turned to stone. I went back in to turn on the television and just felt paralyzed, watching and watching. I had to do something. I went into my workroom, shut the door and started writing. I finished the play three weeks later.”

Urban chronicler Guare, best known for such tales of contemporary anguish as “Six Degrees of Separation” and “The House of Blue Leaves,” this time turned to history. Setting his play in 1880s New York, the Tony-winning playwright deconstructed current events by reconstructing historical ones.

Opening today at the off-Broadway Signature Theatre’s Peter Norton Space, “A Few Stout Individuals” recounts the final days of Ulysses S. Grant, the nation’s 18th president. Grant, who served from 1869 to 1877, is dying of throat cancer, in terrible financial straits and writing his memoirs to put bread back on the family table. As Grant struggles with that book for his publisher, the writer Samuel Clemens, a gaggle of family members and others try to help, swindle, cajole and honor him.

Guare had great material to work with. Grant did indeed lose his money in a financial scandal and miraculously finish his memoirs shortly before dying. His widow did make a bundle on them. But the truth of this tale, as in so many of Guare’s tales, is filtered through what a longtime friend, Lincoln Center Theater executive producer Bernard Gersten, calls Guare’s “skewed view of the world and the inhabitants thereof.”

Unexpected and fantastical characters appear and reappear in “A Few Stout Individuals,” much as they usually do in Guare’s plays. But they’re less outrageous than the men and women who often populate his plays, and none of them have names like Lusty, Bananas or Torah. There are no seeing-eye people for blind dogs, no old ladies on crutches devoured by cats.

Talking with a reporter between rehearsals, the tall, aristocratic-looking writer uses elocution that belies his Queens roots. As he chats, he appears as comfortable talking about his eccentrics as about his depictions of people like Grant or, for that matter, J.J. Hunsecker, the Walter Winchell-style gossip columnist that John Lithgow inhabits across town in the Broadway musical “Sweet Smell of Success,” which Guare adapted.

Guare is clearly fascinated by larger-than-life bad guys. His play recounts, for instance, how Grant aide Adam Badeau, for instance, sought the copyright to Grant’s memoirs, expressed eagerness to write them if given freer rein and even tried penning a few pages. “He was Grant’s trusted aide for 20 years off and on,” explains Guare, “but he was an authentic American monster who attached himself to the Grant family.”

Actually, Guare continues, “I love those grotesques, which J.J. Hunsecker most certainly is. Monsters are people who pursue power for their own ends. Hunsecker and Badeau live on information to use as ammunition.”

Guare’s adaptation of Ernest Lehman’s novella and the 1957 Lehman-Clifford Odets screenplay for “Sweet Smell” opened on Broadway recently to largely negative reviews. Last week, it received seven Tony nominations, including one for Guare. And it has had good box office receipts, leading Guare to comment that he’s gratified theatergoers “have not been distracted by the venom” of the reviews.

Guare tells vividly how, as a boy, he’d go with his father to the corner newsstand at night to see what Winchell had to say. At 14, he first went into Manhattan on his own and “the city was mine.”

Guare left New York for Georgetown University in Washington, then Yale University School of Drama in Connecticut, but he immediately headed back to New York after a stint in the Air Force in the early ‘60s. Lured by a poster he saw advertising Lanford Wilson’s play “The Madness of Lady Bright,” he stopped in the tiny Caffe Cino, often credited with launching the off-off-Broadway movement in the late ‘50s. He saw the production, then came back the next day with some of his own plays to show theatrical producer Joseph Cino (who Guare says worked as a steam presser in a laundry by day and produced plays by night).

“I had just gotten out of the Air Force, didn’t know what I was going to do and said I want to work here. Joe said, ‘Well, in this period, I’m only doing plays by Aquarians.’ So I showed him my driver’s license,” says Guare, who was born on Feb. 5, 1938. “And he said, ‘Good, I’ve been looking for you.’”

Guare grew up in Queens’ Jackson Heights, but spent every summer on Long Island’s East Atlantic Beach. There, at age 11, he wrote three plays that were staged in his friend Bobby Shlomm’s garage across the street. For his 12th birthday, fledgling playwright Guare received a Royal portable typewriter from his parents.

Theater was in his genes. His great-uncles toured in vaudeville, and Guare is the nephew of theatrical agent Billy Grady. Grady, who represented such performers as Al Jolson, W.C. Fields and Will Rogers, was also for many years head of casting at MGM. There, says Guare, “his big claim to fame was what he said about Fred Astaire’s screen test: ‘balding, can’t sing, can’t act, can dance a little.’”

The playwright had his own audition with Grady. “He’d gone on a nationwide hunt to find the ideal young American boy to play Huckleberry Finn,” Guare says, “and I was determined to play him. He came to our house because he was so fed up with kids, and I took it as an opportunity to audition for him. He stormed out of our house, thinking my mother had set me up to do it, and didn’t speak to me for 10 years.”

Guare re-created that experience in Act 2, Scene 1 of “The House of Blue Leaves,” his first big theatrical success. Former New York Public Theater associate producer Gersten recalls when the play first premiered at the small Truck and Warehouse Theater in the East Village in 1971, “We at the Public, who thought we had a lock on young playwrights, were suddenly jealous. He is a remarkable storyteller, a highly, highly gifted near-genius of a playwright.”

Gersten, whose Lincoln Center Theater has produced four Guare plays, including an acclaimed 1986 revival of “The House of Blue Leaves,” lauds Guare’s “smart voice, his manic yearnings, his keen eye”--all traits the playwright applies to chronicling worlds both public and private. For “The House of Blue Leaves,” for instance, he drew not only on Uncle Billy, but also on the pope’s visit to New York City in 1965.

“The playwright Sidney Kingsley has said, ‘Write what you know about but know what you write about,’” Guare says, repeating the phrase a few times. He turns it around on his tongue, staring out into space as if debating whether he agrees with that notion. “Yeah,” he decides, “you have to write what you know about. That’s all we have.”

Research helps, of course. Guare has turned to 19th century America before, for his ‘80s trilogy “Lydie Breeze,” “Gardenia” and “Women and Water,” and it is clearly a period that interests him.

“A Few Stout Individuals” came about rather casually. A few years ago, Guare was asked at a party if he’d ever read Grant’s best-selling, two-volume “Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.” Guare said, “Of course not,” and was immediately chastised.

Intrigued, however, he went out and bought a copy.

“I was bowled over,” the playwright says. “I was so bowled over that I wondered how this drunken general and semi-corrupt president came to write this extraordinary work. I went to his biography and the circumstances under which he wrote it were so amazing that I said, ‘My God, this is a play here.’

“It was tragic and weird and crazy. The people in his household were so remarkable that I had to find out more about the period. I did a ton of research, and it just kept leading me into what was happening in his life at the time. The financial scandal that Grant was in was like Enron today. Not only was he in disrepute, but it left him penniless.

“The more the material manifested itself, the more I was at home in it,” Guare continues. “It was about things I was interested in. How we make art. Who makes art. What are the reasons for memory. How we are all watching life through our own tiny little reality and miss the big picture.”

The Signature Theatre is celebrating its 10th anniversary by asking each of its former resident playwrights for a new play. That includes Guare, whose residency spanned the Signature’s 1998-99 season.

“These world premieres continue the exploration of their work,” says Signature’s founding artistic director, James Houghton. “This seemed a way to celebrate the theater they helped build by honoring them with more work.”

Another Signature playwright is Edward Albee, and Guare says he kept running into Albee, asking what page he was on of his play, then worrying as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright reported on his progress. “I owed them a play, and I didn’t know what it was going to be.”

That all changed, of course, last fall. “Every one of us had to process [Sept. 11] in our own way,” Houghton says. “John processed his feelings and his experience through writing. A common theme of his, and one very much in this play, is how we all have desperate needs to connect to one another.”

Guare was writing this play at a time when we were really thinking about our identity as Americans, adds the play’s director, Michael Greif. “He chose another moment in American history, the end of the 19th century, when Americans were striving to define themselves as a people.

“There’s a lot of resonance with his other work,” Greif continues. “There’s a similar affection for the characters and the way he roots for them in very difficult situations. He creates a very ferocious environment, an urgent and great need, which he expresses in a comedic and farcical way. And that comedy often dances side by side with a much more serious purpose.”

Guare, whose plays have nearly all been honored with one award or another, although not always critical or audience success, would certainly agree on his intention. Writing plays, he says, “is the way I get to tell the truth about what we see, to challenge an audience and take them to places they might not go, to put things together in a way they haven’t been put together before.”

Having recently written two film scripts, the screenwriter of Louis Malle’s 1980 movie “Atlantic City” is now “sort of” working on a new play. “I had 12 productions in the last four years--including revivals and two versions of one play--and I am sort of taking a breath for the summer. But I love the theater, and writing is the way I get to work in the theater.

“Somebody asked John Gielgud how he picks a part and he said he never picks a part. He said he picks the world of the play, because you have to live there. That’s what playwrights do: We make attempts at building worlds.”

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“A Few Stout Individuals,” Signature Theatre Company, Peter Norton Space, 555 W. 42nd St., New York, through June 2. $50. Ticket information: (212) 244-PLAY.

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Barbara Isenberg, a regular contributor to Calendar, is host of the Getty’s Art Matters series of public interviews.