WHAT HAPPENED WAS...                                     (click here for THE WIFE)

I decided to start with a play. I set the date of June 12, 1992 as the opening of the play in my theater (Paradise Theater) in New York. Between September and March I wrote nearly a half dozen bad plays. I was convinced at that point that I'd never write a decent script so I decided I would sit on stage in June and explain to the audience ‘how I couldn't write a play'.

Having given up, I went to dinner at a friend's house. During the meal I asked my friend how her brother was (whom I'd never met) and she said, "Oh, he's such a jerk. This woman he works with asked him over for dinner. Well, he went and halfway through the meal he realized sensed romantic overtones and asked, ‘Is this a date?'. When the woman told him that she really liked him, he said that he wouldn't have come to dinner if he had considered this a date. The woman blew and threw him out." I got up from the table and left my friend's house and rushed home and started writing. Ten days later I had written WHAT HAPPENED WAS... Three weeks later I went into rehearsal and the play opened, as scheduled, on June 12, 1992.

THE WIFE                                                (click here for WHAT HAPPENED WAS...)

I began the script in June - I would write in the morning then edit (What Happened Was...) the rest of the day. By July I had the first draft of WIFEY completed.  The story came very quickly as the plot was simple and I was in great turmoil about this question of being married.  And I was writing with specific actors in mind (for 3 of the 4 characters) and one of those actors was my own wife.  At first it seemed like it would be a good idea to have me and my wife (Karen Young) play a married couple in the story but the prospect of doing that seemed to inhibit me - so I switched the couples, putting Karen with Wally Shawn which made me laugh (always a good sign).  Things went much faster after having done that.  The distance in this case was freeing.  I saw that if Karen and I were to play husband and wife in the show it might produce the same inhibition.   I didn't think we were ready to play parts on stage that in life we were still struggling with.

Originally, Rita and Jack were not Cosmo's therapists but that emerged in the rewriting during rehearsal.  We were all just friends - Cosmo and I worked together and Jack and Rita had never met Arlie.  When we rehearsed it this way, the emotional drive in the story seems lacking.  The actors wanted more pressing issues to feel comfortable saying such intimate things about themselves.  I was ambivalent about changing the script to make it more 'dramatic' (and still am having done it) but when I'm in rehearsal, I'm the director and he rules the writer.  It is a tricky situation when you both write and direct - there are great advantages (many) and disadvantages (a few).  

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