Could I Have This Dance? presented by Theatre 40, continues playing Wed.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through Feb. 28. Tickets: $23-$25. Reuben Cordova Theatre, Beverly Hills High School campus, 241 Moreno Dr., Beverly Hills; 310.364.0535 or theatre40.org.
To say Doug Haverty enjoys a full dance card might be metaphorically tripping the light fantastic even as it brushes against reality in a literal sense. One has to work around his busy schedule to talk with him about the latest production of his play Could I Have This Dance? now running at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40.
Doug Haverty
First he teaches. “I started in the fall of ’98 at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising where I teach two graphic design classes once a week to a maximum of 16 students for three hours each session.” In addition to designing over 300 CD packages and penning liner notes for albums, he also picks up freelance assignments. “Jim Beloff, a dear friend of mine who is into all things ukulele, approached me about a book he wanted to do on the subject. I said okay. He brought me four tubs of stuff: sheet music, ukulele toys, pictures.” Haverty helped Beloff turn all that raw material into the coffee-table tome Ukulele, A Visual History for Backbeat books.
Most significantly to the theatrical community Haverty, a native Californian, wins awards and earns plaudits for writing plays. “I started writing melodramas and one-acts in high school. In college I wrote more one-acts but I wanted to tackle a full length. I knew the only way I’d do it was to enroll in a class where there’d be that pressure to keep moving ahead on it. The play I wrote called Hello, This Is the Bottom Drawer came out of my personal experiences in college.”
It later became his first professional production after graduation. “It started at the Fountain Theatre and then moved to the Callboard.” That’s when he captured his first laudable review as well when the Herald Examiner called him “the Frank Capra of the ‘Me’ generation.”
He followed up with In My Mind’s Eye for Group Repertory Theatre, The Legend of the Crystal Waters for Access Theatre of Santa Barbara and Death Defying Acts for The Long Island Stage. In 1989 he won the International Margo Jones Playwriting Competition for Aftershocks, another play drawn from his well of personal experience.
“There was an instance in my family where this person we didn’t know but who had been put up for adoption by a family member years earlier sought us out. I used that for this play as a girl searches for her birth mom and re-opens 18-year-old scars in the process.”
Next was another hit for Group Rep entitled Roleplay co-written by Adryan Russ which enjoyed a phenomenal success. It ran for five months at Group Rep, the longest run in that company’s then 16-year history. It later moved to off-Broadway under the new title Inside Out and still later transferred to The English Theatre Group of Zug in Zurich, Switzerland.
Theatre 40 Cast Members Shelby Kochee, Diana Angelina, David Hunt Stafford and Amy Chaffee
The Colony Theatre welcomed Haverty’s Could I Have This Dance? to its boards in 1991. This one didn’t spring from his own background but from a TV news story. “I saw a segment on 60 Minutes about a mother and her two daughters dealing with Huntington’s disease and the test they could take to determine if it was likely to strike. The daughters split on the decision. One daughter took the test. The other didn’t. I thought there’s a play here.”
Again the critics agreed in a big way. That production captured a total of 10 Drama-Logue Awards and went on to be declared one of the best plays of 1991 by the American Theatre Critics Association. “I was thrilled. Even more than thrilled. I was astounded. The LADCC nominated the play as they had seen that production. All the major critics across the country, however, had not seen it. They had to judge it solely from reading the text and they were reading many, many plays from different theatres in different cities. They chose mine just from the script alone. That was pretty astounding to me. Then the LADCC took me to lunch. I thought, ‘I’m getting money from critics!‘ That was amazing too. Of course it never makes up for the bad reviews you get but it’s still a glorious feeling.”
Not that Haverty has had a lot of experience in dealing with negative nods from the news media. He asks, “How does a creative artist begin to measure success? Is it great reviews? Lots of money? Shiny awards? Or is it something too intangible to put into words or recognize with rewards? I mean I’ve had reviewers react very favorably to something of mine while another reviewer saw the exact same production and didn’t like it at all. I don’t know what makes people respond to something the way they respond to it. I always think of Mortimer in Arsenic and Old Lace who says, ‘Have you got some paper? I can save time if I write my review on the way to the theatre.’ Maybe that’s how it is in real situations too.”
He’s currently reuniting with Adryan Russ on a new musical they call Ghost inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost. “Adryan and I get along famously. After we had that record-breaking run at Group Rep with Roleplay, it moved on to the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York.” They’re hoping-or perhaps planning is the better word-to catch another flash of lightning with this new spectacular specter. “We always create a good blend of script and song because I write the play first. Then we sit down together and go through it scene by scene to decide what needs to be musicalized. That way all the songs arise naturally to advance the story rather than being superimposed on top of it. We’re to the point now where we’re ready to start workshopping it. We have a website at playworksmusic.com to attract grants or any investors or benefactors or arts patrons who might want to get involved.”
Surprisingly for one who teaches graphic design and practices it in his work for CDs and album covers, Haverty expresses no desire to go into theatrical set design. “Oh no, I took one set design class in college and that was enough. It’s not that I had a bad experience with it but I just developed too much respect for it as an art form. It’s one thing to design an album cover, because you can dictate the color and where it folds or bends and where it’s stapled, but a stage set has to not only look good but be functional as architecture too. I designed a CD two years ago for Tony Walton and I was in awe just talking to him. Here was a man who’s won five or six Tony Awards for set design. I thought, ‘I can never do what you do.’”
But then Walton along with most others couldn’t do what Haverty does. “I find great joy in writing plays. It’s a lonely business in many ways. You sit in a room by yourself and write. You sit some more all alone for the rewrites. That’s why the rehearsal process liberates me in another whole direction.”
Is he one of those hands-on writers who is always present? “If it’s a first production of one of my plays locally, then I insist on it because there might be questions I can answer or misconceptions I can clear up. Otherwise I don’t have to be. If the producer and director are amenable, I enjoy being a part of that process. The other night, for example, after rehearsal I went with the director and cast to Jerry’s Deli, and we spent two hours going over notes. I didn’t need to be there but I enjoyed it, and I managed to answer a question or two.
“I’m also enjoying my relationship with our director (Alex Craig Mann). It’s the first time I’ve worked with Alex. He and the cast are doing a great job. I’m especially thrilled that David Hunt Stafford is in the cast because he helped turn my career in a different direction many years ago. I had written a play called Tenants Anyone that went up at the Cast Theatre. It was a comedy – or at least I thought it was a comedy – but it got no laughs. I said that’s it. From now on I’m writing only dramas because I’m obviously no good at comedies. Then a few months later I had a staged reading of my drama In My Mind’s Eye and David read the play with such subtle intonations that it was full of laughs. I learned from that night really good actors can fill in the cracks of what you’ve written. They can fool you into thinking you’ve written a good play when you haven’t, or they can take a so-so play and make it better. The trick is to always get those outstanding actors who can do that. If you can’t, then you’d better have a good piece on paper.”
The production history of Could I Have This Dance? indicates he’s achieved that goal and he says, “I’m looking forward to seeing how it resonates with audiences again. I haven’t seen it in awhile. It’s perfectly cast so I think it’ll hold up.”
Doug Haverty-dancing his way into LA theatrical greatness.
Article by Gary Ballard
Feature image of David Hunt Stafford, Johnny J and Nicole Nelson and story image by Ed Krieger
