On a gorgeous winter day in California, flames from a gas fireplace provide warmth and a relaxing ambience inside the renovated Craftsman-style bungalow of playwright/actor Nick Salamone, in the neighborhood of the Melrose Hill Historic Preservation Overlay Zone. The charming and quick-witted Salamone shares the beautifully designed home with his partner of 13 years, Clay Storseth, an actor also known for his design work as The Christmas Decorator.
Although great comfort is found in this inviting 1913 structure, “comfort” is not an apt description of Salamone’s creative nature. He searches for greater meaning and truth.
IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS “LIFE”… AND DEATH
Nick Salamone
Salamone’s The Sonneteer marks his tenth produced play since he first put pen to paper in 1984. Salamone’s creative journey began unknowingly when he saved a copy of LIFE magazine from 1981.
A gripping article – centering on a woman seriously debilitated by multiple sclerosis — had caught the self-described hoarder’s attention. Says Salamone, “This disease ended this woman’s marriage. As the articles in LIFE are mostly pictures with some narrative, it was about her boyfriend who became her husband who became her ex-husband.” While Salamone didn’t know anyone who had MS at the time, his inner voice told him that one day the magazine might be useful.
In 1984, Salamone was sent a life-changing curve as his mother was diagnosed with cancer. As a working actor in New York, his career trajectory came to an immediate halt. His focus shifted to his family.
“To help my sister care for my mother, I would commute from New York to Philadelphia and back every weekend,” he says. This important familial sacrifice meant Salamone couldn’t accept theater work. In order to keep creatively active, he started writing on the train. “While I had graduated from college with two majors – English (early American literature) and Drama (acting and directing), I had never received any formal training as a playwright. I was an actor and a reader of plays and literature (narrative and fiction).”
Over a period of 18 months, Salamone wrote his first play, Another House on Mercy Street, based on the resonating LIFE magazine article he had saved three years earlier. Seven years later, the play was produced at the Off Ramp Theatre in Los Angeles. It was optioned and made into an award-winning independent film, Mercy Street.
A CHANGE OF SCENERY AND LIFE DIRECTION
A gradual tailspin began for Salamone after his mother’s death in 1985, and a new horror soon came to the forefront – the AIDS epidemic. He grew seriously depressed. “Once that started, it subsumed me,” he says. “I needed a change and I didn’t know what else to do.”
A change of scenery to Los Angeles proved advantageous. “I consider where I grew up was New York but I had to leave. I took a sublet for a couple of months and began to feel more like I wasn’t in a bell jar.” Staying on a friend’s sofa for a year and embracing the California lifestyle, Salamone’s vibrant spirit re-emerged. But the AIDS epidemic affected Salamone as much as his mother’s death, as his lover died from this ravaging disease.
“AIDS was raging and I really couldn’t think of anything else, couldn’t write about anything else, so my next batch of plays came out of the epidemic, though not necessarily about AIDS.” All Souls’ Day, produced at the Heliotrope Theatre in 1991, led the charge.
In the early 1990s, Salamone found his way into the restaurant business as a waiter. Another broad-stroke life-shift occurred through a series of circumstances in which Salamone became the eventual owner of the popular Hollywood eatery, Off Vine. As he readily admits, “Owning Off Vine was onerous. While I was proud of the restaurant, and still am, I can’t help wondering what my artistic life would’ve been like if I hadn’t taken that 16-year detour.” Yet that detour didn’t completely hinder his acting and writing. In 2000, he was honored with a Maddy Award for excellence in playwriting.
WRITING AND COLLABORATION – FORMULA FOR SUCCESS
The Sonneteer Lucius Livvy
Not one to be deterred by a challenge, Salamone jumped head-first into the musical arena. First produced in 1998 by Playwrights’ Arena, Moscow struck a chord in the theater community, recognized for its absurdist, existential tone – book and lyrics by Salamone, composed by Maury R. McIntyre.
While many playwrights call it a day when a play has been produced, Salamone continued to tweak and pare down the musical, even though he had already been awarded by Backstage West for his work. Three years later, Moscow received a Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
“This musical was in 36 different snippets and was the most non-sequential thing I had ever written,” Salamone says. “It took years of development to finally get where people could comprehend it.”
Jon Lawrence Rivera, founding artistic director of Playwrights’ Arena, and Salamone developed a symbiotic relationship. The Sonneteer marks the fifth collaboration between the playwright and director.
Salamone speaks highly of Rivera, who is also one of his closest friends. “Jon is very astute, very direct; brutal about cuts, economy and streamlining. He keeps me honest about my writing and has a great gift for narrative strength – telling the story cleanly and in as simple a way possible. We both like things surprising, challenging, not quite so formal. There’s no pabulum, nothing cloying or programmatic or run-of-the-mill about Jon’s work. Working with him is always adventurous.”
In 2008, Salamone had two premieres in Los Angeles – the musical Gulls at Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena and Sea Change at the LA Gay & Lesbian Center in Hollywood. Salamone was on a high after receiving numerous honors for these works which included Backstage West Garland Awards, LA Weekly Awards, another Maddy Award as well as an Ovation nomination for Best Book and Lyrics. Rivera was recognized as well by the LA Weekly as Best Director for Sea Change. Salamone is quick to add, “Don’t forget McIntyre, who is a genius and composed the score for Gulls.” Likewise McIntyre walked away with numerous award recognitions.
SONNETS BEYOND THE PAGE
Ed Martin and Ray Oriel
Now, The Sonneteer comes to life onstage. Salamone describes how the play rose from familial roots.
“I’ve been working on The Sonneteer for years and years. I’ve never written about my family before as composite characters, and this isn’t my family per se. It’s probably my family about as much as Tom and Laura were Tennessee Williams’ in The Glass Menagerie.
“My mother died 25 years ago and a large part of the play is about a son (a young professor) trying to discover who his mother really was.” The discovery is found through a lockbox full of sonnets she wrote, revealing a new side to old perceptions. “The sonnets tell a story of how his father died before he was born, the real details how it happened, how it affected the whole family and ultimately affected the relationship with his mother.”
Asked how closely the father’s death hits home, as well as the relationship between mother and son, Salamone replies, “My biological father died before I was born. My mother and I were all each other had after he died, when she was pregnant with me. It was a very close, very complicated relationship. This story is about the death of someone like my father. I only knew what I read in a simple 1950s obituary, but then after my mother’s death, my aunt told me in a sentence or two how a cousin was actually involved in my dad’s demise.”
Taking true life to form, Salamone constructed the play from that sentence and his dad’s obituary.
“Art can be tremendously healing,” says Salamone. “The son discovers who his mother was through her works of art, a woman who wrote herself out of a post-partum depression, to keep a hold on whom she is and what she’s feeling. The mother heals the best way possible by writing the sonnets; by the son reading them, she communicates to him and to the world in a way her life didn’t.
“He would’ve never known his mother without the art. Art is two-fold – what it does for the artist and what it does for the recipient.” Through the sonnets, the son and mother experience growth – as art has done for Salamone.
ON THE HORIZON
Cynthia Gravinese, Victoria Hoffman and Sandra Purpuro
What’s next for Salamone after The Sonneteer opens? “I split six-month periods of time between LA and New York. After 9-11, I felt the pull of the other coast and I wanted to have roots there again. After I sold Off Vine, it enabled Clay and me to put a foothold in New York.” For the past several years, Salamone and Storseth have performed Shakespeare at the NY Classical Theatre, and live at a modest place on 181st Street.
In the coming months, Salamone’s play Billy Boy will receive a reading at the Lark Play Development Center in New York. Salamone chuckles about how he wrote the piece. “Last year, I was doing three Shakespeare plays, performing way downtown with big commutes on the subway of 40 minutes each way. While I usually write on the computer, I reverted back to my old legal pad days.”
Making the most of his time with numerous rehearsals and performances, Salamone wrote on the subway. “You bounce around on the subway; it’s not private, you free-associate because that’s what a subway ride is.” And from the subway, Billy Boy was born.
As for the future of the small-cast Billy Boy beyond the reading in New York, Salamone expresses a desire to return to Scotland. “Sea Change and Gulls have been more large-scale – not the festival fare. The shows I’ve brought there have been with four characters, tops.” What is the draw of Edinburgh? “It’s like a distillation of a season in New York and the whole town is about theater. It’s a tradition but it’s also inseparably woven into the fabric of their society. That’s like coming home!”
LAST BUT NOT LEAST…
“My plays are about the human condition,” says Salamone, “and about what it’s like to be alive. Shakespeare says it best when you hold the mirror to life, but that mirror is really a prism, and what you’re looking for through the prism is meaning and reasons to live. I ask myself why do we move forward; what’s the purpose? That’s why I write, why I act. I have to do that every day. Who we are is a question that never gets settled. Writing… it’s just something I have to do.”
The Sonneteer, presented by The LA Gay & Lesbian Center’s Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center, opens Feb. 18; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 7 pm; through March 13. Dark Sun., Feb. 27. Tickets: $20. The Davidson/Valentini Theatre, 1125 N. McCadden Place, Los Angeles; 323.860.7300 or lagaycenter.org/boxoffice.
