Keith Huff

The famed bluebird of happiness traces its more modern roots to the 1697 publication of L’Oiseau Bleu by Madame d’Aulnoy, who adapted the premise from ancient legends. The Road Theatre Company in NoHo now invites its audience to get Pursued by Happiness, the title of its next production, opening March 25 at the Lankershim Arts Center.

Playwright Keith Huff says it’s part of a long succession of works for the stage, a calling for which he had not originally planned. He relates, “I was born in Chicago but moved as a child with my family to Wisconsin. When I came back to the city to study English and pre-law at the University of Chicago, I ushered at a production of [Lanford Wilson’s] Balm in Gilead directed by John Malkovich at Steppenwolf. I found it emotionally powerful. I ushered a Saturday matinee and was so moved I stayed for the second performance that night. It had the same power for me the second time. I knew right then I wanted to write for the theater.

“The funny thing is I was not that impressed with the actual play itself so much as the human connection, a spiritual connection almost, from the live theater experience. It’s a cliché to even say it, but it’s a connection you do not get from film. It’s an important connection because it’s that link to what makes us human that has sustained theater for thousands of years, even when financially it didn’t always make sense to keep doing it.”

To help realize his dream, Huff joined Chicago Dramatists, a group dedicated to the development and advancement of playwrights and new plays. “I became one of many resident playwrights who enjoyed the feedback from readings of our work in our 75-seat theater,” he says. “My first efforts were awful but I was not daunted. I was too stubborn to quit, or maybe I was too stupid.”

CHICAGO COP TRILOGY

He obliged himself to keep learning his craft by earning an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Playwrights Workshop. He also kept his eye on those minutiae of everyday occurrences so often taken for granted — but which he found contributed to his art. He credits his marriage for inspiring him to try his hand at a genre that’s frequently utilized in novels, plays, films and TV productions, with the objective of finding an original angle.

Mark St. Amant and Avery Clyde

He explains, “I married Georgette Hieber, whose father was a Chicago cop his whole life. My brother-in-law also became a detective. They told me many stories of the ethical quandaries they face nearly every day on their job. This led to what I call my Chicago cop trilogy: The Detective’s Wife, Tell Us of the Night and A Steady Rain.

“The last one was my formal experiment with the buddy cop category, which has been done so many times the very idea is an automatic cliché, but I set out to tell it the way I wanted to tell it. As I searched for a way to do it, I took stock of the realism of my situation. Since I couldn’t afford a huge budget with multiple sets or a large cast, I thought what advantage does a small theater have? Intimacy. I could capitalize on that, although ‘capitalize’ is probably a bad choice of words in this case. But the primacy of storytelling could engage people in the absence of budgets or special effects.”

STEADY THE COURSE

Huff penned a two-hander about officers Joey and Denny in a sort of good cop/bad cop discourse, in which the audience begins to wonder which cop is virtuous and which villainous. Every theater in town rejected the play. At first. Enough people kept reading it, recommending it and running it past others until finally Chicago Dramatists staged it. Then the Royal George Studio Theatre picked it up for an extended run; subsequently, Broadway called with a production opening at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in 2009, with Daniel Craig in his Broadway debut as Joey and Hugh Jackman as Denny. It was a hit, with Time Magazine’s Richard Zoglin ranking it number two on his Top 10 Plays of the year.

Another Chicago playwright, Tracy Letts, was staging his Superior Donuts at the nearby Music Box Theatre. He reported that his second act was punctuated by the noise of squealing fans seeking autographs from the stars of Steady Rain, where the curtain was brought down earlier. “The noise was a real problem for our play,” the Chicago Tribune quoted Letts, “but I’m so happy for Keith.”

Its success at the Schoenfeld put Huff on the map. He continues, “I’d been flying under the radar for 25 years with local Chicago productions but not much else outside of there. [This production] enabled me to finally leave my job as a medical editor for over 20 years.”

It accomplished much more than allowing him to put his stints at Children’s Memorial Hospital and the archive journals of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons behind him. It introduced him to the world—literally and literarily. A Steady Rain is currently in productions or in various pre-production plans in Barcelona, Budapest, Paris, Mexico, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Greece, Madrid, Czechoslovakia and Germany, as well as being adapted into a screenplay by Huff.

He admits, “I haven’t seen one of those [foreign] productions yet. I hope to this summer. Maybe the Buenos Aires and a couple of the European ones. The Paris production, scheduled to close in mid-April, has been extended to the end of June so that’s a possibility.”

He answers the query of whether he’s fluent in those other languages with a “no, but I learned something a few years ago, when Robert Lepage used to come through Chicago with his shows which were about 80 percent French and Chinese. I still enjoyed them. They were very visual, almost like staged cinema with a multi-generational story I could follow. It taught me how easy good drama can transcend language barriers. The Madhouse Theatre in Budapest does their shows in rep, I understand, in both English and Hungarian so it would be fun to experience that.”

HEARING VOICES

Just as he did with his new perspective on the old cop/buddy bromance narrative, Huff strives to unearth fresh ways into established storytelling techniques. He explains, “It’s valuable to me to take an already recognized template and find something new within that framework. It’s me trying to help the audience into the richest, most entertaining experience I can provide.

Mark St. Amant, Elizabeth Herron, Tom Knickerbocker, and Avery Clyde

“My greatest leg up is to get them fairly engaged. It’s comparable to the process of reading a good book where all those pages of words are just verbal cues for readers to create something in their own minds. I want to get my audience away from that kind of passive experience where they might say—sometimes quite justifiably—‘Well that was a waste of time. That’s two hours I’ll never get back.’ If I can get them engaged, I think I’ve solved that problem.”

How does he do that? “I always start with characters. I hear their voices clearly. I let them go and get out of their way. I never outline. I don’t know exactly where the plot is taking me. If I’m engaged in the journey, hopefully the audience will be too. Of course it makes for a very messy first draft. But I try to take it 50 percent of the way and then hand it over to the director, actors and designers to finish the journey for me. I just try to make sure my aural portion is clear enough [so] they know where to go.”

Huff began his relationship with the Road Theatre Company in 2009 with the West Coast premiere of his The Bird and Mr. Banks, starring the Road’s co-artistic director Sam Anderson in the lead and directed by Mark St. Amant. He approved the Road’s handling of the show, so he looks forward to its creative interpretation of Pursued by Happiness — another example of his face-lifting a venerable format with a variable formula. He tells how it came about. “It’s the familiar lovers-meet-the-parents story structure, but twisted a little in that the couple making the introductions are both in their 40s. Then as we meet their parents, we begin to understand why these two never married at an earlier age.

“I read eclectically so I take ideas from different sources. Peter Kramer wrote a book called Against Depression [2005] in which he became one of the leading advocates of Prozac as a treatment to combat depression. A few years later [2008] Eric G. Wilson wrote a counterpoint to that one called Against Happiness where he said essentially we’re born to die, so a certain amount of somber feelings are natural. Other hard-core data tells us that from the age of six on, we start losing brain cells, but neurons keep forming and reforming to replace those we lose. We can be depressed as all hell, but with the rewiring and repatterning going on in our brains, you can advance the argument that through our natural adaptability happiness is indeed pursuing us rather than the other way round.

“R. D. Laing back in the ’60s suggested a similar philosophy when he said schizophrenia is a life experience we shouldn’t be seeking a cure for, because it’s transactional. It’s a way of communicating that our mind and body are going through something. When we interfere with this natural occurrence through medication, we disable our system’s natural healing process, sometimes forever. Or at least so he believed.”

Huff gives a quick glimpse of how his way of angling for an uncommon aspect on a subject informs his writing. Discussing the unconditional horrors of lobotomies, he plays devil’s advocate when he poses the question, “Who is the lobotomy for? The patient or the caretaker? True, a lobotomy seldom if ever corrects the ailment it’s intended to correct, and the patient almost never resumes what we’d consider a normal life. On the other hand the caretaker benefits greatly from fewer seizures or incidents by the patient and is able to provide a higher, more consistent level of fostering without the stress of those unplanned episodes.”

From such unconventional ideological extrapolations, Huff’s plays emerge. Then he hands them to other talented individuals to breathe in the final spark of life. Currently he has a robin to help his Happiness take wing. He actually has two Robins in his life, his daughter and his director.

Of the first he says, “My daughter Robin is 10, so a lot of my plays are a bit too R-rated for her just yet. But I’m pleasantly surprised at her knack for storytelling. She can take an idea and just begin going places with it off the top of her head. I’ll look at Georgette and say, ‘I wonder if she’s got the writing bug.’ If she does, I’ll be delighted.”

DIRECTOR’S PASSION

Robin Larsen

He seems pleased as well with the newest Robin in his life, Robin Larsen, who is directing Pursued by Happiness at the Road. Of her he says, “We talk on the phone and e-mail often about the overall tone of the play. I understand she’s somewhat picky about what she chooses to direct. She wants to experience some sort of passionate involvement with the material, which of course is what every playwright always hopes to find in his directors.”

Larsen responds to Huff’s enthusiasm: “It’s always nice to hear someone speak well of my contributions. Yes, I do appreciate good material. I love a good story and am very detail- oriented. I like material which feels like real life to me. Paychecks are not to be discarded—in fact they’re essential—and I don’t mean to minimize their importance at all or to suggest I’d turn down any job, but when you can add a sense of passion onto a project on top of the paycheck, that’s the best of all worlds. I certainly feel that way about Keith’s play.”

Larsen hit the ground running after finishing an acting curriculum at SMU by enrolling in graduate studies in film at UCLA. There she became a quadruple hyphenate as director, writer, actor and producer, as her first feature Sombra won the Student Academy Award and her second, Out of Habit, won the Directors Guild of America Student Film Award. She followed those up after graduation by helming plays. Tryst at the Black Dahlia Theatre extended four times past its original scheduled run and won her a Backstage Garland Award. Her West Coast premiere of Chicago playwright Joel Drake Johnson’s Four Places for Rogue Machine Theatre received an Ovation Award this year in the category for best production of a play at an intimate theater (tying with The Ballad of Emmett Till) as well as a production award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle.

When quizzed about her preference for film or stage, she replies, “I’ve always loved theater, but honestly I don’t see why it’s necessary to choose one over the other. I love the rehearsal process of theater. I love the budgets of film. Being able to tweak something beyond its initial concept is so exciting for me. With stage you get the luxury of rehearsal [to do the tweaking]. With film you have the luxury of retakes.”

The passion she expresses for material doesn’t preclude the possibility of new passions in the future. She gives an example, “I’m drawn to the work of Arthur Miller. I think he tells amazing stories. So far the plays of Chekhov don’t speak to me, but I look forward to a time when they do.”

HEALTHY ALTERNATIVE

Larsen also embraces the relatively recent practice of populating stage plays with smaller cast sizes. She approaches that reality with a healthy alternative to the usual lamentation about a sluggish economy forcing drastic cuts to productions.  “The fewer characters you have on stage the better you get to know them,” she says. “I personally want to get to know them and I want the audience to as well. I thrive on working with people in collaboration to tell the story in the best way possible. I want to establish a close relationship with my cast and production crew, which then leads to an intimate relationship with our audience.

“The first step to all this are the words on the page. Keith has more than fulfilled his part of the bargain with good writing. I love good parts for actors. It speaks to me whenever I read a play with such depth and dimension as Keith has written. The tone of the piece particularly struck me because it’s comical but not pure comedy. Not dark comedy either exactly. It’s not easily classified. It’s a love story but not a typical one. We go on a different journey, meet two distinct sets of parents and make new discoveries in the process.

Mark St. Amant and Avery Clyde

“My job is to talk it out, talk it through with the actors when they come to me with a problem they haven’t quite figured out yet. Sometimes I’ll have an answer for them right away. Sometimes I’ll need to let it percolate awhile until the answer is revealed to me. Directing is similar to the writing process. I’m sure Keith would probably agree that often a first draft is not very good. The second draft gets a little better and the third better still until finally you’ve got a story ready to go. It’s the same with me. We do something today in rehearsal and I ask myself: what did I discover? What do I need to change moving forward tomorrow? In this way we collaboratively keep reaching for the ultimate story to transfix our audience.”

This cooperation at the the Road is not the end of the trail for either Huff or Larsen. Huff’s plans include an original screenplay entitled Kill Switch, a cable series with Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks for AMC called Why We Fight and a development deal for HBO on a project called The Brothers Buczakowski. And he just may dabble again in another art form.

He recalls, “Right after [my daughter] Robin was born, I wanted to stay home with her instead of spending so much time at the theater. So I spent five years writing three novels. In fact The Bird and Mr. Banks was a 650-page novel before I adapted it into a 65-page play.

“I think different writers have different strengths. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote some plays but they haven’t been translated or found their way to the U S. I think James Joyce wrote a couple of plays but who has heard of them? I love Jonathan Franzen’s work but I couldn’t do what he does.

“I’m not a musician. I’ve never trained to play any kind of instrument but I think in sounds rather than visually, which is why playwriting seems to come more naturally to me. I guess we gravitate toward what our natural strengths are. Maybe if we worked more on our weaknesses, we’d develop greater strength in other areas. I don’t know.”

Larsen meanwhile engages in private coaching with actors currently in series TV and says, “This is another of my passions, helping actors unlock secrets to characterizations. I haven’t advertised. They sought me out. For this reason I don’t feel comfortable revealing who they are. But I’m also working with executive producer Joe Russo on a feature film project called Dying for Dummies.

“Right now, however, it’s all Keith’s play. I must say it’s been a great, positive experience working with the staff at the Road. They’re as lovely as they are talented with a wonderful trickle down from the top with Sam [Anderson] and Taylor [Gilbert, founder and co-artistic director] who has become one of my new favorite people.”

Both Robin Larsen and Keith Huff keep harvesting success from a crop rotation cutting across different fields of the entertainment stratum. If they persist in perfecting their performing parameters, the happiness pursuing them most probably will prevail.

Production Photos by Deverill Weekes

Pursued by Happiness, presented by the Road Theatre Company, opens March 25; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through May 14. Tickets: $25. Lankershim Arts Center, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood; 877.369.9112 or roadtheatre.org.