Christopher Evan Welch, Reg Rogers, Johanna Day and Sharon Lawrence in "Poor Behavior"
It’s a recent Tuesday morning. 2005 Tony-winning director Doug Hughes (Doubt) is seated in a conference room at Center Theatre Group’s Annex, explaining his rehearsal schedule, a scant 20 days before the September 18 Mark Taper Forum premiere of Poor Behavior, scripted by Pulitzer-nominated Theresa Rebeck. “My cast of four and I are in the last few days in the rehearsal hall. We move onstage Friday evening and that’s a big change in the process.
Director Doug Hughes
“I think we are very eager to get onstage. It is a very active play. The behavior, the activity is really important. The more time we have in that room — the summer house kitchen of Peter (Christopher Evan Welsh) and Ella (Johanna Day) — the better off we will be.”
Hughes’ great anticipation for finally moving the play to its stage is not unlike a field general anticipating getting his troops to the actual field of battle. The play’s publicity material describes this weekend-in-the-country sojourn of Peter and Ella and their guests Ian (Reg Rogers) and Marian (Sharon Lawrence) as a supposed-to-be pleasant respite from everyday suburban life “that turns into a high stakes game of marital mixed doubles.” For Hughes and Rebeck, the action is as brutal as it is comedic.
“I have referred to this play as a ‘boulevard play’,” says Hughes. “To my mind, that is an old-fashioned term usually applied to comedies about marital matters. Married for a long time, these two couples get together and marital complications ensue. Jealousy and a sense of betrayal become factors. This play treats those subjects with a certain amount of savagery and a great deal of depth. I’d say it is a boulevard play with a big brain in its head.”
“I love him (Hughes),” chuckles Rebeck, who is speaking by phone from New York. “He speaks beautifully. I can’t promise that I will deliver as quotable lines as Doug.”
Rebeck affirms that she has recently contemplated the subject of married life a lot. “Longstanding marriages have certainly provided great food for drama for centuries. Time and commitment sometimes turn on you, and people who know each other very well have patterns of behavior that can divulge a cruelty that is particularly acute.
Reg Rogers and Sharon Lawrence
“I had the situation in my head of taking these people away from their comfort area, based on experiences I had and even some personal history. As I examined it, the location started to serve more clearly as a cauldron because they are stuck with each other out in the country. What I found interesting was how people being polite, while being impolite, becomes its own kind of trap. The idea of a weekend away from the city where everyone is going to have a lovely time is a cultural idea that misrepresents itself a lot of times. Without actually intending to go there, I kind of landed on the concept and then discovered the tricks inside it.”
Hughes is certainly enthusiastic about underscoring Rebeck’s tricks. “There is actually no mention at any point in the play of people’s professional lives,” he explains. “What they’ve got, over this weekend, is confrontation with their lives today. They’re middle-aged people without children. Are they happy? What steps might be taken to make them happier? What things have been buried and, for reasons of good social behavior, have not been mentioned or dealt with? What things might rise to the surface? This play is about all that.
“One of the things that Theresa has done beautifully is make very clear how the past informs the present. It is a ‘chickens come home to roost’ play, really. There is something, perhaps, that has been waiting to happen, ready to erupt and the characters probably have made best efforts to make sure that it doesn’t. Fortunately, for those of us watching, on this occasion it does erupt.”
That “eruption” leads Hughes to discuss what he calls “another great asset of the play, the idea that all of us know the seemingly tranquil surface of our lives can in a moment be disrupted and some waves can be made. We’re all rather delicate. We’re all filled with longings, desires we’re not sure it would be seemly to reveal. And when we do reveal them, there is often pain, humiliation, and, most important, change. The play directs the characters to a point of change.”
Playwright Theresa Rebeck
Hughes, who collaborated with Rebeck in the 2007 staging of Mauritius, produced on Broadway by Manhattan Theatre Club, has been involved with the development of Poor Behavior almost from its inception. “Actually we’ve been working on this play over three years and Theresa, my goodness, a fair amount longer.
“I have been working on it for around four years,” says Rebeck. “I drafted it and Doug was the first person I brought it to. We work together well. We enjoy each other. It seemed like it was his kind of material, psychological and funny.”
In the spring of 2010, there was a well-publicized reading of Poor Behavior in New York, featuring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver, that was rumored to be heading for a fall Broadway premiere, but Hughes shrugs that notion away. “We simply did a reading of a much earlier draft of the play. We have done other readings of the play. Nothing else was going on. There were no big plans at that time. After that, Theresa worked on other things and I worked on other things. We both feel very grateful we get to do it out here.”
As Rebeck recalls it, “The play that was read by Kevin and Sigourney in the spring of 2010 is the same play we are doing now. I’ve done a little more work on it since then, but it is essentially the same play.”
When Hughes mentions he and Rebeck, separately, have been working on other projects, he is making an understatement. ”I have been working almost perpetually for about four years,” he admits. “I have a tendency to be a workaholic.”
Reg Rogers
Hughes launched his career as a director as soon as he graduated in 1978 from Harvard, where he studied biology. Hughes and some fellow college mates produced and he staged a comedy revue that was presented at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. “I had decided after college that I would like to make a stab at directing professionally. I felt I could follow the old fashioned path of apprenticeship and a kind of self-education doing my own work. At the same time I was assisting directors, offering myself as an apprentice. I served as associate director of Seattle Rep, working for Dan Sullivan for 10 years. I loved the phenomenon of assisting because you’re privy to everything with a much lower level of responsibility. That’s very freeing to the mind and a wonderful way to learn a thing or two.
“I now consider myself a director-for-hire. I am in a position to make a living and work fairly constantly in commercial theater as well as institutional theater. I really felt I have been driven. In the last 14 months, I’ve done six productions.”
Hughes’ recent stagings include Farragut North which was produced at the Geffen Playhouse in 2009, and has been adapted into the feature film, The Ides of March, starring Ryan Gosling and George Clooney, scheduled to open in a limited release on Oct. 7. Most recently, Hughes staged the world premiere of Maury Yeston’s musical Death Takes a Holiday, the Broadway revival of Born Yesterday and the Manhattan Theatre Club production of The Whipping Man. He promises, “after Poor Behavior opens, I am going to ease up, probably go back to work in the spring. I turned down a couple of things and I’m actually going to sit down and shut up for awhile.”
Reg Rogers and Johanna Day
Rebeck has been even busier. Originally from Cincinnati, holding an MFA and a PhD from Brandeis University, she has established a prolific career as a playwright, television writer, novelist, feature writer and more. In fact, the first two weeks of Poor Behavior rehearsals were held in New York — because while she was producing and writing a television program, she also wanted to be close at hand to the rehearsal process of the play.
“I also have a five-character play called Seminar that is going to Broadway,” she adds. “It begins rehearsals on September 25. We’re actually finalizing the cast right now. Alan Rickman is set to star in it. We start previews at the end of October and we open on November 20. This past year, I was commissioned to write a really large play for a LORT company that is associated with the University of Delaware. They told me I could write something for up to 20 actors. So I wrote a play with around 40 characters. There is a lot of doubling in it. ”
Hughes reports that “as rehearsals have moved along, Theresa has done some re-writing and some cuts in the script. She hasn’t turned the world of the play upside down, but she has honed and perfected sections of it. She is a very practical woman of the theater as well as being an inspired writer. There are things she will listen to and decide are superfluous. She’s really the first to suggest some things should be cut.”
Johanna Day, Reg Rogers and Christopher Evan Welch
“The play has evolved with this cast,” says Rebeck. “When things go up on their feet, and it starts living inside actors, you start seeing and hearing things in a different way. Generally what I’ve been involved in is cutting. There are certain things in the story I’ve over-articulated a little bit too much. So, once I heard the characters living it, I realized, ‘You know what, you don’t need to say that again. Everybody heard you the first time.’ So it has been a lot of making it leaner and meaner.
“Of course, there are always surprises when you first put a play in front of an audience. I have to say, not as many as there were at the beginning of my career. But there are still always surprises, some wonderful, some not so wonderful. Sometimes, I have felt there is something that is so funny and they never laugh. Then there are these delightful moments you don’t expect the audience to get it in the way they get it. It is most obvious with comedy, where the laughs come and where they don’t come. Sometimes you spend a little bit of time setting them up differently. I’ll hear, ‘Oh, that’s where the laugh is, but the line goes on for another four words.’ Then you have to figure out how to move those four words or just get rid of them altogether. There is always a little bit of tinkering around that stuff. But that’s what previews are for.”
Poor Behavior, presented by Center Theatre Group. Opens Sept. 18. Tues.-Fri., 8 pm; Sat. 2:30 and 8 pm; Sun. 1:30 and 6:30 pm. Tickets: $20-$65. Through Oct. 16. Mark Taper Forum , 135 N. Grand Ave., LA. Visit centertheatregroup.org, the CTG box office located at the Ahmanson Theatre, or call 213-628-2772.
***All Poor Behavior Production Photos by Craig Schwartz
***Photos of Doug Hughes and Theresa Rebeck by Joan Marcus
