Interview: Pat Hazell of THE WONDER BREAD YEARS at The McDavid Studio At Bass Performance Hall

This week, BroadwayWorld guest writer Sarah Comley-Caldwell had the privilege of chatting with the playwright and star of THE WONDER BREAD YEARS, Pat Hazell. With his background as a Seinfeld and sitcom writer, commercial director and actor, Hazell brings wit, warmth and nostalgia to his one man show-a self described hybrid of theatre, stand up comedy and communal laughter.

Our conversation ran the gamut in a fascinating way -from the origins and inspiration that led to the creation of THE WONDER BREAD YEARS, to Hazell's experiences writing with Jerry Seinfeld.

PH: I've been doing [this show] for almost 20 years, and its updated all the time. It is a return for me to this particular venue, I was there a couple of years ago.

PH: What's great about the McDavid [Studio space in Bass hall] is the intimacy. This show has some interaction with the audience, where the fourth wall is down, and their [the audience] engaged in the conversation [somewhat]. In my case, the narrative involves them in what their favorite 'show and tell' items were, or when I do a family slide show, I'm the Dad doing the slides, and they're the family watching the slides. Its fun having [people] right near by you.

PH: I had written a play called BUNK BED BROTHERS with another writer-an era piece about brothers who grew up in the 1970's, returning to their old childhood bedroom}. It was a 3 person show-a sort of a sitcom on stage. Back then, this was Pre-Ebay, and you had to go to thrift stores to find old toys and games, and so forth.

In the course of decorating the stage and putting the set together I started to see that there was a real hunger for people to look at their past. Nostalgia became a real hot button for me. In the search to dress the shelves with the most fantastic stuff that I remember growing up...etch-a-sketches or string art Superman on a wall], I realized, 'Hey, we all have memories we want to hang onto.' It actually became something that I was writing on the side.

[In the end], I was in LA working on sitcoms, and I was on hiatus and I thought, 'I want to do something in between these [TV] episodes.'. So that's basically how I began to develop THE WONDER BREAD YEARS. I began renting out [a theatre] and testing out material on an audience [at that time].

I was lucky enough that the PBS affiliate in Lincoln, Nebraska invited me to come back to the Johnny Carson theatre and tape it as a pledge drive special. So, it was really intended at that time just to become a one hour [pledge drive] comedy about growing up, sort of a bull's eye to the Baby Boomer, so to speak.

When taping [the original show] in the live theatre, they said, "You can have the theatre for a week to rehearse to get ready for the TV taping". I realized having the audience every night, and their response being different-when they would [do things like] repeat back the Jiffy Pop jingle back to me-there was just a lot more meat on the bone that I hadn't gone after.

After we taped it an hour, I added another 30 minutes to it for it to be a full night in the theatre.

PH: When I crafted [the show], I decided that I wasn't going to make it my life story, I was going to make it our life story. It doesn't really matter if you're 25 or you're 65, there's still a time that you were 5, right?

I can tell you the facts-that my Dad may have played with little toy soldiers in the sand that were made of lead, and I played with toys made of green plastic. [So] what I do is try to gloss over some of the specifics and stay in a more universal area. The only places that people might say, "Wait, that's not true!" is if I said milk money was a nickel, you might say, 'Wait, it was a quarter!', right? But the fact is that you know what's its like to have milk at school.

I try to position myself in the story, in the family pictures and so forth, so I appear to be somebody you grew up with, somebody who lives in your neighborhood, somebody who spied on your life a little bit.

Its actually a very contagious type of experience. And the one thing that makes it a hybrid between theatre and storytelling and stand up comedy is that I want people to step into a bit of a time machine of their own life. At the end of it, my hope is the gift that they [the audience] walk away with is thinking of other toys and games and jingles and recipes that are specific to their own life. I want to continue the dialogue about 'that one thing', whatever it is [for them].

PH: Here's the interesting thing about one person shows. Its a misnomer that its a monologue-people think that's you talking outward. I always find that its a dialogue-whether they're responding or not. Their laughs tell me that I'm heading in the right direction.

Its a little like being on the date with the audience! You want to please them, and you have something to tell them, and you find the best way to tell it to them, and for me, I want the date to have a good outcome, right? So, you tell your best stories on the date. The nature of a direct address to the audience is that you want both parties to leave on an upbeat, positive result.

PH: Well, first of all, the Seinfeld experience was an awesome experience all the way around. Jerry was a terrific mentor in terms of finding your voice as a writer. Of course, when I wrote in his camp, I was a 'mechanic' working on 'his cars,' and we did it through his voice.

When I went on to begin to do other things, his encouragement was "Take what you've learned, and *****lose sleep over it for YOU." THE WONDER BREAD YEARS is my voice, I'm hosting my party, and this is the soundtrack I want you to hear. There's some maturity in not being derivative of all that experience I had, but he had so many great pieces of advice along the way.

They [Seinfeld and his writers] wrote a show that wasn't like the previous shows that were on TV. [In] most of the television shows at that time, the parents were part of the central family unit, and it was Family Ties and shows like that before he [Seinfeld] came along. And then he [Jerry Seinfeld] sort of defined a universal truth which was our friends are our family, and our parents become the secondary characters, and so forth.

I think he and Larry David really developed that philosophy, that you then saw unfold in Ellen and Single Guy, and all these other things, which was comedy is about your friends and your family. And that is really quite true in today's generation, so I thought they were really of their time, in terms of that choice.

The difference is that in [sitcom] television, your writing your very, very best, but you're writing disposable material. It all has to go on TV on Thursday night at 9:00 or whenever. So you have a deadline and you have to meet it in order to shoot it. And then once you shoot it, you edit it, its done and it gets archived.

In theatre, which is my first love, you are able to hone a story that sustains itself over time.

The other thing is that television [which is not to put it down] comes to you for free in your house.

In theatre, you buy a ticket, you have an experience-so in a strange way, there's a different relationship with the audience. And I feel a great responsibility to a theatre audience to give them an experience. How can we transform ourselves in this black box into having some communal experience that brings out our humanity? Whether that's laughing really hard or having a certain pathos or creating a dialogue afterwards. It makes you explore some things about yourself.

And often times, particularly in situation comedy, there's a little veneer, it [can be] a little artificial, with the invention of the 'laugh track'-we're mechanically reminded where things are funny. And you can't fake that in theatre. Either the actors can sustain and take you on their journey, or they can't. All of the different roles in the theatre {director, lighting and sound designer, etc.} can make you feel something.

PH: It is intended to reflect a little bit of the time and the nostalgia, but more interestingly I think, the name reflects a sense of comfort food. There was an actual era where they talked about in advertising your developmental years being your 'wonder bread years'-the time of curiosity and adventure. It defined less about whether it was the 60's or the 70's, and it was more about ages from 5 to 12- about your growing years. It was when you sat at the kid's table. It was when you rode in the back of the country squire wagon. It seemed to embody the general areas that I like to shine a light on.

PH: Over the years, I've received some criticism as to why I wasn't talking about [other aspects of that era, such as] the JFK assassination, and other things. I did make a choice, and the choice was that when you escape into the theatre for 2 hours, its not about putting the juxtaposition into the story itself. This is the free pass to come in. Listen, there's nothing to me more powerful than community laughter, and realizing that we have much more in common than we have differences.

Its a bit of a thesis - our sense of wonder, where we lost it, and how do we get it back.

I learn so much from the audience. I'm always on the receiving end of a story. That's the power of reminiscing-it usually comes from a very warm place. That's really the nature of what's happening in this particular piece.

Now today, with every generation-not just kids-[they're] looking at their texts, and into their phones. People aren't looking up and out as much as they're looking down.

So I feel like this is the time to say, "Look, I'll take you, I'll be the sherpa guide on this trek back. And then I'm going to let you safely go, and you can decide if you want to take it with you, or leave it behind."

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THE WONDER BREAD YEARS is playing at the Bass Hall McDavid Studio April 27 - May 1 in Fort Worth.