Broadway Bullet Interview: The Last Word
By: Michael Gilboe Feb. 21, 2007
Oren Safdie wrote the off-Broadway play "Private Jokes, Public Places." He also wrote the film "You Can Thank Me Later," which starred Ellen Burstyn. His other plays include "Jesus & Jews," "Fiddler Sub-Terrain," "Hyper-Allergenic," "Broken Places," "Laughing Dogs," and "La Compagnie."
Alex Lippard received his MFA in directing from Columbia and his most recent credits include "The Gold Standard" at the Irish Arts Center, "Cupid & Psyche" at Altered Stages, and "Sake with the Haiku Geisha" at Perry Street Theater.
"The Last Word" is playing through March 11th at the Theatre at St. Clements. Tickets are available through Ticket Central by calling 212-279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com
You can listen to this interview and many other great features for free on Broadway Bullet vol. 102. Subscribe for free so you don't miss an episode.
Broadway Bullet Interview With Oren Safdie and Alex Lippard
Broadway Bullet: The Last Word is a play off Broadway starring Daniel J. Travanti. Just opened very recently to some solid reviews. And we have the director and the writer here with us. How are you guys doing?
Oren Safdie: Pretty Good.
Alex Lippard: Very Well.
BB: You want to introduce yourselves quickly?
AL: I'm Alex Lippard. I'm the director of The Last Word.
OS: And I'm Oren Safdie and I'm the writer.
BB: On a side note, I have to say, I was thinking your name sounded familiar. You came in and looked familiar. And it immediately hit me, that I'd seen one of your productions that you directed while you were a grad student in Columbia.AL: Really? Which One was that?
BB: It was, I forget the name of it. It was a new musical. It was a staged reading.
AL: Maybe it was Mall Story.
BB: That was it!
AL: It was about kids in the mall on drugs. It was like RENT meets Kids. Very Columbia University. Didn't go anywhere but great music.
OS: We're both from Columbia actually. I went there too.
BB: Really? When did you go there?
OS: I was there 96-95. But I was in the fiction writing program. MFA.
BB: I that how you got together on this play? Because you were there at Columbia at different times?
AL: Not quite. Although I'm trying to build a mafia.
OS: It was through Daniel Travanti we got connected.
AL: I was an assistant director on a show about 9 years ago at Arena stage (http://www.arenastage.org/) in Washington. Dan Travanti was playing the lead in a Eugene O'Neill play. And I was the little assistant director. Dan and I stayed in touch for years. I kept sending him scripts saying, "Will you do this? Will you come to New York and do this?" He said, "No I don't like the part. It's not big enough. It's got to be a star role." Finally he said to me "If I keep saying 'no' will you stop sending me things?" And I said, "No." Then about a month later he called me. He said, "I've got this script for you. You should read it."
OS: yes, we originally did it in Los Angeles. Just a 3-week try out there. Then after we did it there he told me to contact Alex.
BB: Well I guess before we go so much further, maybe you could you set the stage for our listeners as to what the shows about.
AL: The show takes place in real time. It's about 8 minutes long. No intermission. It's the story of a job interview. There's a young kid from NYU who answers an ad. A playwright wants to have an assistant because he's losing his eyesight and needs someone to do dictation and that kind of thing. And he shows up and is immediately bombarded with this cranky, opinionated, older gentleman's opinion on everything, from what's a great play, to why kids today do everything wrong. So the kid starts off needing a job and soon finds himself sucked into doing things for the guy. And guilt tripped into opening mail. He tries to leave, and the guy says, "Hey c'mon. I'm blind. Could you help me out?" And as the kid gets more comfortable in his own skin in the room there starts to be a real dialect. A real argument about what a good play really is. Is a good play based n reality as it really is? Or reality as it should be? And the kid sides more on the side of reality. And the older gentleman sides more with fantasy.
OS: So's the world. In terms of general. If it's a better world from the past, as Henry Goodall would see it. Is the new world better?
AL: There's a lot of humor that comes out of the generation gap and this conflict between essentially a teenage kid and an 84 year old guy. There's a real dissonance between the way they look at the world. And a lot of humor and a lot of laughs come out of that.
OS: The last word actually grew out of my own experience. When I was at Columbia I was working as assistant for several elderly people. One of them who was a man who was very much similar to the play, was from Vienna, who had a successful advertising business. And had retired. He was in his 80's. And now was pursing a dream of his life which, he has written all his life but never really had the time. He had family. Trying to write plays and make it to Broadway. Sending out his plays everywhere and getting a lot of rejections. I think his writing was very much suited to the early 20's or 30's. It just didn't seen timely. And he was trying so hard to be timely with his work. But he came from a certain period. And I just got this sense, and I do feel, especially in our society today, elderly people really fall by the wayside. You walk down the street, you very rarely sort of look at an old person and wonder, "Oh what's this whole life?" It's almost like they don't exist because they're not players. Everything is about being up to date here. It's really a youth driven culture. So I think those 2 things really drove me in writing this. And feeling a bit that there's a real gap between the generations. And somewhat of a disrespect as well, on both sides. So that was the driving part for that.
BB: How old is Daniel J. Travanti?
AL: Travanti is 66. Are we allowed to say how old he is?
OS: Yeah.
AL: He's 66. He'll be 67 next month.
BB: I was gonna say, I didn't think he was that old yet.
AL: The man is a vegan who eats very little oil, salt, sugar. He gave up alcohol about 35 years ago. And he looks great. He's in great physical condition. He's in better physical condition then many of my contemporaries. He has a lot of energy and he's sharp as a tack. Both physically and mentally.
OS: But he's very much transformed himself for this role. He looks, even onstage, and he's grown a beard and his hair as grown long. So he looks very much the part, in his 80's. But I remember after we finished the play on Los Angeles and we had a post party after the production. He went upstairs and he shaved his beard, he cut his hair and he looked very much like the Daniel J. Travanti everyone remembers from Hill Street Blues. It's quite amazing the transformation.
AL: He also, unlike many actors, doesn't really have vanity when it comes to being seen or remembered the way that he used to look. He wants to serve the role. And the role is this alter cocker, from Vienna. So he's got poufy Einstein hair, and a white beard, and a little bowtie and a stooped back. It's funny, cause a friend of my mother's came to see the show the other day and she said, "I used to have a crush on that guy. I don't have a crush on him now." It always helps to have a name actor in a role. But I do feel that Dan is a real stage actor. He's a stage vet. He's done a lot of regional theatre stuff. He played, like I said, he did the lead in Touch of the Poet at Arena Stage. He did it at ART, the Denver Center. He's done shows at Old Globe Theater and other major regional theatres. So he's got the chops. He understands the language of the stage and he's extremely expressive. And it New York, as you know, it's hit or miss with TV actors coming to do stage. Some of them aren't even audible. Mr. Travanti certainly knows how to work a crowd, and knows how to infuse the stage with life. It's been very exciting working with him.
OS: I think he's more of theatre actor that went into television rather than the other way around.
AL: Absolutely.
BB: Well now you guys just had your review come out in New York Times this morning. It was a very good review. That must be exciting.
OS: Yeah, it's always exciting to get reviews when they're good.
BB: Although Oren, I heard you say before the interview, that you felt you were spoiled. Something about this review wasn't what…
OS: Well I've been on both sides. I remember I did a play, it was a musical comedy called Fiddler's Sub Terrain at LaMama. Which got such a thrashing and then I came back right after that actually wrote my play in 10 days after that trashing to almost answer the critics. Private Jokes Public Places, and it was the opposite. I think I've leveled off a bit. I don't expect too much. But sometimes you see one word and you focus. I think it' just tendency that we do focusing on a one word negative thing rather than the 90% that might be positive. You can't help it, you know.
AL: I generally tend to think that when reviews are good that they're well written. And when reviews are bad that the reviewer is completely wrong. Generally when a show is reviewed as being good the cast is lauded as being terrific. And usually when the review is a bad review the director is trounced for being weak. So I don't put too much stock in them. I take them completely to heart, and they make me sick for a couple of days and then I forget about it. And If they're nice then I send them around and try to let people know that, 'Hey look Ma, no hands. I did this."
OS: But I'm always surprised because I never set out to write comedies. Even with my last play Private Jokes, Public Places it was really the press that labeled it as a comedy. A lot of our promotional leading up to the play, I think we all saw this as a thought provoking serious play. Which you like to have both, really. But a lot of the reviews have come out about how it's very funny and hilarious. We didn't see it as a comedy but it seems to have gone that way. And that's not too bad. You just sorta have to let it be what it is. And maybe a different production would be different. Since I'm not writing set up jokes so much, the comedy comes out of the awkwardness of the situation hopefully, which Alex brings out very well of course. I think that's sort of being trumped here in a lot of the reviews that people have been writing.
BB: What's all the information. How do people catch the show? (http://www.ticketcentral.com/showdetails_f.asp?i=1201) It's playing till March 11th, correct?
OS: March 11th and Theatre St. Clemens. On West 46th between 9th and 10th.
AL: And there's a website for our show which is TheLastWordThePLay.com. (http://thelastwordtheplay.com/)
BB: All right, well I thank you 2 for coming down and congratulations on your great New York Times review this morning. And best of luck with the run of the show.
OS: Thanks very much.
AL:Thank you so much.
###You can listen to this interview and many other great features for free on Broadway Bullet vol. 102. Subscribe for free so you don't miss an episode.
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