Tony Nominee Q&A with Jack Viertel
By: BWW Jun. 08, 2007
Helping to represent Best Play nominee Radio Golf, Jack Viertel is the creative director of Jujamcyn Theaters, in charge of creating and identifying new projects for the company's five Broadway theatres. He is also artistic director of City Center Encores! This is the sixth play in August Wilson's Century Cycle in which he has been involved.
Congratulations, you must be very proud of being involved with this last landmark August Wilson production.
Thank you very much. I am, and it's tremendously gratifying for a lot of different reasons because it's such a contemporary story which makes it different than a lot of August's plays, but it's also funny and sharp and just makes us incredibly happy that it was accepted for what it was, but it's also sad because it's the end of the legacy, the end of the cycle as it's the last play. So it's a historic thing for Broadway from that point of view.
How have audiences been reacting?
The audience that's there, are those who have been participating in seeing the other plays, and knowing where this is going I think that they know that they're participating in something very special and very significant.
How early did you get involved with this show's journey?
I read a script before the Yale production. It was a very sketchy script and I just got it out of my files a couple of days ago. I've always done this with all of his plays, once the Broadway version is up and running, I'll go back and will read the very first draft of the play. I'll find myself just literally smiting my forehead at all the things that aren't there, but that wind up there. The original draft had almost no second act at all… I'm going to have to sit down and read it again.
And you've been producing previous plays in this cycle as well…
You come from finishing one of his plays on Broadway and reading the first draft of the next one and you feel like – oh my, we're going to have to climb Mt. Everest again. But, you take a deep breath, and you say that you've done all the others, and let's do it again. We'll finish this one.
Did the same thing happen here?
That's really what happened, except because of his illness, he didn't do it as he usually does it, which is to keep changing things over 4-5 productions. He did a huge overhaul after the Yale production, and about another 5-10% after that. The draft that he wrote immediately after Yale was almost a different play.
The cast of this show is so phenomenal, what has working with them been like?
It's a great cast and they've been with it since the beginning, finding the best details of those characters since the beginning and they don't stop improving. The next job for me is that all of these artists need to keep working and need to keep doing their plays, and you want to see them in different plays and to keep working on Broadway because they're such consummate actors and you want to watch them even if they don't have the August Wilson rhythm, you just want to see them up there doing their thing.
What's next for you?
Actually, I'm just at the end of everything for the season and what I'm working on is taking a big, deep breath. We're now working on planning the next Encores! season, and working on some other things – a musical and a play, but both are in such early stages of gestation that they're not worth talking about yet.
Photo by Ben Strothmann
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