Pictured Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas.
** The Light In The Piazza began its run at The Goodman Theatre Jan. 10.
Gay writer Craig Lucas (Prelude To A Kiss, Longtime Companion) is a very busy and heralded man. The New York Film Critics Society declared the screenplay he wrote for the movie The Secret Lives of Dentists (starring Campbell Scott, Hope Davis and Denis Leary) as the best of 2003 and it was also praised and recommended for Oscar consideration in the Jan. 9, 2004 issue of Entertainment Weekly. Lucas is currently in Chicago where a production of the musical The Light In The Piazza, for which he wrote the book (Adam Guettel wrote the music and lyrics) is at the Goodman Theatre. Lucas was kind enough to take time away from watching a rehearsal of The Light In The Piazza to sit down for an interview with Windy City Times.
Gregg Shapiro: I want to begin by asking you to say something about the challenges and rewards of adapting work from another source for the stage.
Craig Lucas: I’ve done it a lot and I actually like it as another muscle, another whole way of working; because you’re not in charge of inventing a narrative which is an enormous part of creating something new. Making up a narrative, telling a story, which I love to do as well, utilizes a part of the unconscious and one’s entire understanding of storytelling that is not called upon in the same way when you’re taking someone else’s work. I’ve adapted quite a few novels into screenplays and quite a few other forms into theater over time, including a couple of musicals that ultimately did not see the light of day (laughs), as well they should not have. But this one was wonderful. When the underlying material is firmly structured, it’s fun. If it turns out the underlying material is a little feeble, which you only find out if you spend a lot of time with it, it can fall apart in your hands. So, I’ve done novels by very famous American writers where you realize it’s all smoke and mirrors and there’s nothing there. Nothing will expose the weakness of structure like drama. A novel can be baggy and contain a thousand things, and if you try to dramatize it and there’s no narrative there, you’ll find out quickly enough. But the two times that I’ve adapted something strong, and that was this (The Light In The Piazza) and I did a Jane Smiley novella called The Age Of Grief, which we made into a movie (The Secret Lives Of Dentists), both times it was a thrill because the underlying material constantly rewarded me with new insights. In fact, we put a new scene into the musical yesterday, and I’ve been working on this for quite a few years, and we went back to the novella and there it was, exactly what I needed. Because Elizabeth (Spencer) is that kind of dense and rewarding writer and Jane Smiley is equally remarkable.
GS: Italy and romance seem to be linked in people’s minds. Would you agree that the two belong together?
CL: There’s a brilliant little sequence in the Spencer where she says, ‘No one with a dream should come to Italy. No matter how dead and buried you think it is. This is where Italy will get you.’ It is that idea of the possibility that I think imbues the novel and hopefully imbues this piece. I think there has been much too much made in twentieth century fiction about the differences in the English and American attitudes toward love and the possibility of love and family, and the Italian. It stems originally from E.M. Forster’s I think somewhat (pauses) racist notions about Italians and it’s thread through (Tennessee Williams’s) The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Arthur Laurents’s play The Time Of The Cuckoo, and Three Coins In A Fountain. And I think it’s all hooey (laughs). That notwithstanding, I felt that Spencer found something true at the heart of our interaction, at least when it comes to the post-war period, where Americans were being idealized by the Italians and the Italians were being romanticized by the Americans and we were, in a sense, failing to see one another. What I find moving about the Italians, at least the central Italians, is their devotion to history. They have not neglected what is precious. As Americans, we tear down anything that is older than 50 years because it embarrasses us. We don’t know what to make of it. You can drive around Tuscany and actually see what that country looked like 500 years ago, whereas you can’t find a building in Dallas that was built before 1911 because they’ve torn them all down.
GS: Another interesting aspect of the play is the take on how refreshing young love can be. Can you please comment on the combination of young love matched with the element of musical theater?
CL: Adam (Guettel)’s feeling, which I think is very interesting, is that in the blossoming of new love, the feeling contains within it, the loss of that love; so that the feeling is intensely painful because one is always facing the immediate loss of it. The musical isn’t so much about young love as it is about what young love opens up for everyone; those watching it, those who are living through it, those who are looking forward to it, those who are regretting never having had it, and also those who are experiencing it. The story is told through four couples who are at different places in that continuum; from first falling in love to falling out of love to reinventing love to ending a relationship. The catalyst, as it were, are the lovers. But it’s as if we wrote Romeo And Juliet about their parents (laughs) as well as Romeo and Juliet, as if it were also really about the Capulets and the Montagues and how their lives were unsettled and rearranged by the young lovers.
GS: The play also deals with the subject of mothers and daughters. Is that a subject you like to explore?
CL: I was thrilled to be asked to be part of the piece because I felt that it addressed letting go of our children and letting go of your parents in a way that was not clichéd and that I had not seen dramatized before. Because Clara is both an adult and ready to be released and also not an adult and not ready to be released, it gets at that paradigm of that moment when your children are not going to stick around anymore, but you know that they’re not ready. They’re going to make terrible mistakes and they may in fact be destroyed. When you have to let them go to college or go to work or get married or have sex at whatever age they’re having sex now, (there is) that terrible fear of ‘I won’t be able to be there to spare them that hurt.’ And in our world the hurt could actually be fatal. That, I think, is what it’s about.
GS: During the rehearsal that I attended, some of the actresses were wearing these very slim, below-the-knee skirts and the high heels from the 1950s.
CL: They’re hard to walk in (laughs).
GS: One actress commented on that. Do you enjoy writing about that period?
CL: It was a time when Americans cared about how they looked and what the world thought about them. Now, of course, we don’t care because we just bomb them, it doesn’t matter what they think of us because they are already dead. I did enjoy writing about it. I was too young to experience it as an adult or even a conscious child, but returning to it, it says so much about the war and those men who went off to fight and how they all came back. I love the way Elizabeth has written the husband. There’s no there there. All those men, and my father was one of them, came back and never spoke of it. They always did their job and went to work. I think they all made a secret pact that if they got to their graves without anyone knowing about what they were feeling then they had succeeded. I find that tragic. Whereas in Italy, you can’t be in a room for five minutes without knowing what everybody’s feeling (laughs), because they’re all shouting. It’s not the awful Oprah-fication of feelings we are now witnessing. It’s a cultural respect for passion, which is epitomized in Verdi, Bocaccio, (Di Lampedusa’s) The Leopard. Italian literature and music has purified that which is ennobling, as well as that which is debasing in human emotion.
GS: How does the subject matter of The Light In The Piazza compare to some of your other recent work?
CL: I am able to steep myself in what I am doing and I can only do one thing at a time. I wrote The Secret Lives of Dentists and then I put it away. I just directed the movie of my play The Dying Gaul, which is, in a sense, the opposite of The Light In The Piazza, because it is about people whose desire and ambition for themselves basically destroys everyone around them and also themselves. It’s a tragedy about people flailing about in quicksand. It’s so heartening to come to Chicago (laughs) and see something that is kind of beautiful. Even though I think the ending is ambiguous and not meant to be purely a release, I think it has some foreboding in it as well; it’s largely a gratifying experience emotionally. I never saw the movie. I hear it’s terrible. Even though I hear it’s terrible I also know people who say it’s their favorite movie (laughs).
GS: What was the experience of directing your first movie, The Dying Gaul, like for you?
CL: It was the best experience I’ve ever had, largely because I had a producer who believed in the project and was willing to fund it. I had a cinematographer, a gay colleague, who totally got it and was a full collaborator with me. And I had three of the finest actors I’ve ever worked with: Campbell Scott, Patty Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard, who I believe is going to be the Brando of our generation. He’s so remarkable in this movie—so completely naked, both physically and emotionally, and spiritually, it’s going to be profoundly upsetting to people to see what happens to him in this movie.
GS: It’s interesting because all three of those actors have connections to the world of queer film. Patricia was in High Art and Far From Heaven, Peter was in Boys Don’t Cry and, of course, Campbell was in Longtime Companion. It’s interesting that you would be working with those three.
CL: Yes. It’s very much about bisexuality in America now. It’s about materialism and this desire to have more. Always more—that there is never enough. As Americans, we are both entitled and permitted, almost obligated to take more as we see it, to grab it. Of course, that’s a tragic prospect. It can only create tragedy as it is proving to create internationally.