Broadway Bullet Radio Interview

We talk to Rob Urbinati about what it’s like to have two shows opening at the same time. Rob is the writer of “West Moon Street” and the director of “The President and Her Mistress.”

“West Moon Street” is based on Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.” According to the press notes: "Young Lord Arthur is deliriously happy—just down from Oxford and engaged to be married—until a fateful evening at Lady Windemere's when a mysterious palm-reader predicts a shocking turn of events."

“The President and Her Mistress” is according to the press materials: "In 2155 A.D., The Year of Our Goddess, women rule. Beck Shine is President of the World. Insurgent men have taken 10,000 women hostage in Australia and, for the first time since the femme revolution, women are in danger; Beck's mother convinces her that 'nano-probe technology' will give her the energy to save her presidency; and Beck's husband and her mistress vie for her allegiance. What's a woman president to do?"

Broadway Bullet: You often hear actors use the words, “Well what I really want to do is direct,” but, I don’t know how many times you’ve heard a director say, “What I really want to do is write a play,” as our current guest Rob Urbinati has done. He started off his career in directing and then moved into playwriting, and now does both furiously. How are you doing today?

Rob Urbinati: Furiously. I like that. Everything is great, thank you.

BB: In fact, you’ve got two plays- two different plays- one that you’re writing and one that you’re directing opening on the same day. Is that correct?

RU: Yeah, they open the same night. April 21st.

BB: How are you juggling this all?

RU: It is juggling. My play is “West Moon Street," an adaptation of a somewhat obscure Oscar Wilde story called “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.” It’s directed by Davis McCallum and produced by the Prospect Theatre Company, opening at the Hudson Guild Theatre. The play that I am directing is called “The President and Her Mistress.” It’s a wacky futuristic comedy written by Jan Buttram and it’s opening at the Abington on the same night.

BB: You directed a long time before starting to write, isn’t that correct?

RU: Yes. Basically I was a theatre fanatic. I had a job with Home Box Office as a theatre consultant for a long time -

BB: What did HBO do with a theatre consultant?

RU: At first, they were just looking for material, sometimes writers. It actually helped me learn how to direct. They weren’t interested in the production. They were interested in the quality of the writing, so I had to separate what a writer does from what a director does, which is kind of a difficult thing to do. I did that for a long time, perhaps too long. I got kind of tired of it, but I did see something like 2000 plays over a period of like five or six years, and HBO wanted everything covered – all kinds of theatre. The theatre division at HBO was just starting, it was in the mid to late 80s, and my taste is eclectic, so it was a good match. On the one hand, it was fun. I got to see a lot of stuff, but like a lot of people who are observing the arts, or are peripheral to the arts, I wanted to be more hands-on. And again, because of the nature of this job - which was to evaluate the writing apart from the production - I got clear on what a director did and I became interested in directing, so I started to do that in the late 80s.

BB: Now why didn’t you just ask for the scripts from the PR reps?

RU: I was getting free tickets so I didn’t ask. And there were other people – writers, specifically, who were reading scripts. But I was the theatre fanatic, and having someone go to see plays gave them “advance word” on new plays. Sometimes they were specifically looking for star vehicles, and at the bottom of the evaluation forms it said: “star potential.” They would actually say before I went to the theatre, “See if you can find something for Carol Burnett." So, it was a particular type of theatre job, and as you mentioned, not something you associate with Home Box Office. One result, and I take credit for this along with hundreds of others, is I sent HBO to the Whoopi Goldberg show, which was playing at a little theatre in Chelsea, and ultimately they ended up doing her first television appearance.

BB: Now, this inspired you to move into directing?

RU: Yeah.

BB: And how was that?

RU: I hadn’t studied theatre and I hadn’t studied actor training or anything, but I did have a sense of movement and composition, and I could envision what the final product would be like, but I had no idea of how to get there. Luckily, I had friends who were good actors, who would help me get there, who would get themselves to the place where a good director might be able to get them - to shape their character. So, at first I was relying on them, and I wasn’t sure that I would like directing, because of these communication issues. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be good at it, but I got the chance…basically, what happened was that someone who worked at HBO, her parents ran a theatre in Omaha, Nebraska and she asked if I wanted to direct a show there. I went there, and there are actually a lot of theatres in that city. I don’t know if you know this, but Omaha is kind of hip.

BB: It is?

RU: Yeah, I think what's going on is that Kansas City used to be the sort of epicenter of hipness in the Midwest, but Omaha has a great rock and roll scene, and an experimental theatre scene, for the Midwest. If you live in nearby states or small towns, and you’re young and ambitious and artistic. you move to Omaha. So this was kind of ideal, because it was a place to really learn the craft, and not under watchful eyes. Also, I’d been living in New York for about 7 or 8 years and I was ready to be away from it for awhile, and I have a rent stabilized apartment so I kept that and stayed in Omaha for about 4 years, and directed about 40 plays, and did Shakespeare, dinner theatre, experimental pieces, children's theatre, plays by Inge and Coward. Lots of stuff. So, that’s where I really learned how to direct. It was a great training ground and I’m forever grateful to those folks, and I’m still in touch with them.

BB: So at one point did you switch over to also deciding you wanted to write?

RU: It wasn’t like I was harboring a desire to write. It really never entered my mind. But when I was in grad school in Oregon, I heard a a radio announcement, and this is what it said: a lesbian love triangle in an Indiana junior high school led to murder. I thought, wow, lesbians at an Indiana junior high school- it just seemed so strange. I was intrigued, and forgot about it, moved back to New York and this was like 1996 and I read two crime books written about this murder. I was in the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab and there was a discussion about adapting your own plays as a way of helping your career as a director in New York. Well, these two crime books actually had the letters and notes that these junior high school girls had written to each other, and they were fantastic. Some were raunchy, some were tender and innocent. The girls were like 12 or 13. Sometimes, they were threatening, violent. The letters were potent, to put it mildly. So I thought that I would create an epistolary-type play based on these letters and direct it. They were actually the notes that these girls threw to each other during class that had been preserved. So when I started to put them all on the computer, it became clear that if two girls were writing notes to each other about the same event, I had enough information about what actually happened and how they spoke to write the scene. So I started to write scenes that were loosely based on this crime, and that became my first play called “Hazelwood Jr. High.” I was really lucky because I had directed some readings at the New Group and I gave the play to Scott Elliott, and playwrights sort of hate to hear this but I gave him the play on a Monday, and Thursday of that week he said that he would be directing it the following season at the New Group. That doesn’t happen to often. It hasn’t happened to me since.

BB: How many plays since has it been now? What is “West Moon Street” now? How many plays?

RU: I think it’s like…I’ve written some one acts so I’d really have to count, but not a lot. I’m still principally a director. Less then 10 including the one-acts. 5 or 6 full legnth, I think. I’m working on a couple of new things now.

BB: All right, now “West Moon Street.” What are some of the exciting things about it?

RU: It has a great director, Davis McCallum and a terrific cast. It’s written in a style that I think is difficult for American actors - maybe even British actors. I think Shakespeare is easier then this kind of high style that Oscar Wilde wrote in. A funny thing happened though, regarding “Hazelwood Jr. High.” After that play, I wanted to write something really different in terms of language. Those were teenage girls, and I wanted to write something the polar opposite of that, so I thought, “Oscar Wilde, that might be fun,” and I read his short fiction, and I loved the story, “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.” It’s about a gentleman who is engaged to be married, Lord Arthur is his name, and shortly before the wedding he goes to a reception where there is a palm reader - in the story it’s called a cheiromantist - and the palm reader reads his palm and tells him that he’s going to commit a murder. Being a proper English gentleman, he feels that it’s best to get this murder out of the way before he marries, but because he is, in fact, a proper English gentleman, he’s completely incompetent at the skills required to murder. So the play is about his hapless attempts to try to do away with someone before he gets married, and like all good Wilde there’s a social critique under his précis - the bumbling efforts of this man who has had every opportunity throw at him, educational opportunities, but who is still incredibly naive. There’s a sort of loopy murder mystery element to the story that I thought really gave the play a dramatic drive. It’s not in the style of “The Importance of Being Earnest.” It’s not as superficially comic and artificial as that as it deals with murder. As I started to say, the connection with “Hazelwood” is that after I’d written “West Moon Street,” despite the fact that they are entirely different plays in terms of language, they ended up, thematically, to concern the same thing. They are both about societies, or contexts, where murder is sort of a vehicle to achieve personal ends. Neither the girls in “Hazelwood” nor the character of Lord Arthur, or frankly, the other characters in “West Moon Street” really see murder for what it is. It’s just a means to an end, to acquire something that they want. And language becomes a way of disguising, or allowing this disassociation. So the plays ended up being curiously similar.

BB: As a director first, and as you say, a playwright second, do you just find a subject you want to write about passionately, write about it, and then try to find someone to do it, or do you usually have someone who’s interested who says, “I’d like to do one of your plays, do you have anything?’

RU: That’s a really great question. I have a tremendous respect for writers who scribble away in their turrets, and pour their passions into plays. I’ve never done that. I like to get produced. I’m not saying that I write overtly commercial plays, I mean in “Hazelwood Jr. High,” they light a girl on fire, so it wasn’t the most…

BB: Violence is always commercial.

RU: Right, but I did things like reduce the number of characters in that play so it would be easier to produce. And I knew there was a ton of interest in Oscar Wilde, which would increase the chances of West Moon Street getting produced. I like to figure out what the production opportunities are for the things I’m interested in before I put pen to paper. I’m not bragging about that. In some ways, again, I wish I was John Guare and just wrote whatever came to me, but I like to know what’s going to happen to it, or at least what might happen. I wrote a musical this year called Shangri-la which was based on the girl group from the 60s. And I knew that there would be interest in it, partly because I also work in Queens Theatre in the Park, and the Shangri-la’s where from Queens. And I say proudly, it's a jukebox musical, after a fashion. It's ideal for babyboomers. So like that. On the other extreme, I wrote an adaptation this year of Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove’s book, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” and I knew that the Culture Project, where I’ve worked as a director, would be interested. Does that answer your question? I kind of figure out where I could pitch a particular play and I don’t write it unless I feel strongly that there will be interest. My new play, Mama's Boy, is about Lee Harvey Oswald's mother. My guess is that there are people who'll want to see it.

BB: So we’ve got “West Moon Street” which you’ve written opening at the Prospect Theatre Company April 21st, and then “The President and Her Mistress” which you’re directing at the Abingdon which opens at about the same time, and we’ll have links on our website for people to find out more information.

RU: That’s fantastic.

BB: Well, thank you for coming down here and sharing a lot of interesting information with our listeners.

RU: Thank you.