KPFA - Bay Area Theater

Arthur Laurents (1917-2011), interviewed on April 7, 2000 by Richard Wolinsky and Richard A. Lupoff, during the tour for his memoir, Original Story By …

Arthur Laurents was one of the giants of American culture. A playwright, librettist and director, he was one of the collaborators on two of the greatest musicals in the history of Broadway, West Side Story and Gypsy. In Hollywood, he was best known for the screenplays to The Way We Were and The Turning Point.

He spent most of World II in New York, working on propaganda films under George Cukor, A playwright with a huge hit after the war, The Time of the Cuckoo (which became the Katharine Hepbutn film Summertime), Laurents then moved to Hollywood where his career as a screenwriter was interrupted by the blacklist. He went to Europe but returned to write the screenplay for the Ingrid Bergman film, Anastasia.

Coming back to New York, he collaborated with Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim on West Side Story, then with Sondheim and Jule Styne on Gypsy. He also wrote the libretto for Jerry Herman’s hit, La Cage Aux Folles. Along the way, he continued to write plays and direct. His final two years saw two new plays and, at the age of 92, he directed a successful revival of West Side Story.

Arthur Laurents Wikipedia page.

Left: the creative team for West Side Story. Center: Richard Rodgers, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim working on the ill-fated musical “Do I Hear a Waltz?” based on Laurents’ play “The Time of the Cuckoo.” Right: Poster for the original production of “West Side Story.”

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In honor of Pride:

Legendary playwright, cabaret performer, actor, and drag superstar Charles Busch in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded in New York’s Greenwich Village in late July, 2018

Charles Busch, as a playwright, was nominated for the Tony Award for “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife.” Among his other works are “Red Scare on Sunset,” which had a production at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre in the fall of 2018, “The Divine Sister,” “The Lady in Question” and the long-running off-Broadway hit, “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.”

From his website:

He wrote and starred in the film versions of his plays, Psycho Beach Party and Die Mommie Die, the latter of which won him the Best Performance Award at the Sundance Film Festival. For two seasons, he appeared as Nat Ginzburg on the HBO series OZ and is the author of the auto-biographical novel Whores of Lost Atlantis. He has directed two films; the Showtime short subject, Personal Assistant, and a feature, A Very Serious Person, which won an honorable mention at the Tribeca Film Festival. Due to his love and knowledge of film and theatre history, he has appeared as a guest programmer and in numerous documentaries for Turner Classic Movies, and has lectured and conducted master classes at many colleges and universities including NYU, Harvard, UCLA and Amherst College.

In this interview, he talks about “Red Scare on Sunset,” about his early career and how he came to be a playwright and performer, and about drag and the politics of drag.

New Conservatory website

Charles Busch website

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Mart Crowley, author of “The Boys in the Band” and its sequel, “The Men from the Boys,” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky on October 31, 2002.

Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band, which deals with the lives of gay men in the 1960s burst upon the off-Broadway scene in 1968 and ran for a thousand performances, becoming a film directed by William Friedkin two years later. In 2002, he wrote a sequel titled The Men from the Boys, which took place 35 years later, after Stonewall and after the AIDS epidemic. It premiered at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre on November 9, 2002. This past year, Broadway saw a revival of The Boys in the Band, featuring Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannels and Jim Parsons. Several members of that cast, including Mario Cantone and Denis O’Hare return to their roles for a live stream of The Men From the Boys, directed by Zachary Quinto, airs through June 29, 2020 at playbill.com/prideplays

Mart Crowley died of a heart attack on March 7, 2020 at the age of 84.

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This week’s podcast is a June, 2011 interview with Anna Deavere Smith, while she was in the Bay Area discussing her then latest project, Let Me Down Easy, which was running at Berkeley Rep into early September of that year.

Anna Deavere Smith has written and performed in several one-woman plays similar in style to Let Me Down Easy, including Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which consist of short monologues in the voices and characters of individuals she interviewed. Prior to the interview, she’d appeared as an actress in several movies, and as a regular on both The West Wing and Nurse Jackie.

She returned to Berkeley Rep three years later with another show, Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, which was filmed in 2018 and can be seen on HBO and HBO Max. Since 2011 she has been a regular on the TV shows Blackish and For The People, and is listed in the cast of an upcoming Netflix series, Inventing Anna. She was also seen in the film Can You Ever Forgive Me.

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Tarell Alvin McCraney, playwright, actor and screenwriter, recorded in 2014 as he had two plays produced in the Bay Area, Head of Passes at Berkeley Rep, and Choir Boy at Marin Theatre Company. Both plays eventually made it to New York to excellent reviews. Since the interview, he won the Academy Award for co-writing the screenplay of the film Moonlight, based on one of his plays, and wrote the screenplay for the Netflix film High Flying Bird. Tarell Alvin McCraney is also the author of the acclaimed Brother Sister Plays Trilogy, and most recently, created the TV series David Makes Man, which aired on the OWN network and can be seen now on DirectTV. Hosted by Richard Wolinsky.

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