Resisting temptation

Walt Whitman fiddled with Leaves of Grass for years after its initial publication. This is easy to do with a collection of poems: you take things out and add other poems. It's also easy to do with a novel like Sodom, Gomorrah & Jones with its modular construction of vignettes. Indeed, no sooner was it published than I found myself watching the news, thinking, I didn't make CJ's world dark enough, the news he watches isn't horrific enough, not like the news I'm watching right now. Maybe I should put in darker examples.

But I resist! I could fiddle with the book for the rest of my time. In fact, I could fiddle with just about anything I've ever written. Indeed, in the 90s, during a rehearsal of a revival of Christmas at the Juniper Tavern, I tweaked the ending, changing its rhythm a bit.

Never in my career, however, did I have more opportunity to change things than during the run of The Comedian In Spite of Himself, my play about Moliere, at the New Rose Theatre. The play was commissioned by artistic director Gary O'Brien. I never would have chosen this subject on my own. I had the opportunity to house sit in Bend and write the play. But I was immediately distracted by the Rajneesh phenomenon, which was getting much more press in central Oregon than in Portland. I quickly wrote Christmas at the Juniper Tavern, which initially upset O'Brien since he had paid me to write something else.

But I got the Moliere play done by deadline -- however, I didn't like it. O'Brien loved it. I didn't like it. We reached a compromise. We'd open as scheduled but I could continue rewriting the play. The result was extraordinary: the six week run presented six different versions of the play! Every Tuesday, after seeing the weekend run, I'd bring in pages of changes, which of course the actors hated, and O'Brien would put the changes in, and a slightly different play would result. And so on, for the entire run!

In retrospect, I wanted to write a different play than O'Brien wanted. He wanted the focus to be on the relationship of Moliere and the King. I wanted the focus to be on Moliere's fear that he may have married his own daughter. The play that resulted, in my view, was too long and too sprawling, a three-act epic. Consequently my changes were almost all cuts. Indeed, the final show was 45 minutes shorter than opening night! This wasn't because of tightening scenes in performance but because of my using the chain saw.

I had one argument with O'Brien about changes that I finally won. I cut the funniest scene in the play -- the scene that got the most laughs consistently. It was a scene between Moliere and La Grange, his buddy and the narrator, when both are drunk. It was a very funny scene actually. However, it had absolutely nothing to do with the story. It was a great scene in the wrong play. I don't think O'Brien let me cut it until the final weekend.

Even though some critics loved The Comedian In Spite of Himself and even Mr. Producer Hal Prince wrote me a kind note in admiration of it (a NY actress who had seen the play got the script from the theater and gave it to him -- she wanted to be in it in NY), I still didn't like the play. Because the play was commissioned, I had to share royalties with the theater for five years after the New Rose premiere -- but I shelved it. Ten years later I picked it up and redid it with my focus, changing the sprawling 3-act epic into a tight 2-act personal drama. I renamed it Sad Laughter, later adapting this as a screenplay, which my agent at the time called the best screenplay he'd ever read, and meant it, though we went nowhere with it, despite several typical false starts.

Well, that's was a windy aside. The point is, as a writer said once, literary creations aren't ended so much as abandoned.

No, I am not going to fiddle with the novel. I'm done. ("What an extravagance! What a relief!" Lew Welch).