Wednesday, September 15, 1999
'Side Man' puts playwright up front
BY JACKIE DEMALINE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Warren Leight took the age-old advice “write what you know” to heart and earned himself a Broadway hit and a Tony Award for Best Play with Side Man, now in its first national showing at Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (through Sept. 26).
Because Side Man is what the fortyish Mr. Leight knows and hits close to home — a jazz musician father, a failed marriage between his parents — it took him years to actually put words to paper.
“I avoided writing it for 20 years,” he says. Instead he's been writing obscure Off-Broadway plays and cabaret acts and movies including The Night We Never Met. His only earlier claim to fame was a pre-Ally McBeal Calista Flockhart starring in The Loop, a showcase of his.
Side Man came to be because he had joined a playwright's lab five years ago and had to come in every week with six pages.
“I think I was able to write it,” he says, “because on some level I thought, "Nobody ever produces anything of mine; this is never going to happen.'”
Surprise.
His parents are still speaking to him. “Each of my parents thought the depiction of the other was very fair,” he reports, “and it had this completely bizarre effect of bringing the family a little closer together and bringing people from the past back in touch with them.”
Side Man took a long, circuitous route to production. “I'm the king of readings,” says Mr. Leight. Once the play was finished more than three years ago, “We did a year and a half of readings.”
Finally there was a summer workshop in 1996 at the respected New York Stage and Film festival in the Hudson Valley. “People saw it and would say, "Kid, you'll never have to worry again.' I was out of work for the next year and a half.”
Finally a small producer (Peter Manning) took it on. There wasn't money for an upscale production “so we thought we'd sneak it into New York and let it get discovered.” They leased five weeks at a theater in lower Manhattan, the night they were going to close the very upscale Roundabout Theatre Company called. A play fell through, did Side Man want to fill the slot?
The story of Side Man ends happily, but Mr. Leight is placing no faith in the typical commercial Broadway producer. “I'm tired of hearing people complain about "the lack of good American playwrights.' What we have is a lack of places for good American plays to get produced.”
Post-Tony, his phone has been ringing off the hook with people wanting work and offering him work.
He spent the summer working on The Glimmer Brothers, related to Side Man central character Gene Glimmer. It had a workshop production at the famed WilliamstownTheatre Festival in Massachusetts, starring Friends' David Schwimmer, but it wasn't a comfortable experience. He had the feeling that everyone was “waiting for lightning to strike twice.”
He auditioned for and won the job of writing the book for Big Street, a musical based on a Damon Runyon story with Alan Menken (composer for many Disney animated films) and lyricist Marion Adler.
“There I am trying to play in the big leagues,” laughs Mr. Leight. “I go to Menken's house where we work, and it's like he has eight musicals stacked up over New York like planes over LaGuardia. He has an endless flow of melodies. It's exhausting and stunning.”
All this work does not necessarily translate into wealth. “I have a friend who owns a restaurant, he has a cookbook and he cooks on TV. He assumed I was making the kind of money he's making.
“When I told him what I do make, he said "Are you nuts? What's the point?'”
And Mr. Leight is hanging onto his ethics. He was offered a deal to develop Side Man for prime time TV, “but I turned it down. A friend more cynical than I am said, "Someone else will do it, you may as well rip yourself off,' but the numbers people are offering me to sell out are not high enough.”
If Mr. Leight isn't quite hearing the advice of his friend the chef or his friend the cynic, he is listening to the guy who runs the cheese store in his neighborhood.
“He said, "You write a Side Man three or four times in 20 years — that's not a bad life.'”
Mr. Leight laughs. “He's right.”
IF YOU GO
• What: Side Man
• When: Through Sept. 26
• Where: Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, 1127 Vine St., Over-the-Rhine
• Tickets: $25 adults, $20 students and seniors. 421-3555.
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