commentary
"what happened when
israel horovitz
showed up at
long beach playhouse"
long beach, ca
01 march 01
commentary by
eric eberwein

---

Okay, so we got an e-mail in the middle of November. "We" being the greater playwriting/theater community of Orange County, CA.

It said: Israel Horovitz appears on short notice this weekend at Long Beach Playhouse.

Show up.

Israel Horovitz: a major American playwright by any standard. Someone to listen to, someone to learn from. So the local cognoscenti, the people who really cared and wanted to excel, we all decided to be there, because Israel Horovitz had proven so much, he had nothing left to prove.

The Rep.
I had heard some stories.
I had read some anecdotes.
I had even met some people who had met him.

They said Mr. Horovitz was -- well -- feisty. Difficult.
Someone else, this guy who I didn't like very much anyway, had referred to him as "a jerk."

But you can't go on hearsay. All I had was a book. The usual Smith & Kraus book, in this case Israel Horovitz: 16 Short Plays, compiled and published in 1994. Each play having an introduction, a really well-written and memorable introduction from Mr. Horovitz. Unforgettable stories of a man who had really lived:

Filling in scared and nervous for another actor at the opening night of Line...
Getting married at 17, becoming a father, and losing a child...
Knowing at 17 that he'd be a playwright...
Living in London with a new wife and daughter on $35 a week...
Writing and directing Hertz commercials to make a living...
Trying to be a vegetarian in 1967...

Meeting his lifelong friend Al Pacino for the first time, after seeing him excel in a worthless and obtuse play way off-Broadway. ("He was a janitor in a run-down building in the West 60s -- his apartment was in the basement. I remember drinking coffee from old orange juice cans.")

Hanging out in the New York Knicks locker room in the mid-1970s with his sons, doing research for a CBS miniseries on basketball he got paid $80,000 for writing, which never aired...
Hanging out in a hooker bar in Berlin and taking notes for a new play...
Watching Deep Throat in a 42nd Street grindhouse against his will alongside a guffawing James Coco...

...all told with candor and wit, a great autobigoraphy of sorts that came free with the play collection.

And his memories of the late 1960s and early 1970s: "Two things were certain in my life: 1) never enough money; 2) absolutely no sleep."

And his habits back then: "Sometime in the early 1970s, I knew I had to change my life, or lose it. I was smoking, drinking, overdoing recreational drugs, never sleeping. I was having daily attacks of free-floating panic that almost always ended in agonizing, blinding, migraine headaches. I weighed in at 130 lbs. dressed up." In the next paragraph, he passes out at the steering wheel while driving through the Santa Monica Mountains, and almost drives his family into the bottom of a canyon en route to Oliver Hailey's house.

Then he took up running and saved his life and got off the substances and wrote 20 plays in 10 years and continued to kick ass, forever and ever amen.

Okay, so it was Saturday morning and we went to Long Beach Playhouse. Up the stairs to the Studio Theater. There was nothing happening, or so it seemed. Some mistake?

Then, just inside the Studio Theater, there he was. Israel Horovitz. Sittin' onstage in a black jacket, gray jeans, some comfortable black shoes. Just talkin'.

He was quiet. I mean, you could hear him, but he was quiet. He was not feisty. There was no advanced ass-kicking. He seemed mellow. This was the real Israel Horovitz.

TIME OUT

Imagine if you were Israel Horovitz.

Imagine the whole deal. The "hey man, would you take a look at my script" sycophants, the losers and do-nothings who come up to you, asking you to help them, to give them advice or magic to make them a star. You, having seen it all, having lived, trying to inspire, trying to teach, just trying to be yourself.

The whole deal of "being a writer," the writer identity, that's your burden. You are expected, maybe, to "be a writer," to function as would a jukebox, to perform in some way, to live up to what students and armchair playwrights imagine you to be like.

I wonder how he deals with it. But I certainly don't ask.

Imagine if everyone were Israel Horovitz.

The world would be intense. Relaxed, okay, but with more inner fire, more personality. The world would operate on first draft, but it would be as good as the fourth.

The scripts of our lives would be interesting.

END OF TIME OUT

What did he say?
Okay, so the talk only drew about 20 people, which was disappointing. In a way, it seemed to be a de facto meeting of the Long Beach Playhouse principals. Elaine Herman, the artistic director, was present. So was Bob Leigh, the managing director. Both of whom, by the questions they asked, were interested in making exciting and new theatre, and in involving the Long Beach community in the process. And others were there as well. So the talk sometimes seemed like an artistic staff meeting, as well as just shooting the breeze.

It went like this.

He talked about how rare it is to talk to a veteran playwright, a playwright who had stayed a playwright and not run salivating to Lifetime or the WB or wherever to make easy money writing crap. "I'm a dinosaur," he reflected. "You read about me, but you don't expect to see one."

He talked about the New York Playwrights Lab, the informal gathering of top playwrights that he oversees and has fun with. Among the current members: Kenneth Lonergan, Richard Vetere, Warren Leight. They all try to write five pages a week. The feedback is really good, he noted. "They're not there to bullshit you, because they're not into bullshit themselves." He said 100% of the plays that have come out of the Lab have been produced, many commercially.

He also runs the Gloucester Repertory Theatre in Massachusetts, which is obviously high-profile. So he knows a thing about how hard it can be for playwrights in the market. "[GPT] gets 3,000 new plays a year. What do 3,000 new plays look like? It looks like a Buick."

He asked about what LBP does to develop new plays. This led to a brief discussion of the playhouse's annual New Works Festival. The staged readings, the talkbacks, the local critics who serve as judges.

Upon the mention of critics, he got a little sour. He said there shouldn't be critics involved. It was explained that the critics give notes to the playwrights, with the intention of helping them. He wasn't sure that was help. Dismissively, he said, "You do what you feel comfortable with."

He frowned on Q& A talkbacks. "Most playwrights under the age of 50 can't deal with a Q&A -- 20% of the people that talk just want to hear their own voices."

He didn't really care for dramaturges either. He said introducing a dramaturge into the play development leaves the playwright with "almost a Hollywood setup," with hints of executives and writing-by-committee. He wasn't for it.

Elaine Herman mentioned that A Really, Really Famous Theatre in Chicago was interested in Dan Riley's "Spinelli", which had been produced at LBP and which had come up through the New Works Festival. So there was hope, and good stuff happening at LBP.

Bob Leigh asked some questions.

Elaine Herman talked about how LBP was looking for new plays. She mentioned "a dearth of new plays, we can't find plays." It was the question people have asked since 1965 or so: Where are the new American plays? (That is, where are the new American plays that are exactly like the old ones.) She talked about maybe programming to various constituencies in Long Beach: the gay community, the Latino community, the Cambodian community.

She mentioned the LBP production, a few years ago, of Octavio Solis' "Man of the Flesh".

Israel Horovitz had never heard of Octavio Solis.

Mr. Horovitz asked if they hadn't thought about starting a playwright's group at LBP. That would be one way to develop new plays. They really hadn't thought of that.

Mr. Horovitz asked if we had seen "Sunshine", which he wrote the award-winning screenplay for. Only one person had seen it. (Later on, weeks later, this woman I knew, very attractive also, started crying when I told her that I had sat in a room with the screenwriter of "Sunshine", and how she would have given anything to meet that screenwriter. And I made nothing further of the opportunity.)

He asked if we had heard of his late friend John Berry, a blacklisted American actor whose film adaptation of Fugard's "Boesman and Lena" was coming out. He had worked with him in Paris. We had not.

(Israel Horovitz is something like a national treasure in France, or so I have heard. Ionesco, for example, was a friend of his and wrote the forward to this Smith & Kraus anthology.)

He kept talking about something called "Eat-a-Puss".
Some kind of great work of drama.
Then I realized he was from Boston.

He talked about his play "Henry Lumper", which dealt with the intersection of New England commercial fishing and the heroin trade. How when it was produced, people got so angry they found out where he lived and threw dead fish on his lawn. "The Mayor of Gloucester said he found out about the heroin problem in Gloucester from my play." (The North Shore towns have long had this big blue-collar hesher/stoner culture; you've seen it parodied on SNL skits by Jimmy Fallon and Adam Sandler.)

He said you gotta love writing plays, and it's lonely sometimes, and it's not about money ("money is money"), it's about passion. "There are about ten playwrights in the country who make a living. It's the sad truth."

He had this -- what do you call it -- analogy or saying he put across. Talking about the changes everybody goes through in life, and the changes in his own life, he said: "If the man I am today met the man I was, there'd be a fistfight." And that might be true for any playwright, at least the male playwright, who is powered by desperation and dreams and then one day, finds a sense of grace and peace and maturity and accepts his talents and the world -- and then his career moves forward and really starts to happen.

And then he got up and stretched, and he looked good, like a guy who runs a lot and takes care of himself. He's 60 now. And we had to go too, and we were glad that Israel Horovitz had intersected our paths and we hoped it was all meant to be.

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