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Ed’s project #2

Posted by DCA Theater on August 18, 2009 in July-December 2009 Season, INCUBATOR Series: Promethean Theatre Ensemble

by Ed Rutherford, co-director of A Month of Development

In my last blog post a talked about one of the scripts I’m workshopping during this process.  Now it’s time to talk about the other one.  In order to explain the background of this second script and how I came to start working on it, though, I first must make a confession.  I am a huge musical theatre geek.  I mean massive.  I mean, I listen to showtunes almost exclusively, and songs from musicals make comprise something like 95% of the music on my iPod (ok, also a little They Might Be Giants, ABBA, and The Decemberists). 

Though not a writer of music myself, I have tremendous admiration for those who do that for the stage, from the classic musical theatre composers like Rodgers and Hammerstein, to the more modern and avant garde musical composers we see nowadays like Adam Guettel, Jason Robert Brown, and Michael John LaChiusa.  But my favorite will always be Stephen Sondheim.  His style is so intricate and instantly recognizable, yet each of his shows (Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd, to name just a few) are incredibly distinct.  While many of his musicals are quite well known, he also took part in some more obscure pieces that aren’t as well known today.  One of them is called Evening Primrose.

Evening Primrose was a televised mini-musical from the 60s, and starred Charmian Carr (yes, Liesl in the film version of The Sound of Music) and Anthony Perkins, (YES, Norman Bates in Psycho!  Bet you didn’t know he was also an amazing singer) as the romantic leads. 

It was an odd, bizarre, really compelling little tale about a poet (Perkins), disenchanted with the vulgar cruelty of modern day living, who decides to spend the rest of his days hiding out in a major department store, dodging the security guard and roaming freely at night.  It turns out that there is a whole secret society of people that have had the exact same idea- the oldest matriarch of the clan took refuge in the department store right after the stock market crash of ‘29.  Once he joins their society, he risks terrible consequences (being turned into a mannequin by the monsters that live in a nearby mortuary. Don’t ask) if he ever tries to return to the outside world.  Fatefully, he falls head over heels in love for the one pretty young lady of the society (Carr)- a girl who was raised by the secret society ever since she was lost by her mother one day in Women’s Hats.  The girl wants to escape to the real world she’s all but forgotten, and wants the poet to help her. 

There are only four songs by Sondheim in the TV musical (two of which, “I Remember Sky” and “Take Me To the World”, I consider to be among his most beautiful), but I was also tremendously compelled by the weird, Twilight-Zonesque nature of the tale itself.  It turns out “Evening Primrose” was a musical adaptation of the short story of the same name by an author named John Collier. And the story comes by its Twilight Zone similarities honestly- Collier also wrote for “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”  Intrigued by that story, I went on to read many of his other short stories, and found myself very compelled by them.  Eventually, I decided to take a stab at adapting one of them to the stage- specifically, a story called “The Chaser” in which a young man visits a mysterious shop in search of a love potion, but winds up with far more than he bargained for.  It was presented at City Lit Theater as part of their inaugural The Art of Adaptation festival in 2007, and the audience’s response seemed very positive.  So I began to explore the idea further- to develop what could potentially be an entire evening of adapted John Collier short stories.  “Evening Primrose” is not included, but Collier has written many other engaging, funny, creepy, or just plain odd tales to choose from. 

We did a reading on 8/13 of the latest draft, and I’m extremely encouraged by the results- we may be looking at a full production of the script sooner than I thought!