At the Summer Play Festival the playwright is king; so it is only fitting that we save our final "up close" report for a visit with one of the members of SPF royalty.  Today I am happy to bring you an interview with SPF playwright and author of Tio Pepe - Matthew Lopez. 

Matthew graciously sat down, amidst the excitement/chaos of opening week, to answer several questions I posed to him.  His answers are insightful, humorous and provide us with a fascinating look into what it means to be a playwright at SPF and have your show go from the page to the stage in about 3 weeks.

This is the last week of the festival, which closes on Sunday, and things are ending with a BANG! I had the opportunity to see Tio Pepe on Tuesday (opening night) and I am happy to report that it is one of the highlights of the festival!  I hope you enjoy this interview with Matthew and after you are finished reading it you can go to www.spfnyc.com/ and buy tickets for the final performances Friday, Saturday and Sunday! 

SPF: The Playwright's View

Play:

Tio Pepe

Author:

Matthew Lopez

Director:

Caitlin Moon

Synopsis:

Dreaming of a life as Broadway gypsies, The Candelarias refuse to vacate their Manhattan apartment scheduled for demolition. Music, dance, and golden years of the Broadway musical all take center stage in this touching and funny play about the strength of family in the face of impending disaster.

Bio:

Matthew Lopez's play The Whipping Man received its world premiere at Luna Stage in April, 2006, after development with Luna, The Lark Theatre Development Company and Breedingground Productions. The New Group presented a staged reading of the play in February 2008. The play is set to be directed by Lou Bellamy in February 2009 at Penumbra Theatre Company in St. Paul, MN. Matthew recently participated in the McCarter Theatre's "In Their Own Voices" event as part of the theatre's annual IN-Festival. He also contributed to the Monarch Theatre Company's recent One-Minute Play Festival. He is currently at work on Reverberation, a play about loneliness and designer dresses. Other plays include Noble Street, Between Us, and Phemmi Klompers: Agent to the Stars. Matthew is a graduate of the University of South Florida.

Matthew, how excited are you to be a part of SPF this year?  Are you having a great time?    

I am incredibly excited that Tio Pepe is part of SPF this year.  First of all, it's always such a thrill when your work is selected from so many submissions but particularly when it's SPF doing the selecting.  Secondly, it's at the Public this year, where so much theatre history has been made. Very daunting but very thrilling.  Finally, it's wonderful to see this play on its feet for the first time. So, yes, I'm excited and I'm having a really wonderful time. The nerves will probably not escape me but, for now, I'm having a lot of fun.

Let's turn the clock back a little.  Can you tell me how you found out about getting selected to participate in SPF?

I was at work and I got a call from my agent. I had submitted Tio Pepe to several summer festivals around the country and that particular week was bad for me, rejection-wise.  It was like murderer's row.  So when he called and said, "SPF" first, I figured it was a clean sweep. When he followed it up with, "you got in," I almost fell out of my chair.

I know that SPF is a ton of work - are you finding it challenging?  Did you wish you had 8 more weeks?

I wish I had 8 more years! That would be something, wouldn't it? It's definitely challenging to do it in the abbreviated time you're given, but it also puts you on your game.  Luxury sometimes breeds laziness.  We were fortunate enough to have three weeks of rehearsals, instead of the usual two, because of all the dance elements in the show, but we still felt the pressure.  My father used to tell me that if you gave a person six weeks or six months to complete a task, they will complete it exactly the same way both times. Sounds pretty much right to me.

I have heard that you have an amazing cast (including the adorable Barrett Foa).  Is it exciting to see your play come to life with a terrific cast?

We DO have an amazing cast, which includes not only the adorable and talented Barrett Foa, but also the largest collection of Latinos on a stage this side of the Richard Rodgers Theatre:  Vaneik Echeverria, Nathaniel Mendez, Benita Robledo and April Ortiz.  They have been given a big fat family drama to put together in three weeks and on top of that, have been asked to tap dance through much of it. It's like doing Death of Salesman: ON ICE! They constantly amaze me with their discoveries.  I have to remind myself sometimes that I know more about the play than anyone in the room (except, perhaps, my eerily insightful director Caitlin Moon) and that all of them have had a fraction of the time I've had with the characters.  That's why it's so wonderful when they look up from their script, light bulb resolutely glowing above their heads, and pronounce a new discovery they've made that was always in the back of my mind, unarticulated.  The day the actors start teaching you about your play is a happy day, indeed.  With this cast, it's like going to grad school.

Do you have any funny rehearsal anecdotes?  With everyone working so hard, there must be a bit of loopiness that goes on? 

In rehearsal, we kept referring to one of the characters as "Louise," of "sing out, Louise" fame.  It's a somewhat apt comparison. After about a week of this, he looks up at me and says, "hey, who's this Louise chick and why do you keep calling me that?" Priceless.

There have been a few bumps along the road, yes?  You lost an actor and had to find a new one...can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes, we did lose an actor about a week before rehearsals started.  It's funny: in a cast full of dancing Latinos, we never imagined the hardest role to cast would be the good-looking white guy.  Of all things that has happened in this process, that was certainly the most stressful for me. We already had a full cast in place and so re-casting was in many ways like looking for a replacement actor for a role that was never originated.  Then Barrett Foa walked into the room and, like a ray of sunshine, dispelled all the gloom. (That sound you hear is Barrett throwing up.)  Him joining the team so late in the process was really a boost in the arm at exactly the moment we needed one.

Let's talk about your play.  I am so excited to see it.  Can you tell us a bit about the show.  What it is about?  How you got the idea for it?

In a very small nutshell, the play is set in New York in the late 1950's and tells the story of a family of Puerto Rican actor/singer/dancers who dream of a life as Broadway gypsies and who are obsessed with West Side Story.  They are facing eviction from their apartment on West 66th Street so that the city can tear down their building and put up Lincoln Center.

The idea came from my own family, who, while not all actor/singer/dancers, were musical theatre fans.  When the movie version of West Side Story was being filmed around the city, my father and two of his siblings worked as extras.  My father was the only one who made the final cut.  You can see him running up to the fence in the Prologue to watch the Sharks kick the crap out of Baby John.

I wanted to write about musical theatre and what it does to those of us who love it, how it lives so completely in our imaginations.  You see a musical and then can go home and re-live it through the cast recording.  It survives in your imagination in a way that is quite different from any other medium.  It fuels dreams and fantasies.  That's something I hoped to capture in the play.

Have you been revising the play through out the process or did you leave it pretty much "as is"?

I've been working on the play for two and a half years and in that time it's gone through countless readings and rewrites.  I did a reading of the play in early May, after I found out I got in, and then went back to work once more.  I took one last stab at it about two weeks before rehearsals started at a script retreat with my director.  So by the time we got into rehearsals, I felt that the overall structure--the big picture--was settled and all that was left was specific, pin-point work.  That turned out to be mostly the case.  Much of the rewriting in rehearsals was of a subtractive nature: lots of cutting, trimming, streamlining. Some scenes needed it more than others. 

There is one big scene in the second act that has gone through as many permutations as there have been rewrites.  That one, of course, took a little coaxing on the page before it seemed natural on the stage.  It was, also, a completely collaborative effort between me, Caitlin, Greg Graham (our choreographer) and the two actors in the scene. The five of us built that scene into what it is now. That's a nice thing to be able to say.

Tio Pepe has music and dance and singing and merriment, I understand.  Can you talk to us a little bit about that - how does music and dance figure into the piece?

Music and dance are an essential part of the play and have been from the moment I started writing it.  I knew I wanted to write something in the tradition of the classic meat and potatoes American family drama but with my own approach.  Call it the rice and beans American family drama.  That approach, I knew, would include a lot of dance. 

The characters in the play use music and dance to deal with the realities of their lives.  It is at times used as a celebration, a weapon, a means of escape, of bridging long abandoned gaps, and of wish fulfillment.

For me, doing this play correctly meant working full-time with a choreographer and hiring actors who were strong dancers.  We were very fortunate to find Greg Graham, who is a veteran of Jerry Mitchell's earlier shows such as "Hairspray" and "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" and who is currently the dance captain of "Billy Elliot."  Essentially, we got the real deal. Greg is an expert on almost every aspect of musical theatre dance.  He told me he said yes to the project because he didn't want anyone else to stage the dances but him.  That's the kind of cutthroat ambition I like in a choreographer.  He has taken a classic musical theater approach to the dances, with a nod to the Robbins style and incorporating Mambo, Cha-Cha and Salsa dancing.  It is truly a thrill to watch him work and create that which I only in my wildest dreams thought might have been possible with this play.

I also have to mention the incredible work that Barrett and Nathaniel Mendez, who plays the family's middle child, Alejandro, are doing.  The two of them have the lion's share of the dances in the play.  Nathaniel, in particular, is doing beautiful work in what is his New York stage debut.  We were worried about finding a young Latino actor who could tackle such a difficult role and do it all in plié. We were lucky to find him.  He and Barrett should create a vaudeville team together when the show is over.  They look amazing together.  I'll happily volunteer to write the jokes.

I think SPF is so great, because it such a nurturing and supportive environment for playwrights.  How do you think this experience has helped you as a writer and helped you to grow as an artist?

Writers rarely get this much attention.  We write alone, our scripts are read by nameless, faceless people.  Our rejection letters often border on the "form" and the signature, if real, is usually that of Intern Number Three.  Throughout this entire process, I have felt completely supported and nurtured (to borrow your words).  SPF makes it its mission to feature their playwrights, to push them to the front and to make sure they don't get obscured behind the productions.  It just doesn't happen quite like that anywhere else. 

Another nice thing about SPF is the sense of community that is created between the writers.  I have gotten to know several of the writers and then had the pleasure of seeing their work over the last four weeks.  We are a diverse group, telling very different stories.  But our voices are clear and our goals are the same.  It's been wonderful to get to share this experience with them.  We root for each other because we are all in the same boat.

How have you been keeping yourself "sane" during the crazy world of SPF?  Do you chug Red Bull and eat Power Bars?  What is your secret?

Caitlin recently introduced me to the joys of iced coffee.  I don't know why I was so resistant to join the bandwagon.  We rehearse in the evenings and around 4:30 you do need a pick-me-up. My favorite is the Starbucks iced double espresso with skim milk and a touch of sugar. $2.80. Can't beat that.

Other than that, the way I have found to keep sane is to put my head down, do the work and trust that everyone around me is doing the same. There comes a point in the process where the playwright becomes superfluous. I've learned to embrace rather than resist that. It helps reduce stress when you acknowledge that you are, at times, less vital than the interns.  It also keeps you humble.

What has been the most exciting part of SPF?

Besides the myriad parties, having Jack O'Brien tell me he loves my play and getting to meet Annie Golden, just the profound joy of seeing something I have labored on for several years finally come to life. 

Being surrounded by extremely talented artists who are, for a brief moment, wholly dedicated to making my play look and sound as perfect as it can be.  Watching actors create these roles and surprise me with their discoveries.  Finally seeing the dances I had imagined in my head.  Getting to work with my good friend, Caitlin.  Creating roles and work for four very talented Latino actors.  Getting to work with Barrett, whom I've long admired as a fan.

And did I mention all the parties?

What has been the most challenge part of SPF?

Doing it all in three weeks and opening cold without previews. But, then again, that is the point of the Festival in many ways and we are all up to that challenge. But it is a challenge in the best sense of the word.

Also, I find it's a challenge not to run up on stage and start dancing with the cast, myself.  I am, always was and always will be...a ham.

What are you going to do after all of this is over?  Go on a long vacation?  Get an all day spa treatment?

The spa treatment actually happened the day before tech. After the Festival, I'm headed to Oregon with my boyfriend for a much needed vacation.

What are you working on next?  Can you give us the scoop?

I'm finishing a play called "Reverberation" about a boy and girl who meet as neighbors and slowly form a relationship built on mutual loneliness and fear of the outside world.  Among other things, it's about hate speech and the way it echoes and reverberates throughout the world.  It's a much smaller play than anything I've attempted before.  It was a fun challenge to paint on such a small canvass after Tio Pepe. 

I'm also starting to work with a composer, Ryan Scott Oliver, on a new musical. We don't have the rights yet so I won't jinx it by telling you what it's based on.  I'll only say that it could be really fun and really dangerous, if we're able to do it.

I might be adapting a novel from the 1960's for the screen with my friend Lucas Hall.  Again, rights pending.

And, of course, I'll be looking for Pepe's next home.

If you could sum up your experience at SPF in one word.  What would that word be.  If you are desperate you can totally have another word, but no more - two is the limit!

Opening doors.