Onstage exposes

New York —  Knowing a playwright can be dangerous business. Just ask Harry Sanborn, the embattled character played by Jack Nicholson in the film “Something’s Gotta Give.” After a dalliance with playwright Erica Barry (Diane Keaton), he walks into a Broadway theater to hear an entire audience laughing uproariously at a character obviously based on him, exposed sagging posterior and all.

What filmmaker Nancy Meyers has fun with on film is a much more serious business for the playwrights who face an ethical quandary when presenting characters loosely based on people in their lives: lovers, spouses, family members, friends and others who may be dismayed or hurt to find their thinly disguised selves on public view. Almost all playwrights, from Eugene O’Neill to Edward Albee to Tony Kushner, have had to confront what can be a minefield, for even the most affectionate portraits can be misconstrued as acts of betrayal.

“It’s a sticky moral ground, a very daunting thing,” says Douglas Wright, author of “I Am My Own Wife.” The play won a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for telling the real-life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transvestite antiques collector who survived both the repressive Nazi and East German regimes only to stir controversy when it was revealed she had been a government informant for the latter. “I didn’t want the act of writing a play to be an act of informing on her as she had informed on others. You hope that the larger truths you aim to express in your work merit the disclosures you are making.”

The most notorious example of a playwright plumbing autobiography for inspiration is the wrenching 1964 Arthur Miller drama, “After the Fall.” A major revival of the play opens Thursday at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway.

The new production, directed by Michael Mayer, stars Peter Krause (“Six Feet Under”) and brunet Carla Gugino (“Karen Sisco”) as a star-crossed couple: the lawyer Quentin and his wife, Maggie, an emotionally damaged singer whom he tries to save but whom he ultimately abandons to save himself. Taking place in Quentin’s tortured imagination, “Fall” is an impressionistic confessional detailed in scenes of his early family life (scarred by a demanding mother and weak father), his seeming impotence in the face of the anti-communist hysteria that drives a friend to suicide, and his cold betrayal of the women in his life.

The original production marked the reunion of the dramatist with director Elia Kazan, with whom he had shared his greatest successes, including “Death of a Salesman.” But the media and public alike chose to ignore the larger ambitions of the play to focus almost exclusively on the relationship between Quentin and Maggie, as alter egos for Miller and his second wife, Marilyn Monroe.

And how could they not, with the actress Barbara Loden in a blond wig playing the character in an arc that took her from a sexy innocent not wanting to be taken as a joke to an abusive, self-destructive harridan. Coming as it did less than two years after Monroe committed suicide, the play was a sensation, inviting venomous barbs from the critics who saw it as a righteous, self-serving diatribe against a defenseless woman. “A 3 1/2-hour breach of taste,” Robert Brustein wrote in the New Republic. After the opening, the playwright wrote to Kazan: “It is clear that the Marilyn business has effectively overwhelmed the play for almost all of the critics and a good part of the audience as well.”

Miller, who was not available for this article, has remained tight-lipped about the “Marilyn business.” (In the ‘90s, when a reporter cornered him at a restaurant and asked him about his second wife, the playwright punched him.) But Martin Gottfried, author of the biography “Arthur Miller: His Life and Work,” maintains that the playwright felt blindsided by the brouhaha over “Fall.”

During rehearsals for the original production, producer Robert Whitehead was shocked to receive a note from Miller: “My god, it just occurred to me: do you think people will think this character is based on Marilyn?”

“He was not being disingenuous. He deeply believed that he had invented Maggie,” Gottfried says. “You have to remember, Miller had done this before, as had Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. He had based ‘The Crucible’ on himself and his first wife, Mary; ‘The Price’ on himself and his brother; and Willy and Linda Loman in ‘Death of a Salesman’ was based on his aunt and uncle. But who knew them? Everybody knew who Marilyn Monroe was.”

Miller may have felt, Gottfried says, that he was being much harder on himself in the play -- through his treatment of Quentin -- than any of the other characters. Those include Mickey, the informer (based on Kazan); Louise, the wronged spouse (modeled on Mary, Miller’s first wife); and the morally compassionate Holga (the alter ego of Inge Morath, the Austrian-born photographer whom Miller married). Miller’s search for expiation is balanced among these characters. Indeed, Maggie is largely only in the second act. But the vividness of the character -- and the ghost of Marilyn -- makes her loom much larger. “That was the elephant in the room when the play opened. And that’s still a problem today for the play, perhaps even more so,” Gottfried says. “She’s more iconic than ever.”

Miller had begun writing what would become “After the Fall” years before Monroe’s death. The playwright wrote Kazan that he had conceived of the notion that Maggie, spiraling downward in a morass of drugs and alcohol, had to die in the play on the very day before the August 1962 morning when Monroe was found dead of an overdose.

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Death was ‘a writer’s liberation’

The actress’ death obviously affected the development of the “Fall” -- as did the death of Von Mahlsdorf in the writing of “I Am My Own Wife.”

“It was a personal tragedy but a writer’s liberation,” says Wright, who had befriended Von Mahlsdorf after having been alerted by a friend to “the most singular, eccentric character the Cold War ever birthed.”

As he describes in the play, in which he is a character, Wright petitioned Von Mahlsdorf for the right to celebrate her iconoclastic life in a play and interviewed her over many months. Wright was thrown into a quandary when, in the newly reunited Germany, his heroine’s reputation was severely damaged with charges of espionage on behalf of the East German secret police. Von Mahlsdorf fled her native land for Sweden, where she died seven years later.

“I felt I no longer had to write the play to garner her approval or sanction,” Wright says. “Had she not died, I probably would’ve been reluctant to include as much of the moral culpability of her life as an East German informant -- and the play would have been far lesser, dare I say.”

His first obligation, Wright says, was to present Charlotte in all her “maddening complexity.” “It’s the greatest tribute you can give someone, to afford them all the contradictions that they exhibited in life.”

Playwright Paula Vogel concurs, noting that no character can be strictly autobiographical; lives are too complex for that. She faced that challenge in 1992 when she wrote “The Baltimore Waltz” about her brother, Carl, who died from AIDS in 1988. The play will be revived in the Signature Theatre’s season devoted to Vogel’s work.

In the play, a sister and brother embark on a fantastical trip to Europe that inverts the real-life dynamic: He is healthy, and she is dying of a terminal illness and in search of a cure.

Vogel was most concerned, she says, about the impact the play would have on her parents and surviving brother, who were still in mourning. “I made sure that everybody had a copy of the play and told them, ‘I know it will be painful, but I hope it will be healing.’ ”

Vogel adds that she believes she pulled her punches only once to protect the feelings of Carl’s loved ones: She refused to show him in the ugly, devastating final stages of AIDS.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“How I Learned to Drive”) says the most difficult challenge for her was when she had “to surrender the burden of being faithful” to her brother’s memory. “There were times when I’d think, ‘Oh, that’s nothing like my brother, that’s not how he would say that,’ ” she says in observing the actors during rehearsal. “But that shock of alienation would be replaced by the thrill of discovery.”

Vogel, who teaches playwriting at Yale, says she counsels her students to examine their motives in writing about people who are close to them. Is it out of love? Anger? Revenge? During one term, she found herself in the unsettling position of being the thinly veiled subject of one her student’s plays.

“I thought we were in a good relationship, that we were close. But the play was frightening and chilling and filled with incredible violence,” she says. “It wasn’t playwriting, it was a form of assault, character assassination. This was an acting out of a fantasy, one step removed from the scenarios of John Hinckley and Mark David Chapman.”

In this exercise, Vogel says, the student broke a primary rule: When writing about people who are still alive, you must protect their privacy as much as possible. This rule was paramount to Tony Kushner when he set out to write a character loosely based on Maudie Lee Davis, the African American maid in his family’s household in Louisiana in the early 1960s.

Kushner felt he did not need to get Davis’ permission to write about her for what would become the musical “Caroline, or Change.” But he did want to dedicate the play to her and sought her approval.

“I very nervously sent it to her before I sent it to anybody else,” Kushner says of the show, which revolves around an embittered woman with complex relationships with all around her, including the 8-year-old son of her employers who is clearly a stand-in for Kushner himself.

“I was scared that she’d be shocked and upset about certain things in the play,” he says. “I held my breath, and she didn’t get back to me. I finally called her. She told me on the phone, ‘I know it was written with a lot of love for me.’ And that was the permission I was looking for.”

Knowing that reading a play can be vastly different from experiencing it onstage, Kushner cleared a second hurdle with Davis when he flew her to New York to see the musical at the Public Theater. “She loved it,” Kushner says. “She came out crying with her daughter, who is named Caroline, by the way, and said of Tonya Pinkins, ‘You know, that woman looks just like me, but she’s not much like me at all. She’s a very angry woman and very sad, and I’m not like that.’ I didn’t argue with her, but obviously I had a different impression as a kid.”

In fact, Kushner says, he had more difficulties with his family over the less-autobiographical “Angels in America” than with “Caroline.” His mother, who died in 1990, had seen early productions of the plays and was struck by the similarities to herself in the scene in which Joe Pitt “comes out” to his mother, Hannah, a coldly repressive woman, over a pay phone.

“I had also called my mother from a pay phone when I was 26 to tell her I was gay, and she thought she was Hannah Pitt. In fact, she wasn’t in any way or form like her. But it upset her that I used that moment in the play.”

Kushner says the ethics of writing about family members is always a daunting question, no matter how well they are disguised. The questions become especially prickly when one considers Eugene O’Neill, who mercilessly exposed his family in what Kushner considers the greatest American drama ever written, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

“It’s such a shocking thing to do, and yet I buy that he had to write it, it was such a wound in his soul,” says Kushner, who is writing a play about a little-known real-life personality who saved a young O’Neill from suicide. “I think what is important is that O’Neill specified that he did not want the play produced until 25 years after his death, though Carlotta, O’Neill’s widow, broke those terms.”

Horton Foote, who also writes extensively about his family, especially in his nine-play “Orphan Home Cycle,” says he is glad that Carlotta overrode the stipulation.

“ ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ has so blessed the world that I would hate to see it under lock and key,” he says. It is not, after all, journalism, he adds. “You’re creating a scene, a situation in the world, in a certain place and time. O’Neill couldn’t really write about his parents. It’s too subjective. On some level, even they were fictional.”

Foote’s latest play, “The Day Emily Married,” which opens off Broadway next month, is set in 1955 in the small fictional town that serves as the usual stand-in for his hometown of Wharton, Texas. Though the drama features a greedy young man who on his wedding day moves in with his wife’s parents, Foote says he doesn’t think that the play would offend any of the people on whom the characters are loosely based. “Most have already ‘met their rewards,’ ” he says. He carefully controls the licensing of his plays that could be hurtful to anyone, and he has made a point of informing his heirs to be sensitive to that issue.

The protective stance toward those who provide the raw materials for the playwright’s craft, of course, presupposes that they are otherwise defenseless. Vogel argues that this may not necessarily be the case. It’s been said that “every good writer betrays his or her subject,” but Vogel argues: “I think in playwriting, you can say that every good subject betrays the writer.”

In the course of putting a character, living or dead, on the stage, “they invariably lead us down on a path that is antithetical to what we think we know about them. They manipulate us. The Carl that I started to write about at the beginning was far different from the Carl that we ended up with.”

Indeed, far from being a helpless pawn in Miller’s cosmology, Maggie/Marilyn has proved to dominate “After the Fall” in ways unintended by her creator. Miller is again assaying the perils of writing about his second wife in a new play, “Finishing the Picture,” which will bow this fall at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. That play features an unstable actress, beloved by millions, who jeopardizes a movie with her neurotic behavior -- a scenario straight out of the real-life debacle of “The Misfits,” the 1961 film that Miller wrote for Monroe. Whether Miller acknowledges the parallels or not, it seems likely that Monroe could well have the last word in this play as well.