Writer and Director Will Confer at Home
By CELIA McGEE
Published: August 27, 2006
THE director Jo Bonney is watching Eric Bogosian tear up the script of his play “SubUrbia.”
Rip, rip, rip. There go Pages 103 and 104 of the nine-character ensemble piece about young people lost, longing and addled as they head into their 20’s, afraid they’ll never escape the suburban mallscape where they have come of age. They feed off hunks of anger and frustrated idealism as thick and unhealthy as the pizza slices they buy from the Pakistani owner of an unidentified convenience store. As they hang out in his parking lot, their Rollerblades at the ready, their self-confidence is under siege and their jealous suspicion of outsiders ratchets up to racism and violence. They’re waiting not for Godot but for Pony, a former schoolmate nearing the brass ring as a rock musician who drops by in a limo with his publicist.
But the play was written in 1994, and as Ms. Bonney and Mr. Bogosian prepare for a new production at the Second Stage Theater next month, he brings in pages that are reworked to take into account the reality she wants reflected in the piece, about an American anyplace where everything, yet nothing, has changed. He really gets into shredding the old pages in front of his director and the somewhat awestruck young cast.
“Or maybe we should just autograph them and sell them at a benefit somewhere,” Mr. Bogosian, 53, said in a satirical aside. Ms. Bonney merely smiled a tolerant smile.
The actors include the likes of Jessica Capshaw and Kieran Culkin, no strangers to celebrity’s wattage. Nevertheless they seem fascinated to see this famous progenitor of bad-dudeness — writer and performer of “Drinking in America,” “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” and other genre-altering solos — at the professional beck and call of a respected, versatile and in-demand director, his wife.
Like, wow. Mr. “Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead” is married.
Yet the fact of their marriage was precisely why Ms. Bonney says she didn’t want to direct the play.
“That was a real stumbling block for me,” she said. “I had to eliminate knowing Eric. If I’d never met him, what would I think of this play? For so long my personal and professional lives have been separate: we would go off and work apart, then come together at the end of the day.”
Ms. Bonney, a graphic artist by training, got her start as a director inadvertently, helping Mr. Bogosian in the 1980’s on the acts with which he first made his name. But in recent years she has moved on, with notable success, to diverse ensemble works like Lisa Loomer’s “Living Out,” Lanford Wilson’s “Fifth of July,” Neil LaBute’s last two plays and this year’s hip-hop adaptation of Euripides, “The Seven.”
“There was this thing where our kids were older, and I could be Jo Bonney, in brackets, director, rather than, in brackets, wife of Eric Bogosian,” she said.
The notion of having Ms. Bonney direct “SubUrbia” came from Carol Rothman, the artistic director of Second Stage, where Ms. Bonney is an artistic associate. “We circled around it for two or three months,” Ms. Rothman said, “but I knew it was right for her. It has a large cast — she loves that — and it’s political.”
When Ms. Bonney and Mr. Bogosian met 26 years ago — he a caustic refugee from Woburn, Mass., she a hip Australian art-school graduate circling the globe and on her way to South America — both were avid participants in the downtown punk scene, sharing a commitment to anti-establishment culture and social change. They still do, as well as a belief in theater’s concomitant role.
Wait — South America? “I never knew that,” Mr. Bogosian said. Two teenage sons, a tranquil country house and breakfasts near home at Bubby’s in TriBeCa later, “she can still surprise me,” he said. “Whereas if I come up with a story she hasn’t heard, it’s a good day for me.”
The choreographer Bill T. Jones has known the couple since those early days and collaborated with Ms. Bonney on “The Seven.” “Jo wants to do what’s worth doing,” he said. “She takes on tough projects that come from the fringe and gives them new life in a way that helps move them into a position where they can encounter a wider audience.”
The original “SubUrbia,” with a cast that featured Martha Plimpton and Steve Zahn, managed the rare feat of drawing an MTV-conditioned audience to Lincoln Center Theater. In the intervening years it has become a staple of college theater and drama-school auditions. The actor Daniel Eric Gold, who plays Jeff, a would-be writer paralyzed by his ambivalent desire to make something of himself, directed and acted in the play as his senior thesis at Pennsylvania State University. Yet under Ms. Bonney and Mr. Bogosian “it’s like a new play,” he said. “It feels even more relevant. Kids in suburbia now have the Internet, and because it connects them to the outside, they feel even more stuck because they can see the larger world.”
MS. BONNEY said the context of politics and history made the greatest difference, more than any changes she or Mr. Bogosian had brought to bear. “What’s remarkable is how little in the play had to be changed,” she said. Still, as an observer of cultural tidings, Mr. Bogosian continues to update the play with small nuggets: a reference to “The Da Vinci Code,” here a nod to Eve Ensler, there a mention of Darfur.
Ms. Bonney has contributed a subtle shift with the set, no longer a rundown 7-Eleven but “one of those pristine, aluminum-gridded stores we see driving through New Jersey or Massachusetts,” she said. The bleak, dead-end mind-set of much of the teenage generation, she said, remains what it was in the 90’s — or the 70’s, when Mr. Bogosian hung at the Woburn strip mall that inspired the play — but the “cookie-cutter” quality of the surroundings is more threatening and depressing.
All the stores look exactly the same,” she said. “They have no character.” Take into account 9/11 and six years of a presidential administration representing Ms. Bonney’s and Mr. Bogosian’s worst political nightmares, and “SubUrbia” seems altered almost beyond recall. “It shows what history has done to us,” Ms. Bonney said.
Nazeer and Pakeeza, the Pakistani brother and sister who run the store, for instance, “have been dogged by events bigger than themselves,” she said. “Just the decision about whether they’re going to call the cops is so loaded, because the I.N.S. is such a presence now.” Suddenly the word terrorist is among the epithets the local teenagers hurl at them. And, unlike in 1994, these same thoughtless kids “could be sent off to war,” Ms. Bonney said.
For Tim, the alcoholic military dropout, Mr. Bogosian said he felt he had to create a glancing back story that “goes into Operation Iraqi Freedom but also explains why he didn’t see active duty.”
Manu Narayan, who plays Nazeer, “SubUrbia’s” immigrant conscience, added that in the new version: “Nazeer talks about the political situation in Pakistan and how a change of regimes affected certain classes of people, who had to leave the country. You understand why these people want to live here, which is more important to them than their religion.”
As for Pony, whether Mr. Bogosian and his vegetable-gardening, doting-father self likes it or not, Ms. Bonney said, the incipient rock star and the writer who imagined him into being are one and the same. Both were “suffocating in small places and had to get out, be allowed to be themselves and dangerous,” she said.
That residual sense of brooding anger is what led the playwright and television writer Warren Leight, who goes back 25 years with the couple, to push for casting Mr. Bogosian as the police Captain Cross in the new season of NBC’s “Law & Order, Criminal Intent,” on which Mr. Leight is also a co-executive producer.
“Eric just has to stand there, and the subtext comes across,” Mr. Leight said with a laugh. “You can tell his character has axes to grind, that it wasn’t easy for him coming up through the force. Eric wanted me to make sure Cross carries a gun. He’s probably packing now.”
More stage work is in the offing too. Though Mr. Bogosian said he was “done with the solo performance thing,” the actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz of the Labyrinth Theater Company have persuaded him to reprise a recent semi-solo piece next spring. Last year at the Labyrinth, which Mr. Bogosian has since joined, Mr. Hoffman directed him in “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” as a gentleman by the name of Satan. “I was really intimidated about meeting him,” Mr. Hoffman recalled. “I mean, he was an iconic figure to us, he’s the guy. But he’s embodied the idea of the company, to be worker among workers, and he couldn’t be more self-effacing.”
The new show will be running around the same time that Ms. Bonney directs Mr. LaBute’s latest, followed by Alan Ball’s first play in 12 years, “All That I Will Ever Be,” at the New York Theater Workshop. And then a new production of “Talk Radio” arrives on Broadway, starring Liev Schreiber.
It will be another opportunity to look in the mirror of Mr. Bogosian’s career, as has happened on this project. “What’s interesting to me working on ‘SubUrbia,’ ” he said, “is that the guy I was 12 years ago was fascinated with the whole topic of fame and fortune — I was just coming off a period of pretty strong stuff like that — but that’s not the leading plane of it for me anymore. Not to sound pretentious, but I’ve been reading ‘The Three Sisters’ again lately, and looking at the way Chekhov paid such close attention to character. Which is what Jo is also so good at, the earned small beats, the little nuances. And no director I’ve ever worked with is as precise about the writing. She won’t let you cover up the flaws.”
He is not alone in this opinion.
“Jo is quick to dismiss and exile anything in the writing that isn’t top-notch,” Mr. LaBute said.
That’s where the sound of ripping paper comes in.
