Audi-Turgy
Dreaming a Film Forward
Sometimes all a playwright needs is a little inspiration from a little-known film. For Brian Sutow, Producing Artistic Director of No Rules Theatre Co., Stanley Tucci’s 2007 movie Blind Date, which Tucci co-wrote, directed and starred in, provided just that. “It was a pretty instantaneous impulse for me,” explains Sutow. “On a lark I watched the movie one night, and I immediately felt that it wasn’t a movie, it was a play.” And so, with Tucci’s film in mind, Sutow began writing The Personal(s). But the result is far from a simple adaptation.
The Personal(s), which will receive its World Premiere at No Rules, tells the story of an estranged husband and wife who write personal ads and go on a series of “blind dates” with each other in an attempt to save their marriage. The play walks a fine line between absurdism and jarring reality, and although the story focuses on a mysterious tragedy, Sutow has expertly woven in humor. “The Personal(s) is about the nature of comedy itself, and the role comedy plays in our lives,” explains director Josh Hecht, who has been attached to the project since its first reading at the Kennedy Center in the fall of 2011. “It’s about the various ways we use comedy as defense, as offense, to wound each other, and even to apply salve to those wounds. Comedy does all of those things over time.”
The strength of comedy in all situations is something Sutow knows well. “My mother had cancer when I was growing up, and it seemed like she was going to die for most of my childhood” says Sutow. “She’s been healthy and fine for years, but my own understanding of comedy is intricately related to things that are serious.”
Tucci’s film was itself rooted in tragedy, as it is one of three American adaptations of Theo van Gogh’s movies produced after the Dutch filmmaker was murdered in 2004. van Gogh, the great grand nephew of the 19th century painter, was killed by a Muslim extremist because of his 10-minute film Submission: Part 1, which describes the ways in which the teachings of the Koran condone the imprisonment and abuse of Muslim women.
But when Sutow first saw Blind Date he had none of this context; he was simply drawn to the film’s inherent theatricality and, perhaps even more importantly, its potential. “I felt like I had encountered a story that was so close to being really dynamic and incredibly moving and exciting but was not that yet,” Sutow explains. “There are moments that the film gets away with because Tucci and Patricia Clarkson are amazing actors, but they aren’t really well articulated or well communicated.” There was a compelling challenge before him – the outline of a story but one that lacked the depth of characters – and one that played to his strengths both as a playwright and an actor.
Sutow, who considers himself an actor first and foremost despite receiving the prestigious Kenan Playwriting Fellowship at the Kennedy Center, found that he was adjusting the story in order to give the actors more to dig in to. “[My job became] deepening those relationships, clarifying the givens in the situation,” he says. “And at a certain point I realized this was a very different story from the film. It was a surprise.”
That surprise and departure from the film is the play’s biggest strength. Although the tragedy of van Gogh’s death is infused in Tucci’s adaptation, and by extension Sutow’s play, The Personal(s) isn’t merely the staged version of a decent film. It is an entirely new play that is funny and moving and heartbreaking and raw. It is a deeper version of the original narrative that is forward thinking and forces us to reflect on our own lives and our own actions, as all good new plays should. “I think new plays are our chance to dream the culture forward and write things that are relevant to our lives now,” declares Hecht. “They help us take the world that we have and turn it into the world that we want.”
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