AT 74, director Jack O’Brien is a walking repository of theater history of the latter half of the 20th century, having worked with some of the brightest lights of the American stage, including John Houseman (a father figure), Eva Le Gallienne (notorious for her lesbian love affairs), Helen Hayes (“by definition a trouper”), designer Rouben Ter-Arutunian, Rosemary Harris and husband (the flamboyant, bibulous bisexual actor-director Ellis Rabb, who served as O’Brien’s febrile mentor), eventually directing him in Pygmalion.
O’Brien’s new memoir, Jack Be Nimble: The Accidental Education of An Unintentional Director (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), will be an indispensable resource for theater aficionados and students, a behind-the-scenes account of the growth and mundane mechanics of the repertory and regional theater movement. Most entertainingly, the book is packed with anecdotes about the backstage interactions of the brilliant, devoted company—a surrogate extended family, and all that that implies. O’Brien is proud to think of himself as “the living link, through Eva Le Gallienne, to the Moscow Arts Theater and [Alla] Nazimova.”
O’Brien originally aimed to become a writer and composer of musicals. In 1957, while at the University of Michigan, he won an award for “best collegiate musical” for Land Ho!, with a whimsical book about Christopher Columbus arriving in America smuggling a cargo of women on his ship. In time, O’Brien became involved in the formation of the Association of Producing Artists (APA), a touring rep group founded by Ellis Rabb, who functioned as artistic director and actor, with a base in Ann Arbor. Over time, O’Brien, as Rabb’s faithful assistant and “his inevitable Sherpa,” became gradually absorbed into the company. But it wasn’t until 1969, at age 28, that he directed a successful production of A Comedy of Errors and found his true métier.
O’Brien went on to serve as artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theater for 25 years. He’s won Tony awards for directing the musical Hairspray and Tom Stoppard’s nine-hour trilogy, Coast of Utopia. He even tackled the operatic stage, directing critically acclaimed productions of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at Radio City Music Hall (Tony Award) and Puccini’s Il Trittico at the Metropolitan Opera. More recently, O’Brien directed The Nance, a smash-hit play by Douglas Carter Beane currently on Broadway, starring Nathan Lane as a closeted gay burlesque comic in 1930’s New York, who stumbles into a romance with a younger man.
I met with Jack O’Brien at the office of O’Brien’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to conduct this interview.
Michael Ehrhardt: You once referred to approaching your work with “a dangerously rampant enthusiasm”…
Jack O’Brien: That’s probably true. I am a little dangerous. And, God knows, I’m rampant! You know what, I think it all comes down to energy. And I don’t know if you can take credit for it. You either have it, or you don’t. You can’t generate energy. It’s a gift to me; running an organization and doing all these shows, you suddenly realize to what degree I just don’t get tired. And that’s good for a director.
ME: Directing seems to be a way of life for you. You were back to the Lyceum Theater for The Nance. It must have brought back a lot of memories.
JO’B: Oh, yes! And before that I did [Tom Stoppard’s] The Invention of Love there. It was such a wonderful thing, coming back to that theater at this point in my life, because I pretty much grew up there. I actually took The Nance company on a tour, because there’s a passageway from the men’s room backstage, and all sorts of little secrets that nobody knows about. There are a lot of lovely ghosts there.
ME: What was the origin of The Nance, and how did you become involved with it?
JO’B: Well, André Bishop [artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater]sent me the script. I didn’t know Douglas Carter Beane at the time, although I knew and loved his work. They initially sent the script to Nathan [Lane], who flipped over it. So, we did a reading. I was somewhat nervous about it, because I’d never done such a gay-themed play before. However, Larry Kramer was always advising me: “You’ve got to do something for your people!” And I kept responding, “The Irish are doing just fine without me!” Larry really wanted me to take a more political stance. Well, The Nance is more political than is The Invention of Love. I assumed that it was going to push some buttons and upset some people, because of the nature of the relationship between the two men—and the fact that it stars one of our most beloved comic figures playing a gay arch-conservative (which was possible in the 1930s), and then takes a downward spiral at the end.
So, André, Douglas, and Nathan all felt the same way, inasmuch as we didn’t want to pull any punches. We didn’t want to cover our tracks but to give it free rein, to be as funny, as entertaining, as historically viable, and as heartfelt as possible. And I can’t tell you how proud I am of it. Actually, just after we close on Broadway we’re going to televise it and it’s going to be shown live from Lincoln Center. The PBS series called Live from Lincoln Center, apart from concerts, operas, and musicals, has never done a play before. Thus The Nance, which shows a very realistic evolution of a relationship between two men, neither sugarcoated nor romanticized, will be seen in states like Mississippi and Texas, and I’m absolutely thrilled to be part of that.
ME: We’ve come a long way from The Boys in the Band. Speaking of which, how did you feel about this play when it came out? There were those, such as Edward Albee, who castigated it for misrepresenting gay relationships.
JO’B: I remember it as being thrilling. I had friends in it, and we were shocked and stimulated. We were there entertaining people who otherwise wouldn’t be entertained by us—sitting right next to us. Leonard [Frey]’s performance was unforgettable. And there was a direct translation from the stage to the movie, which had never been done before.
ME: While heterosexual audiences found the movie somewhat exotic, gay men were divided by the portrayals, especially Leonard Frey in the role of Harold, the birthday boy and self-proclaimed “Jew fairy.”
JO’B: Well, we’ve had a lot of trouble in representing ourselves, swinging too far from one side to the other. However, I get very nervous when I see things that romanticize and proselytize. I’ve been a gay man all my life and I’m proud of it, but I haven’t felt the need to play a trumpet obbligato all the time.
ME: More recent avatars of the “nance” include Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly, and even more recently, Mario Cantone and Sean Hayes. Do you believe that they’re all tapping in to some “gay sensibility”?
JO’B: As I recognize it in myself? It’s almost as if you have an extra digit on your hand. Maybe it’s because so many of us of a certain generation have lived in so many strata, where we were comfortable, where we were uncomfortable, where we were welcome, where we were edited, where we were cornered and exploited. So, there’s a kind of hyper-sensitivity, a kind of antenna awareness of mood shifts, cultural shifts, music in the air. Of course there’s irony, and a kind of defiant survival instinct. Don’t label me before I can label myself. Don’t pigeonhole me before you see all my colors. So, in that respect, I think we’ve been conditioned to a kind of hyper-awareness that others don’t require. We’re like a delicate car, with extra bumpers. We know when we can let it out, and when we can’t let it out, when to project ourselves [and when not to]. That can be exhausting. Let’s face it, our sense of humor is pretty extraordinary. We’re very quick to mock ourselves. It’s very hard to put me down, because I’m so self-deprecating before anybody else can. And I’m better at it too. We haven’t lost our sense of humor, while many cultures have. We still think gay jokes and campy humor are pretty funny, whereas with most ethnic humor you can’t do it any more, even if it’s basically affectionate.
ME: Even though you work mostly in the New York theater, where the milieu is notably open-minded, do you find there’s still some level of homophobia there?
JO’B: Of course I do! However, it’s much more prevalent on the West Coast than in the East. And the movie business is scary. They’re still in complete denial out there. And when they do face reality and tackle a gay-themed project, they do it with a sort of bravura, such as casting Michael Douglas and Matt Damon—two of the straightest people in the world—in a Liberace bio [Behind the Candelabra]. And, you know, it’s actually not bad. To me, the revelation is Matt Damon, who finds sweetness and a kind of sensitivity in his character [Scott Thorson], without mocking it at all. And, I’ve got to say, he looks pretty damn good when he takes his clothes off.
ME: Damon admitted on The Tonight Show that he was so proud of his bikini tan line that he asked director Steven Soderbergh to include a gratuitous butt shot in the film. He also played a gay character in The Talented Mr. Ripley.
JO’B: Oh, God, he was stunning!
ME: I’d imagine working with Nathan Lane is pure joy.
JO’B: Pure and unadulterated. He’s at the top of the class, as one of the most professional people I’ve ever worked with. On the first day of rehearsal, Nathan was off-book with a brand new play. He was acting and exploring already. That sets the bar very high. And while we’ve known each other over the years and were probably good acquaintances, we’ve never previously had this unique bonding experience that theater provides.
ME: In a profile in The New York Times that touched on his role in The Nance, Nathan mentioned that, like his character, he was self-loathing about his sexuality when he was younger. Did he have any input into his role?
JO’B: Nathan may well have drawn on his own experience for that. And that’s the prevailing view about the character of Chauncey. But Chauncey can’t choose whether to be in a relationship or not. Yes, he does sink his own ship, there’s no question about that. But he says quite clearly to the boy at the beginning and at the end of the play, basically: “This is not what I want. It’s what you want, but not me.” Now, you can say that’s not good, and that it’s defective, but it’s realistic, and that’s why we’ve chosen to end the play in a very ambivalent way.
ME: You’re booked well in advance, such as directing a new opera to open the Dallas Opera’s 2015-16 season with Great Scott, a new commission for Moby-Dick composer Jake Heggie, with the libretto to be written by Terrence McNally.
JO’B: Yes, with [coloratura mezzo-soprano]Joyce DiDonato.
ME: What is Great Scott all about?
JO’B: It’s about a diva who goes back to her hometown to do a lost masterpiece. And in doing so she encounters her first love—the guy who stayed behind. Over time they both married other people and divorced. So, it’s “vissi d’arte”—do I give up my art or choose love. It’s a charming, witty, and touching piece.
ME: You and Edmund White were school pals, having met while taking a play writing course. Do you still keep in touch?
JO’B: We do. We have dinner—yet not frequently enough. And we support each other: he wrote a lovely blurb for my book. He’s a good, dear friend. Years ago, I kept reading the great books that he wrote, and I felt, since we were so close, “Well, where am I?” I never saw myself [as a character]. And then I was in London and picked up a book of his short stories called Skinned Alive (1995), and in the last one, called “Watermarked,” I actually found myself. And it was so sweet, because it wasn’t factual about what happened, but I recognized myself. So, I wrote him a letter to say how thrilled I was. And he wrote back saying, “Only you…” He said that everybody else complains that they’re not like that, they didn’t do that—and why did you make me so unflattering?
ME: Is it true that your friend Stephen Sondhiem urged you to write your memoir?
JO’B: Well, Mike Nichols helped me make up my mind. I didn’t only want to talk about myself in a memoir, because it was my time and experience with ATA and Ellis that I wanted to concentrate on. The idea started with Mike, who recommended that I read Stephen’s book, Look, I Made a Hat. Stephen and I are neighbors in Litchfield [CT] and good friends. So I called and said, “Mike said that I really should read your book.” And he sent me the book and all the précis to the lyrics, his analysis, and the amazing thing is I could hear his voice. I didn’t find it pompous or sententious or arch or academic. I thought it was like listening to Steve. And so I thought “I could do that,” and it really kicked my ass with getting the book done.
Michael Ehrhardt is a freelance writer based in the New York area.
