His 'Eureka' moment is culmination of journey
When George Sauer was a child growing up in Medfield, he says, his parents reneged on a promise to take him on a cross-country road trip.
Sauer always felt that he'd missed out, and -- tantalized by the thought of what such a trip might have been like -- he decided to write a play about one.
In Centastage's ``Heading for Eureka," which opens tomorrow night at the Boston Center for the Arts, a family heads off to drive cross-country in their SUV. It sounds normal enough, except that the family members' names provide a clue that it is not. The parents are George and Martha, the teenage children Dick and Jane, and the dog Toto. And the SUV ends up burning in the desert.
``They're on their own as a family, trying to get out of the desert," says Sauer by phone from Dedham, where he lives now. ``They meet another family, and it's a blending of the two families and lifestyles together. It's a lot like [the TV show] `Lost,' but funnier."
The piece came through the development process of Centa stage's Salon Series, which presents readings of plays in development to invited guests. From the initial reading two years ago to the finished play, Maureen Keiller has played the mother.
Sauer says Keiller is the perfect Martha. But what does that mean? What famous Martha could she represent? All of them, he says. ``Martha changes. Sometimes she's Martha Washington, sometimes Martha Stewart, even Martha from Albee's `Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' "
Keiller says she thinks her character most resembles Martha Stewart.
``She's all about reinventing herself and being creative," she says by phone. ``I love her. She's so much fun to play because she's so self-absorbed. She thinks she's a really good mother but doesn't have the attention span to really be one."
George (played by Adam Soule), Sauer says, is sometimes George Washington, sometimes George from ``Virginia Woolf," and ``maybe even a little George Bush in there."
Sauer has had a busy week. On Sunday he was in rehearsals for ``Eureka" upstairs at the Calderwood Pavilion, ran downstairs to the Virginia Wimberly Theatre to see his ``Miss Marple Attends a Matinee" being performed in the Boston Theatre Marathon, and helped load in the ``Eureka" set next door at the BCA's Plaza Black Box theater.
He says he writes a lot of one-act and 10-minute plays, mostly comedies, which have been done locally and at festivals in New York and California. By day, however, he's an orthodontist.
``Everyone thinks this is a mid-life crisis for me," Sauer says. ``Do you have to say I'm an orthodontist? I just remember a year ago a dentist produced his own play and all anyone latched onto was that he was a dentist."
He's asked if he stuck braces on the teenagers in the play. ``No . . . . I don't know that we could have convinced the kids to wear them."
Tonight through June 17 at the BCA's Plaza Black Box theater. Tickets: 617-933-8600, www.bostontheatrescene.com.
