NEW YORK - Playwright Douglas Carter Beane wields his barbed bon mots like poison arrows. And no topic, it seems, is too taboo for that withering wit.
The skewered subjects range from the lengths people will go for fame ("As Bees in Honey Drown") to self-absorbed WASPs settling for the status quo ("The Country Club"). For the frothy "The Little Dog Laughed," which landed on Broadway to critical kudos in late 2006, Beane takes mordant aim at that favorite cocktail party guessing game - closeted actors in the hypocritical land of Hollywood. The play receives its Boston premiere, courtesy of SpeakEasy Stage Company, at the Virginia Wimberly Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts.
During a recent conversation at The Players club, the historic gathering place for actors, writers, and other drama professionals, where Beane is a member, the playwright unleashes his incisive epigrams on a variety of topics. They include being forced to watch the film version of "Xanadu" dozens of times while writing the stage adaptation ("I really deserve combat pay for that one."); peeking at the snide postings in Broadway chat rooms ("I take their comments with a huge bag of salt."); and being wooed by Rosie O'Donnell to pen a script about a lesbian who was shot by a homophobic hunter while camping ("Oh yeah, it sounds hilarious!").
Yet for all his spiky sarcasm, the 48-year-old Beane is also gracious and zestful as he guides a reporter on a tour of the five-story townhouse in Gramercy Park that houses The Players, founded by Edwin Booth, Mark Twain, and other theatrical leading lights almost 120 years ago.
"I'll be on the walls here yet," he jokes at one point. And you don't doubt it, especially considering the Wildean wit on display in "Little Dog."
The play revolves around Mitchell Green, an up-and-coming movie star "who suffers from a slight recurring case of homosexuality"; Alex, the rent boy he falls for; said hustler's party-girl best friend; and Mitchell's manipulative, morally bankrupt agent, Diane, who delivers a stream of cynical monologues that nearly bring down the house. While Mitchell and Alex fall in love, they're both in denial about their sexuality, among other things. Diane, meanwhile, is desperate to keep her client in the closet in order to further his career and her own ambitions.
"Little Dog" could be dismissed as an amusing, if blunt, trifle, with a tour de force performance at its center (Julie White won the Tony Award for best actress as Diane). But watching a recent rehearsal of the SpeakEasy production, it's devastatingly apparent that underneath Beane's scathing one-liners lies a penetrating satire that illuminates man's penchant for insidious self-deception.
Beane says that most of his plays explore "the spacious difference between who we are [as people] and who we are expected to be" and that "all man's toil is ultimately folly."
"We did a reading of one of my plays, and the director asked me, 'Who's your antagonist?' And I was like, 'I don't think I have an antagonist in any of my plays. How about The World? Our Values? Society?' I guess those are my antagonists," Beane says.
"At first glance, it's easy to poke fun at these people - how they sacrifice everything that's good and true about themselves to the idol of fame and success," says Paul Melone, who is directing the SpeakEasy production. "But at the same time, they're still human, and I can identify with them. And if I do my job right, there should be this simultaneous awe at how far these people go with the deranged things they do, but also this hint of recognition. Like 'I know that feeling. I've done that. I've been there.' "
The inspiration for "Little Dog" came, in part, from Beane's own tumultuous journey into the Hollywood heart of darkness.
His screenplay for "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar," starring Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo as a trio of drag queens road-tripping through Middle America, was produced almost intact. Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin Entertainment shepherded the project, pushed back when producers tried to foist revision notes upon Beane, and the film even became a modest box office success.
The adaptation of Beane's hit off-Broadway play "As Bees in Honey Drown," however, had a radically different trajectory. The rights to the play, about a gay novelist whose life is turned upside down by the con artist Alexa Vere de Vere, were quickly snapped up by Universal, and the project began attracting the attention of A-list stars like Annette Bening and Julia Roberts.
Before long, however, things turned sour. Studio executives asked Beane to make the character "shy around women" rather than gay and, at one point, to rewrite the part for Leonardo DiCaprio ("A wonderful actor but not so Jewish," cracks Beane). He refused, explaining that once you make it a love story, the whole point of the story (people selling their souls for a chance at fame) is lost.
Beane stepped away from the project, and the film, which never made it to the big screen, got caught in development purgatory.
Not long after Beane washed his hands of the project, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate published a story about Hollywood's efforts to drain the script of its gay content; the studio accused Beane of damaging its property and insisted that he wouldn't be paid for his work. The matter was eventually settled, but it was a harsh lesson for the playwright.
"It was very interesting that you couldn't tell the truth or you would be punished for it," he observes.
Beane drew heavily on the unsavory experience for an unseen character in "Little Dog," a successful playwright whom Diane and Mitchell are desperately wooing to score the rights to his buzzy new play about two gay men in love. The duo want to produce the play as a vehicle for Mitchell.
Beane agrees with the characterization that he has a love-hate relationship with Hollywood. "I love them, they hate me," he cracks. "I love working in movies but I also require that I be treated with respect and dignity, which is a bit more than they're willing to pony up with for just a writer."
While Beane has been snakebitten in his travels in Hollywood, he sounds delighted about his most recent experience on Broadway, penning the improbable stage adaptation of "Xanadu," the 1980 Olivia Newton-John stinker that helped inspire the Golden Raspberry Awards.
When Beane was first approached with the project, he thought the producers were out of their collective minds. But when he was told that he'd be given carte blanche to adapt the story, he reconsidered. After all, "Xanadu" tells the absurd story of an Australian-accented muse who comes to earth to help a sidewalk artist realize his dreams of opening a roller-disco.
"I thought, 'I would be putting the worst movie ever up on stage. That is such a middle finger to the theater,' " he says. "Plus, the fact that I could do so while simultaneously making fun of Greek drama, in the style of Greek comedy and Greek drama. I would be taking the very inspiration of theater as we know it - Greek drama -and showing where it wound up."
When news of the show surfaced, however, the snide posts in Internet chat rooms weren't so kind. "They were the worst things that people ever said about me - 'hack,' 'prostitute,' 'anything for a dollar,' 'must be broke,' " he recalls, with a chuckle.
Beane, however, is having the last laugh. "Xanadu," which skewers the banal plotting and ditzy dialogue of the original film, was cheered by both audiences and critics when it opened last summer at the Helen Hayes Theatre, where it's still running.
Beane so enjoyed writing the musical that he's now hard at work on a stage version of the classic MGM film "The Band Wagon," which gets its world premiere at the Old Globe in San Diego in March under the title "Dancing in the Dark." He's also penned a new play about husband-and-wife gossip columnists, "Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Too," which is expected to premiere off-Broadway next season.
"Saturday Night Live" creator Lorne Michaels has also enlisted Beane to write a sitcom that the playwright describes as "Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town' set in a mall."
"It's about the idea of consumerism - the relentless buying of things - filling the hole of our souls," he says.
As for his own soul, Beane seems pretty content about his life and work these days. He and his partner Lewis Flinn, a composer, and their two young children, split their time between New York City and their farm in rural Pennsylvania. He says fatherhood has probably made him a more patient person, but it clearly hasn't dulled his sarcastic streak.
"I mean, I'm answering these questions, aren't I?" he snaps. Touché.
