Melinda Lopez is in demand as her latest production hits Boston Playwrights' Theatre.
(Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff)
Inside a tiny rehearsal space at Boston Playwrights' Theatre, where an old Atari game system and a half-eaten bag of Bugles snacks lie on the floor, a guitar is howling. A bassist looks at his fingers while holding down a hard, steady line, and an actress-turned-drummer, complete with impressive biceps and a riot of curly hair, is making it all look way too easy. With a few amped-up riffs and wails, the late 1970s rock scene, with all its grit and teenage abandon, suddenly lives again.
But these are not musicians. They are actors who just learned to be a no-holds-barred band of rockers a few weeks ago.
And the headbanging woman sitting in front of them, stomping her feet and clapping as she sings along, then tossing both arms in the air, is not a groupie. She's Melinda Lopez, the Boston actress and acclaimed playwright who wrote "Gary," about three troubled siblings in an Indiana city where hard luck is channeled into hard rock. The play starts previews Thursday.
Lopez, whose career has been soaring since 2004, sings the words with her eyes closed and a satisfied grin across her face. She wrote most of the lyrics for this dark coming-of-age story about a dysfunctional family, allegations of rape, and dreams of breaking free.
"I had to tell the story of 'Gary,' and the music was just necessary," says Lopez, 43, after the re hearsal. "I never intended to write a play with music, but that's what the play wanted - something about the violence, the age of the people, and that need to escape. It resonated with me and my young adulthood, and that period is just all tied up in music for me."
A lack of balance
It's been four years since Lopez's play "Sonia Flew" premiered at the Huntington Theatre Company, where she was a playwriting fellow, thrusting the Cuban-American writer into the national theater spotlight.
Lopez, who came to the United States from Colombia with her Cuban-born parents when she was 3, and graduated from Boston University's playwriting program, had already become the first recipient of the Charlotte Woolard Award for her play "The Order of Things," given by the Kennedy Center to a "promising new voice in American theatre."
But it was after "Sonia Flew," an ambitious, Elliot Norton Award-winning work about the exodus of young Cuban children to the United States and its repercussions, that offers started pouring in from theaters in Chicago, Miami, and California to stage the play. Others wanted to commission more original work.
"My life has changed a lot because of 'Sonia Flew' and the successes it had," Lopez says over coffee, just a couple of hours before she has to pick up her 7-year-old daughter, Madeleine, from school. Brightly bundled up, the tall, slender brunette takes a moment to reflect, making sure she credits the Huntington Theatre and the risk it took by putting a local writer front and center, she says, "in a way that really hadn't happened before."
"The payoff for me has just been incredible," she adds, smiling broadly. " 'Sonia Flew' has been produced, I want to say, seven times. More than anything, it made me believe that I could continue writing plays."
One of her new commissions, "Alexandros," is being produced in May at the Laguna Playhouse in California. It's another episode in the Cuban-American experience, but, Lopez points out with index finger raised, "This is a broad comedy. It's just flat-out farce and funny."
"It was a short piece I had written many years ago about a grandmother's birthday party and the hijinks that ensued when her beloved dog drops dead in the middle of the party," she says with a chuckle. "So it's of course ripe for comedy."
Lopez is also working on a commission for South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif.: a ghost story. "I'm literally finishing it right now. I'll send it to them and they'll decide whether they want to go forward with it or not," she says. "It's a comedy about an actress who moves to New Jersey, and her apartment is haunted."
Juggling motherhood, marriage, and career, Lopez recently bought a house in Bedford. She writes when she can as much as she can, she says. The rest is looking after her 80-year-old parents who live with her, nurturing her family, and lecturing at Wellesley College. Sometimes it can all get a little chaotic. Sometimes things fall through the cracks. Her goal, she says, is to try to not drive her family too crazy.
"I think balance is overrated," she says. "I think you have to do what you are doing, and other things will suffer. If I can't write this week I can't write this week because of family commitments or my teaching schedule is heavier, and God forbid I exercise. I don't even try to balance things anymore. I think it's totally impossible."
Upon further reflection on the notion of "balance," Lopez sends an e-mail: "How the hell is a passionate person supposed to live in balance? Balance is colorless and dull - and I much prefer to do what I am doing - cooking dinner or crafting dialogue - at 1000 percent - and fix everything else later," she writes. "Balance is just another thing we are told we need to strive for - and women especially get told this - I am already striving for other things, and trying to manufacture balance is too much work. In the arts, you are either working or you are not working. That's balance. Plus: (My friend has four little kids. Ask her about balance.)"
The final stretch
Lopez has spent much of her free time and weekends lately at Boston Playwrights' Theatre for "Gary," which was produced last year at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's First Look Repertory of New Work and was further developed at the Lark Play Development Center in New York.
Here the rehearsal space, set up to look like a basement rec room, is decorated simply with an old sofa, a beanbag chair, a drum set, and microphone stands.
Watching the play come alive, Lopez can't contain her passionate gratitude toward the actors or her impulse to be involved in the production, making small tweaks here and there, changing a line or two, and even suggesting a movement and stance to actress Elise Manning, who plays Annie, the tough, drumstick-wielding sister.
"I loved that it was all about . . . I forgive you," Lopez says while approaching Manning at the end of a scene of reconciliation. "But I do think she needs at least one, 'It'll be fine.' I think we need that one last thing. 'It'll be sweet. It'll be fine.' "
Director M. Bevin O'Gara, 25, also a BU graduate and an artistic associate at the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, doesn't seem to mind the suggestions.
"I think it's mostly about how open she is to anyone's impressions," she says, "to hear out every idea and let it stew, and I also think it's not about the playwright being able to do that, but everyone involved being able to be that. Sometimes a playwright can have just one interpretation of their work, and that's when it becomes problematic."
O'Gara also confesses that she's a big fan of Lopez.
"Melinda is someone who I have admired for a long time," she says. "She is a wonderfully beautiful woman's voice in playwriting. I was so excited to get a chance to have a professional experience with her."
Creating a play in which scenes melt into rock songs posed a challenge for Lopez, who - aside from taking piano lessons years back - is not a musician. She drew on her BU-student memories of drifting in and out of Boston clubs such as the Rat and the Channel, back when Kenmore Square wasn't filled with high-end restaurants and hotels and South Boston's warehouses hadn't been turned into condos.
At Steppenwolf, Lopez collaborated with composer Rick Sims, a former punk rocker from Chicago who, Lopez says, "made the sound come alive. It's so raw and visceral and exciting to be in a theater where actors are playing music. I really started to understand my own play after Rick wrote the music. I wanted to bring in a real Boston sound, so we listened to the Lyres, Mission of Burma, Peter Dayton, the Neighborhoods. I have all of them on my iPod now . . . I sing really loud in the car."
"Gary" is a departure from the Cuban themes Lopez has become known for, but she appears ready to expand her vision.
"It's about a young man who desperately needs to get out of this town, and I feel like that's everyone's story. It could be anywhere USA," she says, her eyes dancing. "It's also the coming of age of rock music, and how I feel about the rock scene in Boston and having been part of that. For a long time music was really bad and then it was so good. It was like the whole world broke open."
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
