Jeffrey Hatcher Can't Dance

But who cares? He's adding a Jerome Kern musical to his résumé anyway

By Toby Zinman

“There’s something about a bunch of people knowing they’re going to do a show on Broadway that, like execution, focuses the mind.” Jeffrey Hatcher is making deadpan jokes about Never Gonna Dance, the new musical based on the 1936 Fred Astaire—Ginger Rogers movie Swing Time, currently previewing at the Broadhurst on 44th Street and scheduled for a Dec. 4 opening. Hatcher wrote the show’s book, his first full-fledged foray into the commercial-theatre mainstream. 

The plays Hatcher is best known for have made scarcely a ripple in that stream, although they’ve been staples of the regional theatre repertory for well over a decade: Three Viewings, Scotland Road, Fellow Travelers, Sockdology and the adaptation of Tuesdays with Morrie, among other works. Now, like the new musical, Hatcher’s breakout comic drama Compleat Female Stage Beauty, a 1999 co-commission of the Contemporary American Theater Festival of Shepherdstown, W.Va., and City Theatre of Pittsburgh, is also poised to help make the Minneapolis-based writer’s name a mainstream byword. Beauty, a playful account of the career of Edward Kynaston, the last of the cross-dressing “boy players” of the Restoration era, is being turned into a major film starring Billy Crudup, Claire Danes and Rupert Everett and directed by Richard Eyre. In conversation, Hatcher seems exhilarated and chagrinned in almost equal measure by his ascent into this new arena. 

One thing he’ll need in short order is a new headshot. The same photo—of a young, slim, bearded man with a receding hairline, dressed in a suit and tie—has appeared for years on every program and theatre company newsletter. His expression is that of a person just looking up from a book—the corrugated forehead, the serious, unsmiling gaze. In person, Jeff Hatcher turns out to be—a few years and a few pounds later—a be-sneakered, bespectacled 45-year-old (who looks, as he puts it, as if he’s “pushing 60”) with a quick smile and a lot to say. 

The premiere in May by Philadelphia Theatre Company of his newest play, A Picasso, has brought him to my home turf, and our conversation over coffee eventually turned to that work, which had opened the night before. Its plot revolves around a fictional interrogation of Pablo Picasso in 1941 in occupied Paris by a glamorous, noirish Nazi who is an art critic; she wants the master to authenticate three drawings as his for an “exhibition”—which is Nazispeak for a bonfire of “degenerate art” at the Tuilleries. “No collection,” she tells him, “is complete without a Picasso.” And, Picasso being Picasso, the play is also about seduction. The premise provides Hatcher with a huge readymade character and lots of good Picasso apocrypha (when he finished Gertrude Stein’s portrait, she said, “But I don’t look like that.” “But you will,” Picasso answered). The play is full of witty one-liners and snappy ripostes, much like Hatcher’s conversation. 

ZINMAN: I have not been able to find a biography of you anywhere. So, tell me the basic facts.
HATCHER: I’m from Ohio—Steubenville, Ohio, which is famous for being the home of Dean Martin. They’re about to have Dean Martin Day in just a couple of weeks. Do you know Steubenville at all? It’s a real gangster kind of town. Remember in It’s a Wonderful Life—when George finds out what the town would have looked like if he hadn’t lived? Pottersville? We’re Pottersville. A real honky-tonk, steel-and-coal river town, with the largest number of prostitutes per capita in the United States. 

This is back in the day, or…?
This is the ’20s, ’30s and into the ’50s. I grew up when it was settled and tidied up. It’s the kind of town where my father would talk about going downtown on election night and bumping into guys carrying ballot boxes to dump into the river. Highly corrupt. I grew up there, right outside Pittsburgh, actually. So Pittsburgh was kind of our Paris. If only we could get to Pittsburgh!

Your Moscow.
Exactly. We [Hatcher and his wife have a seven-year-old son] lived in New York most of the ’80s, then I went out to Minneapolis on a fellowship from the Playwrights Center, which is a really terrific place. You know, Minnesota has lots of money for the arts, and they put a lot of it into developing new work. So I ended up staying, because the atmosphere was so great out there. I lived on a lake outside of town. Everybody lived on a lake, so it’s not a big deal. If you live in Minneapolis and you don’t live on a lake, you’ve screwed up badly. 

Which of your plays do you like best?
I like Three Viewings a lot, because it came out of some personal things. When my father died, he left behind huge debts and also connections that my mother and I had to deal with—gentlemen who were not on the up-and-up, some of them in the fabric of the local government, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Ohio state government system. Wild corruption. And my mother was a traditional 1950s housewife who was not brought up to deal with guys named Vinnie who wanted cash deposits or else something bad would happen. We both dealt with it, but I thought in the play we’d make it seem as if my mother were dealing with it all by herself. It was kind of an idealized version of my mother’s personality, to tell you the truth. Older women who have lost a husband talk about not only the personal loss, but also the secretiveness of certain kinds of men—men who, say, fought in World War II and built businesses in the postwar period; the silence with which they treated their lives, the way they hid their quote-unquote crimes from their wives—crimes of every sort, business, personal. 

The play seemed to kind of connect with these women, and I was always rather taken with that. That’s nice. It reminds me of Death of a Salesman, in that the sons and the fathers are both weeping. I’m not laying claims of comparison to Death of a Salesman, by any means, but it was nice to know that it affected people on a level that was more than entertainment, more than intellectual—it seemed to have a certain cathartic effect. 

Did your mother see it?
Oh, yeah. She just died in January, but she had seen it. I was terrified of my mother seeing it—any time a writer writes about his own background and family past, there’s a certain scavenger quality, of which I think we should be ashamed. But that’s what we do. She seemed to really get a kick out of it. It’s as if it validated her struggle.

She became the sort of heroine of her story.
She had a bad hip, and she used a cane for a certain period in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Then she got the hip replaced. But in the play, the character has a cane propped up next to her. My mother started walking around with this cane everywhere—like, assuming the role. She would have had every right to disown me and be really upset about it. 

You must have been immensely relieved and pleased.
I was. People are strange that way, though. That was one play for which I didn’t change anybody’s names—and the names in that part of the world are so strange. Like a guy named Bob O’Clock. A guy named Bonecutter. I couldn’t think up names that were better. But when we did the play close to my hometown, I thought, “Well, I better change the names,” and I changed them to second-rate names. Then when all these people went to see it, they were upset because I hadn’t used their names: “I think I was that guy, but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to hear my name.” 

The standard line about your plays is that they have nothing to do with each other, but I see some similarities. One is that you’re obviously interested in the quirky footnotes of history that give rise to large ideas; this makes you unlike most American playwrights, who are still writing psychological domestic drama. 
I think that goes back to my initial desire to be a character actor. My reasoning is that good character actors like to switch a lot. “He played the copper last night and was completely unrecognizable as the guy in Tobacco Road this afternoon.” So I think that kind of writing appeals to me in the same way. “Well, today I’m going to do something about this, and tomorrow I’ll do something about that.” But just as in character acting, there’s some baseline that must pop up, you know—certain reflexes, certain interests.

Did you really imagine a career in acting, or were you always interested in writing?
The impetus was acting when I started out. I really very much wanted to be a character actor, work in a rep company, all that kind of thing. I went to New York, went to NYU for awhile, did some Off-Off-Off Broadway. I did voiceovers for awhile. That was all fun, but I don’t think I really ever had the stamina or the grit required of an actor. You know, to hit the pavement and go to the auditions. It’s a ghastly life. What’s interesting, of course, is that actors are so much subject to other people’s power. So when actors do get power—when they’re able to say, “Well, I won’t go out of town for this”—you understand why they’re exercising their power. I’ve done a little bit of acting recently. It was fun to do again, but only because it was in my own stuff, and I could get away with casting me. 

Another similarity that struck me about your plays is the basic theatrical theme of illusion and reality. What you see may not be what you get. It’s certainly true in Compleat Female Stage Beauty and Three Viewings, and it seems true in A Picasso as well. There’s that wonderful bit of dialogue where Miss Fischer asks Picasso about the second drawing: “So it’s yours?” And he replies: “It would appear so.” That seemed to me to distill so much of the play.
I think most of my plays have something to do with the slippery notion of identity. Maybe that, too, is connected to acting, and also the way in which any person in the theatre remakes themselves. We were talking about John Tillinger [A Picasso’s director]. Now, John is from Iran, of Jewish, Middle-European background, and yet if you talk to John you think you’re talking to this British don. Obviously part of John’s persona is self-created. Actually, you’re finding fewer and fewer people like that in the theatre anymore, because we’re becoming more regular, simple T-shirt kind of people. But people often go to theatre to recreate themselves. I also think my interest in illusion versus reality comes from the desire to want to have fun with the audience—pull out some rugs, do some magic-box tricks, that kind of thing.

Did you find the audience responses last night what you were hoping for? Did they laugh in the right places?
By and large, yes. The most gratifying moments, of course, are not always the laugh lines, but the story-revelation lines. You want those Ethel Merman “uh-oh” kind of moments. That’s always nice to get. You figure if three or four people gasp or go “oh,” they represent eight other people who are sitting there silent. Row captains. 

It occurred to me that one of the problems with the play, in terms of finding a large audience, may be that it assumes smartness—which I’m always pleased to have assumed about me—but if you don’t know who Léger is, if you don’t know that “Henri” is Matisse, or that “Georges” is Braque, you’re sort of wondering, “What’s he talking about?” 
Sometimes I think it’s enough for the audience to hear a lump of names and say, “That sounds like those foreign painter guys.” But they get the idea. Some people are going to come to the play and know a lot about Picasso, but I do think there’s another strata of intelligent audience member who may not know all that. We use the code of “June of 1940” a couple of times. That, of course, is when the Germans came into Paris. But at some point we had to adjust it and say the Occupation began, because a lot of people aren’t going to know what that means. It’s like mentioning September 1939. That’s when the war began, but other people might say, “Well, Gone With the Wind came out that year.” You write what you write, and you write different kinds of things for different kinds of audiences. I think we’re going to be looking for the NPR audience. 

In the play, Picasso says something like, “I didn’t paint Guernica to stop a war or to save a life. I painted Guernica to be a great painting—art has never had as little value as it has today.” I wonder how much you meant the “today” to resonate.
Well, obviously you want some resonance into the present, because otherwise you’re simply creating a self-destructing antique. I’m sometimes frustrated—not “frustrated,” but bemused—by artists’ sense of self-value in the political marketplace. I know that right after Sept. 11 there were a lot of calls for responses to the event from playwrights. It’s not a terribly new idea, but I have to say that it’s got to really well up out of you for it to be an honest response. Otherwise you’re just saying, “Well, okay, I’ll write about Sept. 11 because everybody else says to.” I tend to think that the best artistic responses are the ones that linger, and they linger in indirect ways. People say this about Guernica all the time. There’s not a single reference to Spain in it. Not a single reference to Franco or the Nazis. 

There’s a Guthrie Theater gig that a whole bunch of us got recently—the theatre wants to send us around the world to write plays about the international scene. I was taken by the fact that out of the eight or nine of us, six wanted to go to Iraq. Okay, so let the ambulance chasers go. It’s so obvious. I think maybe that connects to your idea about footnotes. 

What did you choose?
I’m not sure yet. I might go to Chile. I was down there years ago on a USIA gig and I found out that the Germans—the Nazis that got out of Germany in ’45—created a little settlement on a lake in Chile. They called it a Little Bit of Bavaria. Then, when the Berlin Wall fell in ’89–’90, East German Stasi agents who were on the run also went to the same lake in Chile. So you have the old Nazis and these old communists, all of them thugs, living together on this lake.

All speaking German.
All speaking German. What interests me is that the ideology doesn’t matter. They’re all German, and they’re all comfortable together because they’re all gangsters. And Chile welcomed them. So I thought, maybe I’ll go there and look into that. Obviously it’s on no one’s radar. No one’s talking about it. 

It’ll be like a Chilean Steubenville. 
I don’t think they’ll be bothered with ballot boxes down there. 

In A Picasso, critics take a lot of knocks. That’s sort of a standard reflex in a play, isn’t it? 
I don’t know if it’s a depressive tendency or what, but if I read a bad review, I tend to say, “Oh, they’re probably right.” If it’s a good review, I’ll go, “Hmm. Idiot.” In this play, though, I think the important thing was that Picasso had to say some insulting things about critics before he discovered that the other major character was one. I realize there’s always a danger point [in putting down critics], but it’s funny. I once wanted to write a play called The Critics Agree—because you always see that in the ads, “The critics agree!”—about a critics’ meeting where they have to vote for the best play of the year; it would have taken place maybe 10 years ago, in a room with Frank Rich and Edith Oliver and Michael Feingold and John Simon. Which reminds me: Somebody’s doing a musical version of Theatre of Blood. It’s not a very good movie, but it’s fun. It’s Vincent Price as a ham actor in London who is killing off all the London critics in scenes from Shakespeare. 

Switch of topic: They’re making Compleat Female Stage Beauty into a movie? 
Yeah. We start rehearsals in London on the 16th [of August]. It’s a 10-week shoot, but I don’t think they’ll do anything with the film until a year from now. I don’t know if they’ll want to go the film-festival route or open it directly in theatres. Billy Crudup is playing the lead. The script is different from the play in many ways. Claire Danes plays a seamstress who becomes an actress. We folded some of the plot points together. 

Was this your first screenplay? 
It is the first one that somebody paid me to do. I adapted Three Viewings as a screenplay, and we’re going to try to get that going in the fall. Since then I’ve done a couple of other screenplays. 

How do you think Compleat Female Stage Beauty will translate to film? 
It does almost entirely depend on how you do it. The very nature of the theatrical event [women acting on stage for the first time] requires some sort of “broadcasting”—a kind of extra-theatricality. Maybe it will be a better film than it is a play, because you can isolate the…let’s call it the kabuki nature of the early performance style and really get it exactly right for the take. The ending has to seem really scary—it has to seem as if there’s been a quantum leap in performance style. It’s an obvious point, but every theatrical style supposedly gets more realistic than the style that came before. When David Garrick was acting, they said, “Oh, it’s like seeing Shakespeare lit by lightning.” I’m sure if we saw it today, we’d say, “Well, it looks like cardboard with candlelight.” But regardless, the minute that women come on stage, surely the performance style has to become more real, more naturalistic. I’m hoping that this is told on film in a different way than we’ve been able to on stage. 

Tell me about this newest project, Never Gonna Dance.
I based the book on the original movie, working on it off and on since 1999. Jay Harris, the producer, got the rights to Swing Time years ago—there are only six songs in the original movie [including the classics “A Fine Romance” and “The Way You Look Tonight”]—and since everybody who was involved in the original is now dead, you can’t turn and say, “Jerome, we need another song here.” We had access to the entire Kern trunk, except Show Boat and a few others. Most of the lyrics are Dorothy Fields’s, but a few are by Hammerstein, and even P.G. Wodehouse.

Are you a musical person?
Not at all—can’t play, can’t sing, can’t dance. But the connection with my work was my interest in the ’30s, that world of the depression, that black-and-white-and-silver world of New York skyscrapers—I love that sort of thing. The idea was to preserve the naïveté of that world without being naïve yourself. 

Writing a book for a musical is, as has been said before, like writing a play in half the time allotted. Part of the point, of course, is to move seamlessly from song to song. The format of a ’30s musical allows broad strokes—we’re after a champagne-at-the-Rainbow-Room kind of show.

Broadway ups the level of professionalism. The music is so good, and the choreography is so good, and the cast is so good, that the only thing people will have to complain about is the book.

Toby Zinman is professor of English at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and reviews theatre for Philadelphia’s City Paper and Variety.

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