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Tending the flock

Friday, September 20, 2002

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Editor

Playwright is a precarious profession, which makes successful playwright Steven Dietz an anomaly.

		STAGE PREVIEW 'INVENTING VAN GOGH' WHERE: City Theatre, Bingham and 13th streets, South Side. WHEN: 8 p.m. Tues.-Fri.; 5:30 and 9 p.m. Sat. (no 9 p.m. this weekend); 2 and 7 p.m. Sun. (no 2 p.m. this weekend; no 7 p.m. Oct. 13, 20); through Oct. 20. TICKETS: $25-$35; 412-431-CITY.

But he's reversed the famous Robert Sherwood adage that in theater, "you can make a killing but you can't make a living." As Dietz, 44, puts it with a kind of pride, "I've made a living for 20 years, but I've never made a killing."

It certainly doesn't seem to bother him, talking at lunch a few weeks ago at the South Side's Le Pommier, a gracious respite from early rehearsals at City Theatre of his "Inventing Van Gogh," which began preview performances last night.

It's a story about a contemporary painter whose life intersects with Van Gogh's. Featured are Pittsburghers Janelle Baker, Martin Giles and Larry John Meyers, along with Kelly Boulware (from Seattle, where Dietz lives) and Lee Sellars (New York).

There will be more about "Van Gogh" next week, in the review. Our subject was Dietz's life as a playwright.

Pittsburgh has seen his work before: "Private Eyes," a smart, funny, perception-bending noir comedy was given a crackling good production by Playhouse Rep in 1999, and back in 1989, City Theatre (still at its old home in Oakland) staged his "Painting It Red," a story wrapped around a rock band. City also did his adaptation of "Dracula" (1997), vividly re-imagined by Tom Savini. And in 1998, "Silence," Dietz's translation of Shusako Endo's historical novel about Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century Japan, visited the University of Pittsburgh.

That's variety.

Not surprisingly, then, Dietz doesn't define himself by his subject matter. "I'm a playwright," he says simply. "I'm interested in a wide variety of stories, hence I've done a lot of adaptations." Mostly, he's fascinated by language and theatricality.

This is the second full production of "Van Gogh," which premiered at the Arizona Stage Company last fall and had a reading at Seattle Rep. Dietz reworked it each time. "I'm a huge rewriter," he says. "I love to cut my plays." "Van Gogh" started out at 170 pages and he cut it to 99.

"You spend the premiere learning what your play is about, learning the story," he says, referring to the second production as "the subsequent premiere." But it's harder to get a second or third production than a premiere, because theaters make a fetish of being first.

As Dietz says, "that's sort of ridiculous, since this is a big country." A production in one city doesn't actually decrease a play's value elsewhere. Unlike a movie, "a play doesn't open nationwide -- it's a fire, it spreads. It's an art form that can't be owned and rented."

He's grateful to City's Tracy Brigden for overcoming that prejudice against second productions. Oddly, this is the first time they've met, though they've corresponded for five years. Even though he's never made a killing, Dietz is well-known among regional theaters.

"A play is written to have many lives," he says. "I have plays that have been done only once and those done 300 times. Some find homes and some don't." Dietz's plays that have been done most often are "Lonely Planet," "God's Country," Dracula" and "Private Eyes."

His track record is such that most of his plays are now written under commission, "for which I'm very grateful." It would be harder to start out as a playwright now, he says, since few theaters take unsolicited manuscripts. "My first play, I made 50 copies. Now, five."

On the other hand, while regional theaters used not to do many new plays, now, "you can't call yourself a major theater unless you are doing new work." New plays are no longer outcasts. And having set his plays loose, he defines his further role as less salesman than "itinerant shepherd," helping to tend them as they grow toward independence.

Surprisingly, Dietz's wife, Allison Gregory, an actress and dancer, is a playwright, too. Each has a workroom at home: "We meet in the kitchen. I always have all the answers to her plays, and she to mine." They have a 3-year-old daughter, so it's not surprising they're writing a play for the professional Seattle Children's Theater.

At some point we noticed we'd been talking for an hour and neither of us had mentioned New York, sometimes considered the be-all and end-all of theater. Though produced all over, Dietz has hardly been noticed there. "Pittsburgh for me is pretty far east," he says, though he has a premiere coming up at New Jersey's McCarter Theater, which falls in the greater New York orbit.

That play came about oddly, between major works. He'd just spent four months as a writer in ABC-TV's "Thieves," making very good money -- it bought them a new car and other comforts -- but he was sick of it, so he quit and went home to his Seattle office and started throwing things away. A Seattle theater asked him to write something for a festival of readings, and he had a month, so "on a burst, I wrote a three-character play." It was a rare time when "something came out quickly and clean" -- usually he struggles and rewrites ad infinitum.

He sent it to the McCarter and had an offer within a month.

Born and raised in Denver, Dietz got interested in theater at the University of Northern Colorado. After graduation, he got in his '73 Plymouth Duster and set off to drive around the country. The car broke down in Minneapolis in a snowstorm and he went into an old church to use a telephone and discovered it was the famous Playwrights' Center. Minneapolis became his home for the next 11 years, then Seattle for the past 11 -- the two hottest American theater cities after the big two of New York and Chicago.

"If you can't write a play in Seattle, you just can't write a play," he jokes: "It has the three main things: good coffee, a lot of gray weather and, at the end, really good beer."

Christopher Rawson can be reached at crawson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1666.