Eugene O’Neill | Intimate Excellent

Tim Cummings and Bill Brochtrup in rehearsal for ‘The Normal Heart’ .

by Don Grigware

The Normal Heart hasn’t been done in years. Tell me about the play’s relevance today, from your perspective.

Tim Cummings

The play mentions gay marriage, which is relevant today: DOMA being struck down, Prop 8 being ruled unconstitutional, more and more states are voting to allow for it. The play also brings up the failures of the health care system, and those are relevant today as well. We’ve yet to see what Obamacare results in, ultimately, but I have hope. The play discusses homophobia, bigotry, closeted gays, politics, conspiracy theories, etc. Those are all relevant now.

Suicide among LGBT youth has been tragically high, of course there’s this putrid Putin/ Russia debacle. The gay-bashing rate in NYC is currently on an alarming rise, which includes the murder of Mark Carson on May 18th, shot directly in the head after his assailant hurled anti-gay slurs at him and his companion. Right in the heart of the West Village. To be honest, I don’t think there will ever be a time this play is not relevant. It’s only a matter of who is brave enough to produce it, as it is not an easy play to do.

What about your character and how he affects the issues at hand? What are the challenges in playing him?

Tim Cummings and Bill Brochtrup, ‘The Normal Heart’ at the Fountain Theatre.

Ned Weeks goes from hesitant participant to full-blown activist and loses nearly everything along the way: his family, his friends, his love, his station in life. Ned is a fighter. A warrior. He does not understand why other people cannot fight back the way he does, and ultimately this alienates him from his community. He will do whatever it takes to wake people up and make them pay attention to this epidemic. He wants pride for the gay community, not shame, not hiding. He wants gay men to think with their hearts and minds, not their pecs and cocks.

The challenges in playing him are that his intensity, passion, Jewish intellectualism, rallying, rants about promiscuity, confrontational nature, and bursts of outrage are not things that can be handled delicately. Yet, we are in this intimate space—so it’s about striking a balance. Where can we hold back? Where do we need to go forward full throttle?

Talk a little about Lisa Pelikan and your working with her – now in 2 plays.

Tim Cummings and Lisa Pelikan in ‘The New Electric Ballroom’

A passionate perfectionist, a questioner, a force, a presence, a joy. With those mesmerizing blue eyes, to boot. Definitely an actor’s actor. Oddly enough, she is also making me take off my clothes in this, just like she did in The New Electric Ballroom. Ha.

Your participation in Ballroom was the best. I really enjoyed your performance. Was that harder to do than Heart, or easier since you are Irish and probably have lived through a lot of similar experiences in Ballroom? (Or am I all wet?)

Thanks, Don. That was a fantastic experience. Yes, I am Irish, but I tend to play Jewish men a lot, too, as I am now. I grew up in New York, surrounded by an abundance of Irish, Irish/Italian, and Jewish heritage. It comes naturally, I suppose.

What I loved about Ballroom was the transformational aspect: my character, Patsy, goes from smelly chubby fishmonger to sexy, slick, pop idol—right before the audience’s eyes. No special effects, no cutaways, no magic. Just good old fashioned in-your-face theatre. Brilliant playwriting and storytelling.

Was that harder than The Normal Heart? I don’t think anything will be harder than The Normal Heart. The role of Ned might be bigger than Hamlet. He barely leaves the action. He never stops talking. He rarely calms down. The level of stage skill—physical prowess, emotional intensity, collaborative endurance—required to play Ned assures he will likely never be conveyed by any actor that is incompetent, lazy, or timid. Larry Kramer was clever to have
written Ned the way he did.

Tim Cummings and Carmela Corbett in South Coast Repertory's 2012 production of "Eurydice" by Sarah Ruhl.

Tim Cummings and Carmela Corbett in “Eurydice” at South Coast Rep (2012).

Speak about your writing career.

I write novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, and poetry.

I released a collection called Orphans in the summer of 2011. It’s an idiosyncratic assemblage of short stories, poetry, screenplays, plays, and a film treatment. I wanted to put all the different writing forms together in one weirdly prismatic vessel, and unleash it unrepentantly onto the world. So, I did.

I have a full-length novel called Jake Curve that my agent in NYC is working on. It’s a story of a brilliant little boy who loses his identical twin to a mysterious disappearance, and how he contends with the difficulties of his family falling apart. Ultimately it is a story questioning the validity of family, and whether it is okay to leave them behind if you don’t fit in there.

My most recent play, Bully, is an exploration of this pandemic of teenagers committing suicide for being bullied for being gay. It’s a deeply polemical slaughtering of what masculinity is supposed to mean in today’s day and age. It pays homage to William Golding’s seminal masterpiece about savagery versus civilization, Lord of the Flies, probably my favorite book.

Writing or acting, if you had to make a choice?

Yikes! Can’t I conjoin them and be both? We’ll call it wricting! ‘Hi, I’m Tim, and I’m a wrictor.’

Who are your favorite actors?

Argh, this is a hard one—

Meryl Streep, Mark Rylance, Kate Winslet, Simon Pegg, Edie Falco, Sean Penn, Viola Davis, Richard Jenkins, Kristin Wiig, Gene Wilder, Jack Lemmon, Gene Hackman, Bryan Cranston, Richard Pryor, Benicio del Toro. I like people with passion. Jack Nicholson, he’s another. Gary Oldman. Cate Blanchett.

Also, many of our brilliant LA locals, like Anne Gee Byrd, Jenny O’Hara, John Getz, Hugo Armstrong. Our town is so ridiculously chockablock with talent. And no, not all of it is in the Fame and Fortune industry—it’s right there, in your face, on our small stages.

Tim Cummings

Your favorite playwrights?

Tracy Letts, Maria Irene Fornes, Enda Walsh, Ruth Margraff, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Albee, Chekhov, O’Neill, Shaw.

Any role you haven’t played yet that you are yearning to play?

Jonny ‘Rooster’ Byron (Jerusalem).
Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman).
Eddie Carbone (A View From The Bridge).
George (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf).
Thomas in Enda Walsh’s Misterman.
Father Brendan Flynn (Doubt).
Medea, in some awesome, twisted, all-male version.
A one-man version of The Crucible.
I’d also like to do The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh.

As I get older, I get to play increasingly interesting and substantial roles. The best is yet to come, I feel. I don’t fear or ward off age in any capacity. Bring it, I say. Look at Judi Dench, for fu**’s sake. Clint Eastwood. Bette White!

Anything else you care to add?

Looking forward to taking part in The Skylight Theatre Company’s honoring of Terrence McNally in a four-day event at the end of September called Salute. I was very honored to be asked. And, of course, I’m looking forward to The Normal Heart opening, and audiences experiencing it for its beauty and intensity. I hope it encourages conversations, think-tanks, and outrage.

Don Grigware writes his own blog and writes for Broadway World.

The Normal Heart Sept 21 – Nov 3 (323) 663-1525 MORE

by Stephen Sachs

I understand it now. I get it. Why Provincetown has lured playwrights and painters for decades. Some artists anchor here and never leave. Others flock in seasonally, migrating like birds and humpback whales, lingering for a period of nourishment before moving on.

For painters like Edward Hopper it was the light. The soft brilliance of the light here is legendary. The luminosity so rich, light itself seems to hold its own color. Reds are more red, blues are more blue. Lazy watercolor clouds, vibrant cobalt skies, the sun shimmering off the bay. You gaze at the landscape for one hour and watch it change one hundred times as light, sun and clouds shift and dance before your eyes.

Hopper spent nearly 40 of his 84 summers on the Cape. Hopper painted hundreds of canvases here. Everywhere I look, I see a Hopper painting in the landscape. The sand cliffs, the grass dunes, a lonely solitary clapboard house perched on a bluff overlooking the sea.

Tennessee Williams spent four summers in Provincetown (1940, ’41, ’44 and ’47) during which time he worked on The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Night of the Iguana and Suddenly Last Summer. He struck up a friendship with Jackson Pollock (who also spent summers here). Williams was 29 when he first came to the Cape in 1940. It was here that he had his first brief love affair and also met Frank Merlo, the great love of his life.

Eugene O’Neill, a 29 year-old untried playwright, came to Provincetown with “a trunk full of plays” in the summer of 1916. It proved a turning point in his playwriting career and a milestone in the history of the American Theatre. His first plays were performed on the first floor of a two-story converted fishhouse at the far end of rickety Lewis Wharf, which reached about 100 feet into Provincetown harbor. The group called itself the Provincetown Players. O’Neill stayed on in Provincetown for nine years. Some of those early Provincetown plays went on to Broadway.

The original Provincetown Playhouse on the wharf. Eugene O'Neill's first play, "Bound East for Cardiff", premiered here.

On a narrow harbor road, sandwiched between seaside condos, is the site of the wharf that held the Provincetown Players and launched the first plays of Eugene O’Neill. The original dock is long gone. Destroyed by fire and surf. A plaque marks the historic site.

Tomorrow, I drive to New London, CT, to move my older son into his dorm room at Mitchell College. New London is also where Eugene O’Neill spent his young formative years. The house, once owned by his father for 30 years, still stands. It is the setting for O’Neill’s final masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

I journey tomorrow from Provincetown and the ghost-wharf where O’Neill’s first play was born, to New London and the childhood home where his final play is set.

I, too, am a playwright. My week in the Cape now ends. I roamed the beach that Williams sauntered, gazed at the dunes that Hopper painted, and strolled the harbor O’Neill walked. And early each morning, I would pad down the narrow wood stairs of our rented house on Drummer Cove. Make coffee. Fire up my laptop. Sit before the keyboard like climbing into a small boat on Provincetown bay, and cast off! Set sail! Bow pointed toward the rising sun!

The first draft of a new play.