Broadway Bullet Interview: Rob Urbinati - West Moon Street
By: Michael Gilboe Apr. 18, 2007
We talk to Rob Urbinati about what it's like to have two shows opening at the same time. Rob is the writer of "West Moon Street" and the director of "The President and Her Mistress."
You can listen to this interview and many other great features for free on Broadway Bullet vol. 110. Subscribe for free so you don't miss an episode.
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Broadway Bullet: Well, you often hear actors use the words, "Well what I really want to do is direct," but, I don't know how many times you've heard a director say, "What I really want to do is write a play," but as our current guest Rob Urbinati has done. He started off his career in directing and then moved into playwriting, and now does both furiously. How are you doing today?
Rob Urbinati: Everything is great. Thank you.
BB: In fact, you've got two plays- two different plays- one that you're writing and one that you're directing opening on the same day. Is that correct?
RU: Yeah, they virtually open the same night. April 21st.
BB: How are you juggling this all?
RU: It is juggling. The plays are "West Moon Street" which I wrote, which is an adaptation of a somewhat obscure Oscar Wilde story called "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" and that's being directed by Davis McCallum and produced by the Prospect Theatre Company opening at the Hudson Guild Theatre. The play that I am directing is called "The President and Her Mistress." It's a futuristic comedy written by Jan Bothcran and that's opening at the Abington on the same night.
BB: You directed a long time before starting to write, isn't that correct?
RU: Yeah. Basically I was a theatre fanatic. I had a job with Home Box Office as a theatre consultant for a long time,
BB: What did HBO do with a theatre consultant?
RU: I know isn't that funny. At first they were just looking for material, sometimes writers. It actually helped me direct though because ultimately I'd go to the theatre, write my review for Home Box Office, and they weren't interested in the production because they weren't going to use it anyway. They were interested in the quality of the writing so I had to separate what a writer does from what a director and actor does, which was kind of a difficult thing to do, but it was, especially since HBO wasn't interested in the production. I did that for a long time, perhaps too long, I got kind of tired of it, but I did see something like 2000 plays over a period of like five or six years, and HBO wanted everything covered. HBO was kind of just starting, it was in the mid to late 80s, and my taste is kind of eclectic. On the one hand it was fun. I got to see a lot of stuff, but I think like a lot of people who are observing the arts, or peripheral to the arts, I just started to want to be more hands on, and again, because of the nature of this job which was to evaluate the writing apart from the production, I got clear on what a director did and I became interested in directing, so I started to do that in the late 80s.
BB: Now why didn't you just ask for the scripts from the PR reps?
RU: HBO is funny about that. I think sometimes it was rights issues, sometimes it was that they were specifically looking for star vehicles, so at the bottom of this evaluation form it said: star potential. Sometimes they would actually say before I went to the theatre, "See if you can find something for Carol Burnett. We're looking for something for Carol Burnett." So, it was a particular type of theatre job, and as you mentioned at the beginning, not something you associate with Home Box Office. One upshot of that though, and I take credit along with the hundreds of other who did, is I did send HBO to the Whoopi Goldberg show, which was playing at a little theatre in Chelsea, and ultimately they ended up doing her first television appearance.
BB: Now, this inspired you to move into directing?
RU: Yeah.
BB: And how was that?
RU: Well, what was good was that I had friends who were actors and in theatre who were really good, because I think my strengths were visual, like pictorial. I hadn't studied theatre and I hadn't studied actor training or anything, but I did have a sense of movement and composition, and what the final product would be like, but luckily I had friends who were good actors, who would help me get them, who would get themselves to the place where a good director should get them to build characters. So, at first I was like relying on them, but I wasn't sure that I would like it- like directing, because of these communications things I wasn't sure if I was going to be good at it, but I got the chance…basically, someone who worked at HBO, her parents ran a theatre in Omaha, Nebraska and she asked if I wanted to direct a show there. I went there, and there are actually a lot of theatres. I don't know if you know this, but Omaha is kind of hip.
BB: It is?
RU: Yeah, I think what it used to be is that Kansas City was sort of the epicenter of hipness in the Midwest, but Omaha has a great rock and roll scene, and experimental scene, for the Midwest. By the way if you live around it, and you're young and ambitious and artistic you'd move to Omaha. So this was kind of ideal, because it was a place to really learn the craft, and not under watchful eyes. I'd also been living in New York for about 7 or 8 years and I was kind of ready to be away from it, and I have a rent stabilized apartment so I kept that and stayed in Omaha for about 4 years, and directed about 40 plays, and did Shakespeare, experimental, at the Nebraska repertory that does like Noel Coward. So, that's where I really learned how to direct. It was a great training ground and I'm forever grateful to those folks, and I'm still in touch with them.
BB: So at one point did you switch over to also deciding you wanted to write?
RU: It wasn't like I was hoping to write or wished I could. It really never entered my mind, but I did go to graduate school to get a PhD in Oregon and there was a radio announcement, and this is what they said: it was about a lesbian love triangle in Indiana led to murder. I thought lesbians at an Indiana junior high school- it just seemed so strange. So I was intrigued by that, and forgot about it, moved back to New York and this was like 95ish and there were two crime books written about this murder. I was in the Lincoln Center director's lab when I got back and they were talking about adapting your own plays like how to make a career as a director in New York was by doing your own work. I had these two crime books, and they actually had the letters that these two high school girls had written to each other, and the letters were fantastic. They were sometimes raunchy, sometimes just tender and innocent. The girls were like 12 or 13. Sometimes they were very treating and violent. The letters were very potent. So I thought that I would create like an epistolary type of play, just based on these letters. They were actually the notes that these girls threw to each other during class that had been preserved. So when I started to do that and put them all on the computer, it just became clear that if two girls were writing notes to each other about the same event and something that had happened I had enough information about what actually happened and how they spoke to write a play, so I had a play with scenes then that was loosely based on this crime, and that was my first play called "Hazelwood Junior High" and I was really lucky that I had directed some readings at the New Group and I gave the play to Scott Ellis, and this is like the major playwrights sort of hate to hear this but I gave him the play on a Monday and Thursday of that week he said that he would be directing it the following season at the New Group. So that doesn't happen to often. It hasn't happened since.
BB: How many plays since has it been now? What is "West Moon Street" now? How many plays?
RU: I think it's like…I've written some one acts so I'd really have to count, but not a lot. I'm still principally a director. Less then 10. 7 or 8 I think. I'm working on a couple of new things now.
BB: All right, now "West Moon Street" what are some of the exciting things about it?
RU: It has a great director, Davis McKallum. It's a style that I think is difficult for American actors maybe British actors. I think Shakespeare is easier then this kind of high style that Oscar Wilde, and to some degree Noel Coward, is in. So I think we're in good shape there. A funny thing happened though regarding "Hazelwood Junior High." After that I wanted to write something really different from it in terms of language and these were teenage girls and I wanted to write something the polar opposite of that, so I thought, "Oscar Wilde, that might be interesting," and I read his short fiction, and I loved this story, "Lord Arthur's Crime." It's about a guy who is engaged to be married, Lord Arthur is his name, and a couple of weeks before the wedding he goes to a reception where there is a palm reader, in the story it's called a kyroromaticst, and the palm reader reads his palm and tells him that he's going to commit a murder, and being a proper English gentleman he feels that it's best to get this murder out of the way before he gets married, but also being a proper English gentleman he's completely incompetent at the skills required to murder. So the play is about his hapless attempts to try to do away with someone before he gets married, like all good Wilde stuff there's a social critique under this. The sort of bumbling efforts of this man who has had every opportunity throw at him, educational opportunities, who is still incredibly goofy and naïve, and there's also this sort of funny murder mystery element to it that I thought really gave it a dramatic drive. So it's not in the style of "The Importance of Being Earnest." It's not as superficially comic as that, you know, it deals with murder. As I started to say, the connection with "Hazelwood" is that after I'd written "West Moon Street" that despite the polar opposite style in terms of language that they were sort of about the same thing. They were both about societies, or contexts, where murder is sort of a vehicle. Neither the girls in "Hazelwood" nor the character of Lord Arthur in "West Moon Street" really see murder as what it is. It's just a means to an end to achieve something that they want so the plays ended up being curiously similar.
BB: As a director first, and as you say, a playwright second do you just find a subject you want to write about passionately, write about it, and then try to find someone to do it, or do you usually have someone who's interested who's like "I'd like to do one of your plays, do you have anything?'
RU: That's actually a really great question. I feel still like a new writer or kind of a distinct writer. I have a tremendous respect for writers who scribble away their torments, and their passions into plays. I've never done that. I like to get produced. I'm not saying I write to be commercial, I mean "Hazelwood High" they light a girl on fire, so it wasn't the most…
BB: Violence is always commercial.
RU: Right, but I reduced the number of characters in that so it would be easier to be produced, and I knew there was a ton of interest in Oscar Wilde, so it would increase the chances of it getting produced. I like to figure out what the production opportunities are for the things I'm interested in before I put pen to paper. I'm not bragging about that. In some ways, again, I wish I was John Guare and just wrote whatever came to me, but I like to know what's going to happen to it. I wrote a musical this year called Shangri-la based on the girl group from the 60s and I knew that there would be interest in that, and I also work in Queens Theatre in the Park, and the Shangri-la's where from Queens, so like that. I wrote an adaptation this year of Howard Zinn's book called "Voices: A people's history of the United States," and I knew that the Culture Project, who I've worked with, would be interested in that. So does that answer your question? I kind of figure out where I could pitch it and then don't write it till I know that there's interest.
BB: So we've got "West Moon Street" which you've written opening at the Prospect Theatre Company April 21st, and then "The President and Her Mistress" which you're directing at the Abingdon which opens at about the same time, and we'll have links on our website for people to find out more information.
RU: That's fantastic.
BB: Well, thank you for coming down here and sharing a lot of interesting information with our listeners.
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You can listen to this interview and many other great features for free on Broadway Bullet vol. 110. Subscribe for free so you don't miss an episode.
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