Oh, Danny Boy: The Creation of a Comedy

A benefit of spending one's free time in the piano bars of Sheridan Square is discovering rising talent among the crowd. For years, I've enjoyed listening to Marc Goldsmith sing at Marie's Crisis, but only recently did I learn that he is an up and coming playwright with a new play in the 10^th Annual New York Fringe Festival. Danny Boy is a poignantly funny romantic comedy about four-foot-tall Danny navigating single life in New York. On a balmy Saturday, Marc, his director Christopher Goodrich, star Stephen Jutras and I gathered at a flower district coffeehouse to discuss the play and the creative process behind it.

Basing his titular hero and his adventures on a college friend, Goldsmith describes Danny as "someone who's kind of having to face his strengths and his flaws and his perfections and his imperfections, having to accept himself as he is." He also identifies strongly with Danny and his neuroses, acknowledging that they resemble his own. Director Goodrich also connects to Danny. "Mark and I are very similar in our insecurities and fears of life," he says, "so I think it was a good match." After several private and public readings, he continues, "I said [that he should] put it in to the Fringe, and he hemmed and hawed, and it got in. And after it got in," he jokes, "he hemmed and hawed!"

"The writing is phenomenal," says Stephen Jutras, who plays Danny. "I really wanted to do it once I read [the script.] When I first read it, I had not met either [Marc or Chris], and I really thought a little person had written it." While the play deals with a little person's life, he feels that the play "could hit home to anybody. The smaller details are more specific to a little person, but you can generalize those to anybody's day to day life: what they go through, insecurities." Goldsmith agrees: " [Danny's height] is specific to the story, but thematically, what the character is grappling with is much broader."

"It takes a while for certain groups of people to break into certain areas, and I think little people for a long time have been sight gags, and I think they're taking bigger steps and creating better roles," Jutras says. "It's an honor to play a role like this," he continues, and says that he often turns down roles that are demeaning to little people. He would rather "play a real role, play a human being, instead of something that's a joke. I always think, in those demeaning roles, that the little person's not real. This is a real role. This is a real character. This is a real person." But for all that, Goldsmith says, the play remains a comedy. "Chris and Stephen have found a balance where there are situations [in which] funny things can happen because you're short," he says, "because it's funny, but without the laugh being at the expense of the little person."

As the play has developed in rehearsal, Goldsmith says, he has learned more about the characters from the actors playing them, even adapting the script to suit the actors and their abilities. For example, he says, "TRoy Hall, who play's Danny's best friend Gabe, is a great comic actor, and he has definitely come up with some stuff that's gone into the script, and the two of them playing off each other has certainly helped." Goodrich protests that statement quickly: "I think you're being a little modest," he says to Goldsmith. "I think the play is marvelous!" He turns back to me. "It's his ideas, it's his language. We've maybe thrown in a word here, changed a word there, but it's his ideas and it's his humor. We've just attached ourselves to that humor."

As a comedy and as a drama, the play is largely character development, though not in a typical way. "At the end of the play," Goldsmith says, "Danny's journey has begun. He's come to a place where he is ready to actually start on the path towards self-acceptance, towards independence, towards feeling better about himself, and towards healthy relationships with people around him." Goodrich continues that train of thought: "The entire play is him lifting one foot, and throughout the journey of the play we see him slowly putting it down. That's where the play ends, when he puts it down."

"Danny is a real character," Goldsmith continues, "and not just a metaphor for someone who has good things and bad things that he has to accept for himself. But that is a universal truth that everyone deals with: trying to get to the point where you really have to come face to face with your insecurities, decide who you are and who you want to be, and to find yourself based on yourself and not based on how everyone else judges you, not on wanting to please everyone else."

Danny Boy runs from August 11^th to the 19^th as part of the 10^th Annual New York Fringe Festival at the Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th Street. Visit www.dannyboytheplay.com or www.fringenyc.org for more information and tickets.

Photos courtesy of Sergio Reynoso 

From top: Stephen Jutras as Danny, playwright Marc Goldsmith and Stephen Jutras, director Christopher Goodrich.