Interview: Jonathan Hadary's INDIAN SUMMER Hourglass

INDIAN SUMMER is a deceptively simple beach tale, says Jonathan Hadary who plays Grandfather George in this wistful dramedy. "It's not an easy play to describe because there's so much surprise," Hadary said. "He's a Rhode Island widower and he's got corners in his life you wouldn't suspect."

Hadary fell in love with the character-and the play-the minute he read it. "I wanted to be in it, he [George] is dear, not just one color. There's all kinds of sides to him: pleasant, eccentric, bereaved," Hadary said. "The play keeps speaking to bigger and bigger ideas as it goes along." "We're all entitled to be rich and human and complex, and the context of the story is as big and thorough as they come."

The seemingly straightforward story centers on Daniel (Owen Campbell), George's 16-year-old grandson, unceremoniously dumped by his mother in her step-father's seaside cottage. No one knows when she'll collect him. Daniel mopes his days away at the beach alone, until he meets 17-year-old Izzy (Elise Kibler), a local girl with a chip on her shoulder, always ready for a fight. She resents "the summer people" and is shadowed by her shredded boyfriend Jeremy (Joe Tippett), 10 years older and a doofus.

Izzy and Daniel begin a caustic relationship that soon turns playful. Jeremy is not amused, but the teens grow closer as their defenses drop. George does his best to keep Daniel entertained by planning puppet-show-and-ice-cream excursions as he did when Daniel was younger. George, bereaved after the death of his wife Millie, seems happy enough, scouring the beach for change, following the weather reports or talking about sea animals to the audience. But, Hadary said, "You can't tell a book by its cover."

"The playwright"-Gregory S. Moss-didn't specify everything," Hadary said. The audience doesn't know why the mother left Daniel, where she went or when she's coming back. We don't have a lot of backstory about George or his relationships. "He leaves out all kinds of things in the story-telling, and it's up to audiences to fill things in."

"We're here like a drop in the ocean, a blink," Hadary said. "Indian summer is a reprieve within seasons. But what's lovely about the play is it's not heavy handed.

"The play is a wondrous thing and I was in a thrall about it," he said with a laugh. "It's not a word I use often but that's what happened when I read the play. There's a kind of enchantment of a wonderful sort in the story," directed by Carolyn Cantor. "and it remains puzzling."

The seasons drive his life now, he loves looking at the sand, searching for buried treasure beneath the 15,000 pounds of sand that fill the stage. (Scenic design by Dane Laffrey.)

Hadary thinks audiences will relate to the story. "To think about dying in America is almost un-American," he said. "We're not able to change the outcome, we may delay it, but we don't survive. As long as we acknowledge that in daily life and embrace it, it's not morose. It's quite the reverse," he said. "Nothing ends up where you think it will," in life or in the play. "Not to belabor the beach metaphor, but reading the play was like being splashed in the face with salt water. There's a refreshing quality where I was reminded of El Gallo in THE FANTASTICKS who says it's going to hurt a little but it will be okay.

"That thought makes all the wonderful things more wonderful, more remarkable. The writer is saying life is short and it doesn't take a long time to achieve what it achieves. He addresses the human condition in a modern world that has no references to the internet or cellphones," Hadary noted. "This is why we have theater, like Shakespeare said, to hold a mirror up."

He feels a special kinship to George, especially since they're around the same age. "The more I make him like me, the more it works. He's intimate with the audience and he gives almost Shakespearian soliloquies," he said. "There's a breathless forward movement in the second act that's all unexpected. The audience is hanging on where we're going."

Walking on a shifting sandy stage has been tricky. "It was hard to figure out, for all of us, to find a spot to be. The sand moves constantly and gets in every conceivable inch of space," he said. "I have it in my house now, it's in my bed. The rake itself is very tricky to learn how to walk on. And we hear sounds the audience doesn't. The weirdest thing about the sand is it takes a lot of grooming," he said with a laugh.

"The hard part is when we come out for our bows and try to balance," he said. "In order to stand still we have to kind of squish our feet in it."

Indian Summer is playing at Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus