`I know he`s kind of hard around the edges,” one Chicago policeman says of another in the Doug Post play ”Earth and Sky.” ”He`s got a bad disposition and a mean temper. And he cheats on the wife and does deals and sometimes he beats up people.
”But besides that, he`s a pretty good guy.”
Much of ”Earth and Sky,” an off-Broadway hit during the Persian Gulf War that is now getting a belated local premiere at Victory Gardens Theater, is set at a fictional Chicago watering hole called Billy Hart`s Bar and Grill. Tucked under an elevated track, Billy Hart`s, a greasy spoon in a grimy heap
(a dead body is found in a nearby dumpster), might be any of a thousand such spots in the city.
This type of low-life imagery connects the gentlemanly, bespectacled Post and his Chicago with the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler, one of his source idols. Like Chandler, who patented the hard-boiled detective and the gritty, netherworld urban landscape that goes with it, Post sees Chicago, at least in ”Earth and Sky,” as a cesspool.
”You shouldn`t have gone to Billy`s,” a detective tells the play`s heroine, Sara. ”It`s the one place I can think of where dropping the bomb might actually be considered a form of gentrification.”
But Post is not just interested in gloom-and-doom thrillers. Though Chicago is his adopted home, Post, now 34, is the son of a traveling oil businessman and he lived all over the globe while growing up. He even saw
”The Mousetrap,” Agatha Christie`s landmark stage mystery, while living with his parents in London (”It was cheaper than hiring a babysitter”).
”Earth and Sky” has a plot twist attributable to that hit, and the title of the work is embedded in a Dylan Thomas poem, which Sara, a poet herself in the story, recites in full as part of the play.
Form is Post`s plaything. He`s also authored a serious comedy about yuppie relationships (”Suffering Fools”), a musical based on a beloved children`s classic (”The Wind in the Willows”), a surreal suburban mystery
(”Murder in Green Meadows”) and a rock `n` roll opera (”The Real Life Story of Johnny De Facto.”)
Output and stylistic versatility clearly are not Post`s problem. Stick-to-it-ness may be; he rewrites a lot. ”Meadows,” which began as a half-hour script for the local NBC-TV station, has ended up a full-length play in England, and Post is now working on the third draft of the ”Earth and Sky” screenplay (for Time-Warner). Simultaneously, he`s working on a commissioned mystery for a future NBC anthology series, to feature work by eight American playwrights, and he`s revising some of his other works all the time.
”I find there are plays which just take years and years and years to write,” he says. ”I can concentrate on something for a month or so, and then I get bored and need to go on to something else.”
Post first showed up as a writer to watch in the mid-`80s, mainly in off- Loop play readings and studio productions, where his prolific works emerged with distinction amidst the plethora of original would-be plays produced in shoestring abundance here. Even with a small, three-act, Pinteresque yuppie turn, ”Longings and Belongings,” Post showed a flair for delivering punchy dialogue and dark, brooding, elliptical atmosphere. Subsequent full-length productions of the charming ”Wind and the Willows” made that show a small hit for a while, although its third, fullblown holiday mounting struck a lot of people as overkill-plays can be rewritten once too often, too, apparently. When ”Earth and Sky” came along in 1989, Post expected little more than another modest non-Equity production, but by then, he`d attracted the attention of the Eugene O`Neill National Playwrights Conference in
Connecticut. ”Suffering Fools” was accepted for workshop there in 1988; the following summer, he worked on ”Earth and Sky,” and that attracted the attention of New York`s Second Stage Theatre.
On opening night, Post got his first taste of life in a faster lane.
”We went through the usual ritual of waiting for the New York Times review, which turned out to be favorable,” he says. ”I rushed to phone my wife back in Chicago with the good news, but she said, `I already know. Somebody from Paramount (Pictures) called just before you did. I told them you`d be in no condition to talk to them tonight.` ”
