Bard of the urban underbelly” is how an observer tagged him during a visit to Chicago in 1993.
An easy call back then. Eric Bogosian’s super-charged, bug-eyed solo performances, often seething with the fury of the villain he eventually played in the movie “Under Siege 2,” took stagegoers on wild, graphic tours of the cityscape. In works such as “Drinking in America,” “Dog Show” and “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll,” Bogosian mined observations made while sitting in an all-night, Times Square souvlakia shop, “watching hoodlums steal eclairs. Or, I’d take a quick spin around the block to check out the goings-on with the local pushers, bag ladies and soapbox preachers.”
But in the mid-’90s, he surprised the theatrical world with a play set in and entitled, of all things, “subUrbia.” The relocation is apparently permanent.
His follow-up, “Griller,” getting its world premiere Monday at the Goodman Theatre, is even more archetypically suburban, set in a backyard (“subUrbia” took place in a 7-11 parking lot) during an extended family barbecue on the 4th of July-the lead character’s birthday.
Sitting in director Robert Falls’ Goodman office, the ever-loquacious Bogosian now admits he may know suburbia better than city life after all. “I grew up in suburbia (just outside Boston), and (part of the year) I live an hour and a half outside New York now,” he says. “I have a swimming pool, I barbecue and I own a car.
“In some ways, these plays are the real challenge. It’s easy to write about colorful, extreme urban characters who aren’t you. I’m the classic suburban guy who moves to the city and looks around at all these wild people and then writes about them. And then other suburban people come to see the show and say, ‘Yeah, man, you really got that drunk guy down pat.’ When, the truth is, none of us really ever had any experience as a wino.”
But unlike the sunny hopes of the hordes whose ’50s exodus launched the suburban movement in the first place, Bogosian’s vision is Gothic, dark, laced with doubt and scary patches of moral dry rot. “subUrbia”-partly inspired by the 44-year-old Bogosian’s own suburban youth, despite its ’90s setting–boasts twentysomething characters with a comfortable past and a nowhere future. They’re adrift, maybe permanently, and one mock tragedy–a made-up story in which a young man pretends that he killed a young woman–gives way to an actual drug overdose by a confused waif who spends much of the play sitting forgotten on the sidelines. With all the other goings-on in the parking lot, her death goes almost unnoticed.
“Griller,” though every bit as funny as Bogosian’s one-man voyages, is unrelentingly dark too. The main character, Gussie, a successful businessman who’s turning 50, finds himself at the center of a cookout that is anything but fit celebration for someone born on the 4th of July. His eldest son is so absorbed in the brokerage business he’s on the verge of losing his ex-model wife, who’s toying with the idea of having an affair with Gussie’s younger, ne’er-do-well other son, who is just out of detox and secretly shooting up heroin. (He’s only at the barbecue in the first place to sponge more family handouts.)
Gussie’s embittered, spinster sister is sick and tired of caring for their elderly, senile mother and is involved with a seemingly benign cult that turns out to be white supremacist.
Where, Gussie wonders, have all the flowers gone?
A onetime rock ‘n’ roll manager who remembers the ’60s as a time of Woodstock and windowpane, Gussie now has everything, including his brand new, $3,000 barbecue “griller,” complete with an intercom and an icemaker. And yet he has nothing. His birthday celebration dissolves into a very different kind of bad acid trip, that of the complacent, materially soldout Baby Boomer hitting a metaphoric brick wall.
“Since `subUrbia’ was about a young man looking at all the things coming up in his life and trying to decide which path he should take, I wanted to write about a guy who has basically chosen all his paths, lived them and now is looking back and saying, `What if I’d done things differently?’ ” Bogosian explains. “Gussie has a speech in which he remembers being in the emergency room with his injured child back in the ’60s without money or credit cards. He decided right then he’d never let that happen again.”
While critical of Gussie, Bogosian sees the issue of Gussie’s materialism as complicated. We all make compromises.
“I grill, and my family grilled a lot while I was growing up. But we didn’t talk about our new Porsche in the driveway. We weren’t thinking about money all the time. Everything in the newspapers today is about how to manage your IRA. A lot of people spend their money at the mall. I’m no different, I just spend it at these new super bookstores like Borders, buying books I’ll never read. Who could possibly be reading all those books that they’re selling?
“What bothers me is that I spend so much time focusing on this stupid stuff, as we all do. My protagonists’ issues are close to my own. Jeff’s issues, in `subUrbia,’ were mine as a young man. Now, on any given day, I’ll read the newspaper and get all concerned about Algeria or Somalia or AIDS. Two hours later, I’m in the backyard just as engaged in getting a steak cooked at just-the-right doneness. That’s a Gussie thing. When you’re young, you’re gonna be a hero and do amazing things. One of the things that happens as we get older is that we resign ourselves to being pretty insignificant and petty. `Well, life’s life, and you do what you can.’ Deep down, I think Gussie still thinks he’s a hero. Because there are people who don’t give a —- that there’s a guy living in a box out there on Lower Wacker Drive. I’m not one of them. I don’t say to myself that I don’t give a —-. But am I lying to myself when I say I do?”
Gussie is played, by the way, by Yale-educated actor-comedian Robert Klein; one-time “Room 222” ingenue Karen Valentine plays his put-upon wife.
“I live in the city myself,” notes Falls, “but I have a backyard, and I started with charcoal, but now I love my gas grill. When Eric first started writing the play, Gussie felt older, he felt as if he came from another generation. Now, Gussie is us, he’s you, he’s me, he’s a large portion of our audience. It hit me when Hillary Clinton turned 50 and came to celebrate here. It was sort of like `Hillary’s turning 50, we’re all Hillary, America is 50.’ The play asks: What is 50 about?”
The production itself, meanwhile, is the second installment of a still young but promising theatrical collaboration. Falls staged the premiere production of “subUrbia” in 1994 at Lincoln Center Theater to great acclaim. As a team, he and Bogosian have birthed “Griller” in phone calls, faxes and workshops together over the past 2 1/2 years, and Bogosian often calls Falls his collaborator.
Falls says, “What Eric goes through as a writer is an amazing process of public exploration of his own psyche. I actually come in as combination collaborator, therapist, friend . . .”
“Enemy,” Bogosian interjects.
“Enemy,” Falls agrees, “and hostile witness. I’m a kind of griller in my own way, helping him on his journey.”
They met while Falls was directing “On the Open Road” at the Public Theater. Bogosian says, “I’m always thinking about this director or that director and second-guessing his or her work, and then I saw `Open Road’ and said, `Am I dreaming? This guy is doing all the stuff I love in the theater.’ And the minute we met, his hair was longer and curlier then, mind you, well, I knew we were on the same page.”
Later, Bogosian mailed Falls his “subUrbia” script, which the director found “the best new play I’d ever read, certainly the best new play any author had sent me.” A snag developed. Falls decided — he now thinks mistakenly — that the work was too big for the Goodman Studio but not right for the Goodman mainstage, either, where he now wishes he had staged the play. “So I said no thanks, and I figured that would be it,” Falls says. “The next thing I know, he called me and said Lincoln Center wanted to do it, and he still wanted me to direct. It was a fantastic show of confidence on his part.”
A confidence Falls returns. “`subUrbia’ proved the best collaboration I’ve ever had in my life. He is someone truly open to my suggestions and contributions. Because he’s an actor, he knows actors, and, like a director, he cares about design.” (Derek McLane’s set for “Griller” features a functioning backyard swimming pool.)
“After `subUrbia,”‘ Bogosian concurs, “I knew I’d begin writing a play just for Bob to direct.”
As for acting, Bogosian is in Woody Allen’s “Deconstructing Harry,” now in theaters, and HBO’s “A Bright Shining Lie” this spring.
But, “Right after `Talk Radio,’ (the 1989 film in which he starred and which was directed by Oliver Stone) I was being quite the diva,” he says. “I was turning down a lot of parts, and Oliver Stone said, `Eric’s going to have to decided whether he wants to be an actor or a writer.’ At the time, I said, `B.S. I don’t have to decide anything. I can do it all.’ But in a way I already had decided. I’d stayed in New York. I didn’t want to travel, so I turned down location jobs. I enjoy acting, and it’s exciting to be on a set, but when I’m sitting in that trailer, waiting, I can’t stand it. I’m not putting in the time to hone my craft as the best character actors do. I find writing so much more fulfilling.”
THE $3,000 BARBECUE
Eric Bogosian’s “Griller” may be about a barbecue, but suburbia itself and its contemporary Baby Boomer habitues get skewered the most. “They want meat,” one character warns, “somebody’s going to get their hands bloody.”
“The backyard barbecue,” Bogosian explains, “is the perfect nexus of so many things that have to do with the values of living in the suburbs.” But as fans of his last play, “subUrbia,” and his scathing one-man shows already know, Bogosian likes to push things just one step farther than actual reality. The title, for instance, isn’t really a term widely used in the U.S. to mean barbecue–Bogosian heard it in Australia. “It’s a little like those words David Mamet makes up that sound so real: Glengarry Glen Ross.”
The play’s actual barbecue is a $3,000 grill of the mind, one that can make bread and features an intercom and an icemaker. To some extent, life imitated art–Bogosian said he hit on the idea of a $3,000 grill on a whim. “Now, they’ve actually become quite popular,” he observed.
They do not, however, make ice or pipe in grandma’s disembodied voice from the kitchen. “Weber actually donated a grill to use on stage, but they were concerned at first that consumers might see the play and call up retailers wanting `that grill I saw at the Goodman.’ There’s no such thing.” Falls had been pleasantly surprised by Weber’s consent, anyway–the play, after all, grills barbecuing mercilessly and even features one scene in which a drunken curmudgeon urinates on the barbie.
