Allan Appel Photo
Walt, played by J. Kevin Smith, sips vodka and coughs blood (hence the tissues) throughout the play.
And that’s not all, folks!
Walt’s brother Roy, played by Steve Scarpa, locked in sibling rivalry with genius Walt.
Yet it’s the plot culmination of A Public Reading Of An Unproduced Screenplay About The Death of Walt Disney, the 2013 well-reviewed drama by Lucas Hnath, which the game New Haven Theater Company is staging at its English Building Market theater on Nov. 8, 9, 11, and 15 – 18, each show beginning at 8 p.m.
Giving a new — and gallows-humor resonance — to the screenplay term “cut,” Hnath’s play, like his previous works that often deal with famous historical or current figures like Bill and Hillary Clinton, upends the Fantasyland version of Walt Disney. Instead, it presents a narcissistic, nearly monstrous egomaniac Walt as he contemplates — through writing a screenplay — how he can save his genius by cryogenically freezing his head to bring back in a great new future, which he’ll help produce.
Here’s how the final moments read, after the head is chopped off (screenplay direction is: Pencil breaks):
Walt is just a head
Close Walt’s head in freeze
frozen …
Walt sees
everything
in his head, where everything is …
because
what death is,
what death is, is real slow, it’s a slow fade, a slow
and eternal fade …
and Walt is happier than he’s been
better than he’s ever been
smarter than he’s been
and everyone misses him,
and it’s a real
slow
a real
slow fade …
Whew!
Scarpa used Neal Gabler’s biography as Disney for research for his role.
The text is very staccato, single words or phrases, rarely a completed sentence. What’s more, the playwright dictates that his actors are not supposed to emote or leave the table where they are reading the screenplay. They must speak fast, very fast.
And when you walk into the snug little theater at the back of the English Market Building, don’t be surprised that all you see are a few tables and chairs haphazardly arranged, with some glasses, a bottle and sheets of paper strewn about. Have you come to the wrong location? Is it that the New Haven Theater Company has forgotten that there is a show tonight? It looks as if they were reading through a script and left suddenly left to go home.
But that’s precisely the point: the play is a production whose action is reading through a script for possible production.
In the third week of rehearsal, I sat down with Walt and Roy — that is, actors J. Kevin Smith and Steve Scarpa — along with director Drew Gray to find out what drew them to the material, so challenging in both form and content, and how they are finding genuine depth, the sharp edges of sibling rivalry, humor, and lots of universal stuff in the show.
Independent: When and why was the company, which I know operates in play selection as a collective, drawn to the Hnath play?
Gray: I was [as a kid] never into Disney. I used to watch Dumbo, but my parents showed us more Hitchcock. We found [out about the play, which had been staged at Playwrights Horizons in NYC] two or three years ago and we did a reading at Steve’s house. I was curious. Such an interesting text. I was looking for an opportunity to dive into it. With all the staccato sentences, how do you build a world out of this?
Independent: So how do you do that? What are the particular challenges?
Smith: It felt exciting, a risk. How does this work? And you can’t underestimate Walt Disney. It pokes at a lot of touch points: life and death, brothers, America. Hnath said that actors cannot judge characters. As someone who has played lots of bad guys, you must go in and play it that they believe they are right.
Independent: So what did you find in Walt? What was the arc of his journey, as actors sometimes describe the work to be done?
Smith: He was a man of no small ego. His journey is about presenting himself through his own eyes. Bring these people into a room to see the world as he sees it.
Scarpa: In Hillary & Clinton [a previous Hnath play] Hnath says the characters should not even look like the real [figures]. You play the truth, and it holds here in this play.
Independent: Tell me about the challenge of the playwright’s admonition not to have a lot of emoting or even physical movement, if any, and, of course, I guess you don’t have to memorize anything, because the play is about reading the script, and there you are reading, a bit like A.R. Gurney’s play Love Letters?
Scarpa: You aren’t dealing with a lot of memorization
Smith: That makes it weird. I’ve done staged readings, but this is a production of a staged reading.
Gray: It might seem unforgiving on the page, but once it starts, the voices tune in and you’re in their world.
Scarpa: Walt Disney stood up and told stories. He didn’t speak in full sentences. The script replicates Walt’s patter [according to the Disney biography by Neal Gabler].
Independent: You’ve obviously dug down into this material, its subtext. So what is emerging as the central conflict in the play?
Scarpa: It’s a lot about brothers. Walt was an unqualified creative genius. His brother lives in that shadow. It’s in the script from word one, and we mine that.
Smith: There are pieces of Roy’s personality [like labor issues, and interpersonal stuff] that Walt needs to be successful.
Gray listens to run through of the final scenes.
Gray: The central conflict is a man versus his own mythology. Everyone has a myth of themselves and how they go through the world. Walt Disney had a big one. This self-mythologizing is a deeply human trait. It’s most compelling.
Independent: Forgive me for finding in Walt’s character a massive, world-obliterating narcissism that just happens to remind this reader more than a little of the current President of the United States. Did or does that resonance speak to why you are staging the play?
Gray: No, this is not chosen in a response to Trump. We’re after the real people in the play. If the audience wants to connect it to a broad socio-political view, that’s what theater does.
Independent: Thank you, gentleman.
The production, which doesn’t seem right for kids, even or especially for the Disney-addled, unfolds at the NHTC’s English Building Market theater, at 839 Chapel Street, Nov. 8, 9, 11, and 15 – 18, with the curtain going up at 8 p.m. More information and reservations available on the company’s site.
Firstly, Why would you spoil the end of the play in not just the review but the TITLE OF THE ARTICLE, NHI? What does that serve those who might be interested in the production?
Nevertheless, I'm very excited to see this show done in New Haven. Lucas Hnath is probably one of the most innovative up and coming playwrights in the nation, and I personally cannot wait for this show.