Notes From Arden

The Playwright That Could: Roger Crane

By Steven Leigh Morris

 

 

Before Roger Crane’s The Last Confession closes next week at the Ahmanson, it’s worth taking a glimpse into how his play got produced. (The Last Confession is a mystery-thriller starring David Suchet and Richard O’Callaghan, about possible shenanigans at the Vatican pertaining to the very short tenure of Pope John Paul I after only 33 days in in office, in 1978.)

 

 

Though Crane is an American attorney, his play premiered in Britain at the Chichester Festival before transferring to the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Its run at the Ahmanson is the first stop of an international tour.

 

 

Crane tried to get it produced in the U.S., he really did. In a rehearsal room at the Taper Annex, he mentions theaters in his home town, the Public, the Lincoln Center, that he sent it to. He also sent it to the Taper, the San Diego’s Old Globe, Chicago’s Steppenwolf — nada. Then again, he was, at that time, a 50-something NYC lawyer with no track record in the theater, and a play with dozens of characters. Most of them never even bothered to read it, he says without a twinge of bitterness.

 

 

Curiously, and this is the part I find most intriguing, Great Britain’s National Theatre read it, and sent him back notes. He sent a re-writes, then sent him more notes. Finally, they said they really liked it but wouldn’t do it. Still, he was grateful to be taken seriously as a theater scribe, from the power of his rather than from his credentials and contacts. It wasn’t even submitted by an agent. He just sent it, blind, to the National Theatre’s literary department..

 

 

Through a circuitous route, it got read by RSC’s Terry Hands, Canadian director David Jones and the Chichester Festival’s artistic director Jonathan Church. “The only people who would do it were the best people in the world,” Crane reflects. Nobody else was interested.

 

 

 

There’s nothing boastful about Crane. His tone is bemused.

 

 

He started law school at NYU and dropped out because he really wanted to be a playwright. So he entered the drama program at Tufts University. They put on a play he wrote about Malcolm X.

 

 

“The conservatives all hated it because I wrote about Malcolm X,” Crane explains. The liberals all hated it because I made it funny. After that, I said forget it, I’m going back to law school.”

 

 

And he did, at Fordham University. He graduated and became a partner in a law firm, specializing in securities litigation, and keeping public utlilities regulated.

 

 

Thirty years later, without having given any thought to former ambitions as a dramatist, he handed his Malcolm X play to a mentor, who praised his dialogue and said he should really write a mystery. And so he did. It was called The Last Confession.

 

 

“I didn’t write another word [in playwriting] until I was 52 and started this play. Not a single word.”

 

 

But his career as a lawyer aided his ability to unveil a mystery in the theater, he explains.

 

 

“When I try a case, I try to tell a story. That story may have a couple of themes, and that’s how you win cases. A play is the same, except I can create words rather than relying on witnesses.”

 

 

Crane is also no fan of florid speeches.

 

 

“When you write briefs, the language becomes very lean. Malcolm X waxed somewhat poetic. There are very few adjectives and adverbs in The Last Confession. It’s all nouns and verbs, very, very lean dialogue. Each scene is very lean.”

 

 

The Last Confession, is being performed at the Ahmanson Theatre through July 6.

 

 

Solo Creation Festival at Son of Semele Ensemble.

 

 

Have eyes peeled for Son of Semele’s Ensemble Solo Creation Festival, featuring Kendra Ware, Abbie Schachner, Melissa Randel, Susan Tierney, Mike Schlitt, Joe van Appen, and Tiara Jackson and Heather Hewko . It plays for three weekends, starting July 2.