Tom Dulack
The Crap shoot of comedy: On 'Breaking Legs,' comedy, and how theater's like the Mafia
BY NANCY STETSON nstetson@floridaweekly.com

Ask anyone in theater and - if they're honest - they'll tell you that beyond the glamour and the greasepaint, the business is also filled with intrigue, in-fighting, rivalries, fierce loyalties, doublecrossing and competition.

In some ways, a little bit like the Mafia.

Ask Tom Dulack, playwright of "Breaking Legs," "Incommunicado" and many others, how theater is like the Mob, and he laughs.

"Oh God, that's a loaded question," he says.

But he's game to answer.

"I would say that the morality of most producers I've dealt with doesn't differ very much from the morality of the Mob at all," he says. "And maybe the Mob are a little friendlier and have better manners. And are certainly more willing to pick up a check when you're having a meal than the producers that I've dealt with.

 

"Part of the theater scene - and not certainly regional theater - but Broadway, really commercial theater, that's a cut-throat thing there. And when you go on the road with a show, if you don't get your deal up-front and really get paid upfront, you're not going to be paid at all. Because what goes on on the road and the accounting, oh my God: 'But we had to deal with this theater and then they had their guarantees and blah blah blah blah.' And we had a year plus tour of 'Breaking Legs,' a national tour. Yeah, we're playing to sold-out houses all over the country. Big houses, you know, 3,000-seat houses in Detroit and Boston and everywhere. And you're getting the minimum. Everybody's rolling in dough except you."

COURTESY PHOTO The cast of "Breaking Legs" on stage at the Florida Rep.

For the next few weeks, audiences should be rolling in laughter. In celebration of its 10th season, the Florida Repertory Theatre's reviving "Breaking Legs," a farce from their first season. Dulack didn't see the first year's production, but attended the opening of the revival last week.

"I feel old, it makes me feel old," he jokes. "I'm flattered that they wanted to do this, and bring me down. It's nice. The show gets done. It's gotten done over the last 16 years all the time, but this seems like a particularly nice and sentimental thing that [Producing Artistic Director Bob Cacioppo] wanted to do, recall something from the first season. And I feel honored that that happened.

PHOTOS COURTESY CHIP HOFFMAN FLORIDA REP Above, Diana Buirski in Tom Dulack's "Breaking Legs" at the Florida Repertory Theatre. Right, actor John Felix, tweaks the mustache of J. Mitchell Haley while Mark Chambers looks on. "Breaking Legs" runs through April 20.

"I haven't seen the show in a long time, so I want to see how it sounds in 2008…. There have been conversations about a major revival in New York and London, as it's coming up on 20 years [since it first opened.] It would be ripe."

The play deals with a New England college professor looking for funding for his off-off-Broadway play. In desperation, he turns to the family and associates of a former student, on whom he harbored a secret crush. They turn out to be "made men" with their own views of morality and theater.

Dulack was inspired to write it after an experience he had while looking for backing for "Diminished Capacity," his drama about racism.

"It's pretty violent and pushes all sorts of racial buttons," he says. "We were trying to raise money for this play. I was going everywhere, looking for money, and I got steered into a meeting with some guys who ran a restaurant. And it looks as though they were going to invest in the show. And then they stiffed me. And they were very colorful Italian guys, who were not Mob or anything, but very colorful and semi-educated, and spoke hilarious English.

"We had kind of a big dinner in this restaurant, and then, they just really abruptly dumped me, stiffed me, on the whole thing. They promised at one point $100,000, and this was in the '80s, so that was very good start-up money then. And I was so angry about it, that I went home and wrote a play about it, about a university professor, which I was, trying to get a play produced, which I also was, with guys that I then just projected. Actually, these innocent Italian-American businessmen. And I [wrote it], partly as revenge: take that!"

Amazingly, the gentlemen saw the play based on themselves and loved it. So did audiences and critics. The play's enjoyed a healthy life, playing around the country and internationally.

Actor John Felix performed in the original Florida Repertory production of "Breaking Legs" and is happy to be reviving the same role 10 years later, that of gangster Tino de Flelice.

"I was very pleased, I was thrilled," Felix says. "Any actor loves to get work, especially without auditioning."

Though the role is the same, many other things aren't, Felix says.

"All the rest of the cast are different, and every actor works differently. You play off of each other differently. Robert [Cacioppo] thought about the play again very thoroughly. It's a different approach. The core is the same, the heart of it is the love story."

And, using the additional 10 years of life and theatrical experience, Felix found elements of humor in his taciturn character that he hadn't explored previously.

"I feel like a circle's been completed in some way, with the revival of the play," he says.

Dulack finds it interesting to see different productions of his show, because directors and actors interpret his words in myriad ways.

"One of the things that keeps coming up over the years in productions of 'Breaking Legs' is that these three friends, on the page, say what they think to each other. But the guys they're modeled on, the people that I knew, the key to their humor is their irritability with each other," he says. "Everything anybody says to anybody, among the three of them, irritates the other one. And when that's there, the stuff is really, really much funnier than when it isn't there.

"...[It's] fun to see productions over the years, to learn things. To say, 'God, that approach really works, I didn't know about that.' Or, 'I missed that.' Or, 'It's the first time I've seen that approach, and that really works very well.'"

But making compromises is the nature of the business, he acknowledges.

"It's an ongoing, and very stimulating, interesting adventure," Dulack says. "And then it's always fun to come into a place like Fort Myers and see a new theater and meet new people. And I love to be in the theater watching actors. And if they're doing my show, all the better!"

During his playwriting career, Dulack's written about Ezra Pound's arrest and imprisonment ("Incommunicado"), racism ("Diminshed Capacity") and a Marine returning home from the Iraq War ("Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter"). But it's "Breaking Legs" that is his most commercial and well-traveled play. (It played on Broadway, had a long-running national tour, and played overseas.)

"You know what's hard about writing comedy?" Dulack asks. "It's not any harder to write comedy than it is to write serious drama or tragedy. What's really hard is to estimate if what's really funny to you is going to be funny to somebody else, to an audience. The difference is, when I'm writing drama, I'm very confident that I can move an audience in a serious play with a serious story. But it's always a crap shoot when you're doing comedy, because what's funny to me - and I have a pretty wild sense of humor- I'm always wondering, well, is anybody else going to laugh at this? Because it's too broad or it's too vulgar or it's too shocking.

"Because the basis of comedy is being very critical of people, and is making fun of people's foibles and weaknesses. And if you don't do that really right, and if you don't hit just the right notes on that, it seems cruel and it seems abusive, and it seems in very bad taste. So walking that line is a matter of luck, it isn't a matter of difficulty.

"So you learn over the years, well, my sense of humor seems to appeal to this kind of audience. And so I have a certain confidence in writing comedy. But again and again and again, I'll send plays out that I've had readings of, or productions of, where the audience did not stop laughing. And I'll send the plays out to the theater, and they don't get it. They don't get that it's funny. And if they don't get that it's funny originally, they're not going to produce it in that manner. So it's tricky."

People laugh very hard at "Breaking Legs," he says. And he'll never forget what the actor Vincent Gardenia told him about what he saw from the stage during a performance at the Promenade Theatre in New York City.

"There was no orchestra pit there, the first row is just right there, next to the stage," Dulack says. "And Vincent told me one night, at the last night's show, a woman was laughing so hard, she doubled over violently with laughter, and cracked her head on the front of the stage. They had to carry her out.

"That's the kind of reaction you like when you're writing comedy."

if you go

>> What: "Breaking Legs"

>> When: through April 20

>> Where: The Florida Repertory Theatre, 2267 First Street, in the historic Arcade Theatre between Hendry and Jackson, downtown Fort Myers

>> Cost: $38, $34, and $17

>> Information: Call 332-4488 or online at www.floridarep.org.