Jed Levin Talks About Ira Levin

   “I knew him both as a father and as a writer,” Jed says.  “He involved us in his writing life.  Not when he was writing books - he needed time alone then.  But once he finished something, especially plays, he brought us into that part.”

   Jed and his two brothers saw one of Ira Levin’s plays repeatedly.

   “I have no idea how many times I saw Deathtrap.

    “My father went to the out-of-town tryouts and, in New York, he went to every performance with a new actor – not just new leads, but any new actor.  He wanted to be able to confer with the director as to directions for the new actor.  Also, he liked to go to Deathtrap.  And he liked to take us with him.

“We went out to dinner at Sardi’s before hand.  We went backstage afterwards.

   “It was so much fun to be in the back of the theater.  We weren’t watching the play as much as we were watching the audience.  My father didn’t have tickets, of course, no seats - we just sat on the steps. We were fascinated by audience reaction.   We’d wait on the edge of our steps in anticipation.  How hard would they laugh at the jokes?  How much would they jump at the scares?  We never really got tired of it.”

    Jed wondered if I knew the play.

    “It’s great,” he said.  “It’s two plays – kind of a play about a play – something like the little play within Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  It’s funny and it’s suspenseful at the same time. There are lots of good twists.  I can’t tell you the plot.  You have to see it.  Go to one of the frequent revivals.”

     Ira Levin’s sons didn’t spend all of their time on the steps.  Sometimes they spent the second act backstage with Marian Seldes in her dressing room.

     “Marian was the female lead for the duration of the show.  She never missed a performance.  She was so nice.  We loved hanging out with Marian in her dressing room."

     Hanging out with performers in their dressing rooms, dinner at Sardi’s, fussed over by staff and celebrities, aware of his father’s impact in the theater, movie and book business – this was all part of Jed’s and his brothers childhoods.

     “Deathtrap is the work of his that involved us most.  That was about 1974.  I was in the 4^th or 5^th grade when it opened and it ran for a good chunk of time.  Death Trap was something that was always going on in the background of my childhood.”

     When Ira Levin and Jed’s mother, Gabrielle, divorced the boys still saw their father frequently.  He took an apartment nearby their Wilton, CT home.  (Wilton likely provided the inspiration for Ira Levin’s “Stepford Wives”.)

     “It was a small apartment.  We slept on a foldout sofa, I think. We ate on his desk.  It was a big desk and at dinner time he would just move the typewriter.”

     What about all his papers and notes and other things spread out all over the desk?  I wondered.
     “No, no.  He was a neat person.  Meticulous really.  There would just be a folder of notes and an orderly stack of papers.  Easy to move.”

     Jed told me about “Drat! The Cat!”, a musical Ira Levin wrote.

     “He wrote the play, the lyrics, and he actually wrote the music too. They didn’t use that music though.  They advised him work with a musician for the melodies.  His were good though.  Very good.  My father played some of his songs for us in the on the piano.  We liked it.

    “Elliott Gould was in Drat! The Cat!  He was married to Barbra Streisand.  She recorded one of my father’s songs – “He Touched Me” – maybe as a way to help promote the play Gould was in at the time.   The song was a big hit lasting a lot longer than the play ran.

     “Such a charming play.  Too bad it flopped.”

     It flopped?

     “The New York Times went on strike just as the musical opened.  It was a disaster. The review wasn’t printed.  Wasn’t read.  No one knew about it.  The play closed early.

     “It’s just a matter of time, though, before someone puts it on again.  I’m surprised it hasn’t already happened. It was such a good musical.”

    Some time afterwards, the music for He Touched Me was used as background to a perfume ad.  “It was funny,” said Jed, “to hear it come on the TV.  ‘There’s Dad’s song’ we’d say.”

     What did Jed get from his father, Ira?

     “I really treasure his influence on me.

     “I value those interests of his that he passed on to me.  Movies – he loved movies.  The original King Kong was his favorite.  He was pretty clear about that.  That’s one of my favorites too.   I have his same general taste in books.  We both like Dracula and Sherlock Holmes and Poe.  Certain things I read make me think of him.

     “I remember him best when I am reading something we both liked.”

YouTube snippet from Deathtrap 2010 movie – British version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdW7Aft5MSI&noredirect=1

YouTube excerpt from 1982 Death Trap with Christopher Reeve

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrGqLW-ySj4

IMDb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083806/

about the Roman Polanski movie, Rosemary’s Baby, based on Ira Levin’s novel

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063522/

Guide to Drat! The Cat!

http://www.guidetomusicaltheatre.com/shows_d/dratcat.htm

Ira Levin bio

http://www.biography.com/people/ira-levin-20703551

Ira Levin plays board games

Ira Levin’s son, Jed Levin, took this photo of his father playing monopoly.  Jed and his brothers played monopoly and scrabble with their father frequently.  I was surprised.

Their father is the guy who wrote Rosemary’s Baby and the Boys from Brazil and Stepford Wives and A Kiss Before Dying - as well as plenty of other scary things.  Isn’t it hard to imagine him enjoying an ordinary, pleasant board game with his sons?

“People were surprised sometimes,” says Jed Levin.  “especially if they didn’t know him, or if they only knew about some of his work.  He was a mild, nice man.  He was our father.  I didn’t think of him as a horror writer.  For one thing, he wrote in plenty of other genres too.  He wrote comedy and even a musical.  He was a writer, not a certain kind of writer.”

Jed and his brothers spent Wednesdays and alternate weekends with their father after his parents divorced.  Sometimes the four of them would spend the weekend with Ira’s parents, who lived in a comfortable house outside the city.  The photo was taken at Ira Levin’s parents’ house.  Jed’s grandmother was a good cook.  His grandfather was an amateur painter (although Jed doesn’t think his grandfather painted the young woman gazing at Ira from out of a painting behind him).

This monopoly evening must have taken place in 1973 because Ira Levin is wearing a shirt with “Veronica’s Room” printed across the chest.

The play, Veronica’s Room, is one of his scary ones.

“Someone in the cast must have had tee shirts printed up,” Jed said.

Tee shirts announcing his father’s work, and chats with cast members in their dressing rooms, and opening parties at Sardi’s were part of Jed’s childhood.  He and his brothers were involved in all sorts of other aspects of Ira Levin's many plays, and books, and movies from books, and television productions.

Jed’s got good stories.  And they’re coming soon.

One of Jed’s brothers set up this very complete website

http://www.iralevin.org/works.htm

Veronica’s Room

http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=3652

A Conversation with Amlin Gray, Playwright and Dramaturg

“A dramaturg oversees the literary integrity of the play,” Amlin Gray told me. “Dramaturgs do historical research to place the lines of the play in context. They do more than that. They make adaptations to the play. Often they are translators.

"As a dramaturg, I do a lot of translation and adaptation as well as historical and literary research.”
I’d never heard of a dramaturg. Amlin Gray opened a window to behind the scenes at the theater. I wondered if the research was mostly to help costume designers.
“No,” he said. “ Or partly. Costume and scene designers are usually very good researchers on their own. Primarily though, a dramaturg assists the actors and the director with background material, context, and literary flow”.

As a dramaturg, it helps to have experience as a playwright. Amlin Gray is a playwright. He downplayed it in our conversation, not even mentioning that he’d won the prestigious Obie Award for exceptional achievement. He won that award for his play, How I Got That Story, about a war correspondent in Vietnam.
Gray did talk some about his plays when we chatted about Joyce Carol Oates.

“She’s amazing,” said Gray. “She still teaches and she writes about a book a week!

"I worked on a play with her once,” said Gray. “Not exactly with her. Nagle Jackson was the artistic director at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. He adapted the Tragical History of Dr. Faustus for production as Faustus in Hell. Of course, that’s a tale that has been told and retold. Christopher Marlowe in the 16th century. Goethe in the 18th century. As opera, as symphony, as novel, poetry, plays.
“For Faust in Hell, Nagle Jackson commissioned 7 playwrights, each to write a short piece for one of the 7 sins. I wrote for Greed. Oates wrote for Lust.”
The other sins? The other playwrights?
“Edward Albee was Envy. His piece was great. Jean-Claude Vanitallie wrote Pride. Rommulus Linney – Rage. Christopher Durang – Sloth. John Guare – Gluttony. It was a great line-up of playwrights.”
Gray told me which piece he liked best of the seven. “It was brilliant, really brilliant,” he said, but I’ve irresponsibly forgotten which sin, which playwright. I do remember his admiration for everyone though, and his pleasure at meeting with them. “We were all brought together at the last to fine-tune before the production.”

From what languages does Gray translate?

“Spanish, German, French.”
Did he say Greek also, or did I just read that somewhere? I asked him later. “I don’t think I said Greek because I don’t have the same command of Greek I have of the other languages. One time though, I was asked to translate and adapt Sophocles. I used a dictionary and a grammar, but I was surprised at how much Greek I remembered from college.”

Amlin Gray talked enthusiastically about a few of his projects - being playwright in residence at Milwaukie Repertory Theater and his adaptation there of Don Quixote for young people, his interest in covert plots within the ostensible plot, teaching at Sarah Lawrence, his specialty in Shakespeare. He told how Shakespeare’s fairies, “in A Midsummer’s Night Dream, for instance, are a little more sinister, have a little more edge to them then generally recognized today.”
Although Amlin Gray specializes in Shakespeare, his interests are broad ranging.
“I adore Japanese theater. Kabuki is just so extravagant and then on the other hand, Noh plays are so austere.”

Gray enjoys much. He reads widely and deeply. His enthusiasms are contagious. Now I want to see all his plays. We talked in riverrun, so of course we talked about books too.

“I buy too many books,” said Gray.

How well I know (and admire) this characteristic! riverrun salutes all of us who buy too many books, and offers a special salute to Amlin Gray.

synopses, production history, and purchase information for these Amlin Gray plays:
Founding Fathers, How I Got That Story, Kingdom Come, Monkey's Teeth, Pirates, Villanous Company, Bindle Stiff, The Dream Chain, The Fantod, Outlanders, Wormwood

Sarah Lawrence faculty bio (alphabetical, skip down to Gray)

commentary on the 2004 revival of How I Got That Story