The easy quip is to say that Douglas Carter Beane stands tall as a playwright. Indeed, at 6'4' the author of The Little Dog Laughed would stand tall at just about anything. Beane, 48, achieved Broadway and national success with his play As Bee's in Honey Drown ( produced locally at Northlight Theatre ) and with his screenplay, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.
Early in his career, Beane wrote about the country club set, reflecting his own upbringing in Wilkes-Barr and Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. For the last decade, however, his plays have explored celebrity and fame generally associated with entertainment industries. As Bees in Honey Drown ( the publishing industry ) and The Little Dog Laughed ( film industry ) both have gay characters at their centers, allowing Beane to explore success and sexuality and how they may impact each other. As an out author, Beane certainly knows whereof he writes. With his partner, Lewis Flynn, and their two adopted children, Beane splits his time between New York and a farm near Scranton, Penn., inherited from his grandmother.
________________
Pictured: The Little Dog Laughed, written by Douglas Carter Beane. Photo by Michael Brosilow.
________________
Beane recently was in Chicago for 24 hours to attend the opening of The Little Dog Laughed at About Face Theatre. It's the first post-Broadway production of the satirical comedy, continuing at the Hoover-Leppen Theatre at the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted, through Feb. 17. The engaging, outgoing and glib author took a few minutes to talk with the Windy City Times.
Windy City Times: Your current Broadway show is the hit musical Xanadu, which pokes fun at the dreadful movie.
Douglas Carter Beane: The original movie was so bad, it was so bad, that I knew anything I did would be an improvement. Even if I slept in late one day, it would be better. So that gave me a certain freedom. And I knew right from the start what the style [ was ] going to be, which is very much in line with the Theatre of the Ridiculous with Charles Ludlam and then later Charles Busch; that celebration of garbage and high art and low art.
WCT: Musicals usually take years to reach Broadway, but Xanadu was up and running in just two years.
DCB: Barely that. That was one of the reasons I wanted to do it, aside from the young producers saying that I could do whatever I wanted. They only had the rights for a very short period of time. The studio, Universal, didn't think they could do it. So the race was on and we couldn't lollygag.
WCT: Is writing a routine for you or a ritual? Do you write every day like Steinbeck and Hemingway?
DCB: I write a lot of Hemingway. [ Laughs ]
WCT: And I bet you improve it. [ Laughs ]
DCB: I wrote today on the plane, I wrote today in my hotel room. I try not to write at times. I think about things and really stew on them so that when I do write it comes out as a quick explosion. Writing comes very easily to me, and there are different types of writing that I do. Like, my next play is actually one that took me a couple of years to write, but it's only about 90 minutes. But the writing is so dense—jokes within jokes within pain within happiness within sorrow.
WCT: What is the next play?
DCB: The next play is a two-character play about husband-and-wife gossip columnists who decide not to go out of their apartment any more, and just start making up things about people. And then they start making up people. It's about the manufacturing of information.
WCT: It seems that you're drawn to subject matter that revolves around what you actually do professionally: publishing, writing, backstage stories.
DCB: Fame is fascinating to me but I think it's fascinating to everybody. Little Dog Laughed I probably would not have written except so many people I would meet not in the entertainment business [ would ask ] 'Who's gay in Hollywood? Who's really gay?' And then I became interested in open secrets. Secrets everyone would know. Secrets everyone in Scranton, Penn., would know, like certain actors were gay and their wives were just for public.
WCT: Did you come out early or late?
DCB: Too early, very early, high school. 1976, year of our Bicentennial. It was my tribute to our forefathers. It was my reaction to a woman a lot of the kids today don't know about, Anita Bryant. [ She ] was this horrific woman in the late '70s, and I came out as a protest.
WCT: Was your family good about it?
DCB: Considering where they were from they were OK about it. Now they're perfectly all fine with it.
WCT: You and your partner have two children, originally from Central America. You told me Cooper is 3 [ years ] and Gabrielle is 15 months. Does being a parent make you straighter?
DCB: Wow! That's interesting; it's a really great question. It hits on something that I'm dealing with now, in that yesterday we got a present, a big book of nude boys frolicking on a beach. And Lewis and I were like, 'Who sent that? Where are we going to put it? We've got children here.' You never really feel entirely settled in with the straight people, and the single gays are off doing their thing. But there is the incredible support of gay parents. You find a pocket of people you hang around, it's not that big a deal.
Gay culture is in an interesting place right now also. I think that gay 'gay-borhoods' are dissolving in every city that I've been going to. Are they dissolving here as well? Gay kids are going off to the suburbs, gay bars are being replaced with Internet—on the Internet when they say 'swimmer's build,''they mean Shelly Winters in The Poseidon Adventure. I think that there's an end for the need for gay bars [ because ] everything we were hoping would happen has happened. Of course, there are people who are going to say we're horrible, and vote against us and have sex with us on the down-low. That's what it's always been and always will be. But culturally we are so beyond what I ever thought we would be. My farm—my partner and I are there with our kids and, you know, the cars don't slow down and people stare. That part's totally accepted, it's totally understood and totally a given.
WCT: In The Little Dog Laughed, three out of four on-stage characters are gay or lesbian, and the unseen fifth character also is gay; a playwright who's wary of how Hollywood will adapt his hit show for the movies. How much of that unseen character is you, and how much is Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee?
DCB: Paul Rudnick had the great line, 'They call it the redeye because it's full of writers coming back crying.' [ The offstage playwright ] is me warning myself because the character is just as bad as the others are. It's me saying 'Be careful, just watch yourself.' Because [ Hollywood ] is a constant temptation.
WCT: As the play opens the hard-driving Hollywood agent, Diane, declares that she's lesbian, but the play never uses that fact. In an early draft was there a more personal Diane storyline?
DCB: I was interested in someone saying that she was a Lesbian, and then she really has no personal life. She has made the choice to cut out involvement with anyone. There also was my experience of gay and lesbian people with void personal lives telling another gay person to rein it in, don't be so gay. I knew someone who was a lesbian and who was void, saying 'You seem so comfortable with yourself.' Well, this is what I've got! I could probably lose a little weight but, you know, this is it. There was something about a gay-identified person who reined it in. So should Diane have a lovey-dovey phone call with somebody? I don't see her doing it. I see her divorced from that. And there are people who accuse me of having her say she's a lesbian so that I can get away with having her say the most horrible things. There are plenty of straight women who say 'fag' and 'homo.' Margaret Cho's entire career is based on that.
Coming next week: An interview with Lea Coco, one of the stars of About Face Theatre's The Little Dog Laughed
