The compound adjective "Tony Award-winning" is going precede gay playwright Joe DiPietro's name for the rest of his life. On June 13, DiPietro captured two of the awards for his script and lyrics to David Bryan's score in the musical Memphis ( which also picked up two other 2010 Tonys, for Best Orchestrations and Best Musical ) .
"Winning a Tony Award is a childhood dream come true," DiPietro said. "It was pretty exhilarating, unbelievable, unexpected—it was just one of those nights that played out like a dream."
A few days after his moments of Tony Award glory at New York's Radio City Music Hall, DiPietro could be found in far less glamorous surroundings in Chicago. At the Theatre Building Chicago ( recently re-christened Stage 773 ) , DiPietro was overseeing Bailiwick Chicago's production of his play Fucking Men ( try saying that on network TV! ) .
Fucking Men is quite a shift from DiPietro's earlier hetero-friendly hits like the wildly successful off-Broadway shows I Love You; You're Perfect, Now Change; and Over the River and Through the Woods.
"When you first start writing and you're lucky enough to have some success, people expect this is what this writer is going to write about over and over," DiPietro said during a break in Fucking Men's preview weekend. "I'm a writer who tends to like different things and exploring various parts of myself."
DiPietro based Fucking Men's structure on Arthur Schnitzler's oft-banned 1897 sex comedy La Ronde, which is a set of 10 scenes following one character hooking up with another daisy-chain style until it circles back to the first character. But instead of late 19th-century heterosexual mores, DiPietro wanted to explore the lives of men who have sex with other men in the early 21st century.
"I thought it was un-producible—it's a 10 character play, about 10 men speaking very bluntly about intimacy and sex between men," DiPietro said. "And it has 10 actors, which is a big cast nowadays unfortunately. So I thought I'd give it an un-producible title."
Yet the show's title wasn't that much of a shocker in London, where Fucking Men had a wildly successful year-long run starting in January of 2009 ( DiPietro points out that Mark Ravenhill's 1996 play Shopping and Fucking had already desensitized U.K. audiences to profanity in play titles ) . The American premiere of Fucking Men was in September 2009 at Los Angeles' Celebration Theatre, where it was repeatedly extended.
"With both London and L.A., I've just sort of let them do it," DiPietro said. "Plus I'm so far away, I didn't really have a chance to work on it as much as I would have liked."
Yet for Fucking Men's Chicago debut, DiPietro is taking a much more hands-on approach. DiPietro sat in on Bailiwick Chicago's auditions for the show, and he is directly working with director Tom Mullen to fine tune the play.
"I hope I'm showing people in honest light," said DiPietro, who isn't worried about critics who might accuse him of showing gay men and their relationships in a potentially negative way. "In terms of some of the reviews I've read, some critics have said how refreshing it is to see a play where people weren't judged if they were promiscuous or if they weren't. The play doesn't say monogamy is the best thing that everyone should aspire to, or that being promiscuous is what everyone should aspire to. It just says these are the ways that people behave."
Since there is a playwright character in Fucking Men, DiPietro has already fielded questions from people assuming that the neurotic Jewish writer character of Sammy was a stand-in for himself.
"I think that you can only write what your truth is," DiPietro said, adding that he hopes he doesn't come off like Sammy to other people.
"The two characters who are closed to me are the married couple Jack and Leo in the fifth scene right in the middle of the show," DiPietro said. "A lot of the dialogue in that scene is taken from the long-term relationship I've have in my life where me and my ex had this conversation that we've had many, many times before. So that was an easy scene to write."
DiPietro said a New York production of Fucking Men would probably be the definitive script after the Bailiwick Chicago production.
"But until then I would like to keep a little more control over it," said DiPietro, happy to be working on Fucking Men in the safe confines of a Chicago non-profit. "The first thing commercial producers say is that, 'We love it, but we have to change the title.'"
Fucking Men continues at Theatre Building Chicago ( now Stage 773 ) , 1225 W. Belmont, until July 25. Performances are 8 p.m. Fridays, 7 and 9 p.m. Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $25-$30; $15 for students. Call 773-327-5252 or visit www.FMenChicago.com for more information.
