Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Carolyn McCormick in A.R. Gurney’s Family Furniture at the Flea Theater. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Playwright AR Gurney would have found great irony in the fact that his life was commemorated at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre this week because, despite his success, Broadway was never much of a home to him.

Only four of his nearly 40 plays ever made it to the Great White Way, and the longest run was for his 1987 work Sweet Sue, which eked out six months including previews. Gurney attributed that entirely to the presence of Mary Tyler Moore and Lynn Redgrave in the four-strong cast.

The playwright, known to one and all as Pete for reason long lost to his family lore, had a career that flourished Off-Broadway and in regional theatres. When he died in June at the age of 86, there were the appropriate obituaries for such a successful and prolific man of the theatre. But there were few critical surveys of his career, or think pieces about what his plays had meant, like those that followed the deaths of Edward Albee and Sam Shepard.

Gurney’s work was never groundbreaking, but it resonated strongly with audiences of many ages, even though it was steeped in the lore of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had dominated America for many years.

From the very start, Gurney was quietly, subtly rebelling against his genteel upbringing, simultaneously taking pleasure in the traditions that had surrounded him growing up while poking fun at them theatrically.

At Tuesday’s memorial, it was noted that his father took genuine displeasure at Gurney’s chosen career and the sentiments expressed in his plays. Despite that, until his father’s death, he was always billed as A.R. Gurney Jr., out of respect.

As it happens, I first had the opportunity to meet and work with Pete in 1984, when I was only two weeks out of college. He had only truly broken through in his career two years earlier, at the age of 52, with his comedy The Dining Room.

While he was fond of noting the critical reception for Scenes from American Life in 1971, it was The Dining Room that made his name, and allowed him to stop teaching full-time – that alternate profession had sustained him for two decades. He didn’t fit the model of an emerging playwright in appearance, demeanour or choice of dramatic subjects.

I didn’t quite realise this at the time, and I treated him as I treated every artist I met in my earliest years: with something approaching awe. But Pete’s warmth and genuine interest in every person he met led to a professional friendship that lasted the rest of his life, even though he was only three years younger than my dad. When I took a new job in 2003, he called me to say he was proud of me – the most paternal gesture I can imagine, and one that I will never forget.

Being a younger, Jewish man, Pete’s works held a certain anthropological fascination for me. As I watched his plays over the years, often with audiences that seemed to have stepped out of his plays – as did much of the crowd at his memorial – it struck me that they were coming to see their way of life satirised, criticised and – perhaps against their will – eulogised.

Pete’s particular gift, lost to the casual observer, was that he managed to do this without giving offence. I liked to say that his audiences recognised his characters as the family down the street, but never as themselves.

At the memorial, actor Holland Taylor, who had worked with Pete often, said: “He may have hung his heritage out to dry, but he was always dressed in it the next day.”

Pete’s greatest success was certainly his play Love Letters, which was translated into 24 languages and produced in 40 countries. In its simplicity, it was perhaps his most structurally daring play: two actors, seated at a table, reading from their scripts, never looking at one another until the penultimate moment, requiring no rehearsal, consisting entirely of a life-long correspondence of unrequited love.

What few recall is that Love Letters followed his uncharacteristic work The Snow Ball. While his plays typically called for a single set and perhaps six actors at most, The Snow Ball took place in multiple locations, called for a cast of about 16, and if memory serves, about 80 costumes.

Yes, I worked on his most technically complex play, and one of his least seen. At the memorial, director Jack O’Brien railed against a now-deceased Boston critic who had derailed its path to New York.

I will miss Pete always, and with that I will miss the Off-Broadway era that allowed him such great success. While his regional productions were legion, and presumably will remain so, we no longer see the days when plays would transfer from Playwrights Horizons, the late Circle Repertory or other not-for-profit venues to sustained commercial runs Off-Broadway, as Pete’s did.

Now plays either move on to Broadway or they finish their limited runs and are lost to New York, more often than not setting the stage for larger audiences and bigger royalties outside of the city than in it.

Pete didn’t mourn the passing of the world in which he was raised; he told me it was culturally bankrupt when I interviewed him in 2015. But with his death I mourn the passing of an era when plays didn’t have to move to Broadway in order to have a chance of survival in New York, and could find ongoing homes in smaller theatres.

Without that, I fear we lose the opportunity to foster emerging playwrights most fully, whether they’re 20-year-old tyros or, like Pete, 50-year-old overnight successes.

Brandon Victor Dixon and Audra McDonald in Shuffle Along (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

The act of making theatre is of endless fascination to those who make theatre, which accounts for the litany of backstage plays and musicals going back to, at least, the mechanicals’ scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By sheer coincidence, New York is home to two new entries in this genre, both focusing attention on actual productions from the 1920s, and in the process restoring currency to forgotten works.

The more elaborate of the two shows is the Broadway musical Shuffle Along, Or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, written and directed by George C Wolfe. This chronicles the history of Shuffle Along, America’s first all-black musical – both on stage and behind the scenes. It was a groundbreaking, bona fide smash in its debut, playing nearly 500 performances and making stars of many cast members. However, the show itself was very much of its time, and in the days before cast recordings, and no doubt as a result of failed revival attempts in 1932 and 1953, it faded from memory. Only thanks to Wolfe’s creative efforts has the show regained a foothold in theatrical history, beyond the realm of scholars.

By sheer coincidence of timing, Paula Vogel and Rebecca Taichmann, with their Off-Broadway play Indecent, have performed a similar act of resurrection on God of Vengeance, a play with its roots in European Yiddish theatre, which played in two Off-Broadway theatres in 1922 before reaching Broadway, in an English language version, in 1923. Like Shuffle Along, God of Vengeance was largely lost to time, but not after a long successful run. God of Vengeance was effectively shut down when its cast and producer were charged and convicted with offering an immoral performance, and subsequent legal proceedings continued for the next three years, ultimately exonerating them long after the play had shuttered.

Adina Verson and Max Gordon Moore in Indecent (Photo by Carol Rosegg)

Reading press coverage from that era, any number of reasons were cited for exactly what it was that made God of Vengeance so offensive, ranging from depictions of prostitution to portrayals of the desecration of Jewish religious symbols. What the press accounts of the charges left out, like many of the reviews that preceded them, was that the play depicted a lesbian relationship. While that love story was judged harshly by other characters in the play, it was portrayed as liberating by the playwright, Sholom Asch, rather than as shameful, which might have placated the moralists of the time.

As a student of the theatre, I was not unaware of Shuffle Along or God of Vengeance, but these new works certainly made them more vivid for me by recounting their histories theatrically. Working against theatrical censorship 90 years after those plays were first seen in New York, I confess to having invested deeply in Indecent long before I saw it. I went in anticipating a work that might in some way inform my own work, that would show me parallels to the small-mindedness that fuels censorship then and now.

While that is certainly a strand in Indecent, I was surprised to find that it was not, as I’d imagined, a straightforward anti-censorship tract. In fact, it is a love letter to the people who struggle to make theatre against all odds, in this case against those who wish to police morality, just as the new Shuffle Along pays tribute to the men who broke through a theatrical colour barrier, through racism, even though there were (and are) many more societal challenges to face. Both works are about vision and tenacity, with the more mournful Indecent putting me in mind of yet another play about the making of theatre, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good.

While I don’t necessarily think those who forget theatrical history are doomed to repeat it, it’s impossible not to think about the histories of these plays in light of the discourse surrounding America’s endless presidential campaign, where racial bias and limits on free speech are discussed as if they are viable planks in a political platform. I don’t think theatre artists want to turn the clock back one bit – but it’s worrisome to think that the attitudes that artists faced in the 1920s might once again gain political currency, even if they have always been present in our society, both covertly and overtly.

The new Shuffle Along and Indecent are reminders, as they honour and celebrate achievements and travails of the past, of why barriers broken cannot be allowed to be rebuilt. It is why, like the ghostly troupe in Indecent that reanimates nightly to tell the story of God of Vengeance over and over again, we must utilise and support theatre, and all of the arts, in an effort to dispel the worst impulses that will shape not just our stories and our ability to tell them, but our lives.

Whhopi Goldberg in White Rabbit, Red Rabbit (Photo by Bruce Glikas)

I’m seeing Brian Dennehy in a play tonight. I know next to nothing about it. Apparently, neither does Brian.

The play in question is Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit, which began a once-a-week New York run earlier this month after a number of international productions. I’ve chosen to write about it before seeing it because that seems entirely consistent with the play’s promotion – as well as its direction to the actors who take it on – which is to say that one is supposed to go into it with no preparation and no preconceived notions.

Critics have been warned not to give away too much. Even skimming The New York Times review and finding the portion that talked about this moratorium started to say more than I cared to know about the play. I feared that a close reading would spoil things, perhaps in the way that a friend ruined the big surprise in the film The Crying Game for me simply by remarking on the strange absence of pronouns in a major review.

There’s something slightly perverse about a play that asks you to attend simply on faith and not to reveal its secrets, because most any arts marketer will tell you that word of mouth is essential for sales. WRRR gets past that by deploying stars in a small Off-Broadway house (Nathan Lane and Whoopi Goldberg have already taken up the challenge). It would seem a premise that could sustain itself for some time playing only once a week for 200 people, especially in a city the size of New York, but the show is currently announced for a limited run.

Audiences have certainly been admonished in the past not to give away endings, perhaps most famously with The Mousetrap (I’ve never seen it, and I still don’t know who done it). Deathtrap relies on its twists and turns being a surprise, though the revival with Simon Russell Beale demonstrated that as social attitudes have changed, one of the play’s Act I stunners doesn’t have the impact it did 40 years ago.

Yet the idea of a show where you shouldn’t, or even can’t, talk about most what you’ve seen seems to be a very contrarian approach to finding an audience – though it seems to be working. While stars are the draw for WRRR, the mysterious You Me Bum Bum Train has only the enthusiastically cryptic praise of those who’ve managed to get in. I failed to do so in a dispiriting battle with the show’s website, so I’m one of the many who was denied the opportunity to see what would have apparently been one of the great theatrical experiences of my lifetime. That makes me wish I’d seen it all the more (and resentful of its online ticketing process).

While not as secretive about its content, Sleep No More manages to keep an air of mystery about it nonetheless. Having run for almost five years now in New York, it has never bought advertising, relying entirely on word of mouth. But just try describing it to anyone. Yes, it’s rooted in Macbeth and Rebecca, to name two primary touchpoints, but the physical experience of dashing up and down stairs and through multiple rooms at a show without dialogue means that few can sum it up, or have even seen the same show. When I saw it at the start of its run, my guest, familiar with Punchdrunk’s work, said it would be foolish to try to stay together throughout. When we met up at the end, she asked whether I had seen the naked goat head dance. I had not, but just that phrase remains tantalizing to this day.

During my time in marketing and PR, it was a dream that audiences would simply hear about a play, think it sounded interesting, and just buy a ticket, alleviating the need for advertising, media, promotions and the like. Of course, the reality was that people needed a great deal of cajoling to get them into the theatre and by and large, I would say that still holds true. But if the mysteries of White Rabbit Red Rabbit, The Mousetrap, You Me Bum Bum Train and Sleep No More teach us anything, it’s that audiences like to learn the answers to secrets – and keep them, happily in the know while others stand on the outside looking in. It may not be a new concept, but perhaps it deserves a new name, especially for shows where audiences are actively encouraged not to discuss them in any detail: unmarketing. Think about it. Then tell no one.

Lynn Hawley, Amy Warren, Maryann Plunkett and Meg Gibson in Hungry (Photo by Joan Marcus)

I’m writing this column during an interval. I’ll still be waiting out that interval when I write again next week. In fact, I won’t be getting in for Act II until September, after which I’ll wait about six weeks for Act III.

Of course, this is an exaggeration, but as I try to explain the experience of seeing Richard Nelson’s The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family, it gets at what Nelson is doing with his new trilogy, akin to what he previously achieved with his quartet, The Apple Family Plays.

Offering glimpses of a few hours with a family at something approaching real time, these works are not unlike dropping in on relatives that you manage to see only a few times a year. In some ways, it’s the opposite of immersive theatre: it gives you a very small taste of a story, and then makes you wait for months before you get another shot. To be fair, each play can stand on its own, though the collective experience gains a cumulative power.

I saw the first of The Gabriels plays, Hungry, on March 6; the events of the play took place on March 5, 2016 – and they always will. That’s why subsequent stagings of these Nelson works will never quite match the temporal verisimilitude of their first productions, because even if they’re spaced out to approximate real time, they can never again be exactly of the original moment. For all their simplicity, these Nelson works are almost daring in their formal approach to time.

Usually when we think about time in the theatre it’s durational: how many hours did it take? The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Mahabarata, The Norman Conquests, Gatz: part of the experience is how long we sit for them – and subsequently we brandish our stamina in front of others. Nelson not only wants audiences to allow their own lives to pass before they next experience the work, but he also wants time genuinely to pass in the life of his characters – and it forces him as a playwright to grapple with intervening events in the world, beyond the Rhinebeck NY village where both multi-play works are set.

The tradition of playing with time in theatre is longstanding; J.B. Priestley used it frequently, in such plays as Time and the Conways; Ayckbourn has toyed with it as well, adding the geographic complications and simultaneity of House and Garden. More recently, Annie Baker has pushed the perceived boundaries of what can be done with naturalistic dialogue in The Flick, mandating gaps in conversation that mimic halting, awkward real speech, but are contrary to the snap and pace of so many stage works.

Sarah Steele, Arian Moayed and Jayne Houdyshell in The Humans (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Even as The Gabriels unfolds its first chapter and leaves us wondering what will be part of the next, another experiment in time is taking place on Broadway, but so subtly that few people realise they’ve seen one.

Moving from Off-Broadway, Stephen Karam’s The Humans has once again been acclaimed for its portrait of a family at Thanksgiving as they reveal the threads that may be unraveling in their permanently linked lives.

But what people miss is that while the play appears to unfold in real time, from the arrival of guests for dinner right up to the moment the guests depart – with drinks and meal included – it takes only 90 minutes from start to finish, never seeming rushed or abbreviated. Karam packs in an enormous amount of information about his characters’ lives in circumstances as mundane and everyday as those in The Gabriels. His sleight-of-hand compression, played out without a pause, takes an event we know to be lengthy from our own experiences and leaves us thinking we’ve watched the real thing.

Though it is often held up as an artistic goal, nothing in the theatre can ever truly be natural; a certain artificiality is inherent in the form. But right now in New York, in the least apparent of productions, we’re watching playwrights alter how we perceive time and how it can be employed in the theatre, invisible stage magic played out at extraordinary length and deceptive brevity.

Bruce Willis in Misery (Photo by Joan Marcus)

It’s a tad too early to announce the emergence of a new trend, but two recent announcements suggest that there’s something brewing in the theatrical zeitgeist.

The announcements to which I refer are Quentin Tarantino’s repeated references to adapting his newest film The Hateful Eight for the stage, and Warner Bros Theatre Ventures’ announcement that Stephen Adly Guirgis will adapt the 1974 film Dog Day Afternoon for Broadway. I’m more sanguine about the latter than the former, because Guirgis is a proven theatrical talent who is likely to assert his own unique take on the true-life story that fuelled the Sidney Lumet film. While some have noted that The Hateful Eight is, if you strip away the profanity and slurs, the widescreen, and the protracted running time, really a western equivalent of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery.

The potential wave of which I speak is the movie-into-play adaptation, which seems poised to supplant the movie-into-musical and jukebox musical trends of recent years. This isn’t a brand new idea, and has actually been more common on British stages than American ones, with Chariots of Fire, The Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke and The Ladykillers among the examples. But when British exemplars have crossed the Atlantic, they haven’t set Broadway afire, with Festen and Elling being blink-and-you-missed-them failures. The Graduate ran for a year, but it closed more than 12 years ago.

Misery, now on Broadway in a different version than the UK one in the early 1990s, has held its own in the face of negative notices, buoyed no doubt by the Broadway debut of Bruce Willis, but its fortunes have been declining. Breakfast at Tiffany’s and A Time To Kill both closed particularly fast.

Experts will be quick to note that in many cases, the movie-to-play adaptations are often based on an original book from which the film and play have been adapted separately. But it’s usually the movie’s success and familiarity that prompts the theatrical version. The same impulse that has driven the trend for musical adaptations of movies seems to be behind these play efforts, with movie companies eager to exploit even properties that perhaps don’t lend themselves to musicalisation.

The problem is that drama into drama efforts often aren’t transformative enough to make the new stage versions compelling. When assembling songs into a story (like Mamma Mia!) or adding songs to one (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), there is inevitably a change in the source material. But the play into play paradigm doesn’t necessarily undergo the same kind of revision and rethinking – even though it’s essential to making great theatre. And of course without fundamental change, the inevitable comparisons are easier to make.

The best film into stage adaptations (The Lion King, Once) create something that is an altogether new way of looking at the preceding work. If film companies’ only goal is to generate more income from existing material, and to trade on our affection for it, then this incipient genre may well prove an unsatisfying one, as so many jukebox musicals and movie-to-musical adaptations have been before.

Having also produced Misery, Warner Bros’ choice of Guirgis is a heartening one, particularly if they give him room to let his own imagination and language truly create a new work for the stage, rather than a photocopy. While I never want to see them lured away for long from original work, I can only imagine what artists like Annie Baker, Anne Washburn, Stephen Karam, Suzan-Lori Parks, Mike Lew, and Tarrell Alvin McCraney could do with some classic and – better still – not-so-classic films. But only if it interests them creatively – not just for the money.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage, under a slightly different title.