Theater Review

A conversation with local playwright Tom Griffin

By F. William Oakes
Posted 10/27/17

Rhode Island and East Bay audiences are accustomed to seeing great plays at Warren’s 2nd Story Theater. The current offering, “The Boys Next Door”, the acclaimed play by Rhode …

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Theater Review

A conversation with local playwright Tom Griffin

Posted

Rhode Island and East Bay audiences are accustomed to seeing great plays at Warren’s 2nd Story Theater. The current offering, “The Boys Next Door”, the acclaimed play by Rhode Island native and Barrington resident Tom Griffin, is no exception. The experience of seeing this play has left audiences, in the words of 2nd Story Artistic Director Ed Shea, “laughing and crying and standing and cheering.” I can attest to this phenomena as I play a small role in this show; backstage I marvel at the subtle potency of the words delivered here and how these deftly balance both high comedy and sensitive seriousness.

   These “Boys” are not only a joy to behold but as a special added bonus the audience now has an opportunity to see the playwright next door. On Sunday October 29, 2nd Story will, following the afternoon performance, host a special “meet the Playwright” talk back with the play’s acclaimed author Tom Griffin. Mr. Griffin has had a storied career. An actor as well as a writer (and that experience surely informs the sheer and sure depth of the characters he’s created for the stage) he was a member of Trinity Rep’s acting company in the late 70’s and early 80’s and the canon of his work, which also includes the plays “Einstein and the Polar Bear”, “Amateurs” and “Pasta” have been produced on Broadway, in every major theater company in America and worldwide.

   “The Boys Next Door”, his most famous work, is certainly no exception. From the time it was written and first produced in the late ‘80s there has scarcely been a month when the play hasn’t been performed somewhere in the world, there have been as well many college, high school and even middle school productions. The reason why is simple, this play strikes a universal and delightful chord.

   “The Boys Next Door” is set in a group home shared by four mentally challenged men. And it is a comedy. This seemingly inherent contradiction is belied and buoyed by the play’s essential humanity, we are afforded vast glimpses into the interior lives, the needs, concerns and yearnings of these men. The play succeeds precisely because it plays against a common assumption about these ‘special’ humans, namely the notion that, as the playwright said when he addressed the cast after a performance, “will not allow these people to be people.” Arnold, Lucien, Barry and Norman, the “Boys” of the title, are allowed an equal opportunity inherently and wonderfully ridiculous as the characters concocted by Chekov, Moliere  and Neil Simon. Foibles and frailties are universal; this is the human condition.

   I had the opportunity to later sit down and meet with playwright Tom Griffin; in person he is a down to earth and self-effacing guy with a sly sense of humor and the sort of twinkle in his eyes that befits both a man of the theatre and writer of comedies. He doesn’t take himself too seriously and his somewhat sly and disarming charm is refreshing and infectious. When I asked him about a line from the show the I particularly liked he jokingly replied that “I think that that was written on the back of a cereal box!” He refuses to take things too seriously and we had a delightful time just talking about his play.

   The air of amused irony he projects does not mean that he is unaware of the value of his work. A life-long writer — his first attempt at a novel occurred when he was in the 2nd grade — he noted that “unlike my acting career, I never doubted that this play was good.” What makes it work is not only, as he says, because “it is a lesson play about empathy” but because this experience is unique. “How many times,” he adds, “do you have the chance to laugh with and share these characters' humanity, instead of feeling pity?”

   The show also succeeds because of its simplicity: “It is what it is, a comedy about a serious subject without being too heavy about it. What it is is four guys in a room.” He liked as well how the 2nd Story production was “crisp and direct” without over elaboration. He added that a lot of actors “overdo the role of Arnold but Luis Astudillo (the talented actor who plays the role) did not.” From my own unbiased perspective in the midst of this production, I know that we have a great cast of actors, but a lot of the credit for capturing this inherent simplicity and directness must go to director Ed Shea. He would often extol the actors in rehearsal  to “play the humanity” of these characters and not “what you perceive their disability to be.” And it is that comic common ground which makes this play universal.

   The play also succeeds because of its language. Mr. Griffin is adept at making both points and jokes without belaboring these. For example, in my scene I play  coarse and brutal character and if it is at all memorable it ain’t really due to me but to the scene’s brevity, it’s only four pages of the script. The point is made and we move on.

   Griffin also has a fine ear for the way people communicate and miscommunicate, the dialogue is filled with cross-talk non-sequiturs and banter that may seem incongruous but has a specific internal logic to the character who speaks, the result sometimes seems as if Samuel Beckett rewrote a Neil Simon script. Arnold declares that when “the tough get tough, the going get going.” It sounds a bit odd but he has a good point.

    Though this show is “episodic but not disjointed” the idiosyncratic speech patterns and singular obsessions of the characters here serve as a sort of through-line for them, these clues and hints are words placed as carefully as a trail of bread crumbs. The imagery of damage abounds throughout the work and is not the exclusive  domain of our ‘Boys’, it seems here to be a universal condition. Everyone we meet is a sort of square peg trying to fit into the world’d roundness: the lady next door to the boys is deaf, another character is missing a limb and Jack, the social worker assigned to the group home, is stuck in his life precisely because he lacks a certain essential awareness, like his  charges he does not know quite how to fit in and function in this world. The imagery of damage is not exclusive to characters, there are smashed toasters, crushed flowers and broken heart made of chocolate. Disfunction seems to be the normal state here, making us wonder if such a thing as normalcy even exists.

   When I asked Mr. Griffin about all this he replied that the original working title was “Damaged Hearts, Broken Flowers” and that “A director told me to change that title because it sounded too much like something out of Redbook magazine.” As for the universality of the damaged human condition he later added that “we are all people with problems, beating ourselves ourselves up about what’s inside.”

   The play contains the ring of truth too because it is partly based upon anecdotal experience, the playwright had a friend who, like Jack, worked in a group home. Indeed, there are episodes related in this play that are based on incidents that actually happened. But here the writer has instilled not only humor, but an essential humanity that shapes these ends.
“I,am here to remind the species of the species…I will not go away.” a mentally challenged man proclaims in the play, reminding us that we ignore all of humanity at our own peril.  “This play”, says director Ed Shea, “is a reaffirmation of caring. And it reminds us that life is delightful.” In these troubled times this may well be just what we need, a play that reminds the species how essential empathy and laughter are essential. It may well be just enough to jolt us out of what Arnold, wiser than he knows, calls our “behavior patterns” of self-centered cynicism.

   Another good life lesson is not to take this stuff of life too seriously, something I was reminded of when I spoke with Mr. Griffin. Tom is an amusing storyteller in real life, a charming raconteur and as we talked about his play and I tried my best to overanalyze the work he amusingly rebuffed the attempt, preferring to let his work do the talking for him. As I probed to find the deep meaning of a particular scene he slyly replied with a smile: “who knows? You’re a writer. Sometimes we have nothing on our minds and we just keep typing.”  True enough Tom Griffin is a grand man to spend a charming hour or so with, and this Sunday at 2nd Story you will have the chance to do so.

Meet The Playwright talk back will be at 2nd Story Theater at 4:30 p.m., Sunday Oct. 29, following the performance of “The Boys Next Door” at 2:30 p.m.


     
   
   
   
   

Tom Griffin, 2nd Story Theatre

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