In Conversation With Author James Lapine

James Lapine, the celebrated director and playwright, conducted a directing workshop on February 18 in Adams House sponsored by the Office of the Arts' Learning from Performers Program.

Lapine is co-author and director of Falsettos, which garnered two Tonys in 1992 for best book of a musical and best original score; author and director of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park With George, which earned the 1987 Tony for Best Book of a musical and Into The Woods, which received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; and the director of the recent film Impromptu.

He critiqued scenes from last semester's HRDC production of Into The Woods and from this semester's Loeb Experimental production of The Yellow Wallpaper. The following are excerpts from his discussion with The Harvard Crimson and workshop participants.

On Falsettos

Lapine recalled that William Finn, composer and lyricist for the Falsettos series, "tracked me down to direct March of the Falsettos. I [went on to] co-author and direct the third play in the Marvin trilogy, Falsettoland, and Falsettos, the Broadway production which combines the last two of the trilogy.

"He had seen a play that I had done and decided that I was his dream director. Bill Finn is a very determined fellow, and so he browbeat me into doing it. He once stood on Stephen Sondheim's doorstep until he came home and forced his way into his house to play his music for him. He went to Williams College and so did Sondheim. So I guess he felt that was all the introduction he needed."

Lapine spoke fondly, and candidly, of his collaboration with Finn, revealing what he assured us was something. "Bill would admit to in a minute:

"Finn is a wonderfully brilliant guy, but completely disorganized. He dosen't have a linear mind, but he did have certain characters. So I said, 'Let's give them a kid. And we have to have a plot here, Bill...why don't we have the wife hook up with the psychiatrist?'

"Then we put the songs that we had written on a little bulletin board on index cards. I organized them with blank ones in between and said, now we can write a song here about this, or a song here about that. He created the world, and I brought it order."

When asked whether he considered homosexuals and AIDS an unusual premise for a musical, he responded. "To me everything's a musical. Whether you're Shakespeare or...I have a visceral response to music, everything to me is about music. The beat, the timing. I always make the actors act out the songs without the music first. We rehearsed Falsettos as a play initially. And as for homosexuals in musicals, homosexuals have been singing ever since the musical theater began...

"The sensibility about being gay has changed, which is good. But now people pat themselves on the back for being [at Falsettos], so I'm embarrassed for a whole other set of reasons.

"It's interesting about Falsettos... it was conceived by a guy who is openly gay. I feel a little badly. He wanted big, tongue kissing moments, and I think I made it more palatable to the more homophobic sections of the audience."

On Into the Woods

"Into the Woods was very much about themes that interested me. It is a fairytale turned dark. The first act is about what we want as individuals and the second act, what we want as a community. What you want as an individual can't be at the expense of someone else."

I looked for contemporary types on which to build the characters. Jack was the dreamer, the creative type. For Little Red I wanted a compulsive over-eater. The hardest was Cinderella because she is so boring. I kept thinking Nancy Reagan...Nancy Reagan. The Baker and His Wife are a couple from Brooklyn... The Princes, definitely womanizers."

Upon seeing an excerpt from the HRDC production of Woods, Lapine said, "Seeing this reminds me of how much I've taken out of the show. I'm not sure that this is a better version. It's hard when you see your own things. Your except was terrific, except for my embarrassment over my own writing. It's hard to divorce yourself from being the writer. I try to forget that I'm the writer when I start to direct."

On working with Stephen Sondheim: "We discuss and work on things together. With Woods I developed the concept and the book and then he brought it to another level with his music. Sondheim dosen't write anything until the book is written, then he takes it all from the book. You get raped. But he's very respectful of the writer. More so than most composers out there. For Woods, I wrote monologues for three of the characters from which Sondheim wrote their songs."

On how Woods was conceptualized: "I went to see a friend of mine who had just had a baby and I asked, "Will you raise her to have good table manners?" And she said, "I want to raise her to know the difference between good and bad. Into the Woods came [out of that]."

On New Project

Lapine is working with Stephen Sondheim on a combination of two one acts, because, he muses, "I guess I like that form." (Sunday in the Park and Woods originated as one acts as well.) The first act is based on the 19th Century novel, Fosca, by Tanchetti, and the second act is based on a contemporary non-fiction book called Muscle by Sam Fussell. "They're both about beauty and self image," he said. "The first act is about an extremely unattractive, anorexic woman who gets a dashing, handsome man to fall in love with her. And the second act is about a guy who doesn't like the way he looks and makes himself bigger and bigger while at the same time shutting the world around him out.

"I was really intrigued by muscle and he [Sondheim] was really intrigued by Fosca, so we said, 'Hey, let's just do them together.' To me muscle is a metaphor for the eighties. My generation dropped out, did drugs, became very internal, in the same way that the eighties generation became external, more concerned with the outside than the inside. Usually I write the book, but on Fosca, Steve will be writing a lot as well.

"I'm also editing my film Life with Mikey, starring Michael J. Fox and populated with a lot of theater actors, and working on a play at La Jolla based on Cool Million starring Doogie Howser. It's a Horatio Alger story...but he gets dismembered at the end."