Random Harvest

by Richard Willett

Aaron is a struggling young playwright who fact-checks magazine articles to pay the bills. Unusual things are going on in his life. He has been nominated for a Drama Desk Award, causing conflict with his boyfriend. He is developing a strange telephone relationship with the mother of a boy who committed suicide, the subject of an article he worked on recently. And his apartment is being haunted by Greer Garson and Susan Peters, who starred together in Random Harvest, a 1942 film about an amnesiac and the two women in his life.

Aaron has never heard of Peters, but with the help of his boyfriend, Jimmy, he is soon an expert on her short, tragic life. All that Aaron and Peters seem to have in common is being nominated for awards, but one exchange finally spells out their shared fear of success. Aaron: "But what if everything changes?" Peters: "Everything changes anyway."

-Jay Rath, Isthmus

The Hilarious Thing About Life:
My Trip to Madison to See Random Harvest

by Richard Willett

Random Harves was first produced in New York City in the halcyon summer just prior to 9/11, and in the aftermath, the charmed first production of my somewhat magical play about the vicissitudes of success came to belong in memory to a lost time. But many people who had seen the play continued to talk about it and to tell me it was a favorite of theirs, and to ask if it was ever going to be produced again. It came close a couple times, but when Artistic Director Tara Ayres contacted me about StageQ’s desire to produce the play, it was the first solid yes I’d had on the script since its fateful premiere.

I confess I knew very little about Madison, Wisconsin (I’m a transplanted New Yorker trying to hit it big in Hollywood, and I fear sometimes that I’ve become one of those terminally bicoastal people weak on American geography), but I decided to head from sunny California to the frigid Midwest in January to see the production, and even corralled my boyfriend into coming along with me, for “moral support.” “In case it really stinks,” I added, the statement accompanied, as it always is in these circumstances, by a laugh that bordered slightly on the lunatic.

For the visiting playwright, an out-of-town production can be a curious experience. To travel more than halfway across the country, to a place one doesn’t know well, and, within hours of landing, to sit in a darkened theater and watch and listen as a part of one’s psyche hatched almost a decade earlier is enacted on a stage – I admit I always find it somewhat amazing. But, of course, artistically, it can be a roll of the dice. And unfortunately, shortly before John and I were to leave, I did one of those reckless things one is always doing and then regretting: I went online. And searched for reviews. Suffice it to say that on the flight east I had a bit too much to drink and spent an undo amount of time carefully composing all the polite lies I would tell as I crawled from the theater through the wreckage of a terrible production of what I now knew to be my equally terrible play.

The view from our hotel room was incredible. Madison turned out to be a beautiful old city, covered just then in a blanket of what seemed exotic snow to John’s and my Southern California eyes. For dinner that first night we were guided to a restaurant called the Tornado Club, which instantly became one of my favorites for their old world atmosphere, old world steaks, and old world martinis! After a stop off to sample local gay life (of a kind) at the Shamrock, we took a long walk in the snow (well, it was supposed to be long, but it was just too darn cold), past the theater, where I saw the gorgeous artwork for RANDOM HARVEST by Michael Austin, and in a swell of goodwill, I thought, Oh, f--k it. Who cares if it stinks? I’m having a good time anyway.

But then it didn’t stink. At all. The first good sign was when John and I sat down in the theater the next night and heard preshow music that was nothing but songs from the character Jimmy’s beloved 1964. Good call. But there were more pleasant surprises to come: The entire production, in fact, directed by Greg Harris, was full of lovely artistic touches and seemed to have been produced with such great care and to communicate my difficult play so beautifully to the audience, who responded so warmly, that I was left to ask myself, What play did those critics see?

And then it all came back. I’ve been away from the theater, down among the sheltering Tinsel Town palms, too long, I fear. In New York, yes, RANDOM HARVEST got some great reviews, but partly because we had about twenty critics in to see it. And some definitely did beg to differ. (The Village Voice practically drooled venom. You can read it online: “The Sour Smell of Success.” Yikes!) After the show in Madison, as John and I rushed through what seemed to us the Arctic night to meet the cast and crew at the Silver Dollar Tavern, I suddenly remembered that as many people have always absolutely hated this play as have told me it changed their life.

And in the end, I think that was the greatest gift my visit to StageQ gave me: to call back to my Hollywood-addled brain the sacred truth that pleasing everyone isn’t the goal of art. There in the Silver Dollar with the StageQ gang, and throughout what came to seem John’s and my magical trip to Madison (including a terrific lunch and town tour with the Artistic Director), the most wonderful thing for me, and the thing I think the best out-of-town productions give a playwright, was to feel myself suddenly in the caring embrace of a group of talented artists who had “gotten it,” who had understood the quirky heart of my eccentric play and been brave enough to share it.