Word: hamilton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...either a success or a flop. Either way, years may have gone into the production, and the story behind the play is often more interesting than the play itself. To find out what goes on, TIME's Elaine Dutka spent three weeks behind the scenes of William Hamilton's Save Grand Central, a comedy of manners in which two couples find happiness by exchanging marriage partners. The show opened off-Broadway last week, and here is her report...
Unlike Shakespeare, who took most of his ideas from history, news and other playwrights, Hamilton, 40, had to go no further than his own collapsing marriage. "I wrote Save Grand Central three years ago while I was trying to find a way out of an unhappy marriage," he says. "At the time I was madly in love with another woman and hoping my wife would find someone herself and let me off the hook. This never happened in real life, so I invented a play in which this happy ending took place. It was intended as a farewell present...
...Hamilton's first attempt at drama, but he had been writing snappy dialogue for 15 years as a cartoonist for The New Yorker. Though he lived in San Francisco part of that time, he tOOk aim at the Upwardly mobile everywhere, those who flit from trend to shining trend. Grand Central, like his cartoons, was supposed to be pointed and sophisticated, a Private Lives of the '70s. "Cartoons are very much like plays," he says. "A whole way of life is revealed in one sentence. In a play you just move this through time...
When the sentences were assembled, the play received two readings on the West Coast and in 1978 full production at the California Actors Theater in Los Gatos, near San Francisco. But Grand Central was not to be saved in California, and nothing much happened until last September, when Hamilton got a call from Anne Cattaneo, literary manager of the Phoenix Theater, one of the several off-Broadway groups that had received the script. She suggested a reading as part of the Phoenix's play-in-progress series...
...Hamilton immediately agreed and put the play through the typewriter again. He reduced his characters from nine to six, cutting out whole chunks of the dialogue. "You can't stick with good lines just because they're good," he says. "They've got to move the play." The reading, Nov. 18, was a success, and the Phoenix gave the play two weeks in its schedule. Hamilton went to work on script...