Arthur Laurents wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story, as well as the screenplays for The Way We Were and The Turning Point. He gave Barbra Streisand her first Broadway job. And he told all about it in his 2000 memoir Original Story By. Yet here he is, wry and fit at 84, holding forth at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston. What’s more, it’s where he wants to be. "I’d lost my love of the theater until I discovered regional theater," says Laurents, who’s in town for rehearsals of his play 2 Lives, which is headed toward its world premiere in a co-production of the Lyric and the Huntington Theatre Company directed by Huntington artistic director Nicholas Martin.
Laurents and Martin hit it off when the latter directed a 2000 Lincoln Center revival of the former’s 1952 play The Time of the Cuckoo. They’re teaming again on 2 Lives, which focuses on a septuagenarian Broadway playwright coping with the death of his lover of 35 years. Laurents describes the work as "a play about how love lives on, which is in memory." And yes, it’s autobiographical — except that Laurents’s long-time companion, actor-turned-real-estate-developer Tom Hatcher, might react to it with Mark Twain’s famous line that "the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
Laurents wrote 2 Lives during a prolific decade that followed "the infamous Nick and Nora," the 1991 megaflop he both wrote and directed. "I began writing plays as I’d never written them before," he recalls, "practically one a year. And whatever I started to write about is not what the play ended up being. This was supposed to be a play about hypocrisy. What was the center of the play is now a minor episode. It was filling in that episode that took me to a larger place, because it occurred in a real place, in a park that the persons closest to me in this world had created, and there’s a peculiar thing about that park. It brings serenity to you when you just sit there. Well, hypocrisy doesn’t thrive in serenity. So it turned the play to a love story between two men who are well past what people conceive to be the age of thriving.
"I mean, I wrote a play recently called The Vibrator. The point of it was, I wanted the audience to know that people who are in their 70s and 80s have a very healthy, busy sex life. Which used to be anathema in America, but now we have Viagra. Have you tried it? You will."
If the legendary librettist has kind words for the regional stage and Pfizer’s gold mine, he has tougher things to say about new dramatists and the musicals of the moment. Asked whether there are up-and-coming playwrights he admires, Laurents thinks for a moment, then answers, "No. I think they have forgotten there is such a thing as craft. I don’t care how much talent you have, you have to have craft. You have to learn the rules before you break them. To me so much of playwriting today is like action painting used to be. You throw it against the wall and say, ‘There it is, it’s me.’ "
About why he’s sticking to non-musical plays these days, he replies, "It’s the absence of collaborators. The people I did those first two musicals with were too rare. The first time I did it with Lenny Bernstein and Jerry Robbins and Steve Sondheim, and of course we had a terrific time. And then with Gypsy, Jule Styne was one of the most adorable, crazy people in the theater, and we had a great time. After that it was downhill. I mean, I see these musicals now that run for generations, and I think they kill the theater, because a theatergoing audience does not come back. It’s the people who celebrate their birthdays and their anniversaries that come back."
Not that Laurents isn’t asked. "In the last three days," he reports incredulously, "three different people converged on me to do a musical about that well-known historical figure Mary Kay. I mean, who cares? But then, when they asked me to do Gypsy, I said, ‘I don’t want to do a play about the striptease queen of America.’ "
2 Lives is at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston March 14 through April 12. Tickets are $22 to $38; call (617) 437-7172.
