One Big Lie

by Liz Duffy Adams

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Her 'Big' Fling

article by Sam Hurwitt in the SF Chronicle March 13, 2005

 

San Francisco is getting to be a second home for New York playwright Liz Duffy Adams.

"I love New York, but when I come out to San Francisco I feel as though I've left my husband and I've embarked on a wild fling with a younger and sweeter man," Adams says over coffee in a North Beach cafe.

 

"That's a metaphor," she adds, "because I'm not married."

 

Last year's world premiere of her play "Dog Act" -- a postapocalyptic fantasy with elements of vaudeville, Shakespeare, "Peter Pan" and "Road Warrior" -- became the first Shotgun Players production in its new home, Berkeley's Ashby Stage. Her new play, "One Big Lie," premieres March 19 at Exit Theatre in a production by Crowded Fire, which also staged the West Coast premiere of Adams' "The Train Play" in 2002.

 

It was announced last month that "Dog Act" won the prestigious Will Glickman Award, given annually to the best play making its world premiere in the Bay Area, as chosen by a panel of local theater critics. It was an apt choice because the late playwright Glickman wrote Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine, which Adams melded with Darwin, Bible stories and medieval morality plays to hilarious effect in the "mortality play" section of "Dog Act. "

Adams was flabbergasted when she learned the award was named after the man who wrote the skit she refers to as "a priceless artifact."

 

"I almost exploded with excitement," she says. "Maybe I make too much of it, but I was deeply startled. Wow, thanks, Will! I guess that means you don't mind."

 

"One Big Lie," like "Dog Act," is a co-production with the Playwrights Foundation and was developed at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival with the working title "All the Truth in the World," simply using a different part of the same Bob Dylan quote ("All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie").

 

Mueller and Crowded Fire Artistic Director Rebecca Novick talked about working on Adams' "Wet, or Isabella the Pirate Queen Enters the Horse Latitudes," which had its first reading in San Francisco but is yet unproduced, but Adams decided it would be far better to create a new play for the company.

"I wanted to get an idea of not just what they were like as actors but what they were interested in," says Adams, who came out to do a workshop with the company in September. "The brief was to write any play I wanted for these eight actors that Crowded Fire would be capable of producing, but I thought it would be nice to on some level write a San Francisco play via these people as San Franciscans and what was on their minds.

 

"I wrote up a questionnaire and sent it to them to fill out, about the kind of parts they find themselves often playing, and the kind of parts they might rather play for a change, and also just broader stuff like, 'have you ever committed a crime?' I'm not sure how much of it went directly into the play."

 

One might as well ask what didn't go into "One Big Lie," a time-traveling heroes' journey following cruel and capricious gods and hapless human playthings from their familiar ancient stomping ground to a noir city of union- busting bosses and hard-boiled reporters to a milieu of politicized hackers and a shadowy government keeping political prisoners without trial. The rebellious fallen god of lies, Lu-Lu, a Lucifer/Prometheus type with a touch of Cassandra, tries to rouse human resistance to her former heavenly cohorts, but it all comes out a lot of babble about trout. Arne, an ancient hunter turned modern soldier, is killed again and again by friendly fire.

 

"I was re-reading Edith Hamilton's 'Mythology' and asking myself, if I was to pick an ancient myth that would be an emblematic myth for our time, what would it be?' " Adams recalls. "I was particularly attracted to the myth of Actaeon, a mortal hunter who accidentally sees Artemis bathing, because the central point of the myth seemed to me not to be seeing something that's forbidden and being punished for it, but the way that he was punished for it - - that he was a hunter and was turned into his prey and was killed by his own dogs. The image of the predator that is brought down by his own engines of destruction seemed apt to me; it seemed like an American moment."

 

Though "One Big Lie" is the most explicitly mythic in scope, archetypal material both old and new is something Adams returns to often in her work, whether it's Shakespeare and Peter Pan in "Dog Act" or angels and superheroes in "The Train Play." But if Adams' ideas are big, the real heavyweight is her gift for gab. In "Dog Act" she created discrete dialects out of malapropisms, Shakespeare and F-words, and "One Big Lie" freely mixes poetic liturgical lingo with chatty self-referential commentary and clever verbal turnarounds, as well as a fair amount of bursting into song.

 

She comes by her interest in language honestly, she says, having been raised amid storytelling parents, science fiction and "Pogo" comics, and siblings given to inadvertent word coinages.

 

"I was sort of morbidly shy as a kid, and we lived on the outskirts of a small town in the woods of Massachusetts," she says. "There was a kind of world of one's own thing going on."

 

As naturally as it may come, her unique linguistic flair is entirely intentional. "I think that theatrical language should be rich and strange," says Adams, whose path was shaped and defined as much by her disinterest in naturalistic modern drama as her interest in classical and experimental theater. "I don't think it should be less interesting than ordinary language, certainly. Character is language, language is character. How people speak not just reveals them, but I think creates them.

 

"I just think the least you can ask for from art is that it be at least as interesting as life. Art that takes a little tiny, tiny, tiny piece of life and just sort of sits there -- I just don't want to spend two hours in that little tiny room."

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