Curtain up, light the lights, wrote Stephen Sondheim in Gypsy's showstopping "Everything's Coming Up Roses." "You got nothing to hit but the heights." In fact, in theater, the journey to the heights is fraught with trials, tribulations and reversals of fortune.
Because of the vagaries of the business, even Tony Award winners and, in this case, critically-acclaimed director Jack Hofsiss, wonder what their next job will be. Yet as we've also seen, show people, even in worst-case scenarios, have amazing resilience (e.g., Chita Rivera, whose horrible automobile accident left her with 16 screws in her left leg). No doubt or difficulty is so great that it cannot be overcome.
Hofsiss, the 1979 Tony-winning director of Best Play The Elephant Man, says (with a laugh now) that he really put that philosophy to test.
He's currently Off Broadway directing Steven Fales' Confessions of a Mormon Boy (which won the Overall Excellence Award in the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival) at the Soho Playhouse on Vandam Street, where it opens on Sunday.
Hofsiss, prior to his Broadway directorial debut, was quite active Off Broadway, working with Joe Papp and the Public in the mid-70s, the original The Elephant Man Off Broadway and as a staging consultant to Barry Manilow for his 1976 Broadway bow.
For directing Elephant Man, Hofsiss not only won the Tony but a host of other honors. Then, in summer 1985, after directing operas and the play's TV adaptation (winning a Directors Guild Award and Emmy nomination), on an afternoon when he took everyone's advice and decided to relax and go swimming, he fractured his spinal cord as he dove into the pool. The accident left him dependent on a wheelchair and "totally chilled down my career." While still in hospital, he got one job offer, which didn't work out. "But it was very satisfying to know someone wanted me without knowing what I'd be capable of. That gave me hope."
It was an empty hope, as it turned out, because there were no other job offers. It was as if everyone forgot what he'd accomplished. For a year, he says, "while trying to figure out how to go on with my life, I wondered if anyone would hire me."
In March 1986, he was finally released. He got a job that July directing All the Way Home at the Berkshire Theater Festival. "It was the story of a man in an automobile accident," he states with a smile, "and how his family dealt with the issues. The subject matter was as therapeutic as getting back to work."
Landing jobs was still a struggle. "But," he says, "friends, like (the late) Josephine Abady, who offered me the Berkshire job, believed in me."
That led to the one-night-only (and seven previews) of 1983's Total Abandon, starring Richard Dreyfuss.
In 1987, Hofsiss was back in the theatrical eye Off Broadway, directing the musical No Way To Treat A Lady, which garnered good reviews and became a modest hit. It led to helming Circle in the Square's revival the following year of The Shadow Box, which featured an all-star cast: Estelle Parsons, Mercedes Ruehl, Marlo Thomas, Frankie Faison and Mary Alice.
He went on to be a creative consultant on the short-lived A Mom's Life, a one-woman show originally produced by Joe Papp at the Public, later that year; to direct Roundabout's 1991 revival of The Subject Was Roses; and work at Manhattan Theater Club and with JoAnne Akalaitis, the Public's artistic director after Papp.
In 1997, the New Group's 1997 gay comedy, My Night with Reg, starring Maxwell Caulfield and then unknowns Sam Trammell and Edward Hibbert, garnered quite a bit of attention and audience members with binoculars because of it's full-frontal nudity.
In 2000, there was Avow Off Broadway, starring Alan Campbell, in his first post-Sunset Boulevard outing, and featuring Jane Powell and Christopher Seiber. In 2001, Hofsiss directed Surviving Grace, featuring Illeana Douglas, Linda Hart and Doris Belack, the wife of Broadway director Philip Rose (with musical staging by none other than the American Ballet's Robert LaFosse).
At the Soho Playhouse, in a break from rehearsals for Mormon Boy, Hofsiss took a very deep breath and said, "I'm always proving myself. Of course, that applies to everyone in our business, but it's particularly true - and particularly necessary - for me."
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