They say that timing in life is everything. For playwright Allan Knee, timing not only plays an important part in his new play, Syncopation, but in the good fortune that brought his play to the stage of not one but two major regional theaters back to back. As part of a growing trend of theaters collaborating with each other, the George Street Playhouse (New Brunswick, NJ) in association with Long Wharf Theater (New Haven, CT) co-produced Syncopation, in its just-completed world-premiere run at Long Wharf. Syncopation opens at the George Street Playhouse Jan. 12 and looks to be off-Broadway bound. In an era when Broadway seems to be inhospitable to new plays, Knee has to be feeling a millennium high by having his play chosen as George Street's first of the new century. Syncopation also continues the artistic sharing between George Street and Long Wharf that began this season with Anne Meara's Down the Garden Path (which has now moved to the Long Wharf).
The New York born and raised playwright, whose most successful play, Shmulnik's Waltz, enjoyed an extended run at the Jewish Repertory Theater early in the decade, is geared for another hit at the end of the decade. "Writing Syncopation has made me feel particularly alive," says Knee, who began to write it in dribs and drabs a couple of years ago at a 42nd Street writers' workshop. "There was something about that ugly little room of a fifth floor walk-up that intrigued me," Knee recalls, as he tells me how "that room reminded me of the studio that my wild and crazy aunt would bring me to study tap and ballroom dancing when I was a youth."
Knee grew up on the Upper West Side in the 1950s. Unlike other writers who nostalgically cherish their formative years, Knee thinks of the `50s of his youth as a "rigid, stultifying and conformist time." It was only in retrospect and when Knee got away from his "crazy" family that he begin to compare his family with other Jewish families, the gatherings, the vitality, the love and the ethnic experience that he missed growing up." Knee recalls how Jewish family life had a low profile in the Fifties, where every kid wanted to look like a prep-school kid, and noone betrayed their ethnicity."
On the positive side, frequent visits with his parents to the still- prospering Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side were memorable. "When I was a kid," Knee recalls, " I liked to think up titles, write them down on note cards and put them in a little box. I couldn't write a play, but I would walk down the street and dream up dramatic stories to go with the titles. I didn't write a full-length play until I went to Yale Drama School." Knee, whose bio lists nine plays, including two adaptations -- Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Prince and the Pauper -- recently received the Richard Rodgers Musical Theater Award for the book of Little Women (1998), a show that Knee feels has Broadway potential.
For someone who insists he wasn't a good student, an athlete or popular, Knee says, "dancing was the one thing that I could do well." Knee's passion for dancing followed him into his teen years. He buried it totally until he met young actor Michele Gutman at the workshop, who triggered in him the idea to begin writing a play about dance. Meeting every couple of weeks as a new scene was written, Knee and Gutman would act the roles of two people who want to be ballroom dancers. Eventually, Knee felt the time was right to have a public reading. It was two and a half years ago that Syncopation was given a series of public readings at the workshop, and subsequently at the John Harms Theater in Teaneck, as part of a new play reading series presented by Madison's Playwrights Theater of New Jersey. Based on audience response, Knee felt he was on to something. Sending the script to Mark Nelson, who was then directing June Moon Off-Broadway (the same production that played at the McCarter Theater two seasons ago), proved providential for Knee. Although Nelson said he would rather act in it than direct it, he offered to send the play to various playhouses, including George Street, whose artistic director David Saint was immediately enthused about a production. It was Saint who would suggest to Long Wharf's artistic director Doug Hughes that Syncopation be the other half of a two-play co-production deal.
Set in New York in 1911-12, Syncopation is, at its core, about human potential and not giving up, an attitude Knee says is very close to his heart. The era is important to Knee because it was a time when his parents were born, and a time for dreams and yearning, a time, Knee says someone labeled "a revolution of expression." Romance and dramatic twists occur when Henry, a single middle-aged meat-packer who loves ballroom dancing, rents an empty room on the Lower East Side to practice, and places an ad for a partner. That Anna turns out to be half his age and engaged to be married might seem a deterrent to their goal to work as a team and become exhibition ballroom dancers, but that's only the half of it. In the two-character-play, David Chandler, who last appeared at George Street in The Seagull, plays Henry. Lorca Simons, who played opposite Uta Hagen in Collected Stories, both off-Broadway and at George Street, plays Anna. The creative team for Syncopation includes Willie Rosario (choreographer), Jeffrey Lunden (composer), Judy Gailen (sets), Jess Goldstein (costumes), Dan Kotlowitz (lights) and Fabian Obispo (sound).
Knee is up front about identifying with Henry and believes in the play's theme: to pursue the thing you feel most passionately about. We might even presume that those icons of ballroom dancing in the early 1920s, Vernon and Irene Castle, may have spurred Henry on to pursue his romantic notions. Dramatizing the Jewish experience in America has always been at the forefront of Knee's writing, as with his biggest success, Shmulnik's Waltz, as well as Sholom Alechem Lives, Second Avenue Rag, and now Syncopation. It was with Second Avenue Rag, produced Off-Broadway in 1980, that Knee felt he came out of the closet as a Jew. The play was not a success, and the experience with the director, he recalls, caused him a lot of emotional pain. Knee subsequently did "a lot of soul searching."
With unhappy memories of Bronx Science High School ("too competitive for me") behind him, Knee graduated from the University of Michigan in the 1960s and continued his graduate work at the Yale Drama School where he would write his first play. Knee says he has made a "good but not great" living writing plays, particularly adaptations of famous books for the well-known children's theater, Theaterworks/USA. His adaptation of The Scarlet Letter appeared on television, and his screenplay based on his own play, The Man Who Was Peter Pan, has been optioned by a film company.
If the feeling of being betrayed by actors, directors and producers is part of Knee's past, as it must be for many playwrights over the long haul, he stresses how "blessed" he is with Long Wharf director Greg Leaming. In what Knee describes as a nervous moment and not one immediately "simpatico," he met Leaming for the first time just before rehearsals started. Knee admits that he tends to "lose faith" during the rehearsal process, and as a "closet actor" he grows impatient with the actors' process. "I look up there and say to myself, I don't know what this is."
In New Haven could Knee see that what he hoped for had been accomplished: the successful integration of dance and drama in Syncopation, only after the curtain fell on opening night. Syncopation seems hardly out of step at a time when theater appears to be embracing dance as a dramatic propellant as never before (most recent example: Contact). Syncopation is not, however, a musical, although it uses dance as an equal partner to the drama. Just as in Syncopation, which is about two people learning to be partners, Knees says he sees life as "a dance in which we learn to live with and love the partner we are with." Although Knee says he has no partner in his life at the time, certainly local theaters are finding it's the right time to partner with Knee. Call it "Syncopation."
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