Taylor Negron is currently performing with Logan Heftel in a new musical he wrote called The Mayan Countdown . He a regular contributor to Sit and Spin, a monthly spoken word event at the Comedy Central stage, and to Hilary Carlip’s online magazine Fresh Yarns . He is one of the founding members of the Un–Cabaret, dubbed “the Mother show of Alternative Comedy” by the Wall Street Journal. He directed Patricia Scanlon’s Play Three Feet Under at the Evidence Room, produced by Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner. For the last few years he has toured his show The Unbearable Lightness of Being Taylor Negron - an hysterical fusion of story and song, directed by opera director David Schweitzer. The show debuted and was work shopped at the prestigious Green Room at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in Scotland. Unbearable was included in the 2009 best of New York Solo festival at The SoHo Playhouse and began its run at the Barrow Street Theater where it was critically acclaimed. His comedy essays are currently published in the anthology Dirty Laundry(Phoenix Books) and Love West Hollywood: Reflections of Los Angeles (Alyson Books). He has starred in his own HBO special and has appeared on The Tonight Show. His films include Easy Money, Punchline, Stuart Little, The Last Boy Scout, Angels in the Outfield, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and the much-ballyhooed hit The Aristocrats. Recent TV appearances include Curb Your Enthusiasm, Reno 911 and The Wizards of Waverly Place. As a playwright, Negron has enjoyed much success, having written Gangster Planet, a four-character domestic comedy set during the Los Angeles riots. Selecting the play as "Critics Choice," The Los Angeles Times wrote, "If Aristophanes were alive today and had watched L.A. burn Gangster Planet could be the result... acute cynicism with a clown’s humanism." He wrote the afterward to Under the Rainbow: An Intimate Memoir of Judy Garland, Rock Hudson and My Life in Old Hollywood by John Carlyle, edited by Chris Freeman (Carroll & Graf), called "an elegant memoir" by the New York Times Book Review. He is currently directing Who Loves You Baby?, a musical salute to Telly Savalas.
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Kiff Scholl has been honing his craft as a director and an actor for over 20 years, most of them in Los Angeles. He recently directed the smash hit, Kill Me, Deadly at Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood, and the critically acclaimed All My Sons at the Raven Playhouse. Recent shows include the Circle X 10 Minute Play Fest, Shake at Theatre of NOTE and Don Giovanni Tonight, Don Carlo Tomorrow at Sacred Fools, for which the LA Times pronounced “Director Kiff Scholl has few peers at keeping us intrigued”. His productions having won seven Back Stage Garland awards, five LA Weekly awards, and one Ovation award, Scholl was recently listed as one of LA's emerging and accomplished stage directors by the LA Weekly. Some favorites include La Bête, A Mulholland Christmas Carol, Middle Savage, Act a Lady, The Poseidon Adventure-The Musical!, The Something-Nothing, Sona Tera Roman Hess, The Fan Maroo and Joshua Fardon's This Contract Limits Our Liability–Read It! Kiff is also an award-winning filmmaker; his feature Scream of the Bikini won all sorts of awards on the festival circuit, including Best Director, Best Comedy, and Best of the Fest. As an actor, Kiff has starred in numerous national commercials, as well as Criminal Minds, Reno 911!, Untold Stories of the ER, Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, Scream of the Bikini, and Girls Will Be Girls 2012.
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Conversation between Taylor Negron, Kiff Scholl, and Joshua Fardon.
JF: Can you talk about the evolution of the play?
KS: I contributed as an editor...
TN: ...and a dramaturg to create the theatricality of the story.
KS: It was already a play when I first came on.
TN: Yeah, you saw the first draft. And you saw what I saw: the beauty of a holiday piece – because I always love movies and plays in which people get to go places. The play takes place on the Italian Riviera. And Kiff said, “Okay, we can make this like a real beach.” To create water, he had the idea that there would be a piece of blue turquoise plastic and for night there would be a black piece of plastic, so the shades of the day are rolled out. I just think that is so beautiful. And we played with situations. We tried setting the yoga camp in a malarial swamp. How can you do your practice when your ass is being attacked? But, in short, I wrote this in response to having lived in Europe for twenty years and buying a house there. And I became friends with these people.
JF: With the people in the play?
TN: Yeah. Types of them. From very early on, I have always somehow managed to meet with and engage with minor royals. Rock stars, movie stars, and those wealthy people who kind of suck off of them - and those people are more fascinating than the movie stars. In America, you don't really ever go away for seven days for a house party. And by the end of the fourth day, you're like, “Now, Kiff, how do you know Taylor?” And he has a couple of belts in him and he's like, “Well, you know...” and suddenly everybody knows the truth. But those people are phantasmagorical. The character Keith Cassandra Rothman is world-weary and rich and insolent and tired and handsome...
JF: He seems different from the other characters - they're all going through the motions of finding a spiritual foundation, but he seems like he's actually striving for something. He's ill-equipped to get it, but at least he's really searching. But then he ends up being this demon...
TN: Well, that's the darkest part of the play. It's another thing that Kiff and I talked about: what makes a demon? Everybody's talking about angels and the dark side and here's a guy who says, “I would rather kick your ass than kiss you. I would rather kill myself and come back and fuck with you.”
JF: We're used to seeing a benevolent ghost character in a white robe communicating with characters in movies and plays, but when Keith appears in a white robe he really screws people over.
TN: And Christina becomes like a devil. You can make yourself in whatever you want to be. Yoga is about transformation. It's about wanting to make yourself healthy or become connected with upper light. And I thought, “wouldn't it be interesting if you used that power for bad conjuring?”
JF: It's funny that they're all there to get in tune with themselves and to attain spirituality and light and yet they're all drinking and screwing around...
TN: And stabbing each other in the back. And when you grow up in Hollywood and in New York and in these circles, you see these people looking for spirituality with the same fervor you would drive a Porsche into a handicapped slot. Because to them, it's like "I have a yoga class at 7:30. It's 7:15. I deserve this spot. Because there's no crippled people coming to yoga." I wrote this play with Abina and we went through with great mathematics to figure all of this out - but a lot of it is informed by what I've been through. And of the stuff that I wrote, the most tender parts of my soul - the parts about love and my meditations on the afterlife - got the biggest laughs. At the Comedy Central stage production, which Kiff directed, I have never heard such laughs.
JF: The play is so cynical - but it's also moving. What made it work for me emotionally was the duck that keeps crying and moaning offstage.
KS: The play was originally titled "Le Canard Gris." So, the duck's representation is metaphorical for the whole story. It's pathetic and yet grand at the same time. And it's slowly dying.JF: And Keith decides to put it out of its misery - and instead he ends up shooting himself. And the duck's still there.
KS: What really struck me about the play was how it was ridiculously funny, smart, lyrically poetic, but also touching, moving, and powerful with a gorgeous message. So I was very excited to work on it. But it's also relevant. We're living in an age of entitlement. If you're rich, that's your destiny. It's the lie of trickle-down economics - it exists out there for the purpose of rich people getting richer, poor people getting poorer and the middle class evaporating. And this play sticks it to the upper class. This play shows us what they love, what they find important, like all this faux yoga.
TN: People have been sold a bill of goods and they don't want to read the instructions. And I think that in the spiritual movement, people are not reading the instructions.
JF: During the Great Depression, people loved to watch movies that skewered the rich. And now it's the Great Recession...
KS: It's incredibly satisfying to skewer these people who we admire.
TN: Who we want to be.
KS: Because we're sold that bill of goods. We're sold the idea that we will someday be rich like them and we will want their life. But when these jetsetters get what’s coming to them, it's incredibly gratifying.
JF: But there's also something sad about it. You're watching people who have all this material wealth, but they're also incredibly impoverished in basic human ways. And the duck is this thing lingering outside suffering and no one's doing anything about it.
TN: And that's a metaphor for spirituality. Spirituality is outside the door. We have to nurture it and let it in. And we're not. Janice Fischer, who helped out on this play and who loved those play – and who wrote another dark movie - The Lost Boys - inspired me not to be afraid of the dark side. And there's a line in the play which is attributed to Janice: "I see oblivion and it's winking."
KS: Is that in this draft?
TN: It's in one of the drafts.
KS: We've done a lot or rewriting.
TN: Yeah, a lot of editing. One of the things that's so great about working with a dramaturg and director is that, as long as they have as much faith in it as you do, you can be allowed to sacrifice the baby [a reference to William Faulkner's rule "kill your darlings"]. I came up with a great line about killing babies, because we were cutting so many great jokes out of this thing.
KS: He said, "you know, a baby can drown in two inches of water. But it can also drown in one inch of water if you push down on the back of its head."
[Josh laughs]
TN: But that's true. But that's how it is about jokes and insights. One of the things I learned in standup is it has to go fast. My comedy partner and co-writer Abina Anthony Davis and I did a radio show for many years. And I learned from radio how to keep it fast and keep it visual. And working with Kiff has helped me to structure everything; to say "this is the way you have to follow." I'm very pro-collaboration.
JF: About the painting in the play: is there a Picasso called Le Canard Gris?
TN: No, I made it up.
JF: But the painting is called The Grey Duck and you've got a duck dying offstage. And everyone ignores the duck's suffering. The painting is an authentic great work of art and no one recognizes it as being that.
TN: When you live an ordinary life and have ordinary needs, everyday you have to get up, you've got to get your toilet work together, you've got to go to lunch you've got to kill the afternoon and then you've got to have dinner. No matter where you are. But if you're a member of the gentry and land-bound, then you're around all these things, these incredible paintings that people become blinded to. No one stops and sees them. It takes great talent to be able to look at a painting. Because you have to stop thinking about yourself. Just sit down, look at the painting and get lost in it. I'm a painter and I've spent my whole life drawing people. When you draw someone you get your own little play. I've learned I can say to them, "please don't speak." It's not so much about seduction as it is about observation. To me, observation is, "do you hear the duck? Do you know this painting is real?"
JF: And in contrast to that, Faye, the yoga guru, keeps talking about audio books read by celebrities. It's like the only way she can appreciate something artistic is if it's filtered through a famous name...
TN: I've seen gurus and hung out with these kinds of people. But how much do you believe somebody and how much do you believe in yourself and how much faith can you have in your own intuition? That's why the Bible was rearranged, because the original version gave the person too much Gnostic power. And we have to go back to that now. It's the only way we can stop warring, that we can stop treating women and children and gay people badly. You know, basic things.
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All Connotation Press plays are presented online to the reading public. All performance rights, including professional, amateur, television and the rights of translation into foreign languages are strictly reserved. If you are interested in seeking performance rights to a specific work contact the Drama Editor, Joshua Fardon.
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Downward Facing Bitch by Taylor Negron and Abina Anthony Davis.
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