CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’ Alan (Kevin Bacon) has come to live with his father and the father’s new family, which includes Carol (Kyra Sedgwick), a pretty-much-grown-up foster child, in a filmed version of “Lemon Sky” shown on PBS.
“THE THREE GREAT MEMORY PLAYS are ‘Death of a Salesman,’ ‘The Glass Menagerie’ and ‘Lemon Sky,’” Jan Egleson said from his Zoom box one Wednesday evening last month.
Egleson may be biased, because he directed Lanford Wilson’s “Lemon Sky” for a filmed version that was telecast on PBS in early 1988. It starred a very young Kevin Bacon as Alan, the central character.
What is a memory play, exactly? Some of the participants could have explained. In addition to Egleson, they included Marshall W. Mason, a close associate of Wilson’s since the 1960s and a co-founder (with Wilson) of Circle Repertory Theater; and Welker White, who (billed as Laura White) played Penny in the PBS version and Off Broadway.
THE UNBLENDED FAMILY A scene from the PBS film of “Lemon Sky,” with, from left, Lindsay Crouse, Casey Affleck, Kevin Bacon and Welker White.
Lindsay Crouse, who played Ronnie, Alan’s caring but ultimately practical stepmom, was scheduled to join them, but — when last heard from — she was looking for an internet connection in the new house she’d just moved into. (Crouse called later to apologize, said Jeffrey Sweet. Officially, pressnights.com blames whoever is in charge of famous actresses’ relocation logistics.)
TIDBIT///Jerry, one of Doug and Ronnie’s little boys, was played by Casey Affleck. He was 12 at the time, and it was his screen debut, decades before “Manchester by the Sea.”
Sweet, the playwright, author and general theater expert, who organized and moderated the discussion, also could have told us. A memory play is based on the recollections of one of the work’s major characters, who also serves as our narrator. Tennessee Williams was said to have coined the term to describe “The Glass Menagerie,” his 1944 masterpiece.
Sweet pointed out the Lanford Wilson work’s similarity to another Williams play, “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Both are set in a household dominated by an “alpha male,” and a sensitive newcomer is thrown out. Stanley Kowalski is to Doug the gruff father as Blanche DuBois is to Alan.
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ABOUT “LEMON SKY”
Playwright: Lanford Wilson (1937-2011) //// Developed at: Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, National Playwrights Conference. 1968. //// Alan: Michael Douglas, who was 24 at the time /// Off Off Broadway production: La MaMa E.T.C., 1970 //// Off Broadway production: Playhouse Theater, later in 1970. Alan: Christopher Walken, 27. //// Off Broadway revival: Second Stage, 1985. Alan: Jeff Daniels, 30, //// Television: “American Playhouse,” PBS. 1988. Alan: Kevin Bacon,.29.
ALAN (WHO HAS BEEN played onstage by Michael Douglas, Christopher Walken, Jeff Daniels and others) is an intelligent, polite recent high school graduate who has decided to leave his mother’s home in the Midwest and move in with his father, who has remarried and had two more sons. Alan figures he can get a job and go to college there, in Southern California.
The other members of the household are two foster “children” who have been living with Doug and Ronnie for years — and are about to age out of the foster program. Penny is a sensible young woman who hopes to become a teacher. Carol is a promiscuous pill-popper (in the ‘50s, they were just different pills from now) who hopes to marry money.
Doug, the father, works the night shift at an aircraft plant, indulges his artistic side (or whatever he wants to call it) by taking photographs of young, bikini-clad women. He even has a darkroom at home.
Doug welcomes Alan at first, but he hates his son’s ducktail haircut (very, very fashionable in the ’50s), is annoyed that he doesn’t always show up for his aircraft-plant job and becomes increasingly worried that he never goes out with girls.
TIDBIT///Doug found it suspicious that Alan didn’t seem attracted to Carol, who was practically throwing herself at him. He needn’t have worried about the actors who played them. Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick met in rehearsals for the PBS production, married in 1988 and celebrated their 32nd wedding anniversary last year.
The Zoom participants talked about Wilson himself. He stopped drinking for the last 10 years of his life. He didn’t drive. He was indeed gay (as the father suspects) and was wrestling furiously with his feelings when he wrote “Lemon Sky.”
The play was based on the playwright’s real-life experience. In the mid-1950s, he did move in with his divorced father and the father’s new family in San Diego. When the play was in Off Broadway rehearsals, Mason recalled, “Lanford was impressed” by Christopher Walken’s talent and by the fact that the young actor was obviously studying him.
EVEN BEFORE “ANNIE HALL” Christopher Walker played Alan in an Off Broadway production of “Lemon Sky” in 1970.
TIDBIT///Welker White, who played Penny in the PBS film (and Jimmy Hoffa’s wife in “The Irishman,” btw) had worked with Cynthia Nixon and seen her onstage — in Wilson’s “Fifth of July.” She just memorized “everything that Cynthia Nixon did,” adding, “I gave her exact performance.”
Wilson may have been more concerned about how his father and his stepmother came off. He told associates that he did not want his father to look like the villain. In fact, Ronnie — who ends up siding with her husband to save her marriage — seems to fit that description, at least to some degree.
The men on the Zoom screen condemned Doug’s sexist midcentury behavior and attitudes. Sweet referred sympathetically to “what it was acceptable for men to do, what the second wife had to put up with” and to end up looking villainous. Which is probably why he said, “The ‘60s couldn’t come soon enough.”
But — a personal note here — I know how old you guys are. Your birth dates are on the internet. We are of the same generation, and I remember my 1950s-into-’60s childhood. It’s satisfying to hear that when you reflect on that period, you’re horrified, but please don’t pretend that you’re surprised.
I will, however, try to be more like Lanford Wilson. As the critic Clive Barnes wrote in 1970, Wilson’s impartiality was at the core of his brilliance as a writer. “He realizes that there are no heroes, and it is sometimes as painful to be wicked as it is to be good.”