'Side Man' Takes Center Stage

Newsweek.com, June 15, 1999

Two years ago, Warren Leight was hit by an 18-wheel truck. A week ago Sunday, he was hit with the Tony Award for best play. Leight's reactions to these two incidents don't differ much. A split-second before the crash, he though, "'Oh, now they'll produce my play.' ... If I'm dead, then it's got an angle." His thoughts on winning the Tony? "Now I can actually make money from a play." Indeed, who would have thought that "Side Man" — a play about a white jazz musician and his family — would be profitable? Leight (pronounced "light") relishes in telling of producers who wanted to change the race of the characters. But the story of a trumpet player's indifference and obliviousness to everything but music has audiences flocking to the theater. It doesn't hurt that the acting of both Frank Wood (named "Best Actor") and Edie Falco, the couple in the play, is so seamless that you forget they're on a stage. Told from the perspective of the son, Clifford, "Side Man" is more or less the story of Leight's own life. His father was a "sideman," a big band term for the anonymous musicians who support the leader of the band.

For a long time, the play looked like it would remain as little known as its subject matter. "Side Man" opened on Broadway a year ago — a full year before it could be considered for a Tony. In March and April, the big names — Brian Dennehy, Kevin Spacey, Dame Judi Dench, and Natasha Richardson — strutted onto the Great White Way, fashionably late and perfectly positioned to capitalize on buzz before the votes. In an award-obsessed industry, not receiving a Tony would have amounted to instant death — the play would have closed the next night. So naturally, the morning before the Tonys, Leight was nervous. In his ironic, semi-neurotic, run-on way, he described his feelings the morning before the awards.

"I feel like I've been a little bit written off by the press the last six months. They cannot refer to the play without saying it's losing money. When actually the other shows are losing as much or more money and we were doing fine till March, which was a year into our run. I open the Times that day — front page of the Arts and Leisure, there's this huge Hirschfeld drawing — an illustration about the year of the playwright, and there's 12 or 13 playwrights illustrated. David Hare, Margaret Edson, and I'm not in the thing, and I've had the only new American play on Broadway for a year. And my phone's ringing saying, 'It was bad, what a diss, why do you think they did that?' I go, 'I don't think they singled me out to diss me. I hate to not be paranoid ...' They said, 'Are you kidding? This is what they've been doing to you all year!' So, people are fanning the flames of xenophobia. And everybody has been assuring me I'm going to win, and all I can think about it 'These are exactly the same people who assured me I was going to win the Pulitzer.'"

He didn't win the Pulitzer, but when Leight received the Tony, he decidedly looked the part of the successful playwright, decked out in a (loaned) Prada tux, trophy in hand. Three days later in his office wearing a polo shirt and khakis, however, he looked more like a struggling artist — struggling with success, that is. "Today is the first day that I just felt silly and happy. You know when you're overloaded and almost jagged — like too many people touching you or something? I'm not built to absorb like that. And today I was just walking down the street with a half a minute to myself, and I just thought, "This is so much better than" — he pauses — "the other way.'" Then he laughs. "And it's really funny, because apparently everybody knew all along," he says, doing an imitation: "'I knew all along you were going to win.'"

Leight knew better. He and his play have had enough skirmishes with death in their four-year journey to the Tony for him to know that his play might not succeed despite the praise of both critics and audiences. Once, during a successful summer run with New York Stage and Film in Poughkeepsie, NY, writer/director Jay Presson Allen told Leight, "I'm not bringing my play anywhere near Broadway the year your play opens on Broadway, because you're winning the Tony." But, after the play finished that summer, nothing happened for the next 20 months. Well, except that every theater company in New York turned it down, that the truck hit Leight, and that he was unable to find a job.

Finally, a ticked-off theater employee who wanted to get back at his bosses agreed to produce the show. From there, it got its lucky break onto Broadway, where it drew the attention of famed film and television stars, Christian Slater and Scott Wolf. Both requested to play the main character, Clifford; Slater starred in it for four months this past winter, and Wolf who is in it now, began performing right before the Tonys. "They [Slater and Wolf] come to the play out of their hearts. There's something in the play that speaks to something in their past very strongly, and that's why they're doing it. It's hardly a flashy part. They're losing probably tens of thousands of dollars a day for every day they're in it. No joke."

The personal connection that has drawn actors to "Side Man" speaks to viewers as well. Many have seen their own families replicated onstage, Leight said. "I notice that there are always certain laughs, like 'Enjoy your macaroni, mother f---ers!' It always gets these huge laughs. Half of the laughs are like 'Isn't that ridiculous and operatic,' and half of them are, 'Someone finally wrote my Christmas dinner and put it on the stage.'" Ah yes, that scene, — when the mother, Terry, screams "Enjoy your dinners you mother f---ers!" and slams the door; then she opens it again and yells, "Enjoy your macaroni, mother f---ers!" (slam!); finally she screams, "Is anybody listening to me in this f---ing family?"; her husband Gene quietly replies, "Do we have a choice?"

Clifford's and the audience's faces are horrified. Steam is nearly coming out of Terry's ears now. In the ultimate revenge, she kicks his trumpet onto the floor. The entire theater falls silent as Gene walks to his trumpet, bends over, picks it up and gingerly puts it back into the case. It's funny, scary, sad, tense, intense, and completely universal. Everyone knows the feeling of bounds being overstepped.

As a sideman of the writing world, Leight has penned horror movies, corporate speeches, magazine articles, screenplays, Mademoiselle columns, one-acts, and stand-up comedy shows. And he has written powerful theater. He says, "At times, I'd be hailed as the next ... Nobody knew what I was — They knew I was the next something."

The next great playwright?"

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