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THE PLAYWRIGHT.
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(The following is excerpted from an article by Steven Drukman that appeared in The New York Times on June 21, 1998.)
After toiling for 20 years not exactly anonymously but far from the bright lights of fame as a freelance journalist, stand-up comic, playwright, screenwriter and movie director, nobody is more surprised to see "Side Man", a memory play about jazz performers, land on Broadway than its author, Warren Leight. In jazz parlance, side man refers to a musician who works for hire on band jobs, who knows the standards by heart and who can solo dazzlingly but also blend in with an orchestra's sound. The memories are based on Mr. Leight's father, Donald Leight, now 75, a trumpet player who worked with Claude Thornhill, Woody Herman and other bandleaders through the 1950's. As the author's script shows, side men, who sometimes sabotaged their careers with drugs and alcohol, gradually became marginalized with the advent of rock-and-roll. But the main focus of the play is Mr. Leight's own childhood. Clifford, the author's stand-in, revisits his past, resuming the peacekeeper role he was forced to adopt in his parents' crumbling marriage. Ranging between 1953 and 1985, Mr. Leight mixes memories of his bitter, often hysterical mother and diffident, ineffectual father with a joke-filled celebration of the journeymen musicians he knew as a child on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. "All my father's friends could remember the horn section from an obscure gig by such-and-such orchestra," Mr. Leight said, "but would walk right by their own children on the sidewalk and not recognize them." For Mr. Leight, his play is also autobiographical because: "I still see myself as a side man in many ways. Coming from a jazz family, I always felt like I should earn a living. So for the last 20 years I've been a writer-for-hire, basically." [According to Mr. Leight,] "The response from audiences has been, ‘That's my story.' And I ask, 'Oh, your father was a jazz musician?' And they say, 'No, he was an accountant, but it's still my story." Mr. Leight jokes about his difficult childhood. "I was a poor, scrawny kid from the Upper West Side -- very 10025," he said, referring to the zip code of his youth. "At least the 10024 kids had summer camp. I got drop-kicked to Stanford on a scholarship, but was out of place in Palo Alto with these Olympic team water polo players." After graduating in 1977, he returned to New York, sold an article on "something like 'Where to Find a Public Bathroom in New York' " to The Village Voice, and became a career writer. The articles eventually formed the 1983 collection "The I Hate New York Guidebook" -- "my first succes d'estime," Mr. Leight said, "that's French for 'still living in a walkup.' " His "I Hate New York Guidebook" was the basis, along with Mayor Ed Koch's memoir, of the 1985 musical "Mayor." "It was a hit at the now-defunct Village Gate," Mr. Leight remembered, "and everyone said I wouldn't have to worry about work again -- which led, after its closing, to a long jobless streak, of course." In recent years, he has found sporadic success in Hollywood, but has always remained a New Yorker. "I was looking for an apartment in Manhattan, and I'd see something I liked. Then I'd hear the rent and think: 'Yeah, I can afford that -- two days a week.' " The experience prompted the screenplay for the 1993 film "The Night We Never Met" (which he also directed), a story of three people splitting the rent on an apartment but residing in it on alternate days, starring Matthew Broderick and Annabella Sciorra. After writing horror films and documentaries, Mr. Leight wrote a screenplay for what would become the movie "Dear God," starring Greg Kinnear, in 1996. "This was such a humiliating disaster," he said. "After six or seven drafts, it was taken from me. Suddenly, there were 60 speaking parts, a dog in a courtroom scene. I sat in a screening and thought, 'Time to write a play where I make no compromises.' " The result was "Side Man." "Film is good money," Mr. Leight said, "but there's a reason: they pay you to go away. 'Side Man' is filled with my voice because it's my story." The author's father saw the play at Vassar. "I didn't want him to," the younger Mr. Leight said, "but an old musician friend told him, 'Hey, your son wrote a play about you. It's in Poughkeepsie.' My father told me he was up all night afterward. I assumed it was the not-so-flattering portrayal, and then he said, 'Yeah, I couldn't figure out who was playing trumpet on "I Remember Clifford" in that scene.' |
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THE CHARACTERS.
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Clifford is based on the playwright, Warren Leight, who tells us in an author's note that he "avoided writing Side Man for twenty years. This was probably for the best, because . . . I gained a little perspective and shed a little anger." Indeed, perspective is exactly what is provided by the character Clifford—it is entirely through his eyes that we see all the events and other characters in the play. That Leight waited two decades before recording the lives of his parents and himself also suggests another quality we can see in Clifford: patience. As a boy and young man he puts up uncomplainingly with his mother's hysterics and his father's irresponsibility, never complaining, never striking back. Only once, he tells us, did he raise his voice to his father, and that was at a moment of sheer desperation, facing the choice between expelling Gene from the household, or committing his mother to a state asylum.
Thus, at one level Clifford stands out in stark contrast to everyone else in the play. While Terry is crazed and Gene is spaced-out, Clifford is calm and observant, fully aware of the treacherous currents running through the family. And while Gene's jazzman pals are happy to drift from unemployment check to unemployment check as long as they can play their horns, Clifford is focused on finding and keeping a well-paying job. Looked at another way, however, Clifford shares some of his father's most crucial traits, especially his ability to remain somehow above the fray, standing outside the action and watching—which is, after all, a central feature of his role as narrator. As Leight tells us in his author's note, Clifford "too is a bit of a side man. If anyone asks, Clifford is always 'fine.' He does not want to show us everything he is feeling, nor is he even aware of it for most of the play. . . . [H]e keeps things up as much as possible, for as long as he can." Terry is the character who changes most in the course of the play. When we first see her, in 1953, she is a naïve out-of-towner who has just been dumped by her husband. She doesn't drink, smokes little, and is completely unfamiliar with the world of drugs and drug-users. The first thing she orders at The Melody Lounge is a Shirley Temple, that booze-free concoction parents buy for their children when they go out to dinner. By the last time we see her, more than thirty years later, she has experienced madness, alcoholism, lung cancer, and the agony of a bad marriage. Her life has been warped by her relationship with Gene, and she is still fixated on him with a combination of rage and concern as she simultaneously curses him and packs up a supply of lasagna for him because, "He can't even feed himself." The playwright says of her: "If the side men keep their emotions in check, Terry . . . kind of airs hers out. But the actress playing her should not embrace her craziness. Instead, fight for Terry and for her side of the story. Also, no matter how angry she gets, Terry cares deeply for her husband and especially her son." Gene is, in almost every way, Terry's opposite. Whereas she changes drastically between the beginning and end of the play, Gene remains almost unaltered. As Terry complains, "He hasn't aged. He'll never age-nothing gets to him." According to Leight, he "exists in sort of a bubble. When the conversation isn't about music, he's elsewhere; even if he's talking to you. Actors who are used to engaging will find this frustrating." It is this quality of simultaneous presence and absence that drives Terry insane, and that allows Gene to survive in a collapsing world. Patsy and the other side men, says Leight, "come with a lot of mileage.” I think of Jonesy as looking out for Terry; Patsy as Clifford's guardian; and Al and Ziggy as Gene's section-mates. On stage at least, they cover him. Even though no one actually manages to stop the family's slide, they all do as much as they can. As did all the real life side men and family members on whom these characters are based. |
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THE SETTING.
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Side Man is what is called a "memory play," which means that the action embodies and tracks the memories of its narrator. As such, the action, while literally taking place on stage, is figuratively occurring in the mind of the teller of the story, Clifford.
These memories comprise a group of experiences that take place in two principal and numerous secondary locations in New York City. The two principal places are the apartment of Clifford's parents, Gene and Terry, and The Melody Lounge, a jazz club and restaurant frequented by Gene and his musician friends. In addition, Clifford's memories take us to the various places where side men spend their lives: offstage rooms in theaters and clubs, unemployment offices, the homes of friends. Just as the play moves continuously through the liquid spaces of memory, it also passes back and forth effortlessly in time, beginning with the “present," then moving back to the day Clifford's parents met in the basement of a New York apartment building, then flashing forward again to the "here and now" in a continuous game of chronological leap-frog. A good example of the author's handling of time and place occurs in the first act, shortly after Gene and Terry have begun living together. Gene tells Terry that he doesn't want her to take a job because, . . . we're almost out of the woods. And (looks straight into her eyes), I promise you. I'm going to take care of us, (kisses her) you won't ever have to work at all. The time and place change in an instant without any cumbersome movement of scenery or furniture. One moment we are with Terry and Gene in their apartment, and the next we are in a restaurant, some time later, watching Terry work at the job Gene said she would never have to take—a change that happens with the ease with which we move from one thought to another
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THE PLOT.
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The action in Side Man begins in the mid 1980s on the day Clifford, aged 29, pays farewell visits to his divorced, and deeply estranged, parents. He has lived in New York, in the crossfire of their emotional hostilities, for his whole life, and is now determined to start anew, far from them and their troubles. His mother, Terry, long-separated from his side-man father, Gene, is still attached to her ex-husband by anger and curdled love. Gene, as always, is wrapped up in his music, seemingly insulated from the everyday responsibilities demanded of husbands and fathers. Clifford, mediator between the two, has been walking on familial eggs forever, convinced, as he says, "that things would have been better for them if they'd never had me."
He first calls on his mother for dinner of lasagna and rage. "You know what pissed me off?" Terry asks while describing a dream she has had featuring Gene, "He hasn't aged. He'll never age—nothing gets to him. . . You know he gaslit me. Everyone thinks your father's so sweet. . . . That rat-bastard gaslit me. How does he look? Is he eating?" Concern for her ex-husband's well-being together with an ineradicable bitterness at his apparent indifference stamp this as a characteristic outpouring of Terry's tangled feelings. She has been "gaslit" by Gene, she insists, which presumably means she has intentionally been driven to near madness by her charming, but infinitely cruel husband, as was Ingrid Bergman by Charles Boyer in the 1944 film, Gaslight. Following this dinner with Terry, Clifford moves on to The Melody Lounge, his father's hangout for some forty years. There, as he steps through the door, he hears his "father's voice," the sound of his trumpet playing a ballad. Together with his side-man friends, Ziggy, Al, and Jonesy, Gene keeps "time so well that it's kind of stood still for them, at least when they're playing." However, time has not stood still for the world at large, which has abandoned jazz clubs like The Melody Lounge where, Clifford tells us, "In the audience there's me, two drunks from Jersey, and. . . . Patsy." The latter, a longtime waitress at The Melody, and the wife successively of most of Gene's friends, serves as a companion in memory to Clifford, helping to initiate his backward journey when she remembers that, "Once upon a time . . . we were in our prime . . ." Launched into the past by this bit of nostalgia, Clifford returns to the afternoon in 1977 when, at age 21, he collected his first unemployment check and encountered his father collecting "his four millionth." In an ironic reversal of the conventions of father-son bonding, Gene was, "at that moment, prouder of me than I have ever seen him: Today I am a man." Not landing a job, or earning an academic honor, or winning an athletic contest, but collecting an unemployment check is the coming-of-age achievement that Gene celebrates, showing how far outside the mainstream of American values this jazzman swims. To honor this Landmark occasion, Gene, who never picks up a check, treats his son and his friends to soup at The Melody. There the side men reminisce about the odd-ball characters they have know in their lives as itinerant musicians, listen in disbelief as Clifford tells them of his plans to work a steady job, and expound the principles of "jazzonomics," a theory of survival based largely on the unemployment check. We see the attractions of the side man's life in this scene of easygoing friendship, bawdy jokes, bohemian habits, and common love of music—a combination that made these nonconformists hugely glamorous in the eyes of young Clifford. Now that he is facing adulthood, however, he sees ever more clearly the drawbacks of the jazzman's creed : "Musicians don't pick up checks. They don't dance. They don't buy when they can rent." What they do is play music, even when the world seems decreasingly interested in hearing them. Making an exception to the creed, as we noted above, Gene does pick up the check on this distinctive occasion; and "he does something else he's almost never done," Clifford recalls. He looks at me. He just stops and stares. And I think he sees something, some promise, some sadness, or . . . (Gene starts to whistle the first phrase of The Afternoon of a Faun. Clifford waves a hand in front of his father's face: no reaction.) He's gone now. Back to when he had no son, back to 1953-before the Beatles, before Elvis. When these guys were like ball players. On the road, written up in the papers, endorsing trumpets in Down Beat. In disappearing into the past, Gene returns to the moment when he met Terry in the basement of the Hotel Nevada while she was struggling to play the Debussy piece on her flute. Gene overhears her, and picks up the melody on his trumpet, initiating the relationship that will eventuate in marriage, parenthood, misery, and divorce. Through the remainder of Act I, Clifford narrates the scenes of his parents' developing life together: their unconventional courtship; Terry's comical naivete about the side- men's drinking and drug-taking; her discovery that she is pregnant; Terry and Gene's marriage; the growing tension between them as Gene clings to his career in Jazz while Terry prods him to find another life. As the act ends, it has become clear to Terry that Gene has no intention of keeping the promise he made to her earlier: "if there ever comes a Saturday night, when I'm not booked, just one Saturday night, then--I promise, I'll get out of the business, OK?" But with television and rock 'n roll supplanting the culture of the big bands and the jazz clubs, just such a Saturday night does roll around—with the likelihood of more to come. Terry reminds Gene of his promise, but he denies ever having made it. At which point something in Terry snaps: "You have until midnight. If that phone doesn't ring, and you stay in the business, I'll . . . kill you. And I'll kill the baby." She takes her drink, retreats to her bedroom, and slams the door, thus foreshadowing the remainder of her married life. As Clifford says, "Ten years from now . . . nothing will have changed . . . Except, maybe, by degree." With that ominous prophecy, the first act ends. As Act Two begins, we see a day-in-the-life of the side man's malfunctioning family. A decade has elapsed. The relationship between Gene and Terry has further deteriorated, and Clifford, a ten-year-old boy, serves as the harried go-between in his parents' toxic marriage. It is six p.m. and Gene lies sleeping on the couch in preparation for his late-night gig at one of the few remaining jazz venues in the city. Meanwhile, Clifford is preparing dinner, while Terry, as is now her custom, is drinking steadily. Clifford lays out the evening meal on the coffee table then wakes his father who, realizing he is behind schedule, tries to squeeze in a few minutes of practice on his trumpet. This Terry cannot abide. She has come to hate everything about Gene's life as a musician, most fiercely the sound of his horn, and has extracted a promise from him never to practice at home after six, when the evening news comes on—one of her favorite diversions. Hearing the loathed sound of the trumpet, she goes "crazy," and begins to shout at her son and husband: ALL OF YOU. ALL OF YOU ARE IN THIS AGAINST ME. . . . (Terry-on fire-stands over the table. . . . Plates in hand. . . . [She] tries to save the food and yell at the same time. She loses her balance, falls, and knocks over the oval table top. Gene, in his tuxedo, instantly stands before anything stains him.) Sure. Now you move. You motherf***er. Nothing gets you. Nothing gets you. (She runs . . . To her bedroom. Slams the door. The whole apartment shakes. . . . Bedroom door opens.) Enjoy your dinner-MOTHERF***ERS! (She slams the door. Gene shakes his head. Sits down. Continues to eat his salad. . . . uninterrupted by her blasts.) Throughout the remainder of the dinner Terry pops in and out of the bedroom cursing Gene and Clifford like a demented cuckoo in a clock from hell. Gene takes it all in stride, reacting only when she grabs his trumpet and dashes it to the floor. Finally, the side man departs for the evening as Clifford turns to the audience and says,
It's good for a family to have rituals. This was ours. Once, twice, three times a month. He'd screw up. She'd flip out. He'd leave for work. I'd clean up. She'd hide in the room. I'd bring her something to eat. She'd have a few drinks. Fall asleep. He'd sneak in around four A.M. It is not until the middle of the second act that we come to understand why Gene persists in his ever more futile career as a musician. We see him and his friends, Al and Ziggy, in the musicians' green room following their gig with Lester Lanin. As they are about to leave for home, Al produces a tape recording of the last performance of the legendary trumpet player, Clifford Brown—the genius after whom Gene named his own son. The side men gather around to listen to Brown's solo, and in their rapt response to the music we see what keeps them going: Every turn Brownie takes causes them to shake their heads, laugh, murmur. They listen and react to every nuance of this solo with an intensity and passion that is otherwise not part of their lives. . . . For all their joking and f***ing up, they have a profound connection to their music, one they can only share with each other. Bound together by a devotion to jazz that is virtually religious, these men form a sort of secular priesthood whose members are in full communion with one another but separated from the rest of the world—including the members of their own families.
Meanwhile, back home, Clifford is trying to talk his mother out of committing suicide while Terry laments the fact that she has already "been dead for fifteen years.” Later that night, when Gene returns from his gig and plays a copy of the Clifford Brown tape for his son, Terry bursts into the room and pitches another screaming fit, this time pouring sherry on the floor and trying to ignite it and burn the house down. Thus we see the emotional gamut of the side man's life, oscillating between the sublime sounds of jazz and the shrieking of a crazed wife. That night, as Clifford informs us, he "had to call an ambulance. . . . They came and took mom away." This is the first of many breakdowns to come as Terry and Gene grow ever more alienated from one another. Finally, years later, after high school and college, Clifford must face the fact that his mother will continue to spiral into madness as long as she lives with Gene. And so the son performs the ultimate rite of passage in this fractured family: he orders his father out of the house, ending his parents' marriage but not the grief they have caused each other. This journey into the past now circles back to its starting point, The Melody Lounge, as Clifford—bound for California—is about to say goodbye to a father he hasn't seen in five years. Their reunion is marked by sad memories of musicians who are dead or dying and by the melancholy realization that the world his father has inhabited all his life is nearly extinct. But Clifford does make one important discovery: CLIFFORD: I'm gonna go west-work on the . . . painting stuff. . . . So for all his spaced-out air of distraction and detachment, Gene has felt connected to his son, a fact reinforced when Patsy tells Clifford that his father plays the tune, I Remember Clifford "every time."
In the final moments of the play, Clifford thinks ruefully of how his father "is totally in touch with everything that's going on around him" when he is playing his trumpet, and wonders "how he could sense everything while blowing, and almost nothing when he wasn't." To this question there is no answer, and as the play ends with Clifford helpless facing the fact that his father, together with the rest of the world's side-men, "were just burning brass. Oblivious." |
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THE CHARACTERS.
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Clifford is based on the playwright, Warren Leight, who tells us in an author's note that he "avoided writing Side Man for twenty years. This was probably for the best, because . . . I gained a little perspective and shed a little anger." Indeed, perspective is exactly what is provided by the character Clifford—it is entirely through his eyes that we see all the events and other characters in the play. That Leight waited two decades before recording the lives of his parents and himself also suggests another quality we can see in Clifford: patience. As a boy and young man he puts up uncomplainingly with his mother's hysterics and his father's irresponsibility, never complaining, never striking back. Only once, he tells us, did he raise his voice to his father, and that was at a moment of sheer desperation, facing the choice between expelling Gene from the household, or committing his mother to a state asylum
Thus, at one level Clifford stands out in stark contrast to everyone else in the play. While Terry is crazed and Gene is spaced-out, Clifford is calm and observant, fully aware of the treacherous currents running through the family. And while Gene's jazzman pals are happy to drift from unemployment check to unemployment check as long as they can play their horns, Clifford is focused on finding and keeping a well-paying job. Looked at another way, however, Clifford shares some of his father's most crucial traits, especially his ability to remain somehow above the fray, standing outside the action and watching—which is, after all, a central feature of his role as narrator. As Leight tells us in his author's note, Clifford "too is a bit of a side man. If anyone asks, Clifford is always 'fine.' He does not want to show us everything he is feeling, nor is he even aware of it for most of the play. . . . He keeps things up as much as possible, for as long as he can." Terry is the character who changes most in the course of the play. When we first see her, in 1953, she is a naïve out-of-towner who has just been dumped by her husband. She doesn't drink, smokes little, and is completely unfamiliar with the world of drugs and drug-users. The first thing she orders at The Melody Lounge is a Shirley Temple, that booze-free concoction parents buy for their children when they go out to dinner. By the last time we see her, more than thirty years later, she has experienced madness, alcoholism, lung cancer, and the agony of a bad marriage. Her life has been warped by her relationship with Gene, and she is still fixated on him with a combination of rage and concern as she simultaneously curses him and packs up a supply of lasagna for him because, "He can't even feed himself." The playwright says of her: "If the side men keep their emotions in check, Terry . . . kind of airs hers out. But the actress playing her should not embrace her craziness. Instead, fight for Terry and for her side of the story. Also, no matter how angry she gets, Terry cares deeply for her husband and especially her son." Gene is, in almost every way, Terry's opposite. Whereas she changes drastically between the beginning and end of the play, Gene remains almost unaltered. As Terry complains, "He hasn't aged. He'll never age-nothing gets to him." According to Leight, he "exists in sort of a bubble. When the conversation isn't about music, he's elsewhere; even if he's talking to you. Actors who are used to engaging will find this frustrating." It is this quality of simultaneous presence and absence that drives Terry insane, and that allows Gene to survive in a collapsing world. Patsy and the other side men, says Leight, "come with a lot of mileage." “I think of Jonesy as looking out for Terry; Patsy as Clifford's guardian; and Al and Ziggy as Gene's section-mates. On stage at least, they cover him.” Even though no one actually manages to stop the family's slide, they all do as much as they can. As did all the real life side men and family members on whom these characters are based. |
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THEMES.
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Side Man tells a familiar story about the domestic disorder that often marks the life of the artist. At least since the time of Rousseau—who abandoned his children to an orphanage—artists in the west have had the reputation of being bad fathers and worse husbands. In America alone we can cite the likes of Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Anne Sexton, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and many others, who have achieved fame as artists and notoriety for their family troubles.
This image of the artist as somehow incapable of domestic happiness is essentially a romantic idea, linked to the redefinition of art as a secular substitute for religion that occurred during the 18th and 19th centuries. If art is a kind of religion, then the artist is a priest or prophet whose sacred calling places him beyond the mundane requirements of family duty. Absorbed by the higher calling of his work, he has little time or patience to deal with humdrum concerns. Moreover, in his prophetic role, the artist is called to break through the barriers of convention not just in his work but in his life as well. He is entitled to break the rules because, as Woody Allen has remarked about his own conduct, "The heart wants what the heart wants." Such, at any rate, are some of the conventional notions widely entertained about the nature of the artist and his bohemian privileges. Gene in Side Man is certainly not one of life's more extravagant transgressors against the rules of marriage and parenthood—not a wife-stabber, like Norman Mailer, or a child abandoner, like Rousseau—but he does clearly place music above every other value in his life. He may feel affection for his wife, and, as Clifford learns at the end, he may think constantly about his son, but it is jazz that is his true love. Another important theme is the "What if" question that Clifford constantly ponders: what if I had never been born? Would my parents have been happier? Would my mother's life have been less of a calamity? With this question, Leight echoes another autobiographical play about a dysfunctional artistic family, O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. In this work, Edmund, the youngest son of the actor James Tyrone, is haunted by the accusation that his birth is the cause of all the family's misery. If it weren't for her excruciating labor in delivering Edmund, his mother would never have taken to drugs, and the family wouldn't now be grappling with the calamity of an addicted parent. The idea that one's very existence is a curse laid on others—especially on one's mother and father—is another very old theme in dramatic literature. It is, in essence, what Oedipus Rex is all about. At his birth Oedipus's parents are told that the child will grow up to kill his father and marry his mother—and that is precisely what he does in spite of all his heroic efforts to avoid his fate. If Clifford is right about the blight of his birth, then his life is a modern variant on the Oedipus story: instead of marrying his mother (who claims to have been dead for thirty years, the span of Clifford's life), he kills her. And instead of killing his father, he turns into a kind of wife to him, serving all the dinners and performing all the domestic chores that the crazed Terry cannot handle. |
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.
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1. What is the significance of the title Side Man? Does it have implications beyond the literal meaning?
2. Why is Terry so furious at Gene? After all, he never abuses her or cheats on her. 3. What are the cultural developments that contribute to the destruction of Gene's world? 4. Why is Clifford going to California? Is there more than one reason? 5. Why were Gene and Terry attracted to each other in the first place? 6. Do you know people like Gene-people whose work seems to distance them from their families? 7. Do you know anyone like Terry, a person consumed by rage? 8. Do you know anyone like Clifford, a child who has to take responsibilities his parents should bear? 9. What is the significance of the fact that Clifford bears the name he does rather than Francis Albert? Who named him, and what does that mean? 10. Do you think the family would have been happier if there had been more than one child? Why? Why not? |