The Dallas Connection

Simon Gray teams up with a long-time cohort for ‘Dog Days’ at British-flavoured New Arts Theatre.

By Dan Hulbert in American Theatre, June 1986.

Playwright Simon Gray believes that when two artists undergo the initiation right of collaborating on a new play, two things can happen: “Either they never speak to each other again, or they become friends for life.” Happily, the latter scenario unfolded when Gray worked with director Stephen Hollis on some of his earlier plays – Wise Child and Spoiled – at Hollis’s Watford Palace Theatre, just outside London, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The friendship resulted in a play being written expressly for Hollis, Dog Days, but the project was sidetracked, mainly because a West End production suddenly materialized for another Gray play, Otherwise Engaged.

Dog Days was later staged on a modest scale, in Oxford and Vienna, but (like Simon Hench, the character in Otherwise Engaged whose attempts to listen to Wagner are continually frustrated) Gray just couldn’t seem to get together with his original choice of director, Hollis. Ten years and several plays later – during which time Hollis stage the American and British premieres of his cohort’s Molly – Gray was ready to bite into Dog Days again. But by then Hollis had struck out further into the provinces – he’s gone to Dallas, Texas, as artistic director of the New Arts Theatre.

New Arts, a 220-seat house in a stylishly converted garage, was something of an urban pioneer in Dallas’s own West End district. A charming brick anachronism among the city’s glass towers, New Arts had survived four years of sparse audiences and troublesome debts. But Hollis’s arrival in the summer of 1985 coincided with a boom in restaurants and nightlife around the theatre, so ho boldly put his personal British stamp on his debut season with a sold-out run of The Rocky Horror Show and the American premiere of Michael Frayn’s Clouds.

As it happened, playwright Gray was in Los Angeles last February for rehearsals of his latest play, The Common Pursuit, so he stopped off in Dallas on his return trip for a joint staging, with Hollis, of the American premiere of Dog Days. During two weeks of rehearsals, what emerged was a revised text that Gray now feels confident to offer to New York and London.

“I’d always had a strange relationship with the play – I didn’t want to encourage other productions until I’d investigated it in rehearsal. Now, I can approach it as a play, as opposed to my play. After 10 years, I can truly say it was written by someone else,” claims the 49-year-old playwright, whose humorous eyes and black, unruly hair give him a more raffish appearance than one might expect form the man who has examined, with surgical precision, the emotional lives of those in the tweedy milieux of British publishing and academia.

Hollis, 39, has a clue why Dog Days – which concerns an editor’s cheerful skid into alcoholic misanthropy – has been difficult for its author to come to terms with: “Its about a man, Peter, with the same anarchic sense of humor as Simon. Butley was like buying xanax online Simon, too, but I think Dog Days is in some way s a darker play. Peter has to say very unpleasant and outrageous things, and say them with immense charm.”

Hollis, who ran the first two weeks of rehearsal, noticed that actor Stanley Wilson, who had been cast as Peter, began to pick up Gray’s mannerisms, “a certain sarcastic tone, rhythms of smoking and drinking on stage,” when the playwright moved in as director. Though Gray had insisted, in a Dallas interview, that of all his acerbic heroes Peter was the furthest from him personally, he seemed to accept the similarities more readily in a telephone interview from his London office.

“Yes, much was made of it when Alan Bates began to look and sound like me – constantly pushing his hair back, and so forth – in Butley. I certainly didn’t discourage Stanley from using me as a model. After all, actors must get their information somewhere, and there, in Dallas, I seemed to be the only chain smoking, semi-alcoholic Englishman in the vicinity.”

Another strong argument might be made that Peter’s schoolteache borther, Charles, as uptight as Peter is slouchy, is the center of Dog Days and is closer personally to Gray, who taught at a small English college for many years and professes to have a long, happy marriage. The climax of Dog Days reveals that Peter’s reckless search for an illusory “freedom” with a young woman artist provides a vicarious release for the domestic Charles. Ultimately, the brothers complement each other, need each other’s oppositeness. The question arises: are Peter and Charles the contradictory halves of Simon Gray?

“I suppose there’s an element of schizophrenia there,” said the chuckling playwright. “It’s easier to examine oneself when one splits oneself up. And I do have a brother, who’s like Charles in many ways.”

Michael Rothaar, a New York actor who was hailed by Dallas critics for his portrayed of Charles, said he found it useful to become acquainted with Gray and observe “His basic shyness, his tendency to say something quite spontaneous and outrageous and then suddenly pull back, reconsider.”

A brilliantly funny, and yet grippingly painful, scene occurs in the play when Charles reveals that he overheard his headmaster giving what he reasonably thought was a description of himself, only to discover it was an account of an annoying dog (hence the play’s title). As Rothaar pointed out, anyone who’s read Gray’s diary-like book, An Unnatrual Pursuit, with its mildly paranoid reflections on critics and snubbing producers, will recognize not only the playwright’s, but perhaps his or her own, private fears.

As Gray spoke, there were no firm plans for future productions of Dog Days but two established New York producers, representing Broadway and Off Broadway, had just flown into Dallas to see the play at the end of its run. “Not only have I discovered a play that I believe will have a good life ahead of it, but I managed to eliminate its one set change,” Gray points out. “So the play is even more attractive now – nice and cheap.”