Jimmy Breslin |
Jimmy Breslin, Pulitzer-winning columnist and author, has turned playwright. “Anyone working on a column at the level I was doing it is nuts not to try plays,” he says. “It’s the way you compress and then have quotes. I quote people as they talk, not as newspapers think they should talk. You take the quotes out of Washington: blind quotes, anonymous State Department officials. Do you believe those quotes? No human being talks that way.”No stranger to controversy, Breslin titled his last book, which was about pedophile priests in New York, The Church That Forgot Christ. He’s gone on to gentler themes in Love Lasts on Myrtle Avenue, which will have a script-in-hand production at the Cape Cod Theatre Project July 13-15, with Rip Torn and Lois Smith under Gordon Edelstein’s direction. CCTP artistic director Andrew Polk recalls how Breslin’s script arrived. “I had called a member of my advisory board to solicit suggestions for plays. The next day came a knock at my door. A crumpled-up old man with his play in his hand was there. It was Breslin. He sat in my apartment telling me stories. Everything out of his mouth is priceless.”
Love Lasts on Myrtle Avenue is Breslin’s second full-length play. His first was produced at Actors Theater of Louisville, where an earlier effort had won the company’s annual 10-minute play contest.
Using 9/11 as a backdrop, the new work tells the story of a working-class family in Queens, Breslin’s home town. “The people live in the Glendale neighborhood. The guy is an artist, but he paints offices for a living. He went to work on the 11th of September and didn’t come back. His wife is in the backyard hanging out the wash. She sees the buildings going down, which you can do from Queens. It looks like he’s gone, but he was rescued and winds up with amnesia in a Catholic home in South Jersey. He can’t talk, doesn’t know anything. They finally get him a job on a fishing boat.
“I have to backtrack: the big thing in Glendale on 9/11 was, they woke up and the place was covered with pigeons. The wife and her girlfriends decide it was evil spirits that had flown to Queens from Manhattan. So [later] the painter is on the fishing boat. He sees the seagulls flapping after the ship, and they bring him out of his amnesia. He comes back to Queens and walks into the house one night. His wife tells him, ‘I never signed the papers. I knew you’d come back.’ Everything is based on truth.”
“I love this play,” Polk says. “I love that it’s unfinished. That’s what we’re about: to develop this play.” According to Breslin, “This is very hard work. You start going a,b,c,d. Should I have them say this or that? You have to make decisions all the time. It gets murky, the frigging thing.”
LOVE LASTS ON MYRTLE AVENUE | July 13-15 | Cape Cod Theatre Project, Falmouth Academy, 7 Highfield Drive, Falmouth | $18; $10 students | 508.457.4242
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Cape Cod Theatre Project: http://www.capecodtheatreproject.org
