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Anne Lamott novel makes world premiere on Marin stage

by Charles Brousse

Not many nationally known novelists and essayists would turn over the stage rights to one of their books to a pair of relatively unknown adapters without asking for veto power over the script and performance royalties.

Nor would they likely approve of having the world premiere in a furniture store on the main street of a suburban town.

Anne Lamott has done all of the above and those who know her from her West Marin hippie days, or are familiar with the views expressed in her work, will probably have no difficulty understanding why.

On April 25, the dramatized version of Lamott's semi-autobiographical first novel, "Hard Laughter" - the 1981 work that established her as one of the country's promising new literary voices - opens a four-weekend run in a cleared area among the tables and chairs of the Wooden Duck, a store at the west end of San Rafael's business district that specializes in furnishings made from recycled wood.

Adapted by Ann Brebner and Laurel Graver, the play is being presented by AlterTheater, a highly regarded local group that produces mainly new scripts in various donated shop spaces along Fourth Street.

The story of how "Hard Laughter" made its way from page to stage begins in 1982 when Brebner fell in love with Lamott's portrait of her family's chaotic but emotionally rewarding life in Bolinas after their writer father was diagnosed with metastasized melanoma. Looking back on that initial impression, Brebner says, "Those people shared a closeness and an ability to laugh at adversity that I never experienced when I grew up in England. I felt like wanted to be adopted."

Convinced that the book would make a good movie, Brebner, who then owned a well-known San Francisco film and TV casting agency, quickly optioned the rights and oversaw the writing of a screenplay by Lamott and another author. The project gathered steam when Mill Valley actress Kathleen Quinlan, a friend of Graver's, showed interest in playing Jennifer, Lamott's alter ego in the novel. Although there were encouraging nibbles from producers, the movie was never made, but for Brebner the failed attempt was not without rewards: She formed a strong personal bond with Lamott and began an enduring professional relationship with Graver.

Fast forward a couple of decades. Finding her affection for "Hard Laughter" undiminished, Brebner decided to make another proposal.

"I telephoned Anne and said Laurel and I had some ideas for a play," Brebner recalls. "She said OK, but she didn't want to take an active part because her experience with the film script let her know she wasn't a playwright.

"Nevertheless, if I felt like going ahead I could and do what I wanted. ... Carte blanche. I couldn't believe it!"

A couple of days later Brebner received an e-mail that read something like, "I, Anne Lamott, the author of 'Hard Laughter,' give Ann Brebner the authority to make any decisions, anytime."

"It would have made a lawyer faint," Brebner says.

It was full speed ahead. After getting AlterTheater's artistic director Jeanette Harrison to sign on as producer, she and Graver began a lengthy period of script development. Public readings were held, and actors auditioned. Tiburon's Jayne Wenger, who has a long history of working on new plays (many of them during her tenure as artistic director of the Bay Area Playwrights Festival) was brought in as dramaturge and later took over the staging when the original director, Frances Lee McCain, was tapped to perform the role of Honey, Lamott's fictional grandmother.

Brebner, Graver and Wenger all emphasize that "Hard Laughter's" essential content has not changed. Set against the colorful backdrop of Bolinas in the 1970s - a time when residents regularly tore down highway signs that indicated the town's location. Lamott's touching account is about how her family, with the help of many friends, managed to retain a sense of humor despite the tragedy of their father's cancer.

"We've just done some rearranging to make it work better dramatically," Brebner explains, "and we're emphasizing the central theme - how difficult, but how absolutely necessary, it is to be able to laugh when everything seems to be collapsing - rather than the illness itself. We did the opposite in the screenplay, and I think it suffered."

So, how does Lamott feel about the transition of "Hard Laughter" from one medium to another?

"I told them from the beginning that I was going to stay away from rehearsals, and I have, although I've read the script, which is very good," says Lamott, who lives in Fairfax. "I'd trust Ann (Brebner) with life and death decisions, let alone literary ones. On opening night we'll find out whether people like it."

Seated on a sofa at the Wooden Duck on the eve of her 54th birthday, Lamott still looks like the West Marin hippie she was when the novel was written: the familiar bead-ornamented dreadlocks, the casual, fashion-defying clothes. She recalls the days when she and her Bolinas friends searched for an alternative reality, using drugs and alcohol to light the way. It's a memory she treasures.

"My best girlfriend and all the guys we hung out with, we got together and smoked dope nearly every day, took LSD, and I discovered methadrine, which I loved," she says. "We thought we were brilliant and most of us, including me, were eccentric. We didn't want to be part of the mainstream. We wanted something deeper and richer, more part of the natural world. It was an exciting, crazy time. Now I'm sober, but I still want the same things. And I'm an activist - I get out and march for progressive causes whenever anybody asks me to."

She ends with a hint of pride: "And, yes, I still am a hippie."

Those counterculture beliefs may help to explain why she didn't hesitate to hand the theater rights to "Hard Laughter" to a trusted friend instead of employing an agent and an army of dark-suited lawyers to hammer out a formal contract. The latter is a joyless, capitalistic way of doing business, and Lamott is clearly someone who prefers simplicity, good conversation and a warm embrace.

Original link: http://www.marinij.com/lifestyles/ci_9028858

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Feature: 'Hard' promises
Laurel Graver and Ann Brebner tred carefully when adapting Ann Lamott's coming-of-age novel for the stage
by Joy Lanzendorfer

Anne Lamott's first novel, Hard Laughter, was published in 1980. Set in the town of Clement—an alias for Bolinas—at the end of the hippie era, Hard Laughter is an autobiographical novel about Lamott's father's struggle with brain cancer. The novel follows the narrator, Jennifer, as she and her two brothers find out and deal with their father's illness. Despite the heaviness of the subject matter, Hard Laughter balances emotional upheaval with steady doses of humorous observations. Some of the best of these are descriptions of Marin in the late 1970s, ranging from local eccentrics to town politics to the stunning beauty of the coast—observations that often still ring true today.

Now, 28 years later, AlterTheater Ensemble in San Rafael is putting on a play based on Hard Laughter. Written by Ann Brebner and Laurel Graver, the play is the first-ever adaptation of one of Lamott's books. It will run from April 25 to May 18. Jayne Wenger directs it.

Adapting Hard Laughter has been a long time coming for Brebner and Graver. Brebner has been interested in the novel since she first read it when it came out. In fact, she optioned the book in 1983 to make it into a movie. While the film never came to fruition, through that project she met and became friends with Graver. Soon after, they developed a working partnership that has resulted in many plays with ensembles, including Marin Shakespeare Company.

Despite their long relationship, Hard Laughter is the first time Brebner and Graver have written something together. Recently, I stopped by Ann Brebner's house in San Rafael for tea and to chat with the two of them about writing the play.

• • • •

How did you first decide to adapt Hard Laughter for the stage?

Brebner: It's a long story, going back 20-odd years. The book was published in 1980. I read it and fell in love with it. I actually wanted her family to adopt me. I thought this would make a perfect film and I would get to show something I really wanted to show. We did write the film script and it never got made. It came very close. And so it went away into the box in front of the bed that people keep their unmade films in. During that time, when we were talking about casting, we were talking about Kathleen Quinlan, who went to school at Tam High and who was beginning a pretty fabulous career. She was interested in playing one of the lead roles. Laurel was a very close friend of hers, and that's how we first met.

Graver: Yeah, Kathleen and I met Ann for lunch. Of course I had heard of Ann for years and years because I'm in the theater community, but I hadn't met her. So this is how Ann and I got connected, which many years later turned into a really good working relationship.

Brebner: And about two-and-a-half years ago, I guess, there hadn't been any projects that we could work on together, and we both wanted a project that we could sink our teeth into. And so we thought, well why don't we write one? Laurel came up with that idea. And I got permission from Annie to take the material and turn it into a play. And we started working on it.

Tell me about the projects that you have collaborated on before now. How did you start working together in the first place?

Graver: Our professional stuff started in 1989 when I was the company manager for Ensemble Theatre Company, which used to be in the three Tamalpais district high schools. Ann was asked to be a guest artist for one of our shows. It was a piece that was written specifically for our company. She directed and I produced it. And then somehow Bravo TV got wind of the project. Local Comcast, which was Viacom Marin or something like that at that time, came and did a really beautiful video of that project.

Brebner: It was lovely.

Graver: It was submitted to Bravo TV and we won their national excellence in high school theater award. And it came with a very large check at the time—$2,000 or $5,000, which, to a nonprofit theater company, is huge. We got some really amazing national exposure and Viacom played it for about two or three years. You know, you'd get a phone call late at night and someone would say, "It's on!" And so that was the project that Ann and I started on. And then we did Marin Shakespeare together...

Brebner: Yes, the re-opening season of the company. And we did...

Graver: ...Now you're really testing us.

Brebner: As You Like It.

Graver: Yeah, we did As You Like It for Marin Shakes.

Brebner: And it went on. We went in and out of Shakespeare at the Beach, Marin Shakespeare Company and so on.

But Hard Laughter is your first time writing something together. What was that like?

Brebner: It was fairly easy. We had worked creatively together before on the same product. And we've learned to say, "Well what do you think?" "Oh well, no no no no, it should be like this." And to step aside when we've sensed that the other person has a vision of something, and then to watch it and see what happens, and then challenge it and come back and change it.

Graver: And the story of Hard Laughter sort of bailed us out. It wasn't as if we had to decide what the bar looks like that the characters were going to. The bar's there [in Bolinas]. We've been to that bar. We've been to that beach. So it's not like I was married to the bar being red and Ann was married to the bar being blue. We knew it was just dingy and gray. So it was very easy.

Brebner: Well, you were working a lot of the time.

Graver: Yeah, scheduling our time was tough...but we pretty much managed to get two to three hours in a couple times a week. We would always sit and have a nice lunch with each other on one side or the other of it and talk about our lives and what was happening with us, so that our relationship didn't just turn into Hard Laughter.

What was it about this book that first attracted you?

Brebner: Well, the writing, obviously. This is Annie's first book, and "hard laughter" describes it in the sense that the circumstances are horrible, but the currency in the family, the way they connect, is humor. And I love that consistency, that it never really stopped. It's also a family without a mother. There is a mother, but she lives in Hawaii. I grew up without a mother and that resonated with me. And I also got extremely jealous. This person in this book had brothers and a really communicative father, whereas I had no siblings and a father who was very silent. And so I wanted that family. And I love West Marin, and it was set there. I just wanted to go live there with those people. And there is something about the way in which the language works where she doesn't describe every every every detail. She kind of throws it at you and says, "Wear this and see what it feels like." You feel, in a sense, the inside of it. And when we read an earlier version of the play about a year ago, one of the actors said, "It's American Chekhov." And he said, "Don't close it up, leave it open like this so anyone can wear it."

Graver: Yeah, and for me, I first read Annie's book in '83 or '84. Right after that meeting that I went to with Kathleen and Ann, I picked up the book. And I had never read anything where you're sitting very quietly and reading, and suddenly you're laughing out loud. It was the first time I found that in an author. So I always had a great heart space for this book. And also Annie and I are approximately the same age. I grew up in Mill Valley. She spent a lot of her childhood in Tiburon and on the beach. We have family and friends at Stinson Beach. Our lives have paralleled quite a bit as well as our experience of what Marin was, what Marin is, all of that. The story and the setting speak to me because it is, in some ways, my story. I had many similar challenges growing up in the '60s and being on the end of the baby boomer years.

And at the same time, many of the descriptions in Hard Laughter could be of Marin today as easily as Marin 28 years ago. How different is Marin now from when the book was published?

Graver: There's traffic. [Laughs] No, Marin is very much the same. It has always been a real bohemian sort of community with all kinds of artists, you know, directors and painters and filmmakers all stuck in these quirky little neighborhoods. Sean Penn still wanders around. I mean, I still see him sitting outside a cafe having his coffee and nobody bothers him. So it still is this very very very respectful place and also it feels very respectful of its environment, and I mean that in a good way, environmentally. And also just [Lamott's] specific mentions...I mean Bolinas, I don't think has changed. It's still the same place that it was then, very much so. It still has that feeling and all of that.

How much of the world of Marin are you incorporating into the setting of the play?

Brebner: We're just saying that this is a small coastal town anywhere.

Graver: There was a lot of discussion about that with Jayne [Wenger], who was also the dramaturge on the play. She grew up with beach towns on the East Coast. Ann grew up in beach towns in New Zealand. I grew up in beach towns here in Marin and the consensus was, small beach towns are kind of all the same. The people who live there love and revere where they live because of the ocean, because of the sand, because of the mountains, and there's all these quirky characters they live with, everybody they run into down at the post office every day. The small town beach thing is a pretty universal feeling. And the way Jayne has decided—and I think very correctly so—to really establish the theme of this town, which we never see because it's basically set on two people's front porches, is through sound. And there'll be the sound of the ocean in the background of the whole thing, so you really will know you're there.

Brebner: And then the nocturnes and the grand opera.... The things that each character plays in their truck or their car when we hear them coming and going.

Graver: And then the other thing that will really indicate that it's a beach town are the birds. You know, there's a ton in the book about birds. That is one of the themes that we carry through that felt really important. She calls her father "my dear sweet bird legs" in the book.

The narrator of the novel has a lot of internal thoughts and reactions. How did you handle that when adapting the book? Does the lead have monologues?

Brebner: No monologues. We thought about it. It would have actually solved some problems and made it easier. We had to invent the Annie character, whose name is Jenn, because she's never described. It's all through her eyes. And so, in fleshing her out and making her a person, a lot of that internal stuff became external. Instead of thinking, "You asshole," she said it.

Graver: Yeah, and then we had to make up the other half of the conversation. We didn't have the responses to those internal conversations so that's the part where we would have to go, what would the response to her response be? That's where we had to do some adapting and writing. But there are certain scenes that are lifted straight out of the book. They're brilliant. I mean, why would you not use them?

Since this is based on Anne Lamott's experiences, are you concerned about putting part of her life on the stage? What responsibilities come with that?

Graver: Tremendous responsibility.

Brebner: I think we were always respectful. But the fact of the matter is, when you animate the character who is in that book, you get something that is just enchanting. She's enormously appealing, I think.

Graver: As is Annie Lamott.

Brebner: And as quirky as hell. You're never totally sure where she's going to come from. But of all things, you empathize with her. You love her. You want her to succeed in what she's trying to do. And it didn't actually work out as tough as I thought it was going to be—but I thought it could. I never had any sense of "Oooh, should we be doing that or not?"

Graver: It was always in the back of my mind that we would be very true to her, also understanding that that character was being fictionalized, as was every other character within her family.

Brebner: The father. All of them. I know the two brothers.

Graver: And whoever this Kathleen character is, she exists and I'm sure she's probably still in Annie's life. And the little Megan person, too. I assume they are still in Annie's life. So for me it was always a concern to be true to them. However, again, if we were just true to the original work and gleaned the information out of some point in the book, I always felt very safe.

What do you think is at the heart of this play? What is it about at its core?

Graver: Family, love and being present. I think if I were going to try to boil it down quickly.

Brebner: Love and watching a family get into the position of "What the hell do we do now?" And not knowing, and finding their own way through it.

Graver: And I think that one of the lessons of the book is that literally in a blink, an entire family's life can change. And then what do they do with that information and that situation?

Brebner: And another answer to that, to what is the core of the play, is that it's about learning about hope. It's learning to live with hope even when there are no certainties, no promises.

OPENING SOON

Hard Laughter opens April 25 at the Wooden Duck, 1848 Fourth St. in San Rafael. Performances are Thursday to Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 7:30pm, through May 18. Tickets: Thursday and Sunday, $20; Friday and Saturday, $25.

All her world's on stage

Anne Lamott, on seeing her very personal book adapted for live theater

How did you learn that they were going to adapt Hard Laughter into a play?

Ann [Brebner], with whom I have been very close since she optioned the book in the very early '80s, said she and Laurel [Graver] were interested in turning it into a stage play—this was last year. I absolutely trust Ann with any aspect of my life; she and I and our sons are family. So giving her unrestricted rights to Hard Laughter was not even a stretch.

Have you read the script? What did you think?

I did read it a few months ago, and I thought they did a lovely job that stayed true to the spirit of the novel, while presenting these characters in a wildly different form and dimension—i.e., with way less of Jennifer-and-my interior life and endless musings.

It has been a while since this book was published, and since then you've had a very successful writing career. How does this novel seem to you now?

I haven't read the novel since I got sober in 1986. I used to have a lot to drink and then read my books and get all weepy and victim and Irish and sentimental. But I don't do that any more [one day at a time].

As a writer, how do you feel about your books being adapted?

I used to want my novels to be made into movies, partly for the acclaim, sales and of course, money, but after having seen so many beloved novels made into manipulative dreck and phoniness, I am very glad to let them be paper products. I would consider letting a novel be made into a movie, but not any of the nonfiction, which is so much more autobiographical.

How do you feel about seeing some aspects of your life acted out on a stage?

I'll have to get back to you on this. My main feeling at this point is that I wrote Hard Laughter as a love letter to my father and brothers as we went through the end of the world together, an effort to capture everyone's spirit and generosity, lostness, foundness, solidarity, isolation; all the miracles, of coming through, of being crazy, unique, screwed-up individuals, and a functioning organism—the beautiful "we," instead of the graspy rashy "I, self, me." So to the extent that I have managed to portray what a beautiful dad my father was, and what riches of character and sensibility and humor he imparted to my brothers and me, I am so happy for these characters to be fully grokked, by Ann and Laurel, in all their lavish goodness and insecurity, and back in my life. I've missed them.

One of the things that struck me when reading this book is how the descriptions of Marin, such as the quirky townsfolk, cancer patients, burn-outs, etc., all still feel very current. Has the area changed much since writing the book?

Not my areas of life. I lived in Bolinas for a long time, Petaluma for a year, a tiny houseboat in Sausalito and Fairfax for the last 14 years. Those were places with deep '60s values—peace and love and granola and community and passion for the environment and the arts and consciousness-raising and activism and family. For the last 23 years, my life has been grounded in the community of St. Andrew, in Marin City, and in sobriety—and as they say, wherever you go, there you are. So I have lived amidst great beauty, in the less expensive and less developed parts of Marin. And life is life wherever you go—birth, loss, setback, devotion to family, triumph, death, falling-outs, restoration, decay, slow progress and now this incredible spring—and this one more profound to me than any in the last 8 years, because it is Bush's last. And we have come through. Thank you, Jesus.—JL

Original Link: http://www.pacificsun.com/story.php?story_id=1913

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