See what our alumni have been doing by visiting our alumni page.

Alumni: Share your news with us. Email updates and links to mr2xk@virginia.edu

Back to main page...

Elvis People
by L. Douglas Grissom, Associate Professor, Playwriting

Ed Sala* in Elvis People

When Tom Bloom asked me to write a few words about my play, ELVIS PEOPLE, for the newsletter, I was flattered, but a little uneasy.  It’s hard to write about your own work; the danger is either seeming to brag (“just a few words about my brilliant new play”) or to try to be modest in a way that always seems fake (“just a few words about my little unworthy effort - though if you read between the lines surely you’ll recognize how brilliant it really is”).  But finally I decided I could write a few words about the journey of the play, which is really a story about connections, luck and the advantage of dealing with non-theatre people.

The bare facts are: for my sabbatical in 2003, I had planned to write a play about the Weather Underground, but didn’t really know where to begin, when I read a two-volume biography of Elvis Presley.  I had never been an Elvis fan, but the biography started me thinking about the huge impact Elvis has had on American, and even world, culture.  Leonard Bernstein once said that Elvis was the most significant cultural force of the 20th century, and I came to agree with him.

Nick Newell* in Elvis People

Gradually I started to realize that this is what I wanted to somehow write about, but I wasn’t interested in a typical bio-play about Elvis.  Though I was drawn to the story of Elvis’ life, I became even more fascinated by his effect on people; people that he knew personally and people who only knew him through his work.  People’s reactions to Elvis tend to be extreme, I found, and though ‘celebrity worship’ is rampant in this country on all levels, there is something unique about Elvis worship.  I also remembered an earlier play of mine, BUT I SAID NO, that was structured, not as one linear story, but as a collection of vignettes and monologues.  This seemed the perfect structure for this new project, because I wanted to tell a lot of stories, I wanted to deal with the variety of ways that people are affected by Elvis. As I started to write the material, I realized I was writing about more than just Elvis love, I was exploring the power of devotion, of obsession. It struck me that certain things – art or celebrity woship – can give meaning and depth to a person’s life, but if pursued too extremely can also warp and damage a life.

Eventually I ended up with about 400 pages of material. It occurred to me that this could be a flexible script, almost a ‘choose your own adventure’ kind of thing. In other words, different theatres could do different versions of the play; you could do a play that focused on people that actually knew or encountered Elvis, you could do a purely comic play, you could do a play that focused on themes of fan obsession, etc.  To that end, I created a website through UVA’s Digital Media Lab, that has the entire project in a searchable and sortable format. You can do a search for, say “1950’s” or “drugs” and have access to all the sections that deal with those topics. 

That being said, it was also apparent that to build any kind of audience for the play, you have to have something that is coherent and tangible; a reading of a 400 page play, that goes on for eight or nine hours, would probably not generate a great deal of interest or enthusiasm, though it might work as a sleep aid.

My next step was to test the material in readings, and to that end I gathered several friends from UVA and Offstage Theatre who agreed to help me.  We met every Friday afternoon for several months, and these very generous and talented actors would read through and act out the material, helping me to see what was working and what wasn’t.  These wonderful actors included UVA grads such as Bill Rough, Patrick Cribben, Denise Laughlin Stewart, Clinton Johnston and Ken Lambert.  I was helped immensely not only by their acting skills, but by their insights and feedback.

After I had shaped the material somewhat (mainly pairing it down to a performable two hours) a staged reading was put together in Gainesville, Florida by my sister-in-law, who worked at the Hippodrome State Theatre there.  The reading went well, and afterwards I was approached by a local attorney, Robert Rush, who told me how much he liked the play.  That was nice to hear, of course, but that was the end of it. I thought.

David Howard and Meredith Holcom in Elvis People

A couple of days later, Robert called me and wanted to have lunch.  Expecting no more that to be told again that he liked my play (which is enough, believe me), he stunned me at lunch by saying that he wanted to promote the play, and make sure it got produced at other theatres.  Exactly what he meant by this was nebulous, even to him. Robert had no theatre experience, and wasn’t actively trying to get any – he just loved the play and wanted somehow to advance it.  After many further discussions, his involvement evolved to where he became not just a backer of the play, but a full-fledged, totally committed producer.  In fact, I’m sure many of his friends thought he should be committed, taking on a new project, in a field that he knew next to nothing about, and moreover a field that’s guaranteed to be filled with much frustration and little money.  Nonetheless, he jumped right in.  For me as a playwright, this was a new experience.  To have someone strongly love and believe in a work that you’ve created is amazing enough, to have them financially and, in every way possible, commit to it is beyond amazing.

While it may seem a liability to have a producer with no theatre experience – and it some ways it is – there is also a huge advantage.  Robert would constantly come up with ideas that were fresh and not bound to the ‘traditional’ way of developing and producing a new play.  He had, and has, theatre people working for him on this project, who can serve as reality checks/devil’s advocate on a number of points, but more often than not, Robert will come up with an idea, we ‘theatre people’ will say “no way” and yet it turns out to work, and work beautifully.  All this has helped me see that we in the theatre sometimes get so enmeshed in our own world that we don’t take fresh approaches, we’re often locked into our own repetitive patterns, and sometimes it takes someone from outside our profession to come up with innovative ideas that will advance our art.

It’s not important or interesting to go through all the steps and developments of the last couple of years, but the result of our collaboration so far has been two professional productions – one at Mill Mountain Theatre in February of 2006 (featuring UVA MFA Playwright Lucinda McDurmatt and Heritage veteran Ed Sala), and at the Gainesville Performing Arts Center in May of 2006 (again featuring Ed).  This is itself an example of Robert’s approach – who mounts two full productions of a play within a few months of each other? And let me emphasize that these were two quite different productions, using a different cast (and size of cast), different designers, and a different collection and order of scenes. And the second production had not been planned before the Mill Mountain production; all that happened in the months between February and May. 

Another thing I discovered, or rediscovered, through this process is the pure joy of theatre, and that again is largely through my producer Robert Rush.  To see his passion, enthusiasm, dedication and mainly joy throughout the process was to rediscover all those things about theatre myself – to become reacquainted with a youthful, idealistic enthusiasm that I first felt when I discovered theatre, and which tends to let lost or at least deeply buried in the day-to-day grind of being a theatre artist and teacher.

Right to Left: Nell Page*, David Howard, Meredith Holcomb, Nick Newell*, Ed Sala*, Susan Moring, and Thomas Kee* in Elvis People

As for the next step, we are now readying a March 2007 production Off-Broadway at the New World Theatre, in the Times-Square area.  It looks to be much different in many ways than our other shows; depending on what happens there, we’ll see what happens next. Your guess is as good as mine on that one.

Pictures accompanying this article are from the Gainesville production, and more pictures and information can be found at our website:

http://www.elvispeople.com/

* Denotes that the actor is apart of Actor’s Equity Association

Back to main page...