It Really Does Take a Village

I screwed up.

The Signs of Life program has gone to the printers, and I failed to give the credit to the people who really, really made my contribution to this show possible.

I'm speaking, of course, about the people who took care of my kids while I attended rehearsals.

Most of the people I know who work in the theatre are either independently wealthy, don't have kids, or no longer work professionally in the theatre. It's very hard to be a working theatre professional and have kids. Some people do it. Not many.

Although my work has entertained, and continues to entertain, thousands of people around the world, like most playwrights, I don't make a huge amount of money. That's just the economic reality of writing for the theatre. The trade-off is that I write what I'm inspired to write, and, when push comes to shove (which is rare, but happens), no one can force me to write what I don't believe in.

I have been extraordinary fortunate in my career working within this economic model. I've worked with some of America's top directors (Harold Prince, Lynne-Taylor Corbett, David Esbjornson, Jeremy Dobrish) and at some of America's preeminent theatres (En Garde Arts, the Denver Theatre Center, the Cleveland Public Theatre, HOME for Contemporary Theatre and Art, Goodspeed Musicals, The Directors Company, the Cleveland Playhouse, the Prince Music Theatre, the Center Theatre Group at the Ahmanson Theatre, and Amas Musical Theatre). I've collaborated with some of the best people in the business, including Joel Derfner and Len Schiff on Signs of Life. My work has been brought to life by some of the best actors out there, including the current great cast soon to be appearing in Signs of Life at the Marjorie Deane. I've written work I am proud of, and had the honor of seeing it fully staged in front of enthusiastic and supportive audiences.

I've not, however, made a whole lot of money. But that's OK. If I had made choices that made money, I might not now have such satisfying work to show for my efforts.

Even so, one of my major challenges since my son, Alexander, was born nine years ago, followed by his brother, Caleb, six years ago, is trying to be a full-time parent and a full-time playwright in the same twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. Being a primary caregiver is as demanding a job as any, but, of course, you don't get paid for it. Being a playwright is also a demanding job, but you don't rake in the cash doing that either. When my kids were born, I couldn't justify spending money on a full-time nanny, nor did our family budget support such an expense.

So, I wrote during nap-times and after the kids went to bed at night, when I wasn't too tired from changing diapers and chasing my kids around the playground all afternoon. When Alexander was a baby, our friend Monica Mikolajczyk came over on numerous occasions and cared for him while I finished the first draft of Signs of Life. When we lived in Inwood, in Manhattan, Anna and Eileen McCarthy, two sisters from the neighborhood, would look after Alexander from time to time when I had a deadline to meet. They charged way too little for their incredibly nurturing care.

Later, after my family moved to Beacon, sixty miles north of NYC, my father, Dr. Robert Ullian (who passed away in 2005), generously provided funds to pay for an occasional babysitter so I could keep writing. Anna and Eileen McCarthy would drive or take the train up to Beacon to look after my kids when they could. Both my father and my mother came to stay and take care of the boys for short periods of time when I had to be away. My wife, Michele, despite working a full-time and extremely demanding job in the city, would work from home on days when I absolutely had to be somewhere else. Sometimes, I'd take the kids into the city for a meeting, and their uncles, Lawrence Sohner and Barry Greene, would care for them for an afternoon. Once, I left the kids with Michele's mother, Genevieve, at the Central Park zoo, while I went to auditions. And, finally, now that both Alexander and Caleb are full-time students, South Avenue Elementary School provides a safe and nurturing environment for my boys between the hours of 8:40am and 3:10pm, while I work on revising Signs of Life for production.

During the Signs of Life rehearsal period, my Mom has come down to stay with us and care for the kids for three separate week-long periods. Michele has worked from home on several days when it was not convenient to do so. And our good friends and fellow South Avenue parents, Tyease and Waldren Levers, along with their oldest daughter, Brittany, have, on several occasions, picked up my kids from school and entertained and cared for them until my wife or I got back from the city.

And my wife, G-d bless her, is the hardest working woman I know, working her tush off to always make sure her family always had food on the table, a roof over our head, gas in the tank, and decent health insurance.

So, I really need to thank all these people whose names do not appear in the program. They, as much as anyone, made Signs of Life possible:

Robert Ullian
Annette Ullian
Michele Ullian
Anna McCarthy
Eileen McCarthy
Monica Mikolajczyk
Genevieve Sohner
Lawrence Sohner
Barry Greene
Tyease Levers
Waldren Levers
Brittany Levers
The teachers and staff at South Avenue Elementary School

And, finally, Alexander and Caleb, who inspire me every day.

To order tickets to Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life website, click here.

To find out more about Signs of Life off-Broadway, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life Facebook page, click here.

To visit Peter Ullian's Website, click here.

To find Peter Ullian's "Fan" Page on Facebook, click here.

To learn more about Peter Ullian's non-musical plays, click here (website contains material intended for mature audiences).

To read Signs of Life Lyricist Len Schiff's blog, click here.

To visit Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's website, click here.

To read Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's blog, click here.

You're Writing a Musical About What?

"You're writing a musical about what?"

I can't tell you how often I've heard this question while working on Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin.

The question always surprises me a little. After all Showboat, widely regarded as the first modern American musical, involves racism and miscegenation; Oklahoma! features murder and attempted rape; South Pacific addresses racism and war; West Side Story enacts scenes of gang warfare; Cabaret and Sound of Music both take place during the rise of the Nazi Party; Sweeney Todd's main character is a serial killer; and Assassins is about, well, assassins.

The question, I imagine, is due to what we've come to expect our American musicals to be: big, delightful pageants, all-out comedies, or shows that treat the musical form "ironically." Contemporary opera, on the other hand, routinely addresses big, serious subjects: John Adam's Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer come readily to mind.

This is simply a question of fashion, however. It has nothing to do with any inherent limitation in musical form, as the history of the American musical clearly shows.

There are complicated issues involved in representing difficult and tragic real-life events on stage. But the musical idiom can handle those issues as readily as any.

To order tickets to Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life website, click here.

To find out more about Signs of Life off-Broadway, click here.

To visit Peter Ullian's Website, click here.

To find Peter Ullian's "Fan" Page on Facebook, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life Facebook page, click here.

To read Signs of Life Lyricist Len Schiff's blog, click here.

To visit Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's website, click here.

To read Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's blog, click here.

Making Nazis Sing

Signs of Life's lyricist, Len Schiff, just wrote on this very subject on his own blog. So, I'll put in my two cents not so much on the subject of singing Nazis, but, rather, the choices involved in creating characters on stage who are Nazi soldiers.

Writing any type of narrative fiction in which Nazis are characters is, of course, a challenge. You don't want to create obvious, goose-stepping archetypes, even if it sometimes seems as if the historical Nazis were intent upon turning themselves into just that. If you are to be true to yourself as a dramatist, you need to make an effort to find out what makes a person tick, no matter how repulsive that person may be. The Nazis were evil, let's not wiggle around that essential truth -- if "evil" has any meaning, the Nazis were its embodiment. The challenge to the dramatist is to recognize they were evil human beings, not evil cartoon characters; they were monstrous, but they were monstrous people, not monstrous melodrama villains. They had hopes and desires. They had families. They loved their children and their pets. And they perpetrated one of the greatest crimes in human history.

How do you reconcile these two realities? How do you get inside the head of such people? Is it possible to understand them? And if you understand them, does that mean, on some level, you sympathize with them? Are you asking the audience to sympathize them? Do you want them to?

Well, my answer is no. I do not want anyone to sympathize with the Nazi characters in Signs of Life. Even fictional Nazis do not deserve our sympathy.

But I do want those characters in our show to be compelling, to be worth the audience's time, and to feel like real people, not stereotypes.

So, how do you get there?

While undoubtedly volumes can be written on the various personality types who made up the Nazi Party, two types of people intrigued me the most, perhaps because they were the two types I felt I best understood, having seen less extreme versions of them in our own day and age: the cynic and the true believer. The cynic embraces the Nazi ideology for personal gain, to advance his career, to seize power, and to maintain a secure place for himself in society. The true believer actually believes in the Nazi ideology. He is, in a very disturbing way, an idealist.

In our show, Commandant Rahm is the cynic. Officer Heindel is the true believer. I still ask myself which one is the more reprehensible, more truly evil. I don't think there is ultimately any answer to that question.

This focus on these two characters got me started, but I need to dig deeper. I had some insight into why some of the Nazis did what they did, but I still had a hard time figuring out how they could possible have done it.

Joel Derfner, Signs of Life's composer, and I visited Terezin in 2002, when my son, Alexander, was less than two years old. I remember walking around Terezin, and looking at the wall upon which is written the names of all the children who passed through that "model" ghetto: 15,000, of whom only 132 survived.

I just couldn't understand it. It's one thing to convince oneself that a group of people are deserving of hatred. I thought I could imagine that. But how could anyone actually look at a living, breathing child and treat him or her with such disregard of their common humanity? People say that the Nazis didn't view Jewish children as human. True. But how often have you seen people treat animals with the kind of capricious cruelty with which the Nazis treated the Jews? There's a special kind of cruelty that people reserve for other people.

The epiphany that opened the door for me was a small item I encountered in my research:

Suicide rates were high among the SS Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis death squads whose job in the early years of the Shoah was to murder Jews by hand. The reason the Nazis invented the gas chambers was to try to put some distance between the victims and their executioners, in the hope of bringing down the suicide among the SS.

One is first struck by the horrific irony of this. It did not seem to occur to the Nazis that what they were doing violated all standards of human decency. Instead, they decided a more efficient means of slaughter was required.

But upon reflection, I wondered, why was the SS suicide rate high? Why were people who acted without conscience troubled enough to take their own lives? If the actions they were engaged in were so objectionable, why did they willingly take those actions in the first place, and continue to do so?

My conclusion was that, at least for some, while they could not possiblly have had any conscious qualms about what they were doing (or else they could not have continued to do it), on an unconscious level something deeply human inside of them was rebelling, something that they were not fully aware of.

This I found to be cold comfort. On the one hand, it's good to know that some form of human decency exists on an instinctual level. On the other hand, it's horrifying to think that this instinct can be so successfully tamped down as to result in the murder of millions.

It's this contradiction we've tried to explore in the character of Heindel in Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin. We are not seeking sympathy or "understanding." But we have endeavored to treat our audience with enough respect to offer them portraits of human beings rather than caricatures.

To order tickets to Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life website, click here.

To find out more about Signs of Life off-Broadway, click here.

To find Peter Ullian's "Fan" Page on Facebook, click here.

To visit the Signs of Life Facebook page, click here.

To read Signs of Life Lyricist Len Schiff's blog, click here.

To visit Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's website, click here.

SIGNS OF LIFE: A Tale of Terezin Part Three: Origins, Chapter Two.

Producer Virginia Criste commissioned me to write the libretto for Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin in 2000.

At the time, my wife was pregnant. I had a production of Eliot Ness In Cleveland coming up at the Cleveland Playhouse, directed by David Esbjornson, and, immediately after, a production of Flight of the Lawnchair Man coming up at the Prince Music Theatre in Philadelphia, directed by Hal Prince. Meanwhile, the election of 2000, with all the ensuing recounts and hanging chads, went on.

It was a busy year. The research was daunting. I had stacks and stacks of books to read, videos to view, music to listen to (in a future blog entry I'll post a partial bibliography). And it was rough stuff. I was researching a ghetto (Theresienstadt, or Terezin) where the Nazis sent entire families, told them to create art, music and theatre for propaganda purposes, then sent them away to die in Auschwitz. The most powerful material for me was the artwork that survived, depicting life in Terezin in all its misery, but also in all its complexity, including, sometimes, joy. In particular, Bedrich Fritta's drawings to his son Tommy for his third birthday, were extraordinarily moving to me. At that time, I could only see them in a video, Terezin Diary.

I remember the project started to take shape for me over a long Thanksgiving weekend. My wife Michele and I were visiting her family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Our return to New York was delayed by a massive snow storm. I hunkered down with some books and by the time the snow was cleared, I began to see how I might craft a libretto from this material.

I chose not to tell the story of any one historical personage. It felt wrong to do that, like stealing someone's life. But real people and real stories were the foundation of the libretto, in a fictionalized and theatricalized form.

I was planning on finishing the first draft in early February, 2001. But my son Alexander was born about a week earlier than his official due date. This threw off my schedule. I had everything worked out almost to the minute. But life, as always, had plans of its own.

About six weeks later, I emerged from my new father haze, and finished the libretto. Virginia expressed her enthusiasm for my efforts, and we set about finding a composer and a lyricist. At one point, I thought I might try to write the lyrics myself, but after making an effort to do so, I decided I much preferred to hoist that responsibility onto someone else.

First, Joel Derfner came on board as composer. Not long after, Joel and I met with Len Schiff. I remember after the meeting turning to Joel and saying, "you realize he's much smarter than either one of us." Joel agreed he was, and Len became our lyricist.

We spent the next several years writing, rewriting, reading, and workshopping the show. My second son Caleb was born during this period, and my wife and I became homeowners, moving to the Hudson Valley. Len and his wife, Jen, also had a son, Adam, and they also bought their own home. Joel published two books, Gay Haiku, and Swish, and he and his partner Mike also bought a house, in Brooklyn. We were all making a transition into adulthood and responsibility, while dealing with this most sobering subject matter, but also trying to maintain the childlike joy that brought us to the theatre in the first place.

Also during this period, we traveled to Prague and Terezin. This was an extraordinarily moving experience. We spoke to survivors of Terezin, walked the town, and saw a secret room in a now private home that the inmates of Terezin had painted with Jewish iconography so that the room might serve as a makeshift synagogue. Our terrific tour guide, Petra, grew up only a few miles from Terezin, but told us she never knew a thing about the place until after the Communist regime collapsed.

We learned so many stunning pieces of information that later came to inform our show or were incorporated into it. That secret room is referenced. So are the very useful presents that young boys would give to girls they liked.

One survivor told us about standing on a street corner in Prague after the war, and wondering how to go on, having lost her entire family and all of her friends. Our heroine, Lorelei, asks herself the same question at the end of Signs of Life.

In Prague, I finally was able to locate a book of Bedrich Fritta's drawing for his son Tommy. It was published as This is Not a Fairy Tale - it's Real. To Tommy for his third Birthday in Terezin, 22 January 1944. You can't find it on Amazon, but you can order it from the Jewish Museum of Prague. The version I've got has a "fairy tale" written to go alongside the original pictures and text. This "fairy tale" is not nearly as powerful as the original book Fritta wrote for his son. The book in something closer to its original form can be ordered from Yad Vashem.

Fritta hid the original manuscript behind a wall in Terezin. It was recovered after the war. There are many such stories about artwork in Terezin. In some cases, the art was recovered decades later. The secreting of drawings and their post-war recovery also plays a crucial role in our musical.

Fritta died in Auschwitz. His wife died in Terezin. Tommy, only four years old, spent months in the Little Fortress, the horrible prison the Nazis kept outside Terezin. Miraculously, he survived.

I remember crying my eyes out in a motel room outside Terezin as I poured through the pages of this book. Tommy Fritta, as drawn by his father, looks so much like my young son Alexander in some of the pictures. Alexander was himself not quite two at the time I sat in that motel room looking at those pictures. The thought of what Tommy had to endure, and the terror I felt knowing that in another place, in another time, my own Alexander could have been subjected to the same, was too much to bear. It's too much to bear even now. I'm not ashamed to admit that as I write these words, I can barely make out my computer screen through my tears.

Now, with Jeremy Dobrish directing, Signs of Life is set for an off-Broadway run in February and March, 2010.

It's been a long emotional journey. And it's been worth it, every step along the way.

To order tickets to Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin, click here.

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Why Are There No Great Hanukkah Songs?

Some of the best Christmas songs were written by Jews ("White Christmas," "The Christmas Song," "I'll Be Home For Christmas," "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays," "Rudolph The Red-Nose Reindeer," "Silver Bells," "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!").

So, why are there no great Hanukkah songs?

There's a few funny ones (Adam Sandler's "The Chanukah Song"), and a few lame ones ("The Dreidel Song"), but nothing like the list above of great American popular songs. One could suppose that during the era those songs were written, a Hanukkah song might not have been viewed as a highly commercial prospect.

So, maybe it's time to correct that.

My challenge to composers Jewish and gentile (only fair): write a great Hanukkah song in the tradition of the great holidays songs above. Nothing "ironic" or glib. Remember, you've got great material to work with: war, liberation, religious freedom, the victory of the underdog, miracles, family, and, especially, presents.

The Past Really is a Foreign Country.

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." L.P Hartley, The Go-Between.

So, it turns out the past really is a foreign country.

I wasn't at all surprised that I'd have a lot of research to do in writing the libretto for SIGNS OF LIFE: A Tale of Terezin, which takes place in Czechoslovakia during World War Two. But it's amazing how many little things come up that require tracking down.

Here's a few:

When did the terms "Molotov Cocktail," "canoodle," and "throttle" come into being? (1940, 1859, and sometime in the 15th century, it turns out.)

And guess what? Writing about the recent past can be just as tricky.

While I don't consider myself a "political" writer, political issues and current events intrude into my plays a lot, since it's only natural that such events would be on the minds of characters living through them. I've discovered that with some of my "contemporary" plays, this requires either constant updating, which is a huge pain, or a certain vagueness, which is . . . well, vague. Perhaps as a result of this frustration, I was recently inspired to try to address the recent past in my plays. This allows me to delve into contemporary life and issues, but in a specific historical context that doesn't require constant updating.

Sounds easy, right? Not so much, it turns out.

When not working on SIGNS OF LIFE, I've been working a cycle of (I think) five plays, that take place from the election of 2000 through the election of 2008. One would think I'd remember details about this period, during which I was an adult who paid pretty close attention to the world around me.

But it's amazing how quickly details escape the memory. For example, I remember using a cell phone in the year 2000. But did cellphones have built-in speaker phones at that time? I don't think mine did, and I'm having a hard time finding out if any did. Even Wikipedia didn't help.

Another example: a character of mine made a disparaging remark about Facebook in a play that takes place in 2003. Yeah, you guessed it: there was no Facebook in 2003. So, now the character makes no such remark.

When Shaw wrote Arms and the Man in 1894, did he have this kind of trouble writing about events that took place less than a decade earlier? Or is the fast pace of technological change in the internet age the cause of my vexation?

Now, one might ask: do any of these details really matter? Is Julius Caesar any less of a play because one of the characters mentions a clock tower, something that hadn't been invented during the age of Caesar?

The answer is, of course not. But critics give Shakespeare a pass. They claim his anachronisms are intentional! The rest of us aren't so lucky. I once had a critic complain that the American flags featured in my depression-era musical ELIOT NESS IN CLEVELAND contained fifty stars, at a time when our nation's flag boasted only forty-eight. (I have always been amazed at this critic's ability to count so fast. The flags were only on stage for a moment. But critics do have amazing superpowers.)

So, we do our best as we navigate the foreign country we call the past.

See SIGNS OF LIFE: A Tale of Terezin off-Broadway, February 16-March 21, produced by Amas Musical Theatre!

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Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin Part Two: Origins

In 1998, I was one of three playwrights (along with Alice Tuan and Carlos Murillo) commissioned to write one-person plays for the En Garde Arts production A SECRET HISTORY OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE, performed on the rooftop of Seaward Park High School. En Garde Arts, for those of you who weren't around in NYC in the 1990s, was one of the most important, and exciting, theatre companies in the city at that time. They were famous for creating "site-specific" theatre works, in warehouses, street corners, abandoned theatres, and pretty much anywhere else that could accommodate (not always comfortably) actors and an audience. I loved working with them. Writing a play to be performed outside of an actual theatre put me in touch in an exciting and eye-opening way with the essence of the theatrical experience: actor, audience, space, and language. Plus, they were great people to work with.

In 1997, En Garde Arts had produced a show, Sweet Theresienstadt, in Prague. Theresienstadt was the Czech town designated as "Hitler's City for the Jews." Thesresienstadt, or Terezin as it is known to the Czech people, became a repository for "Jewish Prominenten:" Europe's most prominent Jewish intellectuals, war heroes, artists, musicians, actors, composers and well-to-do. The Nazis permitted the Jews of Terezin to create visual art, operas, cabarets, and symphonies. They showed off the ghetto to the Red Cross, and made a propaganda film (The Führer Gives the Jews a City), all designed to fool the world into thinking that Hitler's intentions for European Jewry were benign. In reality, the camp was overcrowded and disease-ridden. The inmates were undernourished, and the transports east to the Auschwitz death camp were frequent. More than 140,000 Jews passed through Terezin. More than 100,000 perished, including over 10,000 children.

For various legal reasons, En Garde Arts was unable to bring Sweet Theresienstadt to the US. Anne Hamburger, founder and Executive Producer of En Garde Arts, remained intrigued by the subject matter, however. She approached me about writing the libretto to a brand-new musical theatre piece on the same subject. Since I hadn't seen Sweet Theresienstadt (which hadn't been translated into English), I felt I could approach the subject from a fresh and original perspective.

Aside from the obvious dramatic potential, and the challenge of helping to bring to theatre-goers this lesser-known episode in the history of the Shoah, the subject intrigued me for another reason. Some of my own family had been sent to Terezin, including my great-great uncle, Joseph De Leeuw, along with his wife and his daughter, Lucy. Of the three, only Lucy survived the war.

Anne and I had several meetings with a composer/lyricist team, and the project looked good to go.

And then En Garde Arts shut down. As it turned out, SECRET HISTORY was to be the final En Garde Arts production. Anne assured me this wasn't my fault; the decision to shut down the company had nothing to do with SECRET HISTORY, which met box office expectations. I was relieved to know I had not done to En Garde Arts what Michael Cimino had done to United Artists.

Anne Hamburger went on to become the Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse, where she helped bring the original productions of both Thoroughly Modern Millie and Spring Awakening to the the stage. She followed this up with an eight-year stint as Executive Vice President of Walt Disney Creative Entertainment, and recently founded her own production company, Big Heart Theatrical.

I went on to re-write the libretto to my musical, ELIOT NESS IN CLEVELAND, previously produced at the Directors Company in NYC and at the Denver Center Theatre Company, and subsequently produced at the Cleveland Playhouse, under the direction of David Esbjornson. I also wrote the libretto for FLIGHT OF THE LAWNCHAIR MAN, which was then directed by Harold Prince at both the Prince Music Theatre in Philadelphia and the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, and then later directed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett at Goodspeed Musicals and 37 Arts in NYC.

Most importantly, during Michael J. Fox's farewell episode of Spin City, my wife, Michele, emerged from the bathroom waving an EPT stick and informed me that she was pregnant with our first child.

But the subject of Terezin wasn't finished with me, just yet.

As it turned out, Virginia Criste, a lawyer from California, had also been interested in producing a musical theatre piece about Terezin. Her own grandparents were sent to a death camp on one of the final transports from Terezin, and she had been traveling to Prague and Terezin even before the collapse of the Communist regime to research the subject. Virginia and Anne Hamburger had discussed co-producing the American premiere of Sweet Theresienstadt. When that production never happened, they too went their separate ways. But when Virginia decided to commission and produce a musical theatre piece set in Terezin on her own, she asked Anne to recommend a writer.

Anne, ever generous to emerging talent -- and also a woman of considerable taste and fine artistic judgment (he said humbly) -- recommended me.

Stay tuned for: "SIGNS OF LIFE: A Tale of Terezin Part Three: Origins, Chapter Two."

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