Busy, Busy, Busy: Playwright Steven Dietz Juggles Many Projects

------------------------------------------- Theater preview

"Private Eyes," by Steven Dietz, previews through Tuesday and opens Wednesday. Runs Tuesdays-Sundays through Feb. 28, Seattle Repertory Theatre, 155 Mercer St.; 206-443-2222. -------------------------------------------

There are these boxes, see, and they're stacked on four shelves, from floor to ceiling, in the basement of a house in Queen Anne. They're all different sizes and shapes.

The boxes are labeled thus: "Dracula." "Halcyon Days." "Lonely Planet." There are more than 20 of these cardboard boxes. That number is growing.

This would not be unlike a motif from a Steven Dietz play.

Seattle writer Dietz, whose play, "Lonely Planet," featured an ever-growing collection of chairs onstage, is sitting in a cafe in Queen Anne, discussing the boxes in his life. He keeps research, drafts and memorabilia from his works in cardboard boxes - one for each of his plays - in his basement.

Dietz needs so many boxes because he happens to be one of the most prolific - and most produced - playwrights in America. At the relatively young age of 39, Dietz has had his plays produced at more than 80 regional theaters around the country and Off-Broadway. His 1988 play, "God's Country," about the white-supremacist movement, has been mounted more than 200 times, including college and international productions.

This season alone, three of Dietz's plays grace local stages. "Still Life With Iris," about a young girl's search for home, debuted at Seattle Children's Theatre in September. That play won a grant from the prestigious Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, putting Dietz in such illustrious company as Pulitzer Prize winners Tony Kushner and Wendy Wasserstein. SCT was the first children's theater to receive that grant. His 1993 play, "Lonely Planet," a two-character sketch of a friendship, won the 1994 PEN Center USA West Award in drama and was mounted at Tacoma Actors Guild in December.

On Wednesday, his 1996 play, "Private Eyes," a multi-layered comedy that takes place in the theater world, opens at Seattle Repertory Theatre. "Private Eyes" has the distinction of being one of this season's 10 most-produced plays in the country (excluding Shakespeare's works and holiday plays), according to American Theatre, a magazine published by Theatre Communications Group, a national network of nonprofit drama institutions.

In October, Dietz received the latest of several awards honoring his work: a $10,000 Emerging Artist Award from the Bagley Wright Fund.

He is modest about his successes.

"With my upbringing - work is what you do. Those boxes make me feel that I've done something concrete."

Praise from friends

Dietz is a man who inspires adverbs. He is not merely a nice guy, he's "ridiculously nice," says one friend. Another calls him "unconscionably handsome" and "unfailingly generous."

One such friend, Jeff Steitzer, who as former artistic director at A Contemporary Theatre mounted many of Dietz's plays, tells this story about his playwriting friend: "I was going to meet Steven at the 74th Street Alehouse. I drove up there - it's always quite busy - and couldn't find a parking place anywhere. I parked three blocks away and just as I walked around the corner, a car pulled up into an empty parking space right in front of the alehouse. It was Steven. There's something about Steven that is absolutely charmed."

So it would seem. More or less straight out of college (University of Northern Colorado, where he majored in theater), he was accepted as a director of staged readings and workshops at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. That center is famous for having groomed such illustrious playwrights as Lee Blessing, John Olive and August Wilson.

Dietz dove in, directing a new play each week: "It was like theater boot camp." In Minneapolis, the playwrighting bug began to bite: "It seemed everybody was writing plays because everyone I hung out with was a playwright."

The very first play he wrote, 1981's "Brothers and Sisters," got produced by The Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis and toured nationally. "Which led me to believe that all my plays would tour nationally," Dietz says with a grin. While that didn't happen, his first play to be produced at several regional theaters was written in 1986, the comedy "More Fun Than Bowling."

But it wasn't until a few years later, when he wrote "Ten November," about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior during a heavy storm (the disaster killed all 29 crew members), that Dietz realized the purpose of his writing.

"It taught me my place in the world," he says. "My job - that I'm fortunate to do - is to tell these stories and give them back to the people they belong to."

Moving on to Seattle

In 1991, Dietz moved to Seattle. He had visited the city when ACT mounted "God's Country" in 1988 and "at that point I wasn't having plays done in Minneapolis and the theater community was not as strong there as here," he says.

While Steitzer was artistic director at ACT, the theater almost always produced one of Dietz's plays each year. More recently, Dietz has formed close ties with the Arizona Theatre Company and Milwaukee Repertory Theater.

It's his background in directing that makes Dietz a good playwright, says David Ira Goldstein, artistic director of Arizona Theatre and director of "Private Eyes" at the Rep. Goldstein was also associate artistic director at ACT for seven years.

"What makes him a particular joy to be with is since he's a director and was an actor, he understands the theatrical process - the journey actors, directors, designers need to take from reading the script to opening night."

Dietz still directs many of the premieres of his works: "It lets me complete the experience of my play."

These days Dietz is "married to a beautiful, intelligent, funny writer/actress and has a beautiful house," Steitzer says with a laugh. "You just want to smack him."

In 1996, Dietz married Allison Gregory, who had a role in "Still Life With Iris." They met when he directed her in a play in 1990. They split their time between Santa Monica and Seattle, where they're in the process of remodeling their Queen Anne home.

Reminders of the past

In the basement of that home, in those cardboard boxes, Dietz has placed cards he receives on opening nights, script notes, rewrites, prop lists, costume designs, lighting plans.

"It's a reminder of how many of us are involved" in each play, he says. "I perhaps start the ball in motion. But by the time it happens, by the time it gets boxed up, so many people have been involved . . . You can't be a playwright until you learn how to rewrite at rehearsals and work with actors."

Dietz is inspired by Seattle actors, several of whom have starred in productions of his plays. R. Hamilton Wright, for instance, was Dietz's inspiration for the role of Matthew in "Private Eyes," which he played at the play's premiere at the Arizona Theatre Company and will play at the Rep.

"They are the colors in my palette," Dietz says of the actors. "Sitting in Tucson, writing rewrites, I've got a room full of Seattle actors in my head. They've taught me how plays work."

Dietz also constantly works at his craft. He jots things down in a notebook: snippets of conversations, interesting storefront signs that capture his imagination, images, notes.

"I either don't believe or don't trust that great ideas for plays will just arrive in my head," he says. "The sobering thing when you write is that your imagination doesn't get your play written. Your craft does. I have a healthy skepticism of my imagination, which forces me to practice my craft."

The practice of writing often puts him at odds with the director in himself. "I tend to have the argument between the writer and director not in rehearsals, but in my head," Dietz says with a laugh.

As a director, he's looking at the structure of the whole play for what he calls "the holy grail": a sense of surprise and inevitability.

"You attain the ending of a play where the audience goes, `I had no idea it would end this way and there's no other way for it to end.' " As a writer, he loves sentences that may have no discernible benefit to the structure of the play.

"As I've continued to write, I've gained courage to throw my net sort of wide," he says.

No kidding. Dietz is known for his versatility. The subjects and styles of his plays have ranged from children's stories ("The Rememberer" and "Still Life With Iris") to an adaptation of "Dracula" to a biographical family opus ("Handing Down the Names") - and that's just in the last four years. (This year, he also wrote an episode for the TV show "Cracker.")

Much of his interest in variety, Dietz thinks, comes from his background as a director: "As a director, you want to encounter a variety of material to just test yourself."

"He's famous for taking issue with the `write what you know' dictum," Goldstein says of Dietz. "He says, `write what you don't know so you can enlarge your vision of what's in the world.' "

Even with that range of subjects and styles, there are certain Dietz touches that come through in all his plays.

"Steven writes with a really rare muscularity," Goldstein says. "His language is very direct and theatrical and lives on the stage. He loves direct address: speeches made directly to the audience. He has a love of intricate structure - you never quite know where the subject matter of the play will take you. And he has themes that resonate through his plays, particularly being honest in relationships, whether in marriage, friendship or business."

Several of Dietz's plays have - with varying success - made it to Off-Broadway. But "there's been an odd blessing in the fact that I've never had a `New York hit play,' " he says. He'd like to, mind you.

"But I don't necessarily have one play that I'm known for. So I don't have one play that I can just ride. I've never had the one play that pays the bills for years." That, he says, has kept him prolific. And "it keeps me steady. It enables me to have a body of work."

Dietz is adding to that body of work with his 20th play, "Rocket Man," about a man obsessed with galaxies, premiering this winter at Arizona Theatre Company. Last month he received a commission to write a play for the 1999 Humana Festival of New American Plays. He just finished the first draft of a piece called "The Quiet House" for a theater group in New York. And he's working on an adaptation of a Goethe novel for the Milwaukee Rep, to premiere in 1999.

It looks like it won't be long before Steven Dietz adds yet more boxes to that collection in his basement.