"Peer Gynt" in the Gold Rush
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
Eric Overmyer has a much-prized skill: He can craft taut, engrossing episodes for top-of-the-line TV drama series.
Yet Overmyer's talents, and imagination, don't stop there. Though he's been "very busy making a living" for 20 years in TV (as a writer on "St. Elsewhere" and "Homicide," and now a producer/writer on the long-running "Law and Order"), Overmyer never forgets he's a playwright also.
Nor has Overmyer, a Seattle native, ever given up on "Alki" — a script commissioned in the early 1990s by ACT Theatre that has languished, unproduced for a decade, only to resurface now as ACT's 2004 season opener.
Loosely based on "Peer Gynt," a philosophical stage fable by 19th-century dramatist Henrik Ibsen, "Alki" unfolds in a mythologized Pacific Northwest. And it's about as far in tone and texture from a "Law and Order" teleplay as a wild Paul Bunyan folk yarn is from a John Grisham legal thriller.
That's why Overmyer is jazzed about it. "In a TV series you're given strict parameters of time and character," he says. "When I got hired by 'Law and Order,' it was like being named caretaker of the Smithsonian. You can't paint the building pink."
With "Alki," Overmyer felt free to experiment with a vivid palette of colors. "In the theater I'm interested in big stories, big performance styles, big language," he notes. "I'm least interested in small, naturalistic dramas, because I think TV and film are better for that."
Big, as in tall-tale size, certainly applies to "Alki," which officially opens tomorrow. Lifting its basic plot and central figure from Ibsen's 1867 play, Overmyer's freewheeling comedy relates the adventures of a cocky fellow (also named Peer, Norwegian for Peter) in the "Puget Sound Territories" during pioneer times.
A braggart, a cad and a shameless fibber, Peer is a quintessential Old West flimflammer — roving from place to place, woman to woman, scam to scam and jam to jam. That is, until time (and karma) take their toll.
Overmyer did no historical research for the text but tapped the Northwest lore he grew up on. As for the dialogue, "it's a kind of faux 19th-century speech ... I'm a big Mark Twain fan, so that's an influence. I love colorful, Western vernacular."
Years ago, ACT's then-artistic director Jeff Steitzer encouraged Overmyer to relocate Peer's saga from Norway and Morocco to the Pacific Northwest and South America. But in 1994, just as plans for the play's Seattle debut were taking shape, Steitzer clashed with ACT's board, resigned under pressure and "Alki" went into limbo.
It took two more changes of regime at ACT before "Alki" would come to fruition under current artistic head Kurt Beattie. In 1992, at Empty Space Theatre, Beattie staged the debut of Overmyer's "Dark Rapture," a stylishly enigmatic take on film noir motifs. Now, with a cast of 13 headed by Seattle's R. Hamilton Wright as Peer, he's directing "Alki."
"The play is enormously pertinent to Seattle today, to our immediate historical journey," Beattie says. "It's about a poor frontier boy who goes out to seek his fortune, and after boom and bust times is stripped of his illusions. It's set in the Gold Rush era, but I think it also reflects the boom and bust we just lived through."
Overmyer actually left Seattle long before the dot-com frenzy here. He grew up near Burien, "in the shadow of Mount Rainer"; his dad worked for Boeing. After graduating from local Highline High School and studying theater at Portland's Reed College, Overmyer eventually moved East to pursue playwriting. He won his first national recognition for "On the Verge," a fanciful, widely produced work about Victorian-era women travelers.
Now living in New York, with actress wife Ellen McElduff and their 9-year old daughter, Overmyer still toils for "Law and Order" while making periodic forays back to live theater.
"Language, real character, mystery and ambiguity, seriousness of content," he says, ticking off what draws him to playwriting.
"And, oh yeah, I'm really happy in a rehearsal hall. The actors make me laugh a lot."
Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com
 |
