“As an actor, you’re a terrific writer”
Grave Doubts playwright David Steven Simon discusses comedy, writing and bringing his show to Harrisburg
David Steven Simon
This weekend, Theatre Harrisburg will debut the first-ever full production of Grave Doubts, a new play by David Steven Simon.
This is a significant shifting of gears for Simon, who has been a successful writer for hit television shows like Sister, Sister, Full House, The Wayans Brothers, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Mad About You, and many others. In his words “the only similarity between writing for the stage and writing for television is the keyboard.”
Simon took some time to answer questions for Ghost Light about his journey from writing for television in California to watching his play’s opening night in Harrisburg.
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GL: What lit the fire in you to become a writer – especially a writer for the stage and screen?
DSS: I saw my first Broadway show when I was about four years old. It was Do Re Mi with Phil Silvers and I knew right there and then: this is the world that I need to live in. Then I went to the High School of Performing Arts in New York City, where I took an afterschool playwriting class. We were evaluated every year, and after giving a particularly stunning performance as George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, my teacher, Mr. Braunstein, pulled me aside and said, "Kid, as an actor, you are a terrific writer."
During my college years, writing became more and more important to me. After college, I became a publicist for United Artists films and that's when my writing really took off. At United Artists, I met a guy from Los Angeles who suggested that we become partners. Once in LA we began working at Disney, which became a kind of “ground-zero” college for me, as the old guard of the studio began the arduous task of teaching us how to write for TV and film.
I soon discovered was that all those years of acting training was the perfect preparation for becoming a writer. After six years of development deals, which took me to Universal and Columbia, I started staffing and/or running TV shows, which led me to Mad About You, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and other programs. Writing for the theater seemed impossible, given that at the height of my career I was writing lines like 'You got it, dude," on Full House. But theatre never left my bloodstream.
Then one day, after having raised my kids and gone through a challenging illness, my soul cracked open like a farm egg and for the first time in my life, rather than having the need to stand in the spotlight, I felt the spotlight began to shine out of me. It was so overwhelming that I had no choice but to write a play. I always knew that I had to write about my mom and a certain tragedy that happened to her. And one day I came up with the idea of marrying fantasy with fact and that became the inspiration for Grave Doubts.
GL: With all of your background in entertainment, what brought Grave Doubts to the Harrisburg New Play Festival last year?
DSS: It is easier to get the next Mount Rushmore made than it is to get a play produced. Ask anyone in the history of playwriting. Until we find a welcoming theatre, ours is a traveling company of players who perform day and night on the stage of our brain, where the actors are the voices in our heads and the sets are the things that dreams are made of.
The only way to get a show done is – to use the ‘70s parlance -- by doing The Hustle. Playwriting is 50% writing, 50% hustling, 50% grifting, 50% self-deception, and 1% success. (I’m a big fan of The Producers.)
For the most part, we donate our services, not because we are charitable, but because virtually no one will pay us. We are chronically rejected. But we keep doing it, fueled by the incontrovertible truth that we love every single second of it.
Some four years into the development process, when Grave Doubts finally found its unique and indelible voice and became a formidable play, I began to submit it, acting like the ultimate Stage Mother until I found Theatre Harrisburg.
Every show has out-of-town tryouts. This is finally mine.
GL: What do you consider an example of good comedy/good comedy writing?
DSS: I love the guys who did it first. The guys who invented American comedy. I am attracted to human comedy, with plenty of helpings of heart, starting with Chaplin and Keaton and Laurel and Hardy. I revere all the radio writers who wrote for Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Burns and Allen, Edgar Bergen and Amos and Andy.
Another obvious answer is my mentors: Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon and Mel Brooks: basically the staff of "Your Show of Shows." I share more than just a last name with Doc (Neil) Simon: the older he got, the more skillful he became. I hold him up as my playwriting god. I got to work with Mel Brooks on Mad About You and every single second that I got to sit in the writer's room and make him laugh was a dream come true.
I adored Lenny Bruce, Mort Saul, George Carlin, Robert Klein and Rodney Dangerfield on the Tonight Show. I loved Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Alan Sherman and Tom Lehrer. On TV it was Sgt. Bilko, Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, I Love Lucy, Cosby, Robin Williams, Tina Fey -- and Paul Reiser is the funniest person that I have ever worked with.
We Jews can claim two things: Superman and Comedy. We have just always had the knack to take our worst mortal fears and turn them into the alchemy of absurdity. That is what makes great comedy approachable and helps make life bearable.
GL: What projects are next for you?
DSS: Well, “There’s….Johnny!,” the television series I co-created with Paul Reiser about behind the scenes at The Tonight Show, is being considered for a second season and I plan to continue to produce and write for that.
I’ve also written another play called My Own Personal Mermaid. Once again, the play deals with loss but in a much different way. It's about how magic, especially in moments when you think it has abandoned you forever, suddenly reappears and inspires your inevitable resurrection. It's told from the point of view of a woman reflecting on when she was ten years old and a child of Park-Avenue privilege. At a time when she is about to lose her mom, she is rescued by the sudden appearance of a mermaid at an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Grave Doubts was the winner of Theatre Harrisburg’s 2017 New Play Festival, which saw the play produced as a staged reading.