Hill playwright's newest work 'slaying' downtown audiences

by ED MAHON

William Shakespeare, comparing life to the stage, wrote in Macbeth that actors strut and fret their way across a stage, telling an idiot's tale and signifying nothing. A pretty harsh criticism - but nothing compared to what Chestnut Hill playwright Alex Dremann thought of the actors and directors who put on a show of his at the University of Southern California (USC).

Dremann, a full time data analyst, is nervous about giving up control of his plays to directors. "It can go either way," Dremann said, sitting in Starbucks on a Monday night. In three days, his latest play and first full length one to appear in Philadelphia would debut. Postcoital Variations, a romantic comedy about people in a "very non-traditional relationship" took him 20 minutes to write the structure for - and four years to finish the rest.

The play is also the Philadelphia Theatre Workshop's first production of their first season. "Our production of Postcoital Variations is the culmination of years of developing this new theater," said Carol Murray, managing director. The stakes were high, and though Dremann has had plays performed in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia, he still gets nervous when it comes to opening night.

"You can have a mediocre play and the actors are great. And everyone thinks you're a genius," he said. "Or it can go the other way. Mediocre actors making a great play average. Or worse, terrible actors making a mediocre play horrendous."

He had returned from a trip to Los Angeles where his SKITsoid, which had been a hit at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in October, was playing. Even though he had no control over it, the play turned out very well, in part because he and the director have known each other for years.

But Dremann hasn't always been so lucky. While studying playwriting at the USC, a director took some liberties with his play. The play, about a vampire stuck in a meat locker, sounds strange enough, but when the director "decided to make it a stance on the Bosnian refugees," it got stranger. The actors yelled Bosnian chants and held two different lights - one red, one green - and in the middle of the play, completely out of nowhere and context, the two would go back and forth saying "red light"/"green light."

Hundreds of people were in the audience. The next night, Dremann says, it got worse. The actors couldn't remember the lines, and the director wasn't telling them, so Dremann had to rise from his seat in the back of the theater, walk down the aisle holding the script and feed them their lines.

Still Dremann says that disaster may have been a good thing, since even the worst shows are bearable now.

Not that he expected anything bad from Variations. He trusted the actors, the directors and the producers. But still, he was always a little nervous, only a little. The real nervousness doesn't start until he's in the theater seats, and it doesn't go away until the night is over.

"I've only seen pieces of it," he said of Variations. "I haven't really seen it." The pieces Dremann saw didn't include any Bosnian refugees holding green and red lights, but after a night like that, how could anyone feel safe?

Dremann has always been a writer, just not of plays. In third grade, his class wrote a play about puppets. But throughout high school and college, he stuck with fiction, mostly short stories, "and I wasn't very good at it."

A Phoenixville native, Dremann graduated from Great Valley High School in 1984 and the University of Delaware in 1988. After graduating from Delaware with a degree in accounting, he read Crime and Punishment, which is still one of his favorites. "Every line's a quote," he said of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic Russian novel.

Dremann went to graduate school, studying publication management at Drexel University, dropped out and then studied computer graphics at the University of Pennsylvania, and again, dropped out. "I sort of got bored," he said. "What I really wanted to do was go for playwriting."

He took a screenwriting class at Penn, taught by Marc LaPadula. LaPadula told him he wasn't a screenwriter. His scenes were good, but they were too long and had too much dialogue for the screen. LaPadula told Dremann he should write plays, not scripts for movies.

Since the switch, he hasn't looked back at fiction. "I sort of found what I was good at, or at least better at," he said and although he hasn't completely put the screenwriting dream away, it's definitely deferred.

He's lived in the Philadelphia area his whole life, until he moved to California to study writing at USC. He was able to write more when he was in California because he was taking classes and had weekly assignments.

And despite the red light/green light Bosnian incident, he enjoyed getting his masters in fine arts at USC. Four or five of his other plays were successful, the people were great, and the ocean breeze, only 14 blocks away, was nice.

But eventually he had to come home. When asked why, he said, "Probably smog and traffic."

He came back east and commuted from Philadelphia to a publishing firm in New York where he did technical, not literary work. Eventually, the company folded, and he came back to Philadelphia where he works as a data analyst at Yves Rocher, a cosmetics company. "It has nothing to do with playwriting," he says.

Alex's goal when he writes is "to make myself laugh." Though he does write some serious plays, his goal is to "entertain myself. I guess there's no point otherwise."

He doesn't have any rituals, but he likes to write on the computer. He takes his laptop into Labrador Café or Starbucks. On Monday at Starbucks, he wore glasses, bluejeans and a blue and white striped shirt. If you saw him, you'd think he was a data analyst or a playwright, but he's having trouble being both.

The shortest time he spent on a longer play (90 pages) was 30 days. He forced himself to write three pages a day, but it depends on how focused he is. "Right now I'm totally unfocused," he said because of work and the stress of opening night. The amount of writing he does in a week "goes up and down. Once or twice a week if I'm lucky."

"We chose Postcoital Variations to be our first show because we loved the sharp dialogue, the sexual diversity of the characters, and the overall sense of humor and normalcy in the world the play that Alex Dremann created," said co-artistic director Robin Eisenberg.

Dremann described Postcoital Variations as "about three people who are in a relationship." Dremann was worried about his co-workers, but especially his parents' reaction, to the somewhat risqué content. Each scene begins after a sexual encounter of some kind - or in some cases in a gynecologist's office, or on the floor of a home in their parents' house.

Postcoital Variations runs October 15 through October 24 at Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 825 Walnut St. Tickets are $18 at the door and $15 in advance. For advance tickets and information, visit www.philadelphiatheatre.org or contact the box office at 215-635-2137.