Private Eyes
October 2-4 & 9-11, 2009

Private Eyes
By Steven Dietz
Directed by Nathan Norcross
Produced by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

This Production Generously Underwritten By

Cast

Sean Hogge as Matthew
Erin DeSeure as Lisa
Tim Cormack as Adrian
Crystal Gould as Cory
Claudia Copping as Frank

Production Staff

Nathan Norcross - Director/Scenic and Sound Design
Jen LaBruzzo - Stage Manager
Morgan Myers - Assistant Stage Manager
Russell Langdon - Lighting Design
Bill Wright - Sound Operation
Alex Morales - Graphic and Poster Design

Special Thanks To

Larry and Jeanne Laird
Lynnette Norcross
Ashley Sinclair
Tiffany Garrison
April Kobetz
Bill Wright
Krystal Cannon
Jen LaBruzzo
St. Pius X School
Harvest Productions
Doug Moston

Matthew's wife, Lisa, is having an affair with Adrian, a British theatre director. Or perhaps the affair is part of the play being rehearsed. Or perhaps Matthew has imagined all of it simply to have something to report to Frank, his therapist. And, finally, there is Cory—the mysterious woman who seems to shadow the others—who brings the story to its surprising conclusion. Or does she? The audience itself plays the role of detective in this hilarious "relationship thriller" about love, lust and the power of deception.

About The Playwright: Steven Dietz

Steven Dietz is one of America's most widely produced and published contemporary playwrights. Since 1983, his twenty-plus plays have been seen at over one hundred regional theatres in the United States, as well as Off-Broadway. International productions have been seen in England, Japan, Germany, France, Australia, Sweden, Austria, Russia, Slovenia, Argentina, Peru, Singapore and South Africa. His work has been translated into seven languages.

Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, Dietz graduated in 1980 with a B.A. in Theatre Arts from the University of Northern Colorado, after which he moved to Minneapolis and began his career as a director of new plays at the Playwrights' Center and other local theaters. During these years he also formed a small theatre company, Quicksilver Stage, and began to write plays of his own.

Mr. Dietz is a two-time winner of the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award, for FICTION (produced Off-Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company), and STILL LIFE WITH IRIS. He received the PEN USA West Award in Drama for LONELY PLANET, and the 2007 Edgar Award for Drama from the Mystery Writer's of America for his widely-produced SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE FINAL ADVENTURE (adapted from William Gillette and Arthur Conan Doyle.) Other widely produced plays include INVENTING VAN GOGH, GOD'S COUNTRY, PRIVATE EYES, THE NINA VARIATIONS, TRUST, ROCKET MAN, HALCYON DAYS, TEN NOVEMBER, FOOLIN' AROUND WITH INFINITY and MORE FUN THAN BOWLING. Other award-winning stage adaptations include FORCE OF NATURE (from Goethe), OVER THE MOON (from P.G. Wodehouse), THE REMEMBERER (from Joyce Simmons Cheeka), PARAGON SPRINGS (from Ibsen), DRACULA (from Bram Stoker), and, with Allison Gregory, GO, DOG. GO! (from P.D. Eastman).

Mr. Dietz's work as a director has been seen at many of America's leading regional theatres. He has directed premiere productions of new plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Denver Center Theatre Company, Westside Arts (Off-Broadway), and the Sundance Institute, among others. Dietz's articles on new play development - most first seen in American Theatre Magazine—have been widely discussed and re-printed.

Recent work includes the Pulitzer-nominated LAST OF THE BOYS (Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago) and the acclaimed adaptation of Dan Gutman's baseball novel, HONUS AND ME.

Additionally, Mr. Dietz is currently at work on new plays commissioned by the Guthrie Theater (Minneapolis) and the Denver Center Theatre Company. He now divides his time between Seattle and Austin, Texas where he teaches playwriting and screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin.

Private Eyes: The Background

"PRIVATE EYES began as a lie," claims playwright Steven Dietz. "And, like a lie, the play grew." Ironically, at the heart of his play, Dietz's characters continually try to tell the truth. And in doing so, they learn the value of "the comforting little lie."

Secrecy and deception have been around forever. It's in the paper and headlined on the news. It's delicious to watch it happen to someone else, but when it turns, it turns with a vengeance. "There is little that matches the mad rush of falling in love, other than the mad rush of being betrayed," says Dietz. "It takes the same amount of energy, same amount of passion." The twin fevers of passion and suspicion feed each other, and fuel the comedy of PRIVATE EYES.

But danger's delicious fevers have inescapable consequences. Only when the masquerade is over do we see that something quite simple lies at the heart of all the games. "We all desire," states Dietz. "But we fill our lives with the complexity to avoid the terrifying fact of simply having someone you want to be with."

The idea for PRIVATE EYES was born in a Louisville hotel room of all places, as Dietz envisioned two lovers failing to speak the truth. "Have you ever, when checking out of a hotel room, looked into those open rooms that have not yet been cleaned, seen the rumpled bed with the bedspread on the floor, and wondered what went on in there? I have," Dietz confesses. "I make up a little scene in my mind. An illicit, romantic adventure, perhaps? The thought is sexy… what went on behind those closed doors?"

In PRIVATE EYES, Dietz dives right into the heart of it. Originally, the heart of it was just a title. "I had the title of THE USUAL SUSPECTS in my notebook, and was waiting for a play to put it to," laughs Dietz. Then Christopher McQuarrie wrote a hit movie and put that title to it. Though Dietz had the title way before the movie, he "begrudgingly changed it."

The play, with its new name, was produced by the Arizona Theatre Company, where it was hailed by one reviewer as "the brightest and wittiest play we've seen in a long time." "Actually," Dietz confesses, "changing the title made the play more personal. It helped to put the heart on the line."

PRIVATE EYES forces the audience to put themselves on the line as well. As we witness the characters' delicious deceptions, we are deceived just as quickly and easily. Ultimately, we are the fundamental detectives, the real private eyes, who search for the clues to Dietz's comedy of surprise and misdirection.

1997 © Liz Engelman,
Literary Manager/Dramaturg:
Intiman Theatre, The Actors Theatre of Louisville

PRIVATE EYES (under the title, THE USUAL SUSPECTS) was initially developed as part of the Arizona Theatre Company's GENESIS New Play Reading Series in March of 1993. It was directed by Mathew Wiener; the dramaturg was Jim Leonard Jr.; the cast featured David Ellenstein, Brigitta Stenberg, Bob Sorenson, Collette Kilroy, and Michael Dixon.

PRIVATE EYES received its world premiere at the Arizona Theatre Company (David Ira Goldstein, Artistic Director; Jessica L. Andrews, Managing Director), in Tucson, Arizona on May 3rd, 1996. It was directed by David Ira Goldstein; the set design was by Scott Weldin; the costume design was by Rose Pederson; the lighting design was by Rick Paulson; the sound design by Steven M. Klein; the dramaturg was Rebecca Million; and the stage manager was Dawn Fenton. The cast was as follows:
MATTHEW - R. Hamilton Wright
LISA - Sally Wingert
ADRIAN - David Pichette
CORY - Katie Forgette
FRANK - Jeff Steitzer

PRIVATE EYES was produced at the 1997 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville (Jon Jory, Producing Director) in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 4th, 1997. It was directed by the author, Steven Dietz; the set design was by Paul Owen; the costume design was by Paul Zinn; the lighting design was by Ed McCarthy; the dramaturg was Liz Engleman; and the stage manager was Juliet Horn. The cast was as follows:
MATTHEW - Lee Sellars
LISA - Kate Goehring
ADRIAN - V. Craig Heidenreich
CORY - Twyla Hafermann
FRANK - Adale O'Brien

Private Eyes: Some Critical Perspective

"Steven Dietz's… Pirandellian smooch to the mercurial nature of theatrical illusion and romantic truth, Dietz's spiraling structure and breathless pacing provide enough of an oxygen rush to revive any moribund audience member… Dietz's mastery of playmaking... is cause for kudos."

"The cleverest and most artful piece presented at the 21st annual [Humana] festival was PRIVATE EYES by writer-director Steven Dietz… Dietz has created a romantic comedy in which what's real inevitably turns out to be an illusion. It's a play within a play within a play within a play within a psychiatrist's office, a Chinese box full of tricks and surprises."

"... a novel variation on the time-honored play-within-a-play device: the brand-new comedy PRIVATE EYES is a play within a play within a play within a play within a therapy session. In fact, there are so many layers in this intricately structured work about marriage and adultery that the audience is forced to take on the title role, and do the detective work of figuring out what's reality and what's not. The play is full of goofy wordplay… a psychiatrist named Frank asks of his patients that they be as 'frank' as he is… and marvelously comic theatrical turnabouts that keep the audience guessing. The playwright isn't shy about using the make-believe world of the theatre as a metaphor for life's illusions."

Private Eyes: Calling Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage."

Pirandello's work is impressive by its sheer volume. His greatest achievement is in his plays. He wrote a large number of dramas, which were published between 1918 and 1935, under the collective title of NAKED MASKS. The title is apocryphal. Pirandello is always preoccupied with the problem of identity. The self exists to him only in relation to others; it consists of changing facets that hide an inscrutable abyss.

Pirandello's sense of disillusionment was burned into his psyche early on by a very personal tragedy. In 1894, at the age of 27, he married a young woman whom he had never met. For a time, the young couple found happiness, but after the birth of their third child and the loss of the family fortune in a flood, she suffered a mental breakdown. She became so violent that she should have been institutionalized, but Pirandello chose instead to keep her at home for seventeen years. The illness had a profound effect on Pirandello's writing, leading him to explorations of madness, illusion, and isolation.

In a play like RIGHT YOU ARE (IF YOU THINK YOU ARE), two people hold contradictory notions about the identity of a third person. The protagonist in TO CLOTHE THE NAKED tries to establish her individuality by assuming various identities, which are successively stripped from her; she gradually realizes her true position in the social order and in the end dies naked, without a social mask in both her own and her friends' eyes. Similarly in HENRY IV a man supposedly mad imagines that he is a medieval emperor, and his imagination and reality are strangely confused. The analysis and dissolution of a unified self are carried to an extreme in SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR where the stage itself, the symbol of appearance versus reality, becomes the setting of the play itself.

The attitudes expressed in HUMOR, an early essay (1908), are fundamental to all of Pirandello's plays. His characters attempt to fulfill their self-seeking roles and are defeated by life itself which, always changing, enables them to see their perversity. This is Pirandello's humor, an irony arising from the contradictions inherent in life.

He died alone in Rome on December 10th, 1936.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967,
Editor Horst Frenz,
Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969.

Private Eyes: Non-Linear Narrative

Beginning a narrative in the middle of things began in ancient times as an oral tradition and was established as a convention of epic poetry with Homer's ILLIAD in the 8th century BC. Several medieval ARABIAN NIGHTS tales such as SINBAD THE SAILOR also had nonlinear narratives employing flashback techniques. The Japanese folk tale, play, and film of RASHOMON also mixes elliptical stories that are mutually contradictory, leaving the reader and the viewer to determine which, if any, is the truth.

From the late 1800s and early 1900s, modernist novelists Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner experimented with narrative chronology and abandoning linear order. Examples of nonlinear novels are: Laurence Sterne's TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN (1767), Emily Brontë's WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847), James Joyce's ULYSSES (1922) FINNEGANS WAKE (1939), William S. Burroughs' NAKED LUNCH (1959), Joseph Heller's CATCH-22 (1961), Kurt Vonnegut's SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (1969) and Irvine Welsh's TRAINSPOTTING (1993).

Defining nonlinear structure in film is, at times, difficult. Films may use extensive flashbacks or flash forwards within a linear storyline, while nonlinear films often contain linear sequences. Experimentation with nonlinear structure in film dates back to the silent film era, including D.W. Griffith's INTOLERENCE (1916) and Abel Gance's NAPOLEON (1927). Nonlinear film emerged from the French avant-garde in 1929 with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's AN ANDALUSION DOG. The surrealist film jumps into fantasy and juxtaposes images, granting the filmmakers an ability to create statements about the Church, art, and society that are left open to interpretation.

Alain Resnais experimented with narrative and time in his films HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959), and LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961). Federico Fellini defined his own nonlinear cinema with the films LA STRADA (1954), LA DOLCE VITA (1960), 8 1/2 (1963), and SATYRICON (1969). Nicolas Roeg's films, including PERFORMANCE (1968), WALKABOUT (1971), DON'T LOOK NOW (1973), THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976), and BAD TIMING (1980) all have a nonlinear approach.

In the United States, Robert Altman carried the nonlinear motif in his films, including MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971), NASHVILLE (1975), THE PLAYER (1992), and GOSFORD PARK (2001). Woody Allen embraced the experimental nature of nonlinear narrative in ANNIE HALL (1977), INTERIORS (1978), and STARDUST MEMORIES (1980).

In the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino influenced a tremendous growth in nonlinear films with PULP FICTION (1994). Into the 2000s, some filmmakers have returned to nonlinear narrative repeatedly. Christopher Nolan utilized this structure in the film MEMENTO (2001). MEMENTO, with its reverse chronology has been described as characteristic of moving towards nonlinear postmodernism in contemporary cinema.

Private Eyes: Deception

Deception (also called beguilement, deceit, bluff, or subterfuge) is the act of convincing another to believe information that is not true, or not the whole truth as in certain types of half-truths. Deception involves concepts like propaganda, distraction and/or concealment.

Fiction, while sometimes manipulative, is not a deception unless it is portrayed as partially truthful or as the whole truth. In many cases it is difficult to distinguish deception from providing unintentionally wrong information. One of the reasons for this is that a person or an entire organization may be self-deceived.

Other examples include...

DISSIMULATION:

Dissimulation consists of concealing the truth, or in the case of half-truths, concealing parts of the truth, like inconvenient or secret information. There are three dissimulation techniques: camouflage (blend into the background), disguise appearance (altering the model) and dazzle (obfuscate the model).

DISGUISE:

A disguise is an appearance to create the impression of being somebody or something else; for a well-known person this is also called incognito. In a more abstract sense, 'disguise' may refer to the act of disguising the nature of a particular proposal in order to hide an unpopular motivation or effect associated with that proposal. This is a form of political spin or propaganda.

DAZZLE:

To amaze or bewilder, as with brilliant wit, intellect, skill, and or misdirection.

DISTRACTION:

To get someone's attention from the truth by offering bait or something else more tempting to divert attention away from the object being concealed. For example, a security company publicly announces that it will ship a large gold shipment down one route, while in reality take a different route.

DUPLICITY:

The contradictory doubleness of thought, speech, or action. Also, the belying of one's true intentions by deceptive words or action and the quality of being double or twofold.

DOUBLE-DEALING:

Suggesting treachery or at least action contrary to a professed attitude.

Private Eyes: Psychological Thrills

A psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the thriller genre. However, this genre often incorporates elements from the mystery genre as well as the horror genre.

Generally, thrillers focus on plot over character, and thus emphasize intense, physical action over the character's psyche. Psychological thrillers tend to reverse this formula to a certain degree, emphasizing the characters just as much, if not more so, than the plot.

The suspense created by psychological thrillers often comes from two or more characters preying upon one another's minds, either by playing deceptive games with the other or by merely trying to demolish the other's mental state.

Sometimes the suspense comes from within one solitary character where characters must resolve conflicts with their own minds. Usually, this conflict is an effort to understand something that has happened to them. These conflicts are made more vivid with physical expressions of the conflict in the means of either physical manifestations, or physical torsions of the characters at play.

Many psychological thrillers have emerged over the past years, all in various media. Despite these very different forms of representation, general trends have appeared throughout the narratives.

Some of these consistent themes include:

REALITY: The quality of being real. Characters often try to determine what is true and what is not within the narrative.

PERCEPTION: A person's own interpretation of the world around him through his senses. Often characters misperceive the world around them, or their perceptions are altered by outside factors within the narrative.

MIND: The human consciousness; the location for personality, thought, reason, memory, intelligence and emotion. The mind is often used as a location for narrative conflict, where characters battle their own minds to reach a new level of understanding or perception.

EXISTANCE/PURPOSE: The object for which something exists; a goal humans strive towards to understand their reason for existence. Characters often try to discover what their purpose is in their lives and the narrative's conflict often is a way for the characters to discover this purpose.

IDENTITY: The definition of one's self. Characters often are confused about who they are and try to discover their true identity.

DEATH: Characters have a fascination with death.

Private EyesOctober 2-4 & 9-11, 2009