Re: RAT The Sassies!!!!

[DgSWEET@aol.com]

Guare did not pretend that he was writing a journalistic account of Mr. 
Hampton's activites.  The character is not named Hampton, of course.  Rather, 
he took an incident and whipped up a "what if?", which is what writers and 
artists always do.  Nobody would have known this had any particular 
relationship to Hampton if Hampton himself hadn't tried to make some money 
out of it.

Remember, too, what got Hampton into the newspapers was because he had done 
something illegal -- he had gained entrance to these people's houses by means 
of fraud.  When you commit a crime against someone else's privacy (which 
Hampton did), then it looks a little hypocritical to complain that your own 
is being invaded.

There is a moral line than, of course, needs to be drawn.  That moral line is 
different for public figures than private ones, which is what the Larry Flynt 
case was all about.  Hampton did indeed make himself a public figure by doing 
something that got him into the newspapers.

Writers always borrow elements from what is around them.  Try to block these 
borrowings and reimaginings and you might as well shut down theatre and 
prohibit the publication of a lot of novels.  One hopes that the writers will 
be sensitive enough to write the works in such a way as to not raise rude 
speculations about those who may have inspired characters in their works, but 
taste and empathy cannot be legislated.

Donald Margulies wrote an interesting play on this, COLLECTED STORIES.  Of 
course, his play was a fictional variation on a true story, as he 
acknowledged.  But, by changing the gender and the nationalities of the 
primary figures, he signalled that what he was doing was not journalistic but 
his own dramatic speculation on the matter.

If I'm going to write something that is derived too closely from someone I 
know, I ask permission, and then I try my best to cloud the water 
sufficiently so that nobody outside that person and me would recognize who it 
is.  A friend of mine, for instance, flipped out in the middle of his divorce 
and held up a bank.  As he was driving a way with the money, he came to his 
senses, pulled over to the side of the road and waved down a cop to 
surrender.  He was jailed for six months.  That story was intriguing to me.  
I asked me friend for permission to use it in a play called WITH AND WITHOUT. 
 He said it was OK with him.  When the play was mounted, he came to see it.  
I asked him what he thought.  He said he liked the play, but he added, "Of 
course, that's not me."

And, of course, that really wasn't Hampton.  The character onstage was a 
little deluded, rather sweet, literate and articulate.

As for what Kunstler is reported to have done with Guare, as much as I 
admired Kunstler, I think he was creating a false analogy.  Guare's living 
arrangements hadn't bordered into the illegal and hadn't landed him in the 
newspapers.  Hampton's activities, by their illegality, had.

My opinion and welcome to it --

Jeff

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Jeffrey Sweet
Resident Playwright, Victory Gardens Theatre
Faculty, Actors Studio at the New School
Council, the Dramatists Guild of America
http://members.aol.com/DgSWEET/index.html