Friday, August 4, 2000

By JOE ADCOCK
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER THEATER CRITIC

Playwright Jeff Jones was between projects some four years ago. "I am the food shopper for our house," he says. "I was in the checkout line at the supermarket. The tabloid newspapers are all there in front of you in a rack. And I thought, 'Maybe there's an idea for a play in one of those.' It could be that I was just looking for a respectable excuse to buy some tabloids."

In any event, Jones got plenty of ideas from his research. The result is "Dirty Little Secrets," which will receive its premiere production starting next week at Annex Theatre.

Like many new works, "Secrets" had various tinkering and adjusting sessions before Jones was ready to say OK, this is it.

"Over the years my house has filled up with stacks and stacks of copies of The Enquirer, The Star and The Globe," he says.

"What I've done is a deflation of an inflation. The tabloids take a story and build it up. I've tried to take celebrity stories and bring them back down to human scale. The factual material in tabloids is so unreliable that the articles turn into just that: stories. It's like legends or fairy tales. You find all kinds of different versions of the same basic story."

"Secrets" now consists of four basic stories: Two women are in love with the same man. The women are Debby and Lisa. The man is Michael. Then there is Frank. He is very ill, dying. His wife, Barbara, and his daughter, Nancy, are in the picture. Thirdly, we have Pam and her husband, Tom. She loves him. But he batters her. They separate. They get back together. They separate . . . and on and on. The final scenario deals with a Washington, D.C., big deal, Dick, and Sherry, a talkative call girl.

Annex Theatre makes the usual disclaimer regarding these folks with famous names: "Any resemblance to any real individuals is purely coincidental."

"Yes, these people are celebrities, or based on celebrities," Jones says. "But it's as if some cousin at the Kennedy's Christmas gathering at their compound in Hyannisport took a bunch of snapshots. Nothing professional. This is not a staged photo opportunity. Just views of famous people as if they were ordinary people.

"I really did not want to satirize tabloids. That would be gilding the lily. But the material they offer is so . . . so primal."

COMING UP DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS PLAYWRIGHT: Jeffrey M. Jones WHEN: Thursday through Sept. 9 WHERE: Annex Theatre, second floor, 1916 Fourth Ave. TICKETS: Pay what you can Thursday, $12 after that, students $7; 206-728-0933 or annextheatre.org

Jones lives in Brooklyn. He works as a computer programmer in Manhattan. His wife is a psychiatrist. They have two children, a girl, Camila, 9, and a boy, Mason, 11 months.

Jones and Annex first got together 11 years ago when the company produced his "Seventy Scenes of Holloween." The play, very long on sinister atmosphere and very short on compelling storyline, is probably Jones' best known work. It premiered in New York 20 years ago. It has been produced since then by experimental, fringe and avant-garde theaters all over the country. Seattle's Hyperion Theatre produced "Seventy Scenes" last year.

"When I was a freshman at Swarthmore College," Jones says, "I won a one-act playwriting contest. So I wrote another play. And another. Finally I was so serious about writing plays that I transferred to Pomona College. It has a theater department and Swarthmore doesn't."

After college Jones took menial jobs to support himself. And he wrote. "After about five years of that," he says, "I had what you might call a crisis. It became clear that the sort of plays I was interested in writing were not going to be a big commercial success.

"Not that I am so interested in becoming rich. Well, I would like to be rich. But I'm not obsessed with it. Anyway, I realized that I would need a good job to support the sort of life I wanted to live. So I became a programmer. And I continue to write plays too."

Jones figures (he's not quite sure) that he's written about a dozen plays. Some of them, like "Seventy Scenes," have been published. He sometimes teaches playwriting to graduate students at Yale University.

I talked to Jones recently by telephone. He was at his Manhattan software services office. "We do a lot of projects for investment banks," he said. "Right now I'm working on a Microsoft Word template for a Japanese bank. The English version and the Japanese version . . . well, there are these differences that I'm trying to figure out."

P-I theater critic Joe Adcock can be reached at 206-448-8369 or joeadcock@seattle-pi.com

TOOLS

Printer-friendly version

E-mail this story