Arts & Entertainment : Friday, August 04, 2000

by Misha Berson
Seattle Times theater critic

Pamela and Tommy are locked in an abusive marriage.

Lisa Marie is very confused about her own ill-fated union with a superstar named Michael.

THEATER PREVIEW "Dirty Little Secrets" by Jeff Jones previews Thursday, opens Aug. 11, and runs Thursday-Sunday through Sept. 9 at Annex Theatre, 1916 Fourth Ave., Seattle. $7-12. 206-728-0933.

Sherry is working at an escort service, when a guy named Dick Morris gives her an earful about his boss, Bill Clinton.

And while Frank is on his deathbed, his wife Barbara and daughter Nancy jockey for power over his memory and his estate.

If these people, all of them characters in the new Jeffrey M. Jones play "Dirty Little Secrets" at Annex Theatre, resemble certain overexposed American celebrities, that's no coincidence.

On the other hand, playwright Jones swears "Dirty Little Secrets" is no tongue-in-cheek spoof of "Hard Copy."

And he's so eager to blur the line between tabloid "fact" and outright fiction, that he hasn't even given his characters last names.

But Jones (best known for his often-produced black comedy, "Seventy Scenes of Halloween") will admit that much of the research he did for "Dirty Little Secrets" involved thumbing through issues of The National Enquirer and other celebrity-obsessed tabloids.

"I picked up on the tabloids initially because I was looking for really strong, simple stories to tell," explained the Brooklyn-based writer. "But as work on the play progressed, I've made these characters into autonomous people who really just exist in my play and nowhere else.

"The only reality here is the world of the play itself, and your own imagination."

But then why, one wonders, did he use media figures, and their reported travails, as prototypes in the first place?

"A friend asked me if I was trying to create contemporary myths," he responds. "Well, what are myths? They are stories that everyone knows. That's why it can be richer to use the names of Tommy and Pamela and Lisa Marie, instead of Bob and Janice and Sue.

"And what do the Greek gods in Homer do? They bicker, they connive, they betray. Those are very interesting kinds of human behavior. And any document that reports that, even if it's as full of inconsistent information and inaccuracies as the tabloids are, will probably be interesting to us."

Jones admits to being curious about the way the lives of celebrities captivate us, how "there's these lurid stories in the tabloids, but behind the stories are actual human beings who give birth, who fall in love, who get sick and die, who have real-life problems just like all of us."

When writing about the final days of Frank, he notes, "I thought about my own father who died about a year and a half ago, after being increasingly incapacitated and disoriented."

And he looked upon the marital trauma of Pamela and Tommy "as something a lot of people deal with. It's not unique to the famous."

"Dirty Little Secrets" isn't humorless, Jones asserts. But the author has advised director Ed Hawkins and his four-member cast (each of whom plays multiple roles) to avoid campy satire and outright celeb impersonations in the Annex's world premiere production of the 75-minute work.

"This play is certainly not an invitation for you to come in and laugh at these people," he says.

"I am curious about why it is that celebrity lives are so interesting to us. I think it's something real that the tabloids tap into. So I've taken these tabloid stories and projected them back into real-world stories without any overt trappings of celebrity, just to see what happens."

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