Doug Stone: "I Write Plays for Real People"
Doug Stone's new off-Broadway comedy Sealed for Freshness opened on February 24 at New World Stages to a set of reviews that ranged from mildly negative to downright nasty. And Stone, who directed his own play about five Midwestern women at a Tupperware party in the 1960s, has something to say to his critics: Get over it. In addition to writing Sealed for Freshness and other plays Leveling the Pulse, Betting the Longshot, Blame, The Glue Trap, Stone spent four years as a syndicated cartoonist Raw Material, has been a freelance writer for Comedy Central and developed marketing promotions for a variety of companies. Not surprisingly, Tupperware plastic containers get a prominent plug in the Sealed for Freshness press materials. The father of a baby girl, Stone insists that his onstage depiction of women is loving and truthful, if exaggerated for laughs. Read on as he describes his target audience—and dares to say what type of theatergoers should stay away.
I write theater for people who hate theater, or so I'm told.
I stumbled upon this description at a party years ago via a twenty-something gent who was clutching a Zima while double dipping a carrot stick in a vat of congealed party dip. Apparently he had just seen the first production of Sealed for Freshness and was trying to impress a gaggle of women about his theatergoing prowess. He mentioned that he had recently gone to one of the few theater events of his short life and was surprisingly pleased by the outcome. The actual remark went something like, "I usually hate theater, but this is theater for people who hate theater." Hence the overheard phrase stuck... I never revealed who I was so I could steal the comment. Nor did I eat the dip some of which was dripping down the front of his sweater.
I write real plays for real people.
I don't apologize for writing plays for the common man. After all, I'm one of them, having grown up in a small town outside of Chicago, so I fully expect the proper New York theater community to think otherwise of their merits. Yes, I do use common words and talk about common things while using common filth, potty talk, blasphemous expletives and common over-the-top action, but that's what real people do, think or say—or at least the real people who don't have seasonal subscriptions to theater companies. Most real people are busy using their extra money to pay for heating oil and clothes for their children instead of pre-ordering Australian Shiraz. Mind you, I'm not kicking Australian Shiraz in the knickers, on the contrary—I dig my reds, I just don't like seeing naked frozen children.
Sealed for Freshness is about common folk trying to get by in the dreary Chicago suburbs during the 1960s—the same kind of place I was raised. It was a place and time where men were emotionless and distant, which left the women frustrated and drunk...usually on Tom Collins, while listening to Tom Jones and wondering where they could acquire a Tommy gun to shoot their husband Tom. As for the kids on the block, beatings were a daily event, and when my father grew tired of beating us, he'd send us over to the neighbors' house and they'd beat us for a while. It was a never-ending roundtable of discipline, a time when the neighborhood raised the children and the neighborhood wasn't afraid to tell the other neighbors just how brutally they were raising their flock of miscreants.
I write plays for real women.
I love women and have a vast network of women friends ranging in age from 20 to 75. The best man at my wedding was a woman. My wife is a woman, and now I have a new offspring six weeks old who just happens to be woman—though a smaller version. I particularly like intelligent women, unlike the ones being portrayed lately in the media, where celebrity has replaced talent and intelligence. I admire older women and their knowledge and wisdom, so I usually write plays incorporating older women.
Sealed for Freshness embodies the aging process and the difficulties that go along with it. It's a play that involves the guilt of either raising a family and not having a career, or having a career and the guilt of being separated from their families. No man has to experience this type of guilt. We men just go to work and rarely have to worry about the nurturing process. Through comedy and drama, the women of Sealed for Freshness delve into the layers of womanhood from the difficulties of raising children to the difficulties of aging and the impact it has on a marriage and their self-image. I admit that sometimes I make light of such hardships but I feel that making a joke of adversity sometimes lets us clearly look at the adversity and in turn gives us a better picture on how to deal with it.
One last thing...
If you don't like to laugh, don't see Sealed for Freshness. If you're a total theater purist and believe life can only be examined through four-hour plays involving swords and ghosts of deranged kings, you may not want to see Sealed for Freshness. If you don't think that behind closed doors women actually talk about nasty things including sex and bodily functions, don't see Sealed for Freshness.
I don't want to disappoint you into thinking this is traditional theater—I purposely didn't write it that way. Sealed for Freshness is a night of energetic good ole' live theater fused with 1960 television sitcoms, a "theatacom," if you will. But if you want to be truly entertained through entertainment's rawest form, forget about your Visa bills, and laugh and sometimes cry then you may want to pop into New World Stages for a night off from reality.