“He did have a keen ability to undermine himself and shoot himself in the proverbial foot, which he did with maddening regularity,” says Wright, who won a Pulitzer for his 2003 play I Am My Own Wife about German transgender biological male Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived repression under the Nazis and then the tyranny of the Stasi in East Germany before founding a museum in Berlin.
If there is a link between that play and Wright’s latest it is that both centre on “people who are fiercely interested in self expression but are held up by their own instabilities”, as Wright puts it.
Born in Pittsburg to Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia, Levant was in real life as prodigiously a talented concert pianist as he was in that daydream on screen. He studied under Arnold Schoenberg and was admired by Aaron Copland. He became an in-demand Broadway conductor and composer, though was haunted by the relative failure of never reaching the heights of his friend Gershwin in whose posthumous biopic Rhapsody in Blue (1945) Levant played himself.
Yet when Schoenberg arranged for Levant to play for the conductor Otto Klemperer with a view to performing a piece with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Levant blew the opportunity by launching into a rendition of the jazz ditty When Irish Eyes Are Smiling followed by Chopsticks.
“I think it was a fear of living up to any one of his talents that kind of unwound his life,” says Wright. On film Levant was a sardonic presence at the keyboard in contrast to his upbeat, beautiful co-stars. In The Band Wagon (1953) he is a reassuringly awkward presence just behind Cyd Charrise’s right shoulder as he joins her and Fred Astaire in the heartfelt anthem to showbiz That’s Entertainment.
Playwright Doug Wright has brought his play 'Good Night, Oscar' from New York to London's Barbican Theatre. (Photo: Bronwen Sharp)[Missing Credit]
But it is Levant’s reinvention in the 1960s as a TV talk show guest hosted by Jack Paar (played by the Jewish actor Ben Rappaport) that Wright focuses on.
It was through Paar’s show that Levant established himself as a master of quips, such as the one about Elizabeth Taylor. “Always the bride, never the bridesmaid.” Or “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”
But he could be just as ruthless about himself. A line he wrote for himself for the film Humoresque starring Joan Crawford was a poignant comment on the particular condition of being hugely talented yet unfulfilled. “It’s not who you are,” he says in the film and in Wright’s play. “It’s who you don’t become.”
Appropriately, therefore Hayes plays Levant as a tormented soul (he won a Tony for his performance). Haunted by Gershwin’s success, Hayes’s Levant is visited by Gershwin’s ghost who says to the friend he once mentored, “I’ve always been afraid of failure. But you? You don’t mind it.”
As if to prove the point Levant is far less well known today than is Gershwin. “He is a pretty obscure figure in American culture,” admits Wright, despite Levant once being a household name in America and with reputation as a loose cannon on live TV, which is why Paar and TV audiences loved him so.
“Though his parents were Orthodox, he was not,” says Wright. “Yet he was very much culturally Jewish and proudly identified as such. And of course, Gershwin and Gershwin’s family were Jewish as well, and they were all part of that east European immigrant community in New York, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side that was so fertile and that went on to play such a significant role in the establishment of American entertainment. Not only in theatre and vaudeville, but ultimately in film too. So Levant was very much a part of that tradition.”
Hayes, however, is not Jewish. But to those who might ask if a character who is so profoundly Jewish should be played by Jew, Wright has an answer.
“It’s the world of the theatre, and it’s true that Oscar was culturally Jewish and proud of it, and that we have cast a goy. But Jack Paar was the most white bread slice of America you could ever concoct – a mid-Western [and] good Methodist. And we have him played by an extraordinary Jewish actor, Ben Rappaport. So we have Jewish representation in the play, we just filter it though theatre where people get to play what they are not.”
Ben Rappaport plays Jack Paar in Doug Wright's play 'Good Night, Oscar', now on at the Barbican.[Missing Credit]
Though Wright seems as much as part of New York’s creative Jewish milieu as his subject, he is in fact a “lapsed” Presbyterian from Texas.
“So when I explore Levant’s Jewish identity in the play, I’m doing my best to achieve some kind of status as an honorary Jew,” he says. “I’ll leave it to audiences to decide how persuasive I am in that regard.”
Rappaport is also aware that he is a Jew playing a gentile opposite a gentile who is playing a Jew.
“I definitely am the representative of Jewish culture in our show,” he says during a phone chat just after watching his friend Adam Dannheisser play Tevye at the Barbican Fiddler on the Roof that Good Night, Oscar is replacing. By coincidence Rappaport and Dannheisser were both in a New York production of Fiddler.
“Jewish culture is really laced throughout [the play],” adds Rappaport, who is currently starring in the American TV series Grosse Pointe Garden Society.
It may seem odd to depict a character as being cursed by his copious talent. Harpo Marx described Levant as having “wit and talent to burn”. But the condition explored by Wright’s play is that of being multi-talented yet saddled with the sense of never having fulfilled one’s potential in any of the talents that luck bestowed on him.
In that sense there is a bit of Oscar in all of us, says Wright. What made his sadness tolerable was humour, adds the playwright.
“It was was genuinely life-saving. Against his tragedy there is also a triumph which for Oscar is that for decades he got out of bed every morning to face a new day with a joke. That was where his heroism lay.”
Good Night, Oscar runs until September 21 at the Barbican Theatre. GoodNightOscar.com
