Shares the Play's Backstory
August 9–September 8
freeFall Theatre, St Pete
Details here
I never met actor June Havoc, but I did speak to her many times when she’d call Manhattan’s Abingdon Theatre Company – she was on the advisory board, and I was their Marketing Director.
One morning June called, and oh, was she in a mood. Another revival of Gypsy had her quite stressed and she was going to talk to anyone who answered the phone.
“Oh, that musical! Must they keep reviving it every time there’s a big enough star desperate to play Mother?”
I knew about her antipathy towards the show and her efforts to have the original production shut down – indeed, we’d all been instructed never to bring up the subject of Gypsy with her in any conversation.
But this time was different – she brought it up herself. And while I listened, for the first time I realized how deeply the show troubled her even all those years later. She felt her own life and reputation had been misrepresented for other people’s – including her sister’s – financial gain, and her own legacy cemented in a fable that would never go away.
“There’s not one bit of truth in that show, not one shred!”
Fable. A Fable About A Musical Fable was born out of that conversation. And while I would never lay claim to any truth-telling in this play – it is, after all, entitled Fable – I cannot deny that June, like her mother and her sister, was a bit of a fable spinner herself.
But as I did my research and began to write the play, I was struck by the Rashomon-like elements in her story, in Gypsy’s story, indeed in the stories of everyone involved in the creation of that show.
And everyone involved in the creation Gypsy was a larger-than-life show-biz legend – June Havoc, Gypsy Rose Lee, their mother Rose Hovick, producer David Merrick, composer Jule Styne, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, author Arthur Laurents, director/choreographer Jerome Robbins, and – of course – the star of the show, the inimitable Ethel Merman. It was theatrical catnip.
It was also a story that fit right into what playwright Marsha Norman refers to as “our stuff,” in my case – misfits, mothers and mendacity.
After many false starts and many revisions spanning nearly a decade, Fable was named a Eugene O’Neill Semi-Finalist in 2019, and in 2021 it was published by Next Stage Press.
There have been several public readings of the piece, but no productions were forthcoming until a friend of mine, Emily Dupré (who had done several readings as both Gypsy and June) sent the script to Eric Davis, the Artistic Director at freeFall Theatre in St. Petersburg. Eric liked the script and gave it the opening slot in freeFall’s 2024/2025 season – directed by Eric – and I couldn’t be more thrilled.
I don’t know what June (or even Gypsy) would think of Fable – I like to think they’d be pleased. I do know that after a reading of the show in New York in 2022, a gentleman came up to me with tears in his eyes. He introduced himself as Josh Ellis, a former Broadway publicist who’d worked with June late in her career. “You caught her. You caught her wit, her charm, her anger, her sadness… it’s all there in this play. I wish she were here to see this, because I think she’d have loved it.”
I hope so. And I hope my play at least shines a spotlight on her side of the story and gets us to think about how we tell other people’s stories when we tell our own.
And I hope it entertains at the same time.
Fable. A Fable About A Musical Fable
Through September 8
freeFall Theatre
6099 Central Ave.
St. Pete FL 33710
Ticket information here
