"Enemy" between friends: Theater partnership in evidence at Intiman

It was a typical first date. Encouraged by mutual friends and co-workers, they met over dinner at a Manhattan restaurant. There was a little nervousness at first, some chitchat to break the ice. But soon the two strangers started clicking, as they discovered how much they had in common. A second date was sure to follow — and many, many more.

It was not romance that brought Bartlett Sher and Craig Lucas together, that night in New York in 2001. But it was the desire for a partnership — an artistic connection that has flourished far beyond the expectations of either Sher, prominent stage director and artistic head of Intiman Theatre, or Craig Lucas, award-winning playwright ("Prelude to a Kiss") and filmmaker ("The Secret Lives of Dentists").

Though both men are bicoastal, their creative alliance began and has thrived in Seattle. It started with a revelatory production of the disturbing Lucas drama, "The Dying Gaul," which the author says "no regional theater wanted to touch" after its Off Broadway debut was vigorously panned in The New York Times. (Lucas said he learned so much from Sher's stark, trenchant staging, it made him excited to helm the 2005 movie version of the play.)

Since then, at Intiman, these two men have amassed many more joint credits: With composer Adam Guettel, they forged a hit Tony Award-honored Broadway musical together ("The Light in the Piazza"), reinterpreted a pair of Chekhov plays (most recently, "Uncle Vanya") and collaborated on the award-winning Lucas epic, "Singing Forest."

Currently they are hammering out the kinks in a new Lucas drama of love, war and family, "Prayer for My Enemy," starting previews Friday at Intiman.

A few years ago, this artistic marriage was formalized when Lucas became the associate artistic director of Intiman.

What does that mean? Lucas has directed, served as dramaturg, and by phone or in person chats with Sher on many artistic matters "once a day." Make that "at least" twice a day, according to Sher's wife, actress Kristin Flanders.

In a theatrical field where playwrights are rarely attached to a specific theater or director, Sher and Lucas have a nonexclusive but unusually tight and productive bond.

"I'm a person of fairly long-term relationships, in friendship and marriage and work, and I think they're much more valuable ultimately," explained Sher recently, over coffee one busy morning in his Queen Anne condo.

"Absolutely," concurred Lucas, the more animated and voluble of the two men. "This relationship with Bart and Intiman is really a gift.

"Bart and I would be friends whether we worked together or not," he reflected, "but we're both people who understand ourselves through our work. It's not like life is over here and work over there. It's all one thing."

Sher nodded a vigorous amen to that. Yet he admits that, like any close-knit couple with a lot at stake, he and Lucas have had to make some adjustments to one another.

What has helped most, believes Lucas, is his own decision to stop drinking a year ago. "I was in this cycle of resentment and anger. Now I don't need to go around spitting nails anymore. When I was drinking, Bart had to lay down some rules on how I behaved with him — well, just one."

The edict: Lucas was never again to use a certain profane epithet during a phone conversation with Sher, and then hang up on him.

But while their temperaments may vary, both men are on the same wavelength about what theater should and can be.

Lucas was particularly glad to again find a creative soulmate, after the loss of his longtime artistic partner Norman René. He and René, who died in 1996 of complications from AIDS, began working together in 1980 on a hit Sondheim revue, "Marry Me a Little."

Their many director-writer collaborations included the stage and screen versions of the romantic seriocomedy "Prelude to a Kiss"; the early film about a gay community coping with AIDS, "Longtime Companion"; and the hit Off-Broadway play "Blue Window."

"I had to learn Norman and Bart are very different in the way they work," Lucas noted. "But Bart has an aesthetic and a vision, and I knew I could learn something from him besides how to get more laughs. Like Norman, he also believes you can make the world better with theater."

Lucas is also grateful that Sher "doesn't approach every play like it's broken... . Plays are not meant to be perfect. The neat ones generally win the Pulitzer Prizes, but they're often not as interesting as the messier ones."

Sher says he's fascinated by the sometimes messy mingling of comedy and tragedy in Lucas plays, and sees their shifting tonalities as a dynamic challenge. "I pretend modern plays are classics," says the veteran Shakespeare director. "I look at them and think, 'How do we do this?' Not, 'How do we fix this?'"

Though both men spend a lot of time in New York, they appreciate being able to seed and nurture their work in Seattle, far from the media glare and commercial expectations of New York. Lucas claims that having his plays reach Broadway is no longer so important to him.

His latest, "Prayer for My Enemy," is "the most complex dramatic organism that Craig has ever given to me," says Sher.

The play concerns the fraught relationship between two boyhood buddies, who meet after years apart as one is about to go on his first military tour of duty in Iraq. Their reunion is complicated by family pressures and their own internal conflicts.

After some juggling of the cast, the show will feature noted Seattle players John Procaccino, Cynthia Lauren Tewes and Kimberly King, along with James McMenamin and Daniel Zaitchik as the two long-estranged friends.

In Sher's view, it's a piece about "a family torn apart by alcoholism and war, interwoven with the narrative of a woman caring for her mother.

"It's very difficult and exciting to work on this play... . It's a kind of topography of emotional life in America with all its intricacies, love, ambiguities and uncertainty."

Lucas would not define the theme, saying he just wants to tell "a compelling story, and the juice for that rises up out of darkness."

Busy directing a film in New York ("Laws of Motion," starring Matthew Perry and Hilary Swank), Lucas has had few days to attend rehearsals in Seattle for "Prayer for My Enemy." (He maintains an apartment here.)

But the writer is happy to leave the script in the hands of a trusted colleague who "has the skill and the curiosity and the devotion to craft" to meet its demands. And who, by the way, considers Craig Lucas to be "the best writer we have."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com