INTERVIEW: ‘Only Yesterday’ finds John and Paul stuck in a motel room together
Photo: Tommy Crawford and Christopher Sears star in Only Yesterday at 59E59 Theaters. Photo courtesy of Carol Rosegg / Provided with permission.
Only Yesterday, the new play written by Bob Stevens and directed by Carol Dunne, is currently playing a sold-out run through Sept. 29 at 59E59 Theaters in New York City. The show, which grew out of a one-act submission to a Liverpool theater contest, imagines Paul McCartney and John Lennon hanging out in a motel room as their tour was disrupted by a hurricane in Florida.
Stevens is a writer best known for his work on The Wonder Years, Murphy Brown and Malcolm in the Middle. The setting is not a luxury hotel, but a cheap dive in Key West. The two famous musicians get drunk, have some laughs and find inspiration for the music that would change the world.
“I was driving to get my daughter’s skis in Vermont where we live, and I heard an old rebroadcast of an interview with Paul McCartney,” Stevens said in a recent phone interview. “And he referenced this incident. I had been a lifelong Beatles fan, and I had never heard this story about how one night he and John Lennon were kind of stuck in a motel room because a hurricane during their 1964 tour had disrupted their travel. They wound up in Key West and with nothing to do right after the storm, so they just got really drunk. Everyone kind of forgets how young they were when all this remarkable Beatlemania is happening.”
Stevens said he was riveted by this revelation, and he immediately thought the scenario could work as a play — with some creative license, of course. In his mind, he billed it as “two guys stuck in a motel room during a hurricane and finally coming to terms about some traumatic stuff from their past.”
He didn’t actually put pen to paper until Stevens’ wife notified him of a Beatles-themed contest out of Liverpool, where the Fab Four grew up. Stevens wrote a one-act and became a finalist in the competition. He traveled to England and, lo and behold, won the top prize.
“Then when I got back home, a mutual friend, Edie Morgan, gave it to Carol, the artistic director at Northern Stage, who loved it and asked me over for coffee,” he remembers. “She asked if I’d ever thought of expanding it and maybe adding music. I kind of secretly had always thought, wow, maybe I could do that. … And that doesn’t always work, turning a one-act into a full-length play, but I did it. And we had some readings, and then we had the production in Vermont. We got pretty lucky with casting and set design and getting song rights.”
All of the content in the one-act has been transplanted into the current play, which is longer and goes deeper into the lives of these iconic characters. Stevens focuses on how McCartney and Lennon were in such a pressure cooker, and they were so young to be facing the world as sought-after musicians.
“They had to write on the fly — on buses, on planes and in these motel rooms and hotel rooms — so it was just a great venue to have them messing around with songs and not only trying to write their own songs but arguing over what songs to cover because at that stage, very early on, they were covering a lot of their heroes of rock ‘n’ roll,” he said. “There’s a stretch in which they kind of reminisce about how they met and started writing together and how they were fans themselves. That’s kind of a fun thing about it. They related to Elvis [Presley] and Chuck Berry the way everyone was relating to them, so we get to see kind of the music they grew up loving and the stuff that influenced them.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Only Yesterday, written by Bob Stevens, is currently playing a sold-out run through Sept. 29 at 59E59 Theaters in New York City. Click here for more information.
