INTERVIEW: Playwright Warren Leight is back on the ‘Home Front’
Photo: Austin Highsmith Garces and C.J. Lindsey star in Home Front. Photo courtesy of Tim Sullens / Provided by Lucy Pollak PR with permission.
Warren Leight, the successful playwright and former showrunner of Law & Order: SVU, has a lot of theatrical credits to his name, including the Tony-winning Side Man, which ran on Broadway almost 25 years ago. One of his most acclaimed plays is Home Front, which is set at the end of World War II in 1945. The drama is currently receiving a revival thanks to the Victory Theatre Center in Burbank, California. Performances run through Feb. 19.
In the show, Austin Highsmith Garces and C.J. Lindsey star as a white woman and African American soldier who fall in love once the war comes to an end, according to press notes. There’s an ebullience in the air because the deadly conflict is now finished, but the discrimination of the mid-20th century is still prevalent — and that tests James and Annie’s relationship.
“I was thrilled,” Leight said about the revival. “I went twice this weekend, and I couldn’t be happier with the Victory Theatre or the cast. Every once in a while you get lucky. Mostly you don’t, but every once in a while you do. It’s a lovely group of people to work with, completely committed to making the play work. I feel like I lucked out.”
The play, which is directed by Victory Theatre Center’s co-artistic director Maria Gobetti, was partly influenced by Leight’s growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He said there were many interracial couples in his neighborhood, and he knew of the prejudices they faced. So he began piecing together a plot, and he thought of the iconic World War II photograph depicting a man and woman kissing in Times Square at the end of the war.
“And then I tried to figure out, well, how do you tell that story,” he asked himself. “I remembered that photo, the Times Square photo, and I thought, that’s the night. V-J Day is like a day of infinite impossibility, and what would have happened if that kiss was an interracial kiss? Would that photo have ever made the covers of magazines? I guess not would be my quick answer.”
Leight started to explore the topic of what happened during the war to marginalized communities and what happened to them after the war. As one example, he noted that women received jobs that they weren’t allowed to perform in the past, but then they often lost those jobs when the military personnel arrived back home.
“All these marginalized people in our society were needed to step up and did step up, and maybe the hope was they could stay on the step they claimed,” Leight said. “And, of course, the boys came home, and the pendulum swung back. And it swung back virulently in the south. Really the second worst period of Jim Crow in southern history was after World War II, which is something I don’t think people are aware of. I found that to be another part of the story worth telling.”
The play has been around for quite some time, but it found its way to the Victory Theatre Center thanks to Gobetti and Garces. Here’s how it landed in Burbank: There was a reading of Home Front approximately five years ago, and Leight touted the reading on Twitter. Garces, who plays Annie, saw the Twitter posts and was interested in the drama. She told Gobetti, and the rest is history.
“Over time she brought it to Maria,” the playwright said of Garces’ inspiration. “I had to have faith that Austin knew a good theater, and I liked the looks of the theater. We had some good conversations. We did a Zoom reading of it, and I think it was, ‘I’ll take a chance on you, if you guys will take a chance on me.’ So we got lucky, and the other part of it was I flew out in December for five days of rehearsal, and that was for me wonderful to be back in the rehearsal room. It was in very good shape. I could tell the cast was the right cast for it, but it was the kind of cast where you could say, ‘Let me change this. Can I try this? What if we did this?’ And they were open to all the changes, so I got to do more work on it then I had thought I might be able to. … It was more than just handing it off and wishing them well, but not a full immersion, not to the point where I drove anyone crazy, I hope.”
When Leight recently enjoyed a performance of the play, he was quite moved. One character in the play — the upstairs neighbor Edward, played by Jonathan Slavin — struck a particular chord for the writer. This character is based on the playwright’s uncle, who was a gay man during the depicted time period.
“Gay men during the war I think people were willing to look the other way,” Leight said. “And he was wounded in World War II, so I had always wanted to tell his story, too. I haven’t seen a lot of stories about gay soldiers in World War II. … It’s a lot of my childhood experiences filtered through a different prism, I guess I’d say.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Home Front, written by Warren Leight, continues through Feb. 19 at the Victory Theatre Center in Burbank, California. Click here for more information and tickets.
