A Unique View of the City
Award-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, a lifelong New Yorker, takes his audience uptown.
Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis (pronounced GEAR-giss), now age 51, has spent most of his life in Manhattan, and his writing expresses a certain New York state of mind. While his plays bring universal emotions to life, they are also reflective of particular city locales. You won’t find Mr. Guirgis lingering in glitzy tourist hubs or trendy Brooklyn hipster havens. His sweet spot is in a whole different direction: uptown, where the Upper West Side meets Harlem.
This is the area where Mr. Guirgis was raised and went to school, and it is the setting of Between Riverside and Crazy, which was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Darkly comedic and deeply moving, the play was inspired by Mr. Guirgis’ own experiences. “I think anything that anyone writes that’s any good is going to have a lot of autobiography," he once told The Wall Street Journal.
The night his mother passed away, Mr. Guirgis moved back into the family’s Riverside Drive apartment. He wanted to be there to give his dad support. What ensued over the next few years was sparring between a feisty father and a son who was having a hard time facing adult responsibilities. Elements of this relationship were the foundation of Between Riverside and Crazy.
The sizzling market for Riverside Drive real estate and the very New York-centric rules of rent control, things that Mr. Guirgis had to deal with in his life, also became part of his play. When his mother was alive, their home was beautifully kept and orderly. But father and son on their own in the apartment attracted a motley assortment of visitors, some of whom never left. The once-immaculate home became disheveled and the landlord tried to use this neglect to evict them.
Another new member of the household was a dog named Papi. People kept telling Mr. Guirgis that he should get his father a dog for company. “I got this crazy, two-time rescue Chihuahua mix from an old girlfriend,” Mr. Guirgis told a London newspaper last year. “It gave him something to complain, care, and talk about. Now my dad has died and I’m still in the same apartment I grew up in,stuck with Papi. He runs the house,” Mr. Guirgis said. The dog, hilariously, also found his way into the play.
On stage, Mr. Guirgis’ characters embrace the diversity of his upbringing uptown, with its active street life, colorful language, and blend of ethnicities. “His urban voice is startlingly fresh,” said writer John Heilpern in The New York Observer. Mr. Guirgis’ own parents were also a mix and match of multiculturalism. His father, who was from Egypt, met his Irish-American wife when she was visiting Cairo. The couple married and started their family in New York, where the elder Mr. Guirgis ran the landmark Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal.
The playwright’s mother, a devout Catholic, sent him to Corpus Christi grammar school on 121st Street. Later, Our Lady of 121st Street became the title of one of his most famous works. In that play a group of former students—Anglo, Latino and African-American—get together at a Harlem funeral home for a deceased nun’s viewing. If the plot sounds sweetly sentimental, consider that her body is stolen and one of the characters starts his confession with: “Bless me father for I have sinned— a lot, know what I’m sayin?”
Also noting an uptown icon is his title Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, a reference to the subway line that connects Harlem and upper Manhattan with points south. In that play two men jailed on Rikers Island in the East River argue about God. According to Manhattan-based Jesuit James Martin, Mr. Guirgis’ play “helped open a window into theological questions for those normally put off by such topics.”
Father Martin assisted LAByrinth Theater in developing The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, also written by Mr. Guirgis. Five of his plays started at LAByrinth (a non-profit West Village company) and were directed by his best friend, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is more widely known as the late Oscar-winning actor.
In 2011 Mr. Guirgis’ play The Motherf***er With the Hat was produced on Broadway, a short distance physically but a world away from his usual New York haunts. Nominated for six Tony Awards, the cast included superstar Chris Rock, who gave the playwright a Rolex as an opening night gift. “I was blown away,” Mr.Guirgis said of the watch. “It’s probably the most valuable thing I own, so if all this comes crashing down at least I could hock it.”
But Mr. Guirgis’ career shows no signs of abating. He once taught improvisational theater classes in schools and prisons and sometimes works as an actor (look for him in a pivotal cameo in the 2015 Academy Award-winning movie, Birdman). While he has written for TV programs in the past, including “NYPD Blue” and “The Sopranos,” this year was Mr. Guirgis’ most extensive foray into television. With film director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!, The Great Gatsby), he co-created the 13-episode Netflix series, “The Get Down.”
A musical drama set in the late 1970s, “The Get Down” tells the story of early hip-hop and how kids in the South Bronx changed the soundtrack of the city, and eventually the world. Since the Bronx is in Mr. Guirgis’ upper New York City comfort zone, all he needed to do for research was hop the ‘D’ train.