Jeffrey Sweet: Striking Back

Here’s the thing about AI. It doesn’t have a soul, and it doesn’t understand psychology, and it doesn’t understand the quirks of human behavior. All it can do is strip-mine what has already been written by other people. So, AI is first and foremost in violation of copyright because it’s using our material without compensating. Secondly, it has no sense of humor and it has no sense of character and so the stuff that comes out of AI sounds very stilted. Third, audiences aren’t that stupid. They can tell when there’s life behind something and there isn’t.

I write scripts for stage (and sometimes for audio and the screen) and write articles and books about the theater.  Two of the books were about Second City and the O’Neill Center.

Jeffrey Sweet has had a split career. On the one hand, as a dramatist, he’s been writing plays and musicals that first were produced professionally in 1970. They have been produced off-Broadway in New York and on stages around the world, though he’s primarily identified with Chicago. He was part of the wave of writers, actors and directors who transformed Chicago’s off-Loop theater scene beginning in the Seventies.

As a resident writer of the Victory Gardens Theater, he saw thirteen of his plays produced there featuring actors such as William
Petersen, Amy Morton, Jon Cryer, Shelley Berman, Gary Cole and Tandy Cronyn. Titles include The Value of Names, Flyovers, Court-Martial at Fort Devens, Porch, The Action Against Sol Schumann, American Enterprise, Bluff and With and Without. Kunstler, a play about the legendary lawyer, premiered in New York and had successful runs elsewhere. He also collaborated on two off-Broadway musicals. One, based on Murray Schisgal’s hit comedy, Luv, played off-Broadway twice, featuring at different times Judy Kaye, Nathan Lane, Austin Pendleton, David Green and Steve Vinovich. The York Theater production was directed by the legendary Pat Birch, who went on to direct I Sent a Letter to My Love, which Jeff co-wrote with his old friend, Melissa Manchester. Along the way, Jeff also wrote a couple of hundred hours of television, working with Alan Bates, Ellen Burstyn and
Candice Bergen among many others.

The other part of Jeff’s career has been writing about theater. His book, Something Wonderful Right Away, was the first to tell the story of the Second City troupe and includes extended interviews with Mike Nichols, Paul Sills, Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner, Alan Alda, Stiller and Meara and many others.

In the late Fifties and Sixties, iconoclastic young rebels in Chicago opened two tiny theaters—The Compass and The Second City—where they satirized politics, religion, and sex. Building scenes by improvising based on audience suggestions turned out to be a fine way to develop great actors, directors, and writers. Alumni went on to create such groundbreaking works as The Graduate, Groundhog Day, and Don’t Look Up. Many of them also became stars on Saturday Night Live. Something Wonderful Right Away features the pioneers of the empire that transformed American comedy.
 

This new edition tells even more of the story. Included for the first time is an interview with Viola Spolin, the genius who invented theater games that were the foundation of improvisational theater. Also included are dozens of follow-up stories about Mike Nichols, Barbara Harris, Del Close, Joan Rivers, Alan Arkin, and Gilda Radner, plus “You Only Shoot the Ones You Love,” the story of how this book’s author, playwright Jeffrey Sweet, became so involved in the community he covered that he was captured by it.

What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing is a collection of interviews with playwrights, including Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, Lynn Nottage, Marsha Norman, Jules Feiffer and Donald Margulies. He also co-edited eleven editions of The Best Plays annual with Otis Guernsey.

He is a member of the Council of the Dramatists Guild, is a Tony voter, an alumnus of New Dramatists and a member of Ensemble Studio Theater. He teaches classes on Zoom The Negotiating Stage.

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