[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Coming up on the show today, Roz Chast will be here. She has a new book called I Must Be Dreaming. We'll hear all about the new Perelman Center down across from the World Trade Center. It is gorgeous, brand new, just opened up a whole new slate of programming. And Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth will be with us. He has a new memoir out called Sonic Life. That is all in the way, but let's get this started with the play I Need That.

[music]

Alison Stewart: A new play now in previews and opening on Broadway on November 2nd is called I Need That. It explores the relationship between memory, identity, and the stuff we accumulate over the course of our lives that remind us who we are and those who are no longer with us. Danny DeVito plays Sam, a jovial, big-hearted widower who just likes his stuff a lot, and the stories that go with the things like the busted-up TV that doesn't work, or the guitar maybe signed by someone he thinks is famous. Most of all, he prizes his late wife's belongings, clothing, and the books she used to read to keep her grounded as her dementia worsened.

The thing is, Sam has quite a bit of stuff, like there's-nowhere-to-sit-level stuff, bookcases that are leaning in piles upon piles upon piles and piles. He's a borderline hoarder. When a nosy neighbor reports his living conditions, it becomes clear he has to clean up or risk eviction by the authorities. His friend Foster, played by Ray Anthony Thomas, and his daughter Amelia, played by Lucy DeVito arrive -- She arrives armed with bubble wrap, boxes, and a lot of opinions about how he should live his life. Sam says it's a free country, and he's keeping his stuff. The play takes a complex, yet funny and touching look at why we keep what we keep, and how psychological traumas can entrench themselves, thanks to the thoughtful script by playwright Theresa Rebeck. She joins me now to talk about the play. Hi, Theresa.

Theresa Rebeck: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Also, along with us is Danny DeVito. Hi, Danny.

Danny DeVito: Hello. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm well. And Lucy DeVito, who's making her Broadway debut. Hi, Lucy.

Lucy DeVito: Hi. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm good, thanks. Theresa, you wrote this play with these two actors in mind --

Theresa Rebeck: Yes, definitively.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: What stuck out about them that you wanted to write a play for them that they could be in together?

Theresa Rebeck: Well, I had been talking to our director, Moritz von Stuelpnagel about-- This was during the pandemic, about working on a project during the pandemic, and he said, "What do you think of Danny and Lucy?" I was not as acquainted with Lucy's work. She's wonderful, and they showed me a little movie, and I said, "She's sensational." Then I'd known Danny's work for a long time, and I did get to see him in The Price, which was really electrifying to me. So, we got on the phone with them, because they really were looking for something to work on together. I talked about this idea, and then Danny was so full of stories, it immediately clicked, and so one of the big stories in the show is one of Danny's personal stories. Then there's a couple that are from my personal history, and then there are some that I made up. That's kind of how things went for us. They had an enormous amount of input. It was really a very collaborative process, like delightfully collaborative, especially since we were in the middle of the pandemic and thinking about a life beyond, which also is sort of-- echoes of that are in the play.

Alison Stewart: Danny, you smiled when you said a lot of stories.

Danny DeVito: Yes, there were a lot of stories. Well, we had a wonderful time working on it in that way, we were zooming each other. The great thing was Lucy brought Moritz into my life, and Moritz brought Theresa into our lives, and so from the very beginning, it was like a family affair. We did talk about personal things, all of us, three or four of us, and Theresa went off and wrote I Need That, and now we're up on the boards, and we're having a great time. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Lucy, how did you bring Moritz, Danny, and Theresa together?

Lucy DeVito: Well, I've known Moritz for many years now. We worked together at the Ensemble Studio Theater, which is where I first started working out of school. Then we just happened to be paired up working on this other benefit reading, and I convinced my dad to do it. This was over the pandemic, it was all on Zoom, whatever, and then that's when we reconnected. We were like, "If we ever get out of this pandemic and theater comes back, let's all work together again. That'd be fun." And he was like, "Do you know Theresa Rebeck?" I was like, "Yes."

[laughter]

It just organically came together in this really fun way, and we were all just like out of this pure desire and joy to want to create something together and work together.

Danny DeVito: When Theresa and Moritz, we all got together and started talking about it, the first place I thought of that I'd really like to bring it to if it ever emerged as anything -- We didn't know, we hadn't any idea at the time. I Todd Haimes was at the Roundabout, rest his soul. He was the first person that we all collectively said this would be something, and Todd was supportive right from the very beginning. A couple of years ago, I think, we did-- Theresa went off and wrote and came back with things. We talked on the Zoom, and she wrote and came back with things. Then we went to Todd, and he gave us four days at the Roundabout to just sit at a table, and that was really, really informative and great. Then again, Lucy and I and Moritz went off, and Theresa went and wrote, and we went back, and I think -- When was it that we went to Dorset, Vermont?

Theresa Rebeck: Last summer.

Danny DeVito: Last summer, we had another four-day workshop of I Need That in Dorset, Vermont. Lucy and I just went up, it was beautiful, Theresa's up there-- It's a great theater. We did the same thing, but this time, we worked on it for four days together with Moritz, and then we put it up on podiums. We just read it, and it was--

Theresa Rebeck: For a real audience.

Danny DeVito: For a real audience, and it was so much fun. It was just-- You knew that there was so much in the play, and so much to offer in the play, and it was a lot of fun for us. We brought Ray-- Ray came with us right from the very beginning, Ray Anthony Thomas, and that was also a great marriage of the whole as he blended in for both workshops.

Alison Stewart: The right chemistry.

Danny DeVito: Yes, chemistry.

Alison Stewart: You have the right chemistry. Theresa, there's a part in the play where Sam, Danny's character, is saying that all this stuff is like a tuning fork. Why is that the right simile for the way Sam thinks and feels about stuff?

Theresa Rebeck: Well, when I was writing it, I started to-- When you start down the road of discussing people who have way too much stuff, you know that's an unhealthy environment, and so I came at it with that attitude. Then the more time I spent with Sam in my head-- with Danny in my head, Sam in my head, and his relation to it, and listening to the stories that could emerge from some-- that he would pick up his glasses and say, "These glasses," and then-- Like, a world of storytelling would come out of that, which is very much rooted in Danny's character himself. Because seriously, you could say, "Oh look, here's a book on Mars," and then you'll get a two-hour story about his relationship to Mars, and I thought that's a really interesting characteristic.

I know that it's true that it's not just photographs that do that for us, but it's things that do that for us, and it became more and more evident to me. That's how this idea that the stuff is a tuning fork rose out of that. I will say, my brother came this weekend, and he's a neuroscientist. He literally said, as we were walking down the street, he said-- Because he thinks about how the brain works all the time, and [unintelligible 00:09:33]. Like, you get lectures about all of it. He's a great guy, but I know more about how the brain works than most people. He said, "That's a very interesting idea." He started thinking about it like a scientist, like the relationship to how that works. He's going to go see the play again and call me up and explain it to me.

Alison Stewart: Sam loves his stuff, but it also traps him.

Danny DeVito: Yes.

Alison Stewart: He doesn't leave the house, he doesn't have a phone that works. Why is he content to live like this?

Danny DeVito: Well, I think a lot of it has to do with Ginny, my wife who's passed away. Our life together was just wonderful. Having Lucy, Amelia, was a joy, and we shared everything. Before she was born, we went on vacation, we did things. We'd go traveling here and there, and Ginny was the kind of person who would just take a menu, or take a little trinket, or like some people take-- we did definitely take towels, and it's like that, you know?

[laughter]

Theresa Rebeck: Soap--

Danny DeVito: Soap, an ash tray from here, and a thing, but then it turned into other things. Like, you would have a moose head, or something, probably somewhere. There were things that just stuck to us, and they meant a lot. They meant a lot. They meant like where we were in our lives, at what point in our lives, and they were touchstones, they were things that you would look at. There is that line that Theresa wrote, "Memories don't just live inside, they all live around you," so there are things that-- the tuning fork played into that. I feel like, again, as you said, it can be a double-edged sword. It can be a trap, it can be something that will--

And then when I lost Ginny, I had no idea what to do. I had no clue about it. There are a lot of people in the world who lose loved ones and wind up with their things forever and ever. Thank goodness that I have a daughter, Amelia, who has her eye on me, and also wants to live her life. Sometimes you're blinded by your own feelings, and as much as I love her with all my heart, I maybe don't see everything. That's what the illumination of the play is for me.

Alison Stewart: Amelia is bossy. She marches right in and tells her dad what's what. In your version of her life that you made, the life for her up until we meet her at this point in her life, was she always like that?

Lucy DeVito: No--

Alison Stewart: It's a situation?

Lucy DeVito: No, I think that she has a different confidence-- When she's with her dad or when she was with her mom, she's a different person than how she is in her regular life. She's very good at hiding things as well, and I think that there's a side of her that comes out when she is with her father that he's the only one who can activate that. I think in her day-to-day life, she's not particularly bossy at all. I think she kind of blends in, and is a good student, is a good worker, and just kind of is trying to find her place and is not totally confident in where that lies. She does know that when she is home with her dad, she knows that she needs to help him, but the only way that she knows how to communicate that to him is by being somewhat abrasive and kind of wanting to slap him out of it.

Theresa Rebeck: Yes. Actually, I think you have to take very seriously the phrase "They love her at her work," and that she loves that job. I think she's extremely successful because I think she is a clear thinker, she's a great employee, she loves being in relationship to other people at work. But at home, she is frankly out of control in a way that I think more and more of us feel when our parents get older. We have to negotiate the fact that their world is shrinking, and that we have to help it shrink, and that causes enormous stress in their hearts and on the relationship I think.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the play I Need That. My guests are Danny DeVito and Lucy DeVito, they're the actors in the play. Theresa Rebeck, she wrote it. Danny, how do you navigate that set safely? [laughs] The set has much on it, and I think that is a little bit part of the tension, is will Sam hurt himself? But then I was thinking, will Danny hurt himself on the stage?

Danny DeVito: [laughs] Yes. It's a great thing because when you read it, you go, "Okay," and Theresa's saying there's so much stuff in the room and all that. Then as we developed it and went on, once we brought it to New York to rehearse it seriously in a rehearsal hall and gathered things, all anybody could say was, "We want more stuff." Like boxes, this, that, the other thing, tables, furniture-

Theresa Rebeck: Records.

Danny DeVito: -records, this, hair brushes--

Theresa Rebeck: Model cars.

Danny DeVito: -board games, everything you can imagine that over the years, besides trinkets and things that they've accumulated that they keep, like [unintelligible 00:16:26] or toys, or stuff that they didn't want to part with that reminded them of all of the different wonderful times that they had. You're right, at one point I got on stage, I think when we first got to the theater, and we have this beautiful set, and it's beautiful-- The art direction and the production design, gorgeous. The costumes, the whole thing, and the mechanics of it. It is a turntable set, which does draw you in a little bit. Like in The Price when we did the Arthur Miller play, that you had the entire proscenium to work from corner to corner. We still do, but there is a confine of space, and so you are navigating plugs, and wires, and ironing boards, and this and that, and the other thing, and sometimes I felt like-- you feel like you're [unintelligible 00:17:26]. It's like you're turning around in circles spinning like a top. It's fun.

Alison Stewart: We get some hints that things aren't going well with Amelia-- I won't give anything away-- with Amelia, but she isn't honest with her dad about her problems. Why isn't she honest with her dad at first about what's going on with her personally?

Lucy DeVito: Well, I think that she has a lot of unexplored trauma that she's dealing with, and I think her way of trying to combat any sort of stress and stuff is to just put it on him. She's sort of in denial of the stuff that she has to deal with and carries so much shame. She's very insecure and very scared of being vulnerable. I think that especially in this dynamic of her feeling like she has to take care of her dad in his old age-- Is he losing his mind? Is he healthy? All this stuff, I don't think that she feels like she can show weakness, and that she has to be very strong. So, I think that whatever kind of stuff she's going through in her own life, she can't admit it to her dad. She can't admit it to him.

Alison Stewart: Can I just add here?

Lucy DeVito: Sure.

Alison Stewart: It's a really funny play.

Lucy DeVito: Yes, it is.

Alison Stewart: It's so funny.

Theresa Rebeck: No, it's very funny.

Alison Stewart: It's got all this stuff going on, but it's just-- it's hilarious.

Lucy DeVito: Yes, totally. Good point.

Theresa Rebeck: What is it that we're all doing?

Lucy DeVito: I know. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: I'm so -- I don't want give time to this, but I wrote a book about this about.

Danny DeVito: Oh really?

Alison Stewart: It's called Junk: Digging Through America's Love Affair with Stuff, and all the things that you're talking about, and the attachments, and everything, you got it. Let me just say you got it right. What is something that each of these actors brought to your characters that you didn't know about that character, but these two actors ignited?

Theresa Rebeck: Well, I have to say, since I've seen so much of Danny's work, I didn't-- He ignited the storytelling aspect of it because he has so many stories in him. When I thought about writing for Danny, I knew so much about what I'd seen in his work over the years, but I didn't know that. I knew that you would get a hilarious line reading and some really odd line readings. I have to say that's one of my favorite things, I just go, "How is he doing that?" I'm very fascinated by comedy. A lot of my plays are comedies, and I'm just dazzled by watching somebody else who really knows how to do it, the choices he makes. There's a kind of technical aspect to it that delights me utterly. Stuff I never thought of, and you go, "I can't believe that line reading. That's hilarious."

Alison Stewart: Who says Ohio like that?

[laughter]

Theresa Rebeck: Right. When he goes, "Oh, God. Oh, God." That's one thing. Then with Lucy, I didn't know her work, and I think it's deeply honest, also really funny. I mean, there's only-- Not everybody can do my plays, because you do have to have a big [unintelligible 00:21:18] and also be good with language, and also have that comic timing. And so it was sort of a delight to get introduced to a young actress who has that whole skill set. Also, I have to say, she revealed to me how much I worry about one of my sisters, who is an exact-- Because the more I watched her, the more I went, "Oh, you're writing about Martha," without knowing that that's what I was doing. I think that's because her work is so honest, just keeps going to the heart of, what are we exploring here?

Alison Stewart: What does your kid do well on stage?

Danny DeVito: Everything. She's just like there for us every second. I've always known that Lucy had the chops, the goods, the feeling, the soul, the heart, the intellect, and it's just great to see it in a play like I Need That where it's like a flower growing, or a garden growing, all these things bursting out. It's like watching the petals just open up to the sun, and looking at the-- Not to get too Chauncey Gardner on you, but it's really a joy to see all of the work that she's done on her instrument, as we say, come to fruition in this play. I think it's exciting to think of what's going to come from this for her because it's a joy to be up there.

Alison Stewart: The name of the play is I Need That. I believe it was just extended.

Danny DeVito: Yes.

Theresa Rebeck: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: Excellent. My guests have been Danny DeVito, Lucy DeVito, and playwright Theresa Rebeck. Thank you so much for coming to the studio.

Lucy DeVito: Thank you.

Theresa Rebeck: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It.

 

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