Beatts directs ‘Pants on Fire’
Former ‘SNL’ writer chooses a new path in one-woman play
By Barbara Hernandez
Daily Bruin Staff
Former "Saturday Night Live" writer Anne Beatts finds it hard
not to be homesick.
Originally from New York, Beatts grew up in various parts of the
East Coast, but something always called her back to her native
ground.
In 1975, when "Saturday Night Live" first started, Beatts was
one of its founding mothers.
"The good thing about ‘Saturday Night Live’ was you didn’t have
to get up early, got the summers off and lived in New York," she
says, living her dream of a glamorous New York life. (It wasn’t
until the last two years she was willing to give up her New York
status for Los Angeles. Previously she just said she worked in
L.A., disregarding her Hollywood apartment).
She lasted there until 1979, with one short stint in 1985 as a
guest writer. Instead of merely writing she created her critically
acclaimed series "Square Pegs" in 1982-83 season. "It’s really hard
to sell a series about young girls," she says. "But there’s a new
show on that’s kind of Square Peggian. Have you seen it, ‘My
So-Called Life’?"
"It’s 86 in the rankings," she says, adding that at Thursday at
8 it seems as if ABC is just throwing it away. "I was really
wishing it well. If it fails it just makes it harder to sell the
next time."
Now she’s working on Jane Brucker’s one-woman play "Pants on
Fire", in which she directs. "The most challenging aspect was
trying to find a place to rehearse while the theater was under
construction," she laughs. They managed to escape the noise and
activity by rehearsing on the fire escape next to the XXX Adult
Theater.
The other challenge was directing a one-woman play. "It’s a
play, not just a show," Beatts says. "We really tried to construct
it as a play, even though there’s only one person on stage."
Working on the expression and interpretation was very time
consuming, where both Beatts and playwright Drucker finding they
could work a half-hour on one line of text.
Both met through Judy Belushi in New York. "We always wanted to
work together, I really wanted to work with her," she says. "There
I was, 1:00 and reading pages on a bar stool."
Taking a chance on each other, they decided to work on it with
Drucker moving to Los Angeles last year. "We wanted to make it a
female voice and a female point of view  without alienating
men," says Beatts, and after a dry run at the Melrose theater for
friends, which pointed out the flaws they decided to make a go of
it. After a showcase presentation at the Tiffany Theater, they
started looking at the incidentals.
"I tried to honor the text and to bring out everything in the
text that shouls be brought out," says Beatts, a self-described
tough critic. "Every night some scene will be better than
others….There will be fluctuation, that’s life. If it was all the
same it would be dead."
Often some lines would afffect different audiences differently,
and both Brucker and Beatts had to prepare for no laughs and some
laughs where there was no real joke. "’Step on over to this fern
and pull my labia apart’ is pretty much a guaranteed," she
laughs.
Any helpful hints for SNL? Beatts sighs. "There’s this article
in Newsweek ‘Dear Saturday Night, it’s over. Please die’ and they
quoted me as saying (I said this years ago!) ‘A show can only be
avant-garde for so long before it becomes garde.’" Regardless of
the statement, Beatts hopes it stays on. "I feel there isn’t enough
social comment or satire on television–even if 60 percent of the
show isn’t good," she says. "It feels like some spoiled white boy
sensibility that I just don’t get behind…it all seems from one
position or one attitude and it’s not diverse enough."
She quickly orders a water. "Until something on TV gets better
I’m watching cop shows."