February 26-March 3, 2004

art

Design for Living

A Stahl is re-born: Stephen Stahl comes back to Philly to direct River Huston's one-woman show. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Director and playwright Stephen Stahl returns with the unconventionality that made him notorious.

by A.D. Amorosi

Substance abuse. Desperate women. Bisexuality. Drag queens. Strippers.

That’s not a guide to plays written or directed by Stephen Stahl, his black-box escapades in Philadelphia, or his respected shows in Great Britain’s West End. It’s an introduction to Stahl’s life.

Yes, he studied under Lee Strasberg, placed Porno Stars at Home at Torano's and staged Charles Busch at TropWorld. Yes, he directed Dee Dee Bridgewater (as Billie Holiday, in his most traveled play, Lady Day, which he also wrote), Divine, Grace Jones, Debralee Scott and Mink Stole, and now he's directing poet/HIV activist River Huston in a frank, one-woman multimedia show -- something Stahl hasn't done in Philly since Judy at the Stonewall Inn ran at the Shubin Theater in 1998.

But Stahl is his own best creation, an innovative director whose talents for writing tales about troubled women were rivaled only by his own troublesome life, and a man whose need for speed (literally and figuratively) ran as deep as his luck in finding new spaces for theater in this city (Grendel's Lair and Ripley's on South Street, Odette's in New Hope) when there was little going on.

Listening to his gravelly voiced stories leaves little room for little going on: Wynnefield native quits school in seventh grade, takes his bar mitzvah money and runs to New Orleans with a woman who'd become his first wife at age 17, despite her knowing he was gay. "It was the '60s," chuckles the 55-year-old Stahl. He says he he's currently separated from a male partner of 27 years, a relationship almost as long as the one Stahl had with cocaine and alcohol. "We both wanted to make certain sobriety was of utmost importance in our lives," says Stahl, a onetime functioning everything-oholic, who, after growing notoriously dependent, got tired of those addictions. "I did rehabs, gay rehabs," he sneers. "Nothing worked, until now -- through AA and the grace of God. See, if it were up to me, I'd be sitting around with an eightball and a bottle of booze."

His sense of daring and guileless honesty is evident in his writing, like his rendering of lonely junkie and artiste Billie Holiday in Lady Day, a tale Stahl wrote one Christmas Day in 1979. That's par for a guy who -- artistically, egotistically -- can willingly stage shows for 10 people in clubs and galleries like Grendel's or Ripley's as well as London's Piccadilly Theater. "That's theater any place you can give a show breath and legs is, to me, the excitement of what that art, any art, is," says Stahl. "Theater's my life."

Stahl started at a time, the mid-'70s, when Philadelphia theater meant People's Light, the Neighborhood Playhouse and Society Hill Playhouse -- highly creative enterprises that produced full seasons. "Painted Bride was just starting a storefront on South. I don't think [Blanka and Jiri Zizka] had even built the Wilma on Sansom," he says. "What little there was, was great. Other than that, Philly theater was a yawn."

It was that void that led Stahl to bring theater into unlikely venues, like Ripley's and Bank Street and a few in New Hope, a getaway lacking in theater cachet. By 1988, while his Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All was at Theater of the Living Arts, a need for respite and an attempt to quell his boredom sent him to New Hope. He moved there and took on Showcase Productions for shows like Leader of the Pack and Odette's for experimental drag works like Sophie, Totie and Belle. Showcase Productions didn't last, but Stahl's love of taboos and funny, troubled women did.

"I guess it's all that unresolved stuff with all the women -- and men -- in my life that makes my plays most torchy, ones that play on my heart. Back then, I had to place all the bullshit into other characters, women like Billie Holiday."

Stahl's women-in-trouble motif does not figure into Huston's world premiere, Sex, Cellulite and Large Farm Equipment: One Girl's Guide to Living and Dying. Huston goes against the grain of his usual characters in that neither she nor Stahl see her raw and funny life as trouble. Speaking of Huston's humor in relation to her HIV-positive status, Stahl says, "She's as unique an orator as she is a survivor, in that she turns everything over to God and carries on with her days. ... "It's not easy for people to reach that point. Maybe it's taken all her life to get to that point, to be able to realize that tale as comedy. But now she can say exactly what is going on, one day at a time."

Huston marvels at Stahl's ability to turn what was previously a lecture/comedy performance into a fully staged work. "Stephen really understood how to change a very funny, inspirational lecture into a full production," Huston says. "We have added music, dance, video, slides, lights, slam poems and animal acts to really transform a good lecture into a real show. At times I didn't feel it could work, but now after much rehearsal I am convinced that it really is flowing, funny, poignant performance that does not even resemble anything like a lecture."

Since it's taken a large part of Stahl's life for him to find one-day-at-a-time salvation -- as well as an ability to tell his own tale, as in his just-completed, semi-autobiographical work Hope Falls -- this meeting of the minds should be as singularly Stahl as it is thrillingly theatrical.

Sex, Cellulite and Large Farm Equipment: One Girl’s Guide to Living and Dying, March 1-28, $30-$35, Society Hill Playhouse, 507 S. Eighth St., 215-923-0211.