Early last Friday afternoon, the playwright-director Moisés Kaufman was at the Acorn Theater on 42nd Street, eager to tweak the penultimate scene of his new show, "One Arm." The night before, at the play's first preview performance, he had seen something that irked him. "I was in the last row, and it was the only scene when people were fidgeting," he told actors Clayborne Elder on Todd Lawson as they stood on the spare, dark set. "The audience is getting ahead of you guys."
Mr. Kaufman wanted his actors to render the audience immobile with a startling moment of connection at the end of a tragic, dissociated journey in the gay underworld. It comes about through the characters' reading and writing of letters, and through a timid unburdening of their true sexuality.
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Mustafah Abdulaziz for the Wall Street Journal
Moisés Kaufman at a rehearsal for his new play 'One Arm.'
It's a lot to unpack, but the source material demands it. "One Arm" is adapted from a 1948 short story by Tennessee Williams about a Navy boxing champion named Ollie Olsen (played by Mr. Elder) who loses a limb, as well as other more intangible parts of himself, in a car accident and turns to prostitution and violence. Williams based the character on a hustler he knew in New Orleans, and he was pre-occupied enough with the story 20 years later to begin what he called "an experimental film-play" adaptation, which was never produced.
Mr. Kaufman is the first to bring the "One Arm" screenplay to the stage. "I think that there's something fantastically paradoxical about choosing a screenplay to explore how theater speaks," the director said, smiling.
And yet the trouble with paradoxical enterprises is that they're, well, tricky. Mr. Kaufman's initial attempt to stage "One Arm," in a 2004 production in Chicago, suffered from "a meandering quality," he said. "I needed to cut to the essence of it."
Which is, put simply, sex and writing. "Tennessee Williams said the only time he felt truly alive was when he was dealing with the page, or dealing with a body," Mr. Kaufman said, employing more delicate language than Williams did in his original quote. It is precisely Williams's directness about homosexuality in "One Arm" that drew Mr. Kaufman, who has produced some of the finest gay and transgender-themed theater of the past decade. Sex is front and center in the story, which comprises, for the most part, a series of scenes between Ollie and his clients. "In my opinion of Williams's work," Mr. Kaufman said, "this is the frankest look at a certain kind of homosexual world."
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Mustafah Abdulaziz for the Wall Street Journal
He directs actors Clayborne Elder, center, and Todd Lawson.
He isn't the only New York-based theater artist to pursue Williams's oft-dismissed later works during this, the legendary playwright's centennial year; at least five other plays have run on Broadway and off recently, including the Wooster Group's "Vieux Carré" and the Roundabout Theatre's "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore." As for the well-worn narrative that Williams peaked early in his career before collapsing psychologically and creatively, Mr. Kaufman countered that the playwright grew in sophistication and experimentation before his death in 1983. "It has taken us many, many years to see where he was headed," he said, "to have the theatrical vocabulary, in terms of what can happen on the stage, and how stories can be told, to keep up with his later work."
Keeping up with Mr. Kaufman's work isn't easy, either. Since arriving in the U.S. to study at NYU's Experimental Theatre Wing in 1987, the 47-year-old Venezuelan-born artist has created a string of unlikely, high-minded hits, like "The Laramie Project" and the Tony-winning "I Am My Own Wife," often through his Tectonic Theater Project. His most recent directorial production, "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo," opened in March at the Richard Rodgers Theatre with Robin Williams in the starring role.
On Friday, a few blocks from the Rodgers, Mr. Kaufman and his actors were getting back to work. The director sometimes stood in for a performer to try out an idea. Or he'd sit on a nearby chair onstage with his eyebrows in furrowed attention. Still dissatisfied, and with issues still lingering, he decided to dive back into the text.
Of course, there isn't simply one text to go back to. Since 2002, when Mr. Kaufman first began working with this material, he has used every draft that he and his dramaturge, David G. Schultz, could find of Williams's short story and screenplay—and there were many. A lesser version of the scene would look like two men simply reading letters; the one that Williams designed was a kind of mutual and wrenching emotional breakthrough. In which draft would Mr. Kaufman find the detail or the scenic direction that would bring his actors and his audience to a transformative, universal moment?
"Moisés has been obsessed with the story, and Tennessee was obsessed with the story," said the New Group artistic director Scott Elliott, who is co-producing "One Arm" with the Tectonic Theater Project. But Mr. Elliot's confidence in Mr. Kaufman showed. "He digs deep, looking for clues that will make the play sharper and more vivid."
This kind of "detective work," as Mr. Kaufman called it, recalls his extensive research on Oscar Wilde and Ludwig van Beethoven for his plays "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" and "33 Variations," respectively. But will it be sufficient to open up a "lost" and fragmented work of Tennessee Williams? That will be up to New York's hyper-discerning theater community when "One Arm" opens June 9 at the Acorn.
As for Mr. Kaufman, he'll be taking some time to lose his mind. "I have scheduled myself a nervous breakdown," he said. "I have to put it in the calendar so that people respect it."
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