Steve Tesich

• Born: September 29, 1942
• Birthplace: Titovo Užice, Yugoslavia
• Died: July 1, 1996
• Place of death: Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada

Other Literary Forms

Steve Tesich is best known as a screenwriter because of the critical and popular success of his first screenplay, Breaking Away (1979). He had five screenplays produced in the 1980’s, the most successful of which was The World According to Garp (1982), an adaptation of John Irving’s novel. Tesich also published the novel Summer Crossing (1982), a coming-of-age story set in East Chicago, Indiana. Both the screenplays and the novel draw heavily on his own experiences and have been praised for their intriguing characters.

Achievements

Steve Tesich has been called the United States’ cheerleader because of the optimism expressed in his early absurdist comedies for the land “where anything is possible.” He demonstrated a unique ability to create fully developed, if eccentric, characters, individualized dialogue, and outrageous situations. His early plays are significant as commentaries on the faith of the United States’ promise in the 1970’s and his later plays on the outrage of that nation’s unrealized promise in the late 1980’s. He received many awards including the Vernon Rice Award and Drama Desk Award for Baba Goya; the Writer’s Guild Award, the New York Film Critics Circle Award, the National Society of Film Critics Award, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Original Screenplay Award for Breaking Away; and the National Board of Review Exceptional Film Award for The World According to Garp.

Biography

Steve (Stoyan) Tesich was born September 29, 1942, in Titovo Užice, Yugoslavia, where he learned the art of storytelling from his mother, Gospava (Bulaich) Tesich. His favorite boyhood theme was going to the United States to find his father, Radisa, who was missing in the war. Eventually, Radisa contacted his family from England, where he turned up after fleeing Yugoslavia to join its government in exile. The Tesich family was finally reunited in 1957, but in the United States, because Stoyan had led a family revolution against going to England: He wanted to go to the land “where anything could happen.” Therefore, at age fourteen, Stoyan became Steve, living in East Chicago, Indiana, where his machinist father found work in the steel mills. Although the unrelenting red glow of the smokestacks was not the great American West that he had learned to love in motion pictures, he optimistically believed that he had found the “frontier of possibility.” Tesich quickly learned English and was assimilated into the high school culture of the late 1950’s. He won a wrestling scholarship to Indiana University, where he made Phi Beta Kappa, won the Little Five Hundred bicycle race, and was graduated in 1965. Tesich has often used his Indiana years as the background for his stories.

After Columbia University awarded Tesich a graduate scholarship, he moved to New York City to study Russian literature, with the notion that he might become an academic. As he began to understand the characters in Russian novels, however, he began to get excited about the idea of becoming a writer, and he augmented his literary studies with writing classes. He also met Rebecca Fletcher, who encouraged him in a writing career. Tesich was graduated from Columbia University with his master of arts degree in Russian in 1967 and married Fletcher on May 24, 1971. He worked briefly as a caseworker for the Brooklyn Department of Welfare while he tried his hand at novels and scripts. The American Place Theatre agreed to produce The Carpenters in 1970. Over the next eight years, the American Place Theatre actively supported his playwriting by producing several of his plays. The most successful of these was Baba Goya (later retitled Nourish the Beast), which won the 1973 Vernon Rice and Drama Desk awards and was produced on public television.

Tesich had also been writing screenplays during this time, with no success. Director Peter Yates suggested that he merge two of his scripts, one about four college-town locals, the other about the Little Five Hundred bicycle race. The result was the award-winning Breaking Away, which established Tesich as a major American writer. He immediately returned to the theater in 1980 with the political farce Division Street. The play was first staged in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum, where it was a resounding success. It then became his first Broadway production, where it was savaged by New York critics.

Tesich did not return to the theater for almost ten years, during which time five of his screenplays were filmed and his novel Summer Crossing was published. He was not “lured away by Hollywood” or disgruntled by all the criticism. He simply intended to stay away from the theater until he could approach playwriting from a new angle. In 1989, Tesich emerged with a daughter, Amy, and two new plays, The Speed of Darkness and Square One, which do present a new Tesich vision of his adopted homeland. Instead of his personal perspective, he developed the ability to write from a societal perspective, to write about moral issues in the dramatic form. His last play, Arts and Leisure, which completed an Off-Broadway run shortly before his death in July, 1996, of a heart attack, portrays a theater critic. This critic’s work, Tesich says, encourages passivity in the face of violence or tragedy in Americans because it teaches people to act like theater critics—sitting on the sidelines, taking notes, and experiencing the crisis, catharsis, and climax of plays.

Analysis

Steve Tesich’s plays are divided into two groups by a ten-year, self-imposed exile from the theater. The early plays, beginning with The Carpenters and ending with Division Street, share the personal viewpoint of “immigrant optimism,” an America where anything is possible, where a Yugoslavian teenager who does not speak English can win an Academy Award before his fortieth birthday. The later plays, beginning with The Speed of Darkness, are based on a social viewpoint that mourns for an America that has not lived up to its promise. The early plays are noted for their bizarre portraits of family life full of eccentric characters, outrageous comedy, wordplay, and individualized dialogue, as well as for their extensive, often burdensome symbolism. The later plays demonstrate the unique comic perspective and symbolism together with the vivid characterization, dialogue, and extreme situation of the early plays, while charting new dramatic territory dealing with moral issues. As he is an intensely personal writer, the plays are a commentary on Tesich’s life.

The Carpenters and Lake of the Woods

Tesich always experimented with dramatic forms, most prevalently the absurdist worldview. The Carpenters depicts a dysfunctional American family living in a house that is breaking down around them, just as their family relationships are breaking down. The father tries but is unable to understand his existence. Lake of the Woods shows another family, on vacation in America’s wonderlands. When they reach their scenic destination, however, they find only a desolate wasteland. Their intentions are hobbled, their mobile home and car are vandalized, and it seems as though their hardships will kill them. Instead of giving up, however, the father rallies his family and sets out on an optimistic trek, away from the lapidation of modern urbanism toward a wilderness of happy people. Both plays have moments of brilliance, with clever dialogue and surprise comic twists, but they are often self-conscious and deteriorate into heavy-handed symbolism that becomes preachy and banal.

Baba Goya

The absurdist comedy Baba Goya is Tesich’s most successful early play. Often called a 1970’s You Can’t Take It with You (pr. 1936, pb. 1937, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart), it depicts another outlandish family, this time headed by a raunchy mother who is intent on making every screwball who darkens her door a member of her family. In the mistaken belief that he is dying, her fourth husband, Mario, takes out a newspaper advertisement to find his replacement. Baba interviews applicants as she tries to help her depressed son and disparaged daughter develop enough strength to leave her nest. Baba can forgive her daughter for divorcing her liberal husband who talked her into getting pregnant just so an abortion law could be tested. She can forgive her daughter’s starring in a pornographic film, selling drugs, and becoming a thief, but never her voting for Richard M. Nixon. Detractors of Baba Goya condemn it as a silly and pointless contrivance of sight gags and clever one-liners. They are, however, blind to this play’s subtler symbolism. Baba Goya is Tesich’s America, taking in all no matter what their idiosyncrasies or problems and helping them to stand on their own two feet, becoming productive members of the family.

Gorky

Tesich’s next effort was a musical, Gorky, based on the life of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky. In what has become a recurring pattern, the play was resoundingly criticized by some but highly praised by others. Tesich had become an acknowledged voice in the theater but one that struck either a nerve or a chord. Gorky is one of his least successful efforts, with not enough facts to be a biography and hardly enough opinion to be a political commentary. What remains is a conversation between three actors depicting Gorky as an innocent youth, a passionate revolutionary, and a disillusioned victim of a Stalin purge.

Passing Game and Touching Bottom

Tesich returned to his absurdist viewpoint in Passing Game and Touching Bottom, the latter containing three one-act plays in the tradition of Samuel Beckett. Both plays return to the skewed lives that have become the hallmark of his plays. He also returned, however, to his heavy-handed symbolism.

Division Street

Division Street, the last of Tesich’s early plays, combines all of his most successful elements into a political farce that emphasizes character and plot over symbolism. A metaphor borrowed from Studs Terkel, Division Street is the story of Chris, an aging radical from the 1960’s, who has sold out to the establishment and is intent on starting a career. As chance would have it, however, he is served a putrid cabbage in a Yugoslavian restaurant and is photographed regurgitating on the street. The picture makes the newspaper, and his past gallops unwanted to his door. What follows is a brilliant farce complete with slamming doors and windows, mistaken identities, reunited orphans, outrageous characters and situations, and clever dialogue full of Tesich wordplay, one-liners, and repartee. The script is filled with radicals who have no place in the “Me” generation but who long for the good old days of “the movement.” The original, published version has a weakly resolved ending, with Chris once again leading the displaced radicals in a new movement and a patriotic rendition of “America the Beautiful.” A revised production eliminated the song, along with two characters, but still ended in sentimental patriotism. Tesich did not intend for the characters to be perceived as shallow hippies without a cause, as it is sometimes interpreted, becoming a mindless romp, a shallow farce and nothing more. When it is understood that Tesich intended the play to be a remembrance of his own college activist days ending with a call to continued activism, to find and eliminate injustice, the play becomes a comedy of ideas.

Even when Tesich is criticized, he is praised for his ability to create fascinating characters and intriguing dialogue. This talent is the result of his mastery of American English, his keen ear for the ways people speak, and his unusual approach to creating characters first, and then situation and conflict. When studying Russian literature, he recognized how he felt about the United States as he observed what happened when Russian characters with differing ideologies bumped into each other. In the Russian novels, the ideas and beliefs were heavy burdens; in the United States the divergent ideas were energizers. This notion of interacting and reacting ideas evolved into the methodology of Tesich’s writing. He begins by writing character notes: anecdotal biographies, snatches of dialogue, and philosophical questions, often accumulating as much as a hundred pages of background material. Next, he begins to write about his characters, to explore and see what they do. As the divergent characters collide, something happens, and that is what he writes about. He discards the preliminary material and writes the story of what happens when his intricately delineated, conflicting, and contradicting characters collide.

The Speed of Darkness

When Tesich returned to the theater after almost ten years of absence, that method was still in evidence. Even though his perspective and motivation for writing changed, his later plays were based squarely on character. While the early plays sprang from his own perspective, emanating from his own experience, in his later plays he wrote from the experience of others. He was the disappointed American, still loving the United States for what it should be, but he was outraged at the moral bankruptcy that he saw around him. The Speed of Darkness was written in response to what he perceived as creeping revisionism in the United States’ memory of the Vietnam War. Tesich adopted a traditional dramatic structure that goes back to Henrik Ibsen’s plays, where the present is jeopardized, if not destroyed, by the secrets of the past. Joe and Lou are emotionally destroyed by the war. Angry and bitter, they return to the United States with no hopes or dreams. They vent their anger by getting drunk and illegally disposing of toxic waste on a bluff outside a South Dakota town. Their lives part, however, when Joe meets Anne, falls in love, and finds some meaning in life. Eighteen years later, Joe is being honored as the state Man of the Year at the same time that Lou shows up, a dirty, homeless Vietnam veteran, aimlessly carrying his life in a bundle as he follows the traveling Vietnam Memorial from city to city. His return opens the floodgates of guilt for past crimes and infidelities, which lead to tragedy and catharsis for this American family. Earlier Tesich themes of the displaced, the foreign, and the guilt of the past are played out against a new moral backdrop of social commentary. The symbolism is somewhat more successfully integrated into character and action, and the theatricality of the crises is not so gratuitous.

Square One

The absurdist comedy Square One creates outlandish characters and situations for social comment. It grew out of Tesich’s observation that humankind’s aspirations have become small and that society satisfies its obligations merely by becoming informed, not by acting on any indignation or moral outrage. He creates a future world in a dysfunctional society where almost no one acknowledges pain. The masses are emotionally massaged by a constant barrage of entertainment presented by “artists, third class.” Tesich’s two characters, who never call each other by name, meet, marry, reproduce, and separate against a background in which Wagnerian tenors are janitors and in which politicians do not appear in public but hire actors to deliver their hollow election promises. The strength of the play is its delicious wordplay. It is the aesthetic counterpart to Larry Gelbart’s political and satirical play Mastergate (pr. 1989). As it did in the early plays, however, the symbolism takes over, becoming too literal and heavy-handed, overwhelming the fun of the language and the outrageousness of the situation.

On the Open Road

On the Open Road is a dark comedy about two men trying to find a safe place after the end of a very destructive civil war. In this Beckett-tinged drama, Angel, the “scum of the earth,” hopes to be educated by Al as they wander through a ruined city. At one point, they betray Jesus to obtain their freedom and are assured by a Monk that they have not sinned because the Bible does not forbid anyone killing God. The two men’s search for and collection of art from ruined museums is meant to represent a misguided notion that becoming cultured can be substituted for developing a sense of morality.

Arts and Leisure

Tesich’s last play takes a similarly dark view of humanity. Arts and Leisure is the story of a drama critic, Alex Chaney, who attempts to spice up his life by creating dramatic confrontations, with unfortunate effects. At the end, Chaney is left alone, deserted by even his maid, who acts as the play’s conscience. The critic’s approach to life, particularly his desire to observe drama, is causing a problem in American society. By encouraging people to act as drama critics—searching for and observing crisis, climax, and denouements while they take notes and experience feelings without actually participating—Tesich suggests that the drama critic is responsible for the passivity in American society. When faced with personal or larger tragedy, people act like theater critics. Even when the desire for drama provides action, that action is not necessarily positive. Critic Chaney claims that “racism works,” meaning that it is dramatic on stage. Tesich suggests that if racism were absent from the world, some people would miss it because it provided a sense of drama, giving their work a heightened sense of meaning and importance that would vanish in the absence of racism.

Bibliography

Brandes, Philip. “Theater Beat: Tesich’s Dark Humor Drives This Open Road.” Review of On the Open Road, by Steve Tesich. Los Angeles Times, October 20, 2000, p. F28. This review of a performance of Tesich’s On the Open Road provides insight into this play as a vehicle for conveying the playwright’s views about morality in modern life.

Coen, Stephanie. “Steve Tesich: The Only Kind of Real Rebel Left, He Figures, Is a Moral Person.” American Theatre 9, no. 4 (July, 1992): 30. This profile of Tesich concentrates on his views of moral issues and how they are reflected in plays such as On the Open Road.

Dudar, Helen. “As One Playwright Strikes Out for the Future . . .” The New York Times, February 19, 1990, p. B5, 20. Written on the premiere eve of Square One, then the first new Tesich play in New York in ten years, this article briefly describes the “new Tesich.” Dudar finds that he is no longer the United States’ cheerleader, having lost his sense of wonder, and that he has learned to write from others’ experiences, not only from his own.

“Playwright Steve Tesich Dies at Age Fifty-Three.” The Washington Post, July 4, 1996, p. B5. This obituary sums up the life and works of the playwright and screenwriter.

Rothstein, Mervyn. “Morality’s the Thing for This Playwright.” The New York Times, March 12, 1991, p. C11, 13. In response to the relatively successful Broadway opening of The Speed of Darkness, Tesich explains how he has changed in the decade since his early plays. He now is concerned with “moral issues,” such as this play’s decrial of the United States’ refusal to deal with the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Photograph.

Shteir, Rachel. “The World According to Tesich.” The Village Voice, June 18, 1996, 88. Tesich discusses Arts and Leisure and explains how the play about a drama critic is critical of what he views as people’s excessive desire to dramatize their lives.

“Steve Tesich.” In Current Biography Yearbook. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1991. This profile of Tesich, published five years before his death, examines his plays and screenplays.