Party Planning

Art, it is sometimes said, imitates life, but what about art about art? Richard Greenberg’s new play The Injured Party, which is getting its world premiere as part of South Coast Rep’s Pacific Playwrights Festival, takes as part of its inspiration the author’s feelings about The Gates, the February 2005 site-specific installation in Central Park in which artists Jeanne-Claude Christo dotted much of that landscape with orange fabric.

“As I wrote the various characters in the play, it actually woke up the appeal of it for me,” says Greenberg. “I have a certain critical bent to my personality where if I know people love something, I tend not to. But I think I saw the point that they had a quality of refreshment for those who don’t like the bleakness of winter — which I do — and transformed them into a different mood.”

The play’s central conflict, however, is not as much about art as money. 94-year-old Maxene (played by Cynthia Harris) has tons of it; her grandson Seth (Reg Rogers) wants it. Creating those characters was challenging and exciting, says Greenberg, who won the Tony Award for Take Me Out. Seth was not written expressly — at least consciously — for Rogers, who has starred in his Off-Broadway shows Hurrah at Last! and The Dazzle. “I do think that after the fact, I realized I had written it for him. Now, I don’t even have the ability to imagine any other voice in this part. He gets me and knows how to play my work like no one else.”

As for Maxene: “I’ve never written a 94-year-old woman before, but I kept thinking about Kitty Carlisle Hart whenever I needed inspiration,” he says. “For the play, I wanted someone who would be unchangeable and unstoppable, who is dominating and domineering and simply defies age. That’s what most confounds Seth about her. And I didn’t make it an easy role just because I knew an older woman would play it. She’s sharp as a tack and she has a lot of lines — even a lot of parentheses.”