BURBANK, Calif. — Opening night flowers are a theater staple, but the sunflowers playwright Eric Anderson brought the cast and crew of “Back Porch” held a deeper meaning. Anderson hails from Kansas, the sunflower state, and his newest play — having its world premiere at the Victory Theatre in Burbank — takes him back to his roots.
He was just 4 years old when Hollywood came to his small town to film scenes for the movie "Picnic."
“One of the scenes takes place at a park where they crown a queen of Neewollah, and they asked people to come from neighboring counties to sit on one half of the bank as Kim Novak sailed down the river,” Anderson recalled.
He admits that, being so young, he was kind of bored by the experience, but it planted the seed for a lifelong love of the play “Picnic” by William Inge, who was also born in Kansas. It was around the 100-year anniversary of Inge’s birth that the idea for “Back Porch” began to sprout. Anderson wanted to pay homage to the playwright by creating a kind of alternate universe for “Picnic” centered on a love story between two men.
“William Inge was a significant playwright, and he was significantly closeted and I think he was tortured by that through a great deal of his life,” Anderson said. “I wanted to write the kind of play that maybe he would have been able to write if he lived in a gentler and more friendlier time.”
Like his own experience, Anderson's play is set in a small Kansas town where the movie “Picnic” is filming scenes. Isaac W. Jay plays 18-year-old Gary, who reads Hollywood magazines and feels stifled by his surroundings.
“He feels like this back porch is... sort of almost a prison,” Jay said.
He recalled the back porch of his own childhood that looked out over wide open land.
“That idea of just having the whole world right at your doorstep and not necessarily knowing how to go into it… I think I can really, really relate to that on a deep level,” he said.
Like Anderson, Jay has always loved the play "Picnic," although he’d never seen the film version. The USC grad is thrilled to be part of the premiere of this particular love story during Pride Month.
“There’s a lot going on in terms of how people are viewing gay relationships, trans people, things like that, in a really negative sort of scary light,” he explained. “So I think that the more that the story is saying, ‘This is love, and it’s OK that this is what love is.’ I think that’s so vital for everybody to see even, if it’s just simply a reinforcement of that fact.”
In a way, Anderson said he’s not only honoring Inge, but he’s also speaking to his younger self in this play. He left his hometown long ago and now lives in Hawaii with his husband, but said he still feels Kansan in many ways.
“It was a rather cozy and secure place to be,” he admitted in hindsight. “But as an artist, and as a gay man, it became increasingly smothering.”
He can’t say for sure how Inge might have felt about the play, but he’d like to think he’d be pleased.
“I have no idea what kind of personality he was,” Anderson said. “I’d like to think he’d be tickled pink. I don’t think he would at all find it to be a parody, or camp or diminution of what he wrote.”
As for audiences, he hopes they will come sit for a spell in the world he’s created, enjoy a taste of small town life through the Buttermilk Baby Chewies made just for the show — the recipe is in the program — and leave the back porch full of renewed empathy and understanding.