Nicky Silver On Creating the Funny Family Dynamic of Off-Broadway's The Lyons
About the Author:
Nicky Silver made a splash on the New York theater scene when his dark comedy Pterodactyls made its debut at off-Broadway's Vineyard Theatre in 1993. In the years since, Silver has maintained a close relationship with the off-Broadway venue, which has produced his plays Raised in Captivity, The Food Chain and Beautiful Child. With his latest work, The Lyons, Silver is yet again examining a dysfunctional family, this time led by Tony winners Linda Lavin and Dick Latessa. Below, Silver recounts the real-life family health scare that inspired the show, and explains why even a play about a family reuniting to stay goodbye to its cancer-stricken patriarch needs its fair share of humor.
All plays are an experiment in one way or another, and I don’t think my last produced play, Three Changes, really worked. It was too full of ideas and theatrical devices, so I sat down to write the simplest play I possibly could. I tend to write about families a lot, so I just put a family in a room. The whole first act of The Lyons is simply a family sitting together in a hospital room, their story unfolding in real time, with no flashy theatrical tricks.
When I began to write, my father had just been misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s disease so that was on my mind. However, the relationships in the play don’t really mirror the relationships in my family. They mirror relationships I see around me. My father and I were very close and he was certainly not disapproving of my life, but if you’re writing about family you have to have conflict. Our first relationships are with our family, and those become our primary relationships throughout life. I know people who don’t speak to their parents anymore. Well, you can try that, but you’re still speaking to them in your head whether you realize it or not. The show may suggest some negative element of family life, but I don’t have a bad view of it. While the story is about the dissolution of a family, each character goes on to find a healthy new beginning.
I try not to plan out everything that’s going to happen in a play before I sit down and write, so I don’t necessarily know how everything is going to turn out for the characters. In this play, I wanted to give every person what they needed, whether they necessarily knew what that is or not. While the tone of the play is at times very dark, it felt like a comedy to me. One of the differences between a comedy and a tragedy is that in a comedy, the characters get what they need. In a tragedy, they don’t.
The comedy that results from these people’s pain is a product of my parents. They helped me to see the world through a funny prism. When I was growing up, my parents were extremely funny in very different ways. In The Lyons, Rita tells her husband, Ben, not to swear; in reality, my mother would never have been offended by my father’s cursing. I don’t think he ever swore a day in his life. At worst he’d say "h-e-double-hockey-sticks." My mother, on the other hand, could give lessons to Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I would say she cursed like a drunken sailor, but the drunken sailor would have to start cursing a lot more to keep up!
Usually I read about plays and think, “Ugh, look at that cast. Why can’t I have a cast like that?” I’m always jealous—and I would like to think everybody’s jealous of my cast now! It’s scary going into a new production, but luckily I knew two people this time around. I’d worked with Dick Latessa about 14 years ago in Fit to Be Tied, and the brilliant Michael Esper is my best friend. But let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Linda Lavin. I didn’t know her. I didn’t know if she’d be nice. She’s Linda FUCKING Lavin! Turns out she’s the nicest, and such a dream to work with every day. I’ve adored her from the first minute, and I’m sure I’ve annoyed her with my cloying admiration.
The Lyons marks my 10th time working at the Vineyard Theatre, including seven productions and three developmental readings. There was a staff meeting the other day, and I interrupted to let everyone know that although I harass them—sometimes with purpose and sometimes just for amusement—I appreciate the theater so much and feel like it’s my home. After my first big show, Pterodactyls, a lot of places wanted to produce my next play, places where I probably could have made a little more money. I chose to stay at the Vineyard because they rolled the dice on me, so I wanted to be loyal to them. As I look back now, I certainly made the right choice.
