I’m sure every person has at least once in their lives has had a class that required they read dramas and more often than not it’s taught by some high school English teacher who doesn’t even like the plays. What a student in the predicament longs for more than anything, more than even the bell to ring ending the class, is someone who understands these are more than just words on paper; someone to bring the dramas to life. What these students need is someone like Jeff Wanshel.
Mr. Wanshel, a recurring adjunct professor at SUNY Purchase College, whose classes have included American Theatre in Our Time, is also the author of over twenty plays and has been a writer as long as he remembers.
“I really don’t know when I decided I wanted to be a writer,” contends the good humored Wanshel, whom one student referred to as, “what Santa would look like if he hadn’t ate so many cookies.” However it’s been a long time since the writing bug bit him. “My mother loved to show me the letter I wrote home from camp when I was eight that said ‘the story about the robot is going well,’” he says with a laugh.
Born and raised in Larchmont, Wanshel found his first success with his first play The Disintegration of James Cherry, while he was in his first semester of graduate school at the Yale school of drama. Not long after the start of the semester Cherry was put into a workshop and then produced at the Reparatory Theatre at Lincoln Center, before it toured around the world. He claims this to be his most successful piece but simply chalks it up to the fact that he wrote it at 21 or 22 and it appealed a lot to young people.
“So missed my first semester and I had had a Rockefeller grant so the joke with his friends was, ‘what are you going to do with your grant Mr. Wanshel…Mr. Wanshel?” he says with a chuckle.
After spending some time abroad and producing his second play, Wanshel received his second Rockefeller grant and moved out to San Francisco to work at the now dissolved Magic Theatre, where he had, “a whale of a time.”
“I was young, - around 25 and San Francisco was a fabulous city. This was around ‘73 so it was the time of the hippies. There was a lot going on, great music, so it was a fun time.”
Along with being fun, working on a Wanshel play is also “wild and challenging,” according to Wanshel’s wife (or, as she prefers, “concubine”) Edi Giguere, who designed costumes for three of his projects.
“Many characters double and triple. [It was] Exhausting; long hours at the theatre, and we took it home. It is also most exciting and creative - working on a Wanshel play is always full of surprises… It stretches one in the best of ways.”
Both Wanshel and Giguere, who lived together over 20 years before marrying, are funny and open about their relationship. When asked if they met working together Wanshel very directly explains, “No we met naked on a beach in Greece.” Giguere, when asked what attracted her to him, explains, “Aside from the perfect tan, he sported a black bowler hat with a red ribbon which complemented his red beard wonderfully. He was flirtatious, and naked except for the hat.”
Along with the plays, Wanshel has written a lot of movies that haven’t been produced and a TV movie to his credit. The Greatest Man in the World, which he adapted from a ten page long short story aired on PBS in 1980 as part of their American Short Story Series, and stared “a lot of great actors who are dead now” including Brad Davis. The scrip is now published in the American Short Story volume 2 and he received a writer’s guild nomination. “I got to stand up and was told immediately that I did not win,” he chuckles
While he admits he prefers writing for the stage because you can be your own boss he also concedes the benefits of writing for the movies. “When you write a play that doesn’t get produced you get zip and when you write a play that does get produced you get very little. If you’re witting for the movies you are being hired so weather the movies gets produced or not u make a good deal of money.”
Another insight I got about writing was that he gets best ideas when he’s asleep.
“I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and make notes and then wake up in the morning and think ‘ what do we have here?’ I got the title of a couple of plays that way.”
As a member of the theatre community for over thirty years, what he’s done might be rivaled only by who he knows and what he’s witnessed. When asked who he thought would have the best Jeff Wanshel stories he got a melancholy look in his eyes and sighed, “I could give you a huge list of people to interview but it wouldn’t much help because they’re all dead.”
While they are not all dead, many of the authors of the materials read in American Theatre in Our Time are people Wanshel personally knew, bring a personal touch to the plays that few students are privileged to get. During classes he’s talked about things such as how he’d spent summers living at Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf author Edward Albee’s house while being a struggling actor and how he was once at a party with Tennessee Williams, author of The Glass Menagerie.
“Williams was with a beautiful younger man on this night and every time the guy went to talk Tennessee would say ‘oh isn’t he just beautiful,’” he related when the topic of how in America if you’re good looking nothing else seems to matter, came up in class.
When asked if, not counting his works, does Wanshel have any children, he says “No,” he then leans his now grey/white bearded chin on his hand and smiles, “but we’ve had a lot of fun trying to make some.”
