Dale Wasserman, who wrote the book for "Man of La Mancha" (as well as the original TV drama on which the show was based) and the stage adaptation of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," has died at his home in the Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley, AZ. He was 94, though he told all who knew him he was a mere 91.
I knew Dale very slightly from when I interviewed him 12 years ago for The Arizona Republic. This was shortly after he and his wife Martha relocated to the Phoenix area. I say "relocated" rather than "retired" because Dale never stopped working. It was what kept him going strong well beyond the average three-score-and-ten.
After not having seen him for several years, I reconnected with Dale just three weeks ago through a mutual friend, playwright Richard Warren, in order to interview him afresh for the radio show I co-host with my wife, Susan, "Arts on the Town." The reason: The upcoming premiere of Dale's newest play, "Premiere!" next month. "Premiere!" was one of several projects Dale worked on until the end.
Susan and I conducted the interview, unaware that Dale knew he had only a few weeks to live. Congestive heart failure was shutting him down. But you wouldn't have known it to talk with him about the theater, his life, life in general and the Grand Scheme of Things. "I think," he said to me with eyes sharply focused, "that we are an existential joke." The meaning of things? "There is none." Then, why work so hard to bring meaning to the characters and situations that inform your plays? His answer (which I do not recall verbatim): To bring some order to the chaos; to make humanity a little less of "an existential joke."
This, to me, is the essential difference between the modernist (which Dale was) and the post-modernist: The latter revels in the chaos; the former strives to imbue it with human value. My own sensibilities are ardently modernist, though that puts me among a minority of artists today.
Dale began life as a hobo in the Great Depression, hopping trains and working at odd jobs. He drifted into theater, where he worked first as a lighting designer. In the early '50s, he looked at his life and decided that his true vocation was writing for theater, not lighting it. This man who'd never graduated high school spent a year studying writing ("I nearly starved") and at the end of his study, he sold his first script. Lucky for Dale, New York in the '50s needed writers for the new medium of television. And so Dale Wasserman joined the ranks of Paddy Chayevsky, Neil Simon and the other burgeoning talents who cut their teeth writing TV scripts.
It was one of those scripts, "I, Don Quixote," that eventually became the musical, "Man of La Mancha," a show hugely successful in every corner of the globe throughout the four-plus decades since its premiere in 1965. The famous phrase, "To dream the impossible dream," actually came from Dale's TV play, not from lyricist Joe Darion.
While working on "La Mancha," Wasserman was asked to adapt "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for the stage; the result was a script so lyrical and so powerful that it is still produced every season around the world. (Wasserman did not write the movie. The film version was considerably updated from the novel by a different screenwriter.)
Those two works remained Dale's mainstay throughout his life, and while he never said anything about it, I always suspected it stuck in his craw a little that none of his subsequent plays achieved anywhere near the fame of "La Mancha" and "Cuckoo's Nest." At the time of his death, there was a good deal of interest in a project that had been dear to his heart for years: A restoration and revision of the 1946 Duke Ellington-John LaTouche musical, "Beggar's Holiday." Postmortem, Dale may yet gain a third perennial for his catalogue.
Our interview with Dale will be broadcast Sunday, Jan. 4, at 6 p.m. over Phoenix radio station KFNX, 1100 AM. Shortly after that, it will be posted as a podcast to our website, www.artsonthetownaz.com.
"Premiere!" premieres Jan. 9 at Theater Works in Peoria, AZ, just west of Phoenix. Go to www.theaterworks.org for more info.
- Kenneth LaFave
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