Imaginary Comforts - Articles & Reviews

[Dante]

Headline too long for the subject line, so here it is:

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Daniel Handler’s First Play, Inspired by—What Else?—an Unfortunate Event
In his first play, ‘Imaginary Comforts,’ the man behind Lemony Snicket confronts dread with his usual wicked wit.
By Shoshana Greenberg

The name Daniel Handler may not be recognizable to many theatregoers, and even though he’s a best-selling author, it may not even be recognizable to many readers. His popular book series for children, A Series of Unfortunate Events, was written under the name Lemony Snicket—not a pen name in the usual sense, but the name of the fictional character narrating the books. While Handler’s prolific output has ranged from a novel about love to a children’s Hanukkah book to a photography collaboration, he now finds himself in unfamiliar territory with his first play.

Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit, slated for its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre Oct. 5-Nov. 19, directed by the theatre’s artistic director, Tony Taccone, has Handler’s signature subversive humor as it depicts the death of a parent and the subsequent chaos. It also explores storytelling, positing that one reason we are drawn to fiction is that we like to fit our lives into narrative frameworks.

“Stories can haunt us,” Handler said during a phone call this past summer while workshopping the play at Berkeley Rep. “We want narratives to be comforting more than we want them to be true.”

Handler didn’t set out to write a play, he explained. He began writing after his father died (“a little bit every day so as not to go crazy”), but he didn’t know what form the piece was taking.

“I was not up for hard work. I didn’t know what I was doing, and that was liberating. It was a raw and unfounded thing.” Still, the unknown rattled him: “I’m used to knowing at least partially what I think I’m doing. And then I went, ‘Uh oh, this is a play.’”

This discovery came from understanding the piece’s structure. “It moved between scenes rather quickly,” Handler explained. “And I wanted that to be jarring and funny as scenes bumped up against each other.” He found that effect difficult to achieve with prose and thought perhaps that the story was a screenplay, but he soon realized it didn’t flow like one.

Having never written a play, he did some research. Playwrights Joe Tracz and Joshua Conkel, who had worked with Handler on adapting A Series of Unfortunate Events for Netflix, suggested playwrights to read. He said he also read a lot of Annie Baker and Caryl Churchill.

After Handler finished a draft, he gave it to Taccone. He and Taccone met in 2010 when Berkeley Rep produced The Composer Is Dead, an adaptation of Handler’s book by the theatre company Phantom Limb, with music by Nathaniel Stookey, which used both puppets and live actors. It was a natural connection: Handler lives in the San Francisco area and Taccone had been following his career for many years, even reading Handler’s books to his children. When read Handler’s play, he wrote Handler back and asked if they could meet to discuss it.

“I thought it was kind of him to take me to lunch to tell me I should not write plays,” Handler quipped. But Taccone had good news: He was interested in producing the play, with time to develop it in Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor residency program in the summer leading up to the production. Taccone said he immediately appreciated the play’s “wicked comic sensibility,” and how it veered from a hysterical opening scene into unexpected territory.

The play emerged from an incident after Handler’s father died. When a rabbi came to talk to him, Handler appreciated how well she handled the emotional weight of the situation. But being a writer, he started to imagine a different scenario: What would have happened if the rabbi had been horrible? Then he realized that on his calendar he had written “rabbit” instead of “rabbi,” and a rabbit character emerged from that silly error.

Rabbits, of course, make regular appearances in both literature and drama. But Handler’s rabbit character would be different. “Much like A Series of Unfortunate Events rebelled against cheerful children’s books, this play rebels against things in theatre that I don’t like,” Handler said. One thing he doesn’t care for: people pretending to be animals onstage.

But as he continued writing, he decided to face his fear head-on by making the rabbit a character. In fact, creating something he disliked so much was a way of dealing with his central resistance.

“I dreaded that I was writing a play,” Handler explained. “So much of theatre is so terrible—not a higher percentage than any other form, but bad theatre is so immediate that you feel it more. If a book is bad, you put it down. If it’s bad theatre, you’re stuck there.” That’s why, he said, his play “opens with someone wearing a rabbit mask. I thought maybe that would shelter me.”

Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor summer residency lab began in 2012 as a place to incubate new work. The process includes focusing on the text of the piece, or the equivalent of text if it is not text-based, with a read-through to understand what script problems need to be addressed. Writing time is built into the residency so that writers can work on their scripts and return later to hear them again with performers.

Handler and Taccone used the Ground Floor process to address issues of clarity and how the play dispenses information. They also focused on making the characters “stage-worthy,” as Taccone called it, creating characters through behavior. “Some techniques he uses in his books had to be either changed, or the balance of different tools had to be shifted,” Taccone said. “He’s such a wordsmith. Every so often cleverness eclipsed the characters.”

Still, Taccone said he knew from the moment he read the piece that it was meant for the stage; it was just a matter of maintaining its theatricality.

“With a book, you can wander,” he said. “You can get lost. You can’t get lost onstage, not for a second. You have to really hold our attention in a different kind of way or plays just collapse in on themselves really fast.”

Handler had never had so much time to develop a script. At Netflix, for instance, he got one table read per episode. At Ground Floor, he and Taccone had multiple opportunities to hear changes with the actors, which proved invaluable.

“Things that you think work in your head don’t work when you hear them out loud, and things that you don’t think are going to work are like gangbusters,” Taccone said. “It’s the ancient mystery of the theatre.”

Even as he prepared his play for production, Handler spent his summer finishing a book for adults as well as another Snicket book. This blend is very much part of his identity. While the marketing for Imaginary Comforts doesn’t fail to use the name Lemony Snicket, Handler is quick to point out that Imaginary Comforts is not a play for children. He is fine, however, with using his more famous children’s brand to promote his adult work.

“I’m happy if it helps get people in the tent,” he said. “I never thought I would get that much attention as a writer, so I never complain about the quality of attention that I get.”

What unites his writing for adults or for children, in novel or play form, is his wit and singular outlook. Said Taccone, “He has the ability to trust an audience. That’s huge.”
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From American Theatre.

[Dante]

Another article on the play has turned up, this time a broader overview from SFWeekly:

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Rabbi and Rabbit Are Just One Letter Apart
San Francisco author Daniel Handler accidentally wrote a play after his father’s death.
Emily Wilson

When Daniel Handler wrote a play, he sat down with his wife, who is not a theater fan, to break the news.

“I had to tell her I’d written a play like I was telling her I’d had an affair,” he says. “It was like, ‘I’ve done a thing that is totally going to upset you, and I need your support.’ ”

Handler, the author of six novels and, as Lemony Snicket, the 13 installments of A Series of Unfortunate Events, books for children about increasingly terrible things happening to the Baudelaire orphans, didn’t mean to write a play. But he has. He wrote Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit after his father died and the rabbi came to their house, offering comfort and solace.

“Two things happened,” Handler says. “One was I thought, ‘What if she had done a really terrible job?’ And the other was I looked at my calendar and I had written ‘rabbit’ instead of ‘rabbi,’ and I thought how close they were. “

The reluctant playwright said he was just writing something in a time of grief, not knowing what he was doing. What made it a play was how it moved very quickly from scene to scene and characters traveled back and forth in time, Handler says. Imaginary Comforts, which premieres at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre Oct. 5, tells the story of Sarah, whose father has died. Her mother totally falls apart and unlike Handler’s family, they end up with a rabbi who does a terrible job at the funeral. And there’s a ghost of a rabbit trying to get Sarah to deal with her deepest issues.

Handler describes watching the rehearsals as “glorious,” because the cast is committed and thoughtful. He says there hasn’t been a lot of rewriting, but occasionally Tony Taccone, the artistic director of Berkeley Rep and the director of Imaginary Comforts, would suggest some changes.

“I would say, ‘Well, they’re still working on it,’ and then they’d do it again later, and I’d see it should be changed,” Handler said. “It turns out the artistic director of Berkeley Rep knows a thing or two about theater. And you can quote me on that.”

To figure out how to write a play, Handler read some playwrights whose work he’d seen and liked, such as Caryl Churchill, Annie Baker, Sarah Ruhl. He also read some older Japanese plays he found in the theatrical section of a bookstore. Handler was looking for things like how long a character could keep talking and how scenes worked. He found it helpful.

“Really good things inspire you in a very vague way,” he says. “And bad plays inspire you in a specific way, like, ‘Oh, God, I never want to do that.’ ”

Handler enjoyed working on the play, a process he found truly collaborative, unlike his experience on the Netflix adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events.

“I can go to Netflix and there are rooms of people working very hard on something that has nothing to do with me,” he says. “This feels like a bonafide collaboration. And it’s pleasing to be around people who are really good at their jobs, and Tony Taccone is very good at his job. As a writer who reads all his stuff out loud, it’s nice to have a workspace where other people are reading it and working very hard to breathe life into it.”

Handler says he would describe the play as funny and poignant and that it moves quickly. It’s also about death, he says, and stories we tell ourselves to try and make sense of life. That need is particularly crystallized around death, he says.

“Obviously, when someone dies, there’s the inevitable opportunity to take stock and try and tell a story about them,” he says. “You can tell a thousand stories and can tilt them all kinds of ways, and you want to be generous to the person, but also tell the truth to yourself.”

Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit, Oct. 5 – Nov. 19, at Berkeley Rep, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley, $30-$97, 510-647-2949 or berkeleyrep.org
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[Hermes]

I once saw an article saying something on the lines of 'When Israelis went to the polls, they did not expect that the future of their government would depend on a few aged rabbits'.

[Dante]

A further article, and our first review:

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A different series of unfortunate events: Down the rabbit hole with Daniel Handler
by Caroline Smith

Daniel Handler is not Lemony Snicket, the melancholy fictitious author of Handler’s popular children’s books “A Series of Unfortunate Events” and “All The Wrong Questions.” Yet his sense of utilizing humor as relief in tragic and grievous situations, as a torch in a pitch-black cave, still comes through in Handler’s adult theatrical debut, “Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit,” which premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre this month.

“I would say that it bears little resemblance to ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events,’” Handler shared in an interview with The Daily Californian. “But it does have a kind of over-educated, digressive philosophical side, which some Snicket readers may recognize.”

Handler’s infamous writing style — whether publicized under Snicket’s name or his own — is rife with dripping satire, jests at mundane social conventions, tongue-in-cheek observations and clever wordplay. These characteristics have earned him a devoted fanbase of children and adults alike, regardless of his works’ vast intended audiences.

This time, Handler was inspired to write “Imaginary Comforts” from a simple erratum made in the aftermath of his father’s death.

“I looked at my calendar and where I had written ‘rabbi,’ to show that (our rabbi) was visiting, I had instead, in my emotional state, written ‘rabbit,’ ” Handler said. This, coupled with Handler’s gratitude that the rabbi who aided his family after his father’s passing “did a really wonderful and sensitive job,” caused him to wonder how events would have transpired had the opposite occurred.

In “Imaginary Comforts,” not only does a rabbi mortifyingly ruin the funeral of protagonist Sarah’s father, but the ghost of a rabbit inexplicably enters Sarah’s life. While little has been released regarding the rest of the plot, promotional material for the play portrays an image of a man in a dilapidated, paper-mache rabbit mask, scratching his head with one hand and holding a bottle of whisky in the other.

True to Handler’s dark-comedic style, tragically humorous and humorously tragic mishaps ensue. While he was keen to not give away any of the show’s surprises, he did reveal that one such a mishap occurs when the show’s rabbi makes Handler’s same spelling mistake: after accidentally writing “rabbit” on her online dating profile, she finds herself on a date with a man searching for a rabbit.

But Handler preferred to discuss the show in more abstract terms. “I hope the very opening of the play rebels against when you go to the theater and from the first few seconds of the play, you know immediately how terrible it’s going to be,” he expressed. “You know, when you’re in the theater and you think, ‘Oh my god, it’s this kind of play and I’m stuck here.’ So I tried to recreate that and then shatter that in the first couple scenes.” He abstained from providing further detail, sharing only that this opening utilizes a bunny mask.

Though “Imaginary Comforts” is his first play for adults, Handler had previously worked on a theatrical production with Tony Taccone, the director of “Imaginary Comforts.” In 2010, the Berkeley Repertory produced a children’s musical adaption of Handler’s “The Composer is Dead” — originally commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony — which Taccone directed.

Handler stated plainly that the challenges in writing for mature audiences were no different than those in writing for children. Instead, his writing process is always demonized by one problem in particular. “The main challenge is that first it’s horrible, and then you try to make it less and less horrible.”

The Bay Area-based author and playwright did contrast, however, his experience in working with the Berkeley Repertory on “Imaginary Comforts” with that working with Netflix on its 2017 adaption of “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” for which he was an executive producer. With Netflix, everything would be filmed and set before it was shown to him, leaving little room to make changes or alterations. Whereas for the world-premiere of Handler’s show, the playwright played a role in making “Imaginary Comforts” stage-ready. “When you’re workshopping a play,” he explained, “everything is in constant flux. So that’s pretty fun to watch them find their footing and then to say, ‘Oh no, wait, I need to change something over here.’ It’s a much more fluid process.”

Affable and humorous in his responses, Handler rarely finished his answers without a laugh or chuckle. Yet when asked if the wit in “Imaginary Comforts” resembled that of his prior work, he became semi-serious. “Once you start talking about your sense of humor,” he said, “you become the least funny person ever.” Instead, he shared the difficulties that arise in translating written humor to jokes that sound funny when spoken. “I would think, ‘Oh this is going to be hilarious,’ and then someone would say it out loud, and I would think, ‘No it isn’t.’ ”

Handler opts to let the audience be the judge of the show’s humor. As for one audience member in particular, the rabbi who first sparked Handler’s idea, Handler recalled their recent phone conversation. After informing his rabbi that she inspired a play pondering the alternative in which she were horrible, she asked if she would recognize herself within the show. Handler laughed and replied, “I certainly hope not.”
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From The Daily Californian.

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Rabbits hop us from dread to grace at Berkeley Rep
By Lily Janiak

Addiction sort of plagues the characters of “Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit,” but it’s more an offshoot of, or a salve for, their overarching affliction: incompetence.

No one can do anything right in Daniel Handler’s world premiere about a grieving family, which opened Thursday, Oct. 12, at Berkeley Rep under the direction of Tony Taccone. Doors won’t open, and no one gets to drink — not coffee, not vodka — because every fragile item is doomed to crash to the floor. Rabbi Naomi (Marilee Talkington) can’t sermonize or comfort the bereaved. She can’t even burst into a room or open her purse without sending everything kablooey. Her sweeping stride, in Talkington’s astute rendering, forecasts a hurricane, and when she takes the podium to deliver a eulogy, the storm comes, in the form of spasmodic interpretative dance moves that take her as much by surprise as they do everyone else.

Mrs. Gold (Sharon Lockwood), the wife of the dead addiction counselor Dr. Marcus Gold (Julian López-Morillas), can’t talk, only blubber. Clovis (Michael Goorjian) can’t direct the play he wants to mount, nor can he introduce himself to a date without instantly belittling her and simultaneously creeping her out. Here’s Jack (Jarion Monroe), not overstating his talents as a bookkeeper: If you want to “pay your bills and not go bankrupt,” he “can sort of help you.”

Yet from this quagmire of ineptitude, Handler (who also writes children’s books under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket) forges a new mythos. You detect it first in the way seemingly unimportant lines repeat themselves, the way everyone keeps referring to him or herself as “cut rate” in his or her profession; the way everyone keeps saying, “That’s basically the history of the Jewish people”; the way a rabbit finagles its way into scene after scene, as a misread word, as the protagonist of a peculiar children’s story Dr. Gold used to tell his daughter Sarah (Susan Lynskey) or as a human-size rodent that personifies Jewish guilt as it wiggles its cotton-tailed booty at the audience (Danny Scheie, in yet another role tailor-made for his sublime comedic talents).

Chief among Handler’s characters’ incompetences is their inability to draw meaning and comfort, in the way they’re supposed to, from the stories in which they’re supposed to be able to take refuge — Judaism, folkloric childhood bedtime stories. Handler’s point, though, is that any story, even an absurd one, can become your rock, your origin story, your comfort animal. In his vision, our universe is gentle enough, charmed enough, to supply founts of myth and solace to us bumbling humans wherever our imagination might land.

The main problem with “Imaginary Comforts” is that it makes that point too baldly. Characters talk about the importance of good stories so much that you start to wish you could actually see one unfold in front of you, instead of hearing repeated assertions that they exist. And many of Handler’s intersecting plot threads remain fuzzy; it’s not clear how much we’re supposed to feel for characters addicted to booze. Finally, his men too handily rescue his women, whom he reduces to damsels in distress.

But ultimately, his world is so likable you mostly forgive its shortcomings. His characters might be oafs, but they’re acutely aware of their oafishness. From unmitigated gracelessness, they create their own grace, which is all any religion or weird bedtime story can hope to do.
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From SFGate.

[Dante]

Another review, this one going into more detail about the plot, from Berkeleyside:
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Daniel Handler’s Intriguing ‘Imaginary Comforts’ at Berkeley Rep
By Emily S. Mendel

Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, author of the wickedly gothic children’s books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, is presenting his first play, the amusing Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit in its world premiere production at Berkeley Rep, skillfully directed by Tony Taccone.

Instead of the bland admonishment to turn off one’s cell phones, the evening begins with a funny off-stage intro by Handler. It sets the mood for the lively, silly, at times expressive, but always curious series of coincidences among the characters who come together around the life and death of Dr. Marcus Gold. All the many short scenes that comprise the one-act Imaginary Comforts are out of time sequence, and part of the evening’s exercise is fitting the pieces of the plot together in a logical order. So it is only at the end of the play that we are able to understand how the characters interact and influence each other’s lives.

Imaginary Comforts begins with the scene of a Tinder-type coffee date between Clovis (Michael Goorjian), who we later learn is a recovering addict, and Naomi, a young “rent-a-rabbi” (that is, a rabbi without a congregation who is available for weddings and funerals). Naomi (Marilee Talkington, Xs and Os) is bemoaning her struggle to prepare a proper eulogy. The comedy begins straightaway as we learn that Clovis thought that Naomi’s profession was rabbit, not rabbi. Yet, as she points out, he still wanted to meet her. Rabbits and a story about rabbits become very important later in the play.

In the next scene, Sarah Gold (Susan Lynskey, Roe), daughter of the newly deceased Dr. Gold (who we also see alive, played by Julian López-Morillas, The Winter’s Tale) has engaged Naomi to perform the eulogy at her father’s funeral. Bungling but adorable Naomi is trying to figure out what to say about him, with little help from Sarah, Dr. Gold’s friend Jack (Jarion Monroe, Volpone), or a sobbing, though hysterically funny Mrs. Gold (Sharon Lockwood, It Can’t Happen Here). And, when given, Naomi’s eulogy is by far the worst ever, ending in an existential cry about how we are all alone.

Imaginary Comforts’ direction and acting are first-rate. Danny Scheie (Troublemaker, or the Freakin Kick-A Adventures of Bradley Boatright, Masterbuilder) is impish, yet restrained, as his part as the ghost rabbit requires. One highlight of the play is the brilliant and effective stage set (scenic design, Todd Rosenthal, lighting design, Nick Solyom), which features lighted doors with door frames of different colors and a moving concentric circular stage.

Written soon after the death of Handler’s father, the precipitating spur for Imaginary Comforts was Handler writing “rabbit” in his calendar instead of “rabbi.” And though Handler’s father’s funeral was nothing like Dr. Gold’s debacle, Handler wondered about what would happen if a rabbi ruined a memorial service. The plotline about the inept, although well-meaning rabbi is amusing and the many jokes about the Jewish people and their guilt and other clichés are funny only to a point, although they seemed to be accompanied by laughs of recognition by the opening night audience.

Once the playwright left the strictly comedic style employed early in the play and veered toward the more abstract and absurd world of coincidence and roundelay, the production seemed to lose a bit of steam. If it was aiming toward fantastical and magical, it never quite made it. But behind the shtick and the sometimes too-clever-by-half aspects of Imaginary Comforts, are some truths about life, death, mourning, helping others and the importance of friends and family.

Imaginary Comforts is playing at Berkeley Rep’s Peet’s Theatre through November 19, 2017. For information, extended dates and tickets, visit www.berkeleyrep.org/
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