Paul Peditto has written nearly a play a year for the past 13 years, and all of them reveal a similar urban pessimism. Two of his biggest hits were adaptations of Charles Bukowski and Nelson Algren’s writings, BUK and Never Come Morning, but even his original plays are infused with an unmistakable fatalism.
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“I was working the day shift, tending bar at a transvestite nightclub in New York City. Claire was living in an abandoned building nearby–she was basically living in the street–and she came into the bar for a drink or something.”
They hit it off right away and within a week they were living together. “I was 26. She was 33.” There was only one hitch. “She was a drugstore. She would do whatever you had.”
The play attracted large crowds but didn’t always keep them. Its unflinching view of drug abuse routinely sent a “half dozen people out of the show in tears,” says Peditto.
Revisiting the story wasn’t easy for Peditto. “I’ve had three women die in my life,” he says. “Claire. A friend of Claire’s I started going out with in 1987. She died of an asthma attack. She was drinking while she was on asthma medication and she had a heart attack. It was just–bam–dead. And a girl I went out with in college. We had broken up, and she died in a car accident. She snapped her neck, and the guy who was in the car with her walked away without injuries. Chris says I don’t allow any relationship to end happily. And there is a certain sadness in my work.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Paul Peditto photo by J.B. Spector.
