THE acclaimed off-Broadway play ”Collected Stories” features a knock-down, drag-out fight between an older novelist and her back-stabbing young protegee.
But that’s nothing compared with the backstage feud raging between the show’s star – the legendary Uta Hagen – and its producers, Leonard Soloway and Steven Levy.
They are fighting over the production’s marketing and ad campaigns, which Hagen claims are all but nonexistent. As a result, ”Collected Stories,” despite rave reviews and strong word-of-mouth, is dying a slow, grueling death, the actress says.
”Never in my born days have I seen producers treat a show in such an offhanded way,” Hagen said. ”They don’t give a s— about it. They don’t advertise it. They don’t promote it. They won’t even put my picture up in front of the theater. We’re playing to piddling houses for most of the week, and they just don’t seem to care. It’s driving me nuts. I’m so depressed, I’m suicidal.”
Hagen, who won Tony Awards for ”The Country Girl” in 1951 and ”Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 1963 and is one of the founders of the famous HB Studios acting school, has repeatedly pressed the producers to place ads for the Donald Margulies play in The New York Times and other publications. They won’t, she says, ”because they don’t think advertising works. They believe in fliers and mailing lists. But, come on – fliers aren’t going to save us!”
Hagen thinks the producers are letting ”Collected Stories” ”dribble away” for two reasons. One, they’re cheap – ”I feel like I’m working for a crummy little shoestring operation,” Hagen said – and, two, they’re out for revenge.
”This is all about punishing Uta,” she said.
Hagen isn’t the first leading lady to slog it out with the producers. Last month, Lillias White, who starred in Soloway and Levy’s ”Dinah Was,” accused them of failing to meet her most basic demands and of not keeping that show’s production values up to a professional level.
The ill will between Hagen and the two producers began while ”Collected Stories” was in previews last summer at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Three days before opening night, Soloway attacked director William Cardin, claiming that his staging had ruined the ending of the play, Hagen said.
Soloway ”insulted my director,” Hagen said. ”It was very ugly, and deeply unprofessional for him to come in and annihilate us three days before our opening.”
Soloway later offered an apology, which Hagen refused to accept. ”Now he’s being vengeful,” she said. ”Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Well, Soloway isn’t a woman, but he sure is behaving like one.”
Soloway and Levy declined to be interviewed for this article. But in a statement, they said: ”While the legendary performance given by Ms. Hagen is evident eight times a week … we must confess that we have grown weary of her ongoing campaign for a marketing program which would exceed the budgets of most Broadway plays. … As a practical matter, we have spent over $450,000 to date in promoting ‘Collected Stories,’ an amount in keeping with both industry standards and the marketing budgets of our other hit productions of ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane,’ ‘Gross Indecency’ and ‘As Bees in Honey Drown.”’
