Annie MacRae: It’s clear from the very first moments of Accent on Youth when we see playwright Steven Gaye’s (David Hyde Pierce) opulent living room that the life of a 1930’s playwright is quite different from the life of a contemporary writer. Does your father’s portrait of Gaye strike you as at all autobiographical?

Joel Raphaelson: That question usually takes this form: did you have a butler when you were growing up? The answer is no. Steven Gaye wrote nineteen successful plays and I think his lifestyle was autobiographical only in the sense that it’s the way my father would have lived if he wrote nineteen successful plays. In actual fact, he wrote nine plays that were produced on Broadway and they weren’t all big hits.

AM: How did your father come to write Accent on Youth?

JR: Here’s what my father said about that, talking to a class in playwriting at the University of Illinois in the spring of 1948:

I was sitting one evening with two friends, James Cain and Vincent Lawrence. Lawrence was talking about somebody and humorously he called him a lecherous old man. I said idly, “That’s unfair. There’s tragedy in the loss of youth. I’m not thinking of a drooling old idiot, but many men of sixty and seventy making fools of themselves over young women are just as touching as a boy of seventeen breaking his heart over a girl.” I was thinking of a painter I knew. I was thinking, too, of my own coming fortieth year. Forty can seem very menacing when you’re thirty-five. You expect your life to be over. I felt very keenly for the gents of sixty having their last romantic flare…

He first considered writing the play as a tragedy, but had trouble making it work. He says, “In moments of relaxation, I would say to my wife, ‘Of course, it would be easy to do it as a comedy, but how trite. I could make him a dramatist – even triter. A successful dramatist of fifty, who had just written a tragedy about an old man and a young woman…’”

So, that’s where he first got the idea for Accent on Youth and dismissed it as being trite. About Stephen Gaye, he said, “I didn’t like him. I found he was all I could talk about, but I found I couldn’t care, not for three acts. I could pity him, but I couldn’t raise him to tragic stature.”

So, then he gets to when he did decide to write it as a comedy:

Comedy made the man small, which he was. His sufferings, though they were real, appeared in terms of their absurdity. You could feel and laugh at the same time. More interesting still, my theme came up by itself. I was no longer writing the tragedy of lost youth. Instead, I was writing the richness of age as compared with the meagerness of youth, a subject which leant itself to some observation of American life and to gaiety.

AM: Accent on Youth had three incarnations in film Accent on Youth (1935), the musical Mr. Music (1950) starring Bing Crosby and But Not for Me (1959) starring Clark Gable. Can you tell us a little bit about the play versus those three films?

JR: My father, for some reason, took extremely little interest in the translation of his plays into movies. He had nothing to do with any of the movies, and, I’m embarrassed to say, I never saw any of them. So, I can’t comment on that. I don’t really know what my father thought about them, but I don’t think he was wildly enthusiastic about them.

AM: That’s interesting, especially because your father is mostly recognized as a screenwriter who worked with Ernst Lubitsch and Alfred Hitchcock, and who penned The Merry Widow, The Shop Around the Corner and Heaven Can Wait.

JR: Today he might be most recognized as a screenwriter, but he was most recognized as a playwright. Screenplays were regarded as passing phenomena. Plays had a kind of permanent stature if they were successful. They were published as books. Once, my father gave Ernst Lubitsch the hard-cover book of one of his plays and Lubitsch said, “That’s really very nice. You can put it on a shelf, you can take it off the shelf, you can look at it, you can hold it. You know what happens to a hit movie? It gets put into a film can and sent off to a warehouse with a bunch of other film cans and nobody ever sees it again.”

He regarded the screenwriting as potboilers to feed his family and put a roof over our heads. He took it seriously as a craft and worked very hard at it, but had no interest in it as manifestation of him as a writer. He thought of himself as a man of the theatre.

And now, of course, three of my father’s screenplays have been published as a book, which tells you how unpredictable these things are. Nobody would have imagined such a thing possible back when the movies were actually being made.

AM: Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of Accent on Youth is the first Broadway production of the play since its original run in 1934. What was your reaction to the news that your father’s play would be revived?

JR: I was thrilled! And particularly thrilled that it was being done under such distinguished auspices as Manhattan Theatre Club and with such a first rate director and cast. It’s just wonderful. And it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing to happen in the last years of my sister’s life. She’s been very ill during the production, but got a great kick out of it.

AM: How do you think your father would feel about this revival?

JR: I think he would be extremely pleased. I don’t know how it would compare with Nicholas Hannon who played the part when it first opened, but I can’t imagine anybody would have been better than David Hyde Pierce. I think my father would have been very pleased with David’s elegance and seriousness. He lets humor arise out of the play itself and not any tricks of performance.

I had dinner with Dan Sullivan about a month before rehearsals and it was an enormous relief to hear him talk about why he wanted to put this play on and the way he intended to do it. He wasn’t going to try to make it anything other than what it was. He really understood that there was a touching and emotional side to it as well as the humor. I could tell from talking to him that the play would be done just right.