Billed as “A Correspondence in Two Acts,” the play “Tiger by the Tail,” now being presented by Group Rep at the Lonny Chapman Theatre in North Hollywood after successful productions in New York, Detroit and Richmond, Va., chronicles the exchange of letters between a therapist living in California and a Jewish inmate at a Florida state prison.
Although the prisoner is straight, he has placed a personal ad in a gay publication, hoping to eventually coax money out of whomever answers so he can survive in jail. The therapist, who is gay, has responded, and what ensues is an increasingly erotic and poetic communication between the two against the backdrop of a harsh and violent penal system. At one point in the story, a prisoner is beaten to death by prison guards.
Playwright Frawley Becker said the idea for his play was sparked by the case of a Florida prisoner who was murdered by guards.
“They came into his cell,” Becker said. “Three of them handcuffed him and stomped him to death. They jumped up and down on his body until every bone was broken and every organ was smashed. What happened after that was that the inmates who heard the screams, as well as a couple of inmates who had actually witnessed it from their cells, were all transferred to other prisons throughout the state of Florida. But those men in those prisons, they started to write some poems, which I’ve read. They’re terrible poems, but that isn’t the issue. They were just full of rage and a sense of injustice and compassion.”
Becker recalled that some of the poems were published online and then in a newspaper. After that, virtually every newspaper in Florida ran the story, and it spread up and down the East Coast. Then, the Department of Justice, along with the FBI, decided to investigate.
“The president at the time was George [W.] Bush, and his brother, Jeb Bush, was the governor of Florida, and so it was all squelched. The reports never got out. So, knowing that, having read up on that, about this horrible injustice and brutality and murder, I wondered what it might be like to play a love story against that, so that you kind of had the yin and the yang of life, if you follow me, something positive in such a negative place,” Becker explained. “But I thought it might be more interesting to do a male love story, rather than a traditional female-male story.”
Becker characterized the therapist as an alcoholic who had once been married, then had a boyfriend for several years. But, at 45, the therapist is at a point where he doesn’t have a relationship and is rather lonely, so he’s very vulnerable.
As for the prisoner, who is bright and sensitive, Becker said that the character has a family heritage as the descendant of two rabbis. “They were both very learned people, but he has a problem [with] learning because of his not seeing words properly when he reads. He’s dyslexic, and so he finds himself suddenly the oddball of that family.”
Becker continued: “When he checks a book out, and the guard says, ‘One week,’ he says, ‘It’s Dickens. Let me have two weeks.’ He’s not a fast reader.
“He couldn’t follow the path of two rabbis — his grandfather and his father.” However, by the time we meet him, he has worked to overcome that handicap as much as possible.
Becker, who is also Jewish, remarked that the only thing about the prisoner that he patterned after himself was the inmate’s approach to his religion — he was born Jewish, doesn’t practice it and is a free thinker.
The playwright feels that, while “Tiger by the Tail” delves into several issues, including prison brutality and the question of how well we ever really know people and what is in their hearts, the play’s main theme has to do with love. “Sometimes it comes in forms we don’t necessarily recognize, maybe even in forms that we do not approve,” Becker observed. He said he is also exploring the idea that love can transcend the division between being gay and being straight, and he cites an unexpected twist that occurs in the second act, when the therapist’s feelings change after he realizes the prisoner is not really gay and has been lying to him in many ways. “It’s the fact that the straight man wants the relationship, including the physical aspects of it, and the gay man does not.”
Becker said he hopes the audience will come to see that love has many faces. “It’s almost unimportant that it happens to be two men, because it comes down to something else at some point.”
Ultimately, the therapist gets past the devastation of having been deceived. “A very important characteristic, I think, is the forgiveness of any kind of hurt or damage that you may receive through love, through correspondence, through knowing somebody,” Becker said. “So, to me, I think the play deals with many things, but specifically with love and forgiveness.”
“Tiger by the Tail,” The Group Rep, Lonny Chapman Theatre
10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood
Through April 19 // 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday<
Tickets: 818-763-5990 or https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/254
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