Theater

Money Changes Everything

He was aiming to do just that when he wrote the original version of the play ten years ago, pegging it to the scandals of the eighties. That version was never performed, and in the interim, Weitz made his name with the American Pie franchise—then began to steer his career toward more sophisticated projects. Last year, Carole Rothman, Second Stage Theatre’s artistic director, rediscovered Privilege and found it freshly relevant. Instead of updating it, Weitz thought, it was easier to address the current corporate scandals through the scrim of the Reagan era. It’s a technique that helps emphasize the way such upheavals continually recur. “And it even feels like it’s going back to another archetypal Republican presidency.”

Instead of modeling the parents in the play on eighties figures, like Ivan Boesky or Michael Milken, however, Weitz said, he decided to make them “grossly distorted caricatures” of his own parents. It’s an unusual choice. And in conversation, Weitz is exceedingly careful to distinguish the real from the fictional, noting that his own parents couldn’t have been further from the social-striving wannabes in the play; in fact, he claims they were the sort of parents the Privilege couple aspire to be. Weitz does acknowledge that he gave the characters traits that are recognizably associated with his parents: Weitz’s father, who grew up in England and traveled around the world, “would say things like ‘Okay, chums, let’s get going.’ ” The father in the play also uses the word chum, “but from him it’s a horrible affectation.”

“It was very easy to be the token rebel druggie at Collegiate. There wasn’t much competition.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the father-son relationship has long been a fraught topic for Weitz. A spy in World War II and later a race-car driver, John Weitz embodied all things macho, and was so tough that Paul has compared his family dynamic to that of a repressive Soviet-bloc country—triggering him and his brother to form a “family within a family.”

In response, Weitz became what he describes as a “really repulsive caricature of the New York boys’-school teenager.” He had a buzz cut with one long lock of hair hanging down to his chin, wore spandex shirts, and frequented Studio 54 in its dying days. “It was very easy to be the token rebel druggie at Collegiate; there wasn’t much competition, so I tried to be that.” This naturally irked his father, who, as a dashingly dressed fashion designer, cared deeply about how people looked and what they wore. “Anything I wore he took somewhat personally, and that just tripled the degree of rebellion.”

Yet even at a young age, Weitz was also struggling not to deny the obvious—his own financial freedom. At 18, upon returning from a trip to Europe, he was asked by a Customs official how he could afford to go to so many different countries, since “I probably fit the profile of a guy who was importing hash.” His response: “Because I have rich parents.” (The Customs official responded, “Well, God bless rich parents.”) “If you grow up wealthy in New York, you get a definition of worldliness, but to me it’s actually not worldliness at all,” he said. “It just means you exclude other parts of the world.” Being raised in Manhattan, he said, gives you the “false impression that you’re faster than everybody else in the country, and that if you didn’t grow up in New York, then you’re probably not as smart or as cultured or you work with one strike against you.”

Weitz toyed with the idea of redeeming the father’s character at the end of the play, but after the dress rehearsal, he decided it would be too saccharine. “I let him have his moment of redemption but followed it immediately with self-indulgence,” said Weitz. “As I was sitting through it yesterday, I realized that if the audience felt like I was asking them to feel sorry for these rich people, I was in serious trouble.” A gamble, it’s true. But one that seems to have paid off.