The theme of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Bad Hemingway By The Bay (A Bad Memory Play), written, directed, and performed by Gary De Mattei, responds to this statement with the question, “You wanna bet?”
De Mattei wrote his solo play in free-verse and while he tells his story playing twenty different characters he is accompanied by an ensemble of musicians underscoring the action with an original jazz score and sound effects. So, in essence, Bad Hemingway By The Bay is a solo performance piece…with other people.
The play is set in the mind of the storyteller, R.T. Dickman (Dick), an aging spirit who haunts theaters to commiserate with the audience about his life in San Francisco during the “California Cuisine hysteria started by Alice Waters up at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Or was it, Wolfgang Puck down at Spago in Los Angeles? Or, was it both?” One thing is certain, Bad Hemingway by the Bay is a two-act bad memory play about a writer and performance artist forced to make his living in the restaurant business in order to fund his obsession to compose one really good page of really Bad Hemingway for submission to an annual Bad Hemingway contest. Winners get their piece published on a tasteful little billboard outside of Prego, a popular Florentine style trattoria on San Francsico’s famed Union Street. The winner also gets a trip for two to a former Ernest Hemingway hangout, Harry’s Bar in Venice, where Hemingway drank Bellinis when he was alive. Or was it, Martinis? Or was it both? One thing’s certain, during the play we also learn that when Dick was alive he was a successful restaurant manager whose special talents included stopping the bleeding, a commonly used euphemism among restaurant owners who’d spend millions of dollars renovating someone else’s building leaving no money for operating expenses during the precarious opening months. Thoreau’s is co-owned and operated by Dick’s friend, a Michelin starred chef from France who Dick calls, Gerard Depardieu, “because of his striking resemblance to the famous French film star, and because…that is his name.” Thoreau’s principal owners are the twin brothers, Henry and David Thoreau, “also known as Enrico and Vito Torro…in five states…Henry and David have never run a restaurant before. They’ve burned down plenty but never managed one.” So, as a favor to Gerard— whose sous-chef wife just left him because “she found him in the walk-in refrigerator with the Sommelier from the Fog City Diner. Or was it the Garde Manger from the Zuni Cafe? Or was it both? One thing’s certain, Gerard is French.” Dick takes a meeting with Henry and David in an attempt to help his friend Gerard stay out of the hole…”and by ‘out of the hole’ we don’t mean whole in the hole.” At the meeting, Dick makes several recommendations on how to save Thoreau’s from closure. Intrigued by his suggestions, Henry and David decide not to kill Dick for putting red lines through their menu and instead they hire him to implement the changes while also paying him to run the bar which includes Dick writing “a very campy floor show about Henry David Thoreau that Beach Blanket Babylon won’t sue them for because they won’t use any big hats. Just little ones…little tiny hats.” Over the next three years, Henry David Thoreau’s becomes a very successful “fun-theme restaurant” with expansion plans in their future.
In addition to working at Thoreau’s in the evening, Dick is also the day bar manager of an underground nightclub South of Market Street known as Club Feat. Dick informs us that “bar manager is just a fancy title for the day bartender.” Dick works at the club by day doing the ordering and the stocking and the inventory “and cleaning the vomit off the payphones…and patching the holes punched in the bathroom walls by the guys who pump iron at Gold’s Gym— the ones who have the steroid shakes.” Dick also performs his nightclub act at Club Feat after hours. His act is a Bad Hemingway piece titled “The Cold Man And The Sea…now in its third sold out year!”
Contrasted with Dick’s successful professional life is his disastrous personal life, which the play highlights by focusing on his on-again-off-again-codependent-relationship with a brilliant Goth artist, La Ragazza, who feels she is sullying her MFA in graphic design from Parsons working as the in-house calligraphist and illustrator for Jacques Print Shacques, which is the printer and publisher of several underground newspapers that features Dick’s column under the byline, Bad Hemingway By The Bay. “Jacques” is down the street from Club Feat and is owned by trust fund baby, Jack, who “looks like Tom Cruise only taller and slightly more annoying because he has a masters in comparative literature from Stanford.” La Ragazza is not so secretly in love with Jack, who is a Luddite so he’s fine with “paying La Ragazza a lot to do all of his illustrations and layout for him by hand for more than his doomed company can afford…while also having Dick write column after column in Jack’s various underground newspapers for free.” Jack’s business is being “threatened by a new personal computing device whose main feature is desk top publishing” but he doesn’t want to touch his trust fund until he makes it on his own steam so he moonlights as a bartender at Tosca’s in North Beach.
Dick and La Ragazza further complicate their relationship by attempting to procreate, but Dick “shoots blanks” which is why they both work two jobs — male infertility treatments are expensive and “not covered under Dick’s Blockbuster card.” During a section of the play we flashback to when Dick was young and his ancestors sent him to a Urologist (Dr. Krab with a K) to be treated for male infertility before young Dick knew how babies were made. After several years of treatment, Dr. Krab concludes that one day, “with a little more better living through chemistry”, Dick will be able to “live a normal life with a wife and have children of his own to leave him alone because…it only takes one.”
Unable to produce that single sperm, consumes Dick with shame and despair. To paraphrase Anton Chekhov, it is his work as a writer and a performance artist that gives him the ability to endure. Until it doesn’t.
To procreate or not to procreate? Is procreation even ethical? Does coming into existence do more harm than good to sentient beings? These are some of the questions Bad Hemingway By The Bay asks, but does not answer.
Photo: Gary De Mattei during the staged reading of Bad Hemingway By The Bay at New York’s Huron Club at the SOHO Playhouse (2023)