Lynda Barry slowly drove home to Chicago last week after taking New York by storm. Her play The Good Times Are Killing Me, an adaptation of her novel of the same name, is a hit off-Broadway, and a lucrative deal has just been cut for a film version to be directed by Norman Jewison. Barry was profiled last week in Newsweek, the New York Times, and Theater Week magazine. She’s hot.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When City Lit’s production of The Good Times Are Killing Me opened in May 1989, in the 70-seat Live Bait Theater space at 3914 N. Clark, no one could have predicted the fate that awaited it. Just getting the show up was a struggle. Barry was wary of the theater business because of a previous experience she’d had in Seattle, and Aprill had to convince her to let him do his adaptation. The contracts they signed promised Aprill 5 percent of Barry’s royalties on all productions of his adaptation, and City Lit was promised a program credit for any future presentations of that adaptation. “There was no room to bargain for better terms,” remembers City Lit managing director Charles Twichell. When the play ended its Live Bait run, Barry gave Aprill more of her royalties than he had bargained for, 50 percent instead of the agreed-upon 5. Aprill says he then contacted Barry’s agent to request the same cut for future productions, but he was refused. He wound up earning a total of $4,659.19 in fees and royalties for the show.
About halfway through the commercial run (which began in September 1989), Barry ceased having much contact with the production or with City Lit. Some feared she had grown disenchanted with the show (which eventually moved to the Halsted Theatre Centre and ran through March 1990), but Barry claims that was not the case. “I didn’t have anything else to do,” she says. “My job was done.”
When The Good Times opened at Second Stage on April 18, neither Aprill nor Twichell nor any of the City Lit staff were in the audience (nor have they yet seen it). But New York Times drama critic Frank Rich did see the show and called it “funny and engaging” in his review. Barry says there has been interest in filming The Good Times since the novel was published in 1988, but when Rich’s review appeared “things started to pop.” She went to Los Angeles to take meetings with a slew of potential producers and directors, and on July 26 the Times announced a film deal that could net Barry a sum “in the high six figures” if the film is made. Barry says that report is an “overexaggeration.”
