Entertainment

Lee Trull is on fire as both a playwright and actor

10:32 AM CDT on Thursday, June 8, 2006

By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News

Reputable theater companies have produced four plays by Lee Trull over the last six months, three of them world premieres. There's probably not another 26-year-old playwright in the country who can make that claim.

Thursday, Classical Acting Company opens Mr. Trull's most ambitious project to date. For Huck Finn, the playwright uses only eight actors to portray all the characters from Mark Twain's sprawling classic.

The lanky Arlington native, also one of the area's busiest – and funniest – actors, is obviously on a roll. But he doesn't sound all that impressed by what he's done.

"I have no 'hot young playwright' ambitions," he says. "I want to be a good playwright – with the potential to be great."

A master of the ironic sneer as well as the boyish smile, Mr. Trull loves to make explosive statements and obviously isn't afraid of coming off as arrogant.

"I tend to get a little cruel," he admits. "I tend to assume everybody else has inferior standards."

Says Chris Baldwin, who plays the title role in Huck Finn: "If he's not in fact the brightest guy in the world, he's got a way of making you believe he is."

Mr. Trull began writing for the stage in projects for Arlington's Martin High School. He left Sam Houston State University, where he was majoring in musical theater, to script a 14-part high-definition TV documentary about Route 66.

Unlike most playwrights, however, his face is becoming familiar to North Texas audiences. Beginning with a role in Inspecting Carol at the now-defunct Plano Repertory Theatre in December 2002, Mr. Trull has performed almost continuously on local stages. He's done stellar work for Stage West, Theatre Three, Kitchen Dog Theater and several other companies.

He was acting in his second show for Classical Acting Company, Romeo and Juliet, when an opportunity to write for the troupe suddenly presented itself.

"We knew we wanted to do a new adaptation of The Gift of the Magi , but we got ourselves into a corner when we announced the show and still had no script," Classical co-founder Matthew Gray says. "I asked Lee, 'Can you do this in two to three weeks?' And he did."

Cheryl Diaz Meyers / DMN

Marcus M. Mauldin, back row left, and Chris Baldwin, back row right, play Jim and Huck in Mr. Trull's adaptation of Huck Finn.

The show proved a major hit as Classical's 2004 holiday show, and was revived in December 2005. Since then, Richardson Theatre Centre gave the world premiere of Mr. Trull's Tulsa Skyline in March at WaterTower Theatre's Out of the Loop Festival, with the playwright himself starring. Shortly afterward, Stage West presented Puppet Boy , a quirky rethinking of the Pinocchio story. It was the first play ever commissioned by the Fort Worth company.

When it came time to put together Classical Acting Company's current season, Mr. Gray says they went right to Mr. Trull for Huck Finn.

Classical, devoted to great plays from the past, has a commitment to doing a major American work every season.

Mr. Trull spent all last summer "and into the fall" researching Huck Finn. He's obviously something of a perfectionist.

"I don't want a rehearsal of my play going up onstage. I don't want a first draft. I want to give the theater a good play," Mr. Trull says.

"I read a lot," including several Twain novels, his autobiography and a book about Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Ulysses S. Grant. "I'm sure I drove people crazy," the playwright says. "I read a book about how racist Huckleberry Finn is and a book saying it was the great book of the civil rights movement. Then I put all that away and just concentrated on how to make the book more theatrical."

Classical Acting Company deliberately cut back on its budget for actors this season, regrouping for a big push after it moves to a new Plano home in the fall. So one of the goals was to do this story with as few performers as possible.

"I went from 11 actors to 10 to eight – which I'm very excited about," Mr. Trull says. "Of course, I'm not the one who has to direct it."

That would be Fort Worth veteran Joel Ferrell, one of the best directors around (among his directorial efforts a memorable production of another version of this story, Big River, for Casa Mañana a few years back). In this one, except for Mr. Baldwin as Huck and Marcus M. Mauldin as Jim, the performers not only take multiple roles but also switch genders. Mr. Ferrell and Mr. Trull gave the part of Tom Sawyer to a young woman, Lynn Blackburn.

In a switch from many adaptations these days, Mr. Trull takes narration out of Huck Finn, rather than inserting it or using Huck, who tells the story in the novel. Narration would make his job easier, but the playwright doesn't think that's the best way to go onstage. He has dramatized every scene. A character may step forward for a moment to speak his thoughts, but that's it.

Reworking Mark Twain came with a built-in intimidation factor. "The hardest part of it is that, in my opinion, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the great American novel – of course, that was Hemingway's opinion and Steinbeck's opinion, too," Mr. Trull says. "The other hardest thing was, how do you decide what you can leave out?"

As Huck Finn moves from writing to production, the young playwright says he's playing around with a couple of ideas over the summer. He's also been asked to write a one-man show for himself, and to expand Tulsa Skyline from a one-act to a full-length script.

And then it's back on the boards for Lee Trull the actor in the fall. He'll star in Kitchen Dog Theater's 2006-07 season opener, the title of which is still to be announced.

If all the attention might swell a lesser man's head, Mr. Trull has his girlfriend of seven years, a Houston actress, to keep him humble.

"She just got offered a season at the Alley Theatre," he says. "She's a lot more successful than I am."

E-mail ltaitte@dallasnews.com

The most troublesome issue Lee Trull faced in bringing Huck Finn to the stage is that same one that has kept the classic out of some school libraries: The characters routinely use a word for black people that has grown ever more offensive since the novel was written in the 19th century.

"We tried it both ways," the playwright says. "Without the N-word, the dialogue doesn't have the same impact. So we went right for it."

The actors' reaction: "Yuck!"

"It raises the hairs on the back of my neck," says Marcus M. Mauldin, who plays Jim. Being addressed with that word takes him back too vividly to his childhood in East Texas.

"What makes it particularly difficult with the word in this show is that you don't save it up for effect," Mr. Trull says. "That's where the power of it comes from – the everyday use."

Chris Baldwin, the show's Huck, says he thought it would get easier as rehearsals went on. But it hasn't. "You want to take a breath before it comes," he says – but that would spoil the effect.

"This book was originally seen by its audience as anti-slavery because it assigns humanity to a slave," Mr. Trull says. "That's Huck's process. For me, there's no interest in the book if it weren't for that."

All the same, writer and actors want to make sure that audiences know what they are in for.

"Tom Sawyer is a children's book," Mr. Trull says. " Huck Finn is a violent, sadistic story. It's not for 6-year-olds who wonder why they [the actors] get to use that word."

L.T.