Purgatory Diaries: The Novel

“… plenty of booze but I can’t catch a buzz, cartons and cartons of cigarettes and not a match in sight.”

Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller

Jason Miller’s original play, That Championship Season, following the reunion of four high school basketball players and their coach long after the applause — and their youth — has faded, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1973, as well as the Tony Award for best play. After that overnight success, Jason Miller, as a writer, was finished, as essayed in the 2007 play I wrote with Tom Flannery, Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller.

There is now a new Broadway revival of Championship starring Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patrick (Miller’s son), Chris Noth, Brian Cox, and Jim Gaffigan, which is sure to renew interest in Miller’s astonishing work as a playwright. For this, and a few other reasons, I have decided to sit down and a novel-novella based on my original play, with the title truncated to The Purgatory Diary of Jason Miller.

One of those “few other reasons” is that, to be honest, I’m still smarting over a newspaper review of a Bob Hughes production of the play in Pennsylvania, wherein the critic writes that Go Irish was “written with the help of L.A. playwright Roger (sic) Jacobs … (the play) shares Flannery’s perspective without asking us to toss out preconceptions.”

Horseshit. As I essayed for Hollywood Elsewhere in 2007 in an article titled Miller’s Ghost, the play originated with me after a chance encounter with Miller on the set of Exorcist III. I sought out Flannery, a Scranton playwright (Miller’s home town) to add some local flavor to the brew. Now, there’s a hell of a lot more than that to the story but I’ll save that for another time, except to say that the novel will help me reclaim my original vision of the story, free of Flannery’s input (and when I resurrect the original text of Miller’s Ghost in the next day or so, it will be apparent that the spirit of Jason Miller did not much care for Tom’s efforts, as I chronicled in the story).

So, for the next couple of months, when my attention isn’t distracted by Popmatters essays and paying journalism gigs when I can find them, I will be immersed in online footage of Pathe News reports of 1930s Notre Dame football games, explorations of Dante’s Purgatorio, the plays of Jason Miller, Jesuit mysticism, New York’s Cedar Bar in the early 1970s, production notes from The Exorcist, Brian Moore’s novel Catholics, and a fascinating essay by Gregory Rich titled The Skeptic’s View: Life After Death in Aldous Huxley’s Time Must Have a Stop.

Because the book is lit-fic with limited commercial appeal where the New York literary trend setters are concerned, I will be going the self-publishing route with this title, both print and electronic download versions, which will also get it to the market in a much more timely fashion; the other novel that I have on the back boiler for the time being is still intended as a mainstream marketplace manuscript.

 

“Go Irish” and the “Championship” Revival

“When I play him (Jason Miller), my subtext is that this is a doomed man,” actor Bob Hughes told the Bucks County (PA) Courier Times in September 2009. “”He had his reasons why he needed to ease the pain of his life and I’m certainly not going to judge his use of narcotics or his use of alcohol.”

Bob is referring to his tireless work presenting my play (co-written with Tom Flannery), Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller, anywhere he can find a venue that will support the one-man show, beginning with the 2007 premiere at the Northeast Theater in Scranton, Miller’s hometown.

Miller, who dropped dead of a heart attack in one of his favorite haunts, Farley’s Pub, in downtown Scranton on May 13, 2001, won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony award for his 1972 play That Championship Season, as well as a New York Drama Critics Award, and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in his film debut as Father Damien Karras in the 1973 film, The Exorcist. My play, which has been presented as part of the Live Arts Festival and the Philly Fringe Festival, concerns the fate of Miller’s soul in the afterlife, where he must account for his wasted talent … in writing in a notebook.

Bob Hughes grew up with Miller in Scranton and knew him until the day the gifted writer, actor, and director died.

“This is a fairytale (for me),” Hughes told the Courier Times. “Your best friend goes to the brink of success, nosedives off the Hollywood sign, and then you get a chance to re-enact his life on stage — how many actors get a chance to play their best friend from high school?”

Last year, around the time that our eviction problems began looming, Bob called me incessantly to tell me that he had heard rumors that a Broadway revival of Miller’s Championship Season was in the offing; he was hoping that a new production of the play might spur more interest in Go Irish. Later, he called and left a message telling me that the rumors were true, that a production was planned for the Spring of 2011.

I haven’t talked to Bob in the last six months; but yesterday, while thumbing through the Arts section of the New York Times — the print edition, which runs six bucks here on the west coast — I noticed that the revival of Championship is indeed underway and in previews. The venue for the new production? The Jacobs Theatre.