If the Haddad family of Ohio had been looking for clues that one of their own would become a playwright-performer and turn some of their stories into theater, the indications were plentiful decades ago.
Now 34 and an Obie Award winner, Ryan J. Haddad was still in single digits when he first corralled assorted relatives into performing shows he directed — initially at home and eventually on the disused stage of a community center where, at 7, he’d taken acting classes. At 10, he started a monthly family newsletter that he kept up for years. And at 16, using an online platform, he self-published a memoir about his relationship with Charlie Haddad Jr., his theater-maven uncle. Ryan told him that he was going to make a play about it, too, someday.
“And I thought, oh, sure you are,” Charlie, a retired dentist, recalled warmly last week by phone from Cleveland.
But with Ryan’s poignant comedy “Good Time Charlie” now running at the Public Theater, that day has arrived. Its principal characters are two gay men from the same tight-knit family who longed for the footlights: Charlie, who resisted the temptation of a career in theater but remained an avid audience member, and Ryan, who left Ohio to make his mark Off Broadway with autobiographical shows like “Dark Disabled Stories” and “Hold Me in the Water.”
He started writing “Good Time Charlie,” the script that got him into the Public’s Emerging Writers Group, in 2017. Had his dream scenario worked out, that play — which calls for his largest professional cast yet, seven actors portraying nine characters — would have made its premiere long ago. Instead, it evolved for nearly a decade.
“How do you tell the story of a man who would have absolutely loved and killed to be on the stage, but had never set foot on it professionally?” Ryan, who portrays himself in the show, said the other morning at the Public. “While I was beginning to become the manifestation of everything he might have wanted if he had even tried.”
“Good Time Charlie” is an ode to the sustaining power of love and art, but the play also confronts what Ryan calls “the hard stuff,” including, for one character, loss of mobility. Disability is a lesser theme in this play than in other works by Ryan, who has cerebral palsy, but it is very much present.
So is the misery of estrangement. The play twines the story of Ryan’s relatively easy coming out with Charlie’s fraught experience a generation earlier, when his parents took a painfully long time to accept him as gay. Not a spoiler: They ultimately got there, and embraced his partner, Lou, as well.
Charlie — who is not actually Ryan’s uncle but rather his father’s first cousin — has been let in on the play’s development all along, from the draft Ryan showed him in December 2017. At a reading in 2018, Charlie found himself moved when the actor Jonathan Raviv, who plays him at the Public, too, “got to the essence of me without even knowing who I was.”
One weekend last month, Charlie came to New York for an early preview performance. To Ryan and the director, Danny Sharron, it was important for him to see it while there was still time to make changes. They wanted to be certain, Ryan said, that “if something was really deeply personally egregious to him, he wouldn’t have to sit there and be like, well, the show is frozen, there’s nothing we can do.”
Yet the feedback Charlie gave them, Ryan said, was not about personal sensitivities.
“What I was so touched by, and sort of so humbled by, was that all of his thoughts came through the lens of a sophisticated theatergoer,” he said. “It was like, ‘This is what the audience was feeling, this was what I was feeling in the audience, and if you did this and this and this, it would be tighter and it’d be better.’ I didn’t expect him to have that kind of clarity. He just wants it to be as good as it can be.”
Then again, Charlie knows theater. This is someone whose first Broadway show was Geoffrey Holder’s 1975 production of “The Wiz”; whose regular theatergoing trips to New York helped nourish the young Ryan with the tantalizing intel he brought back; and who in 2007, when Ryan was 15, tipped him off to the Broadway’s Biggest Fan competition.
As a finalist, and with Charlie as his plus-one, Ryan was flown to New York, where the audience at the Broadway on Broadway concert in Times Square voted him the winner, based on a 60-second video he’d made. And when the contest gave him tickets to “Legally Blonde” instead of his first choice, “Spring Awakening,” Charlie got house seats through a friend and they saw both.
None of that is in the play, but it is part of the story of their real-life bond. Such is the cherishing of family and dearest friends that “Good Time Charlie” celebrates.
Sharron, the director, has worked on the project since 2018, during which time Ryan has changed the script as the lives of the people it’s based on have changed. Some of them got sick. Some died. No one is exactly who they were way back when.
“It’s never just a mechanical ‘I have to cut this line for this reason,’” Sharron said. “It’s always connected to the real humans and his care for them.”
Dramaturgically, of course, that fidelity to them and their stories is a complicating factor.
“Ryan isn’t interested in lying,” Sharron said. “He doesn’t want to put something in the play that is falsified. And over the years we’ve had actors say, ‘Well, it would be better if this happened dramatically.’ I just say, ‘Sure, but that’s not what happened, and we have to find a way to shape what did happen.’”
For Ryan, putting onstage these actor-channeled versions of people he loves is an emotionally laden task. At a rehearsal I watched in September, he had to pause mid-scene to collect himself when a simple moment between the actors Michael Cristofer, as a close family friend, and Beth Malone, as Ryan’s aunt Janice, reminded him so strongly of the real people they portray that he was suddenly in tears.
But the play is a way, Ryan said later, to “hold on to my memory of all of them,” whether they are gone or simply “aren’t as spry or aren’t as youthful as they once were.”
And the thing is, these are people who set the stage for his grown-up life. The little kid he once was, hellbent on theater? They signed on as his actors. They took his direction. They encouraged and indulged him, championed and loved him.
“Even if they were doubting me in the background or in their own minds, they never showed me that they didn’t think I could make it in this career,” he said. “With all the uncertainty, it was like, ‘Well, this is what you’ve wanted since you were literally a toddler. So we’re going to help you make it happen.’ And they did.”
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