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09/14/2017 12:01 AMThere’s something about theater that makes Mike Reiss keep coming back for more, especially in Connecticut.
Not that the decades-long writer-producer of The Simpsons needs the work. He’s been busy enough over the years far beyond the famed animated TV series, now approaching its 30th year.
Reiss is also creator of the cult animated series The Critic and Queer Duck, as screenwriter for such films as Ice Age, Love Among the Ruins, and The Simpsons Movie, and as author of children’s books, including Murray Saves Christmas, which was recently made into a TV holiday musical perennial. He’s also working on a memoir.
But it’s theater that keeps tugging at Reiss, who was born and raised in Bristol before going off to Harvard where he joined Harvard Lampoon—and subsequently to the National Lampoon after graduation. Then came gigs-for-gags as writer for Johnny Carson, Garry Shandling and, most significantly, Homer Simpson and the Springfield gang.
His first foray into legit was I’m Connecticut, which earned him a special award from the Connecticut Critics Circle when it premiered at UConn’s Connecticut Repertory Theatre in 2011.
There was an encore production of the play two years later at Ivoryton Playhouse in Essex, which then premiered his next play, Comedy Is Hard, in 2014. But when he tried out his next show Rubble in New York a few years back, he had mixed results.
“We were in the New York Fringe Festival where they called it the finest show out of 200 plays. It went great every night—except the night The New York Times came and it was catastrophic. The Times just killed us.”
Normally that would be the end of that piece, a playful existential romp about a man trapped in the rubble of an L.A. earthquake who re-examines his life. Think Beckett’s Happy Days with a lot more yucks.
But when a pal suggested rewriting it a musical, Reiss went for it. After all, so many of his comedies tap into a templates of old-fashioned—if not downright surreal—musical comedy, including The Simpsons, Queer Duck, I’m Connecticut, and How Murray Saved Christmas.
“We love writing these songs, sometimes much more than then audience loves seeing them,” Reiss jokes.
An expanded Rubble—now titled I Hate Musicals: The Musical—will premiere at Ivoryton Playhouse from Wednesday, Sept. 27 to Sunday, Oct. 15, now with the show’s protagonist dealing with his worst nightmare: seeing his life flash by in front of him as a musical.
Meanwhile, Reiss continues his one-day-a-week gig in Los Angeles for The Simpsons.
“I lived out in Los Angeles and hated it. So now I fly out there Tuesday night; I stay in a super cheap hotel that doesn’t have bedbugs; I work Wednesday and that night I catch the red-eye back to New York. Its been my schedule for 10 years. It’s crazy, I know. I drag my wife, Denise, along because I don’t want to be Willie Loman traveling alone.”
And what is life like at The Simpsons plant?
“The whole [Simpsons] job is that I sit there in a room with seven or eight writers and just make things funnier. Someone has written a script and we keep changing it trying to make it better as a group. I just step in and see whatever they’re doing. Sometimes it’s a new script. Sometimes it’s a show that’s half-animated in black and white and we can still change 30 percent of it. Sometimes it’s the finished animation—but we can still change 10 percent. I just step in and become part of the group and join in whatever they’re doing.”
Reiss would like to be part of the tradition of great comedy writers who started in television, and also making it on Broadway: Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Larry Gilbert, Larry David, and Mel Brooks, among them.
Other play projects include Shakespeare’s Worst, which premiered in Bristol, England this summer, centering on “a spear-carrier” in one of Shakespeare’s plays doing a not-so-polite running commentary on the play as it goes along.
Then there’s an upcoming reading for a new one-act called It’s All in the Execution, “a funny play about a guy about to be beheaded,” he says. The idea began when Reiss thought, “What if I was one of those guys in an Isis beheading video who has to make a statement. What would I say if I had this one chance to spill my guts?”
Seeing the absurd in profound periods of stress has always appealed to Reiss.
“I remember as a kid seeing Neil Simon comedy God’s Favorite, based on the Book of Job. The play was a dud, but I thought it was the best idea in the world.”