Ryan J. Haddad's 'Good Time Charlie' Premieres at the Public

Ryan J. Haddad's "Good Time Charlie" opened at the Public Theater with seven actors portraying nine characters, after nearly a decade of rewrites that began with the script that admitted him to the theater's Emerging Writers Group in 2017.

The Obie winner, who is 34, plays himself. Jonathan Raviv plays Charlie Haddad Jr., a retired Cleveland dentist who is, in fact, the playwright's father's first cousin — not an uncle, though Haddad has called him that for years. Charlie never pursued theater professionally. He watched it instead. Haddad has built a play about both their relationships to the stage.

What does the play actually dramatize?

Two gay men from one Ohio family. Haddad's coming out ran relatively smoothly. His uncle's ran a generation earlier and much harder. Haddad's grandparents took a painfully long time to accept Charlie as gay. They ultimately did. They embraced his partner, Lou.

Haddad has cerebral palsy. Disability remains in "Good Time Charlie," though Haddad calls it "a lesser theme in this play than in other works." His "Dark Disabled Stories" and "Hold Me in the Water" carried the subject more pointedly. Both played Off Broadway.

How much did the script change along the way?

Director Danny Sharron joined the project in 2018. Since then, Haddad has rewritten the play as the people it depicts have changed — some fell ill, some died, and none are exactly who they once were.

"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."

Haddad's fidelity to the source complicates the craft. Actors occasionally propose dramatic shortcuts. Sharron pushes back.

"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.'"

What did Charlie make of an early preview?

Charlie travelled to New York one weekend last month for a performance held while revisions remained possible. Haddad and Sharron wanted to spare him the indignity of sitting through something personally objectionable if it could still be fixed.

His response, by Haddad's account, focused on craft rather than content.

"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," Haddad said. "He just wants it to be as good as it can be."

At an earlier 2018 reading, Charlie had told Haddad that Raviv, his eventual stage counterpart, "got to the essence of me without even knowing who I was."

What is the family history the play draws on?

Plenty. Charlie's first Broadway show was Geoffrey Holder's 1975 "The Wiz." In 2007, when Haddad was 15, Charlie tipped him off to a Broadway's Biggest Fan competition. Haddad won it on the strength of a 60-second video and, with Charlie as his plus-one, flew to New York for the Broadway on Broadway concert in Times Square. The prize landed them tickets to "Legally Blonde"; Charlie got house seats to "Spring Awakening" through a friend.

None of that is in the play. The earlier family story is. Haddad directed relatives in his own shows while still a small child. At 10, he launched a monthly family newsletter. At 16, he self-published a memoir about Charlie online and promised him a play.

"And I thought, oh, sure you are," Charlie recalled warmly last week by phone from Cleveland.

What does the production ask of Haddad himself?

Quite a lot. At a September rehearsal watched by this reporter, Haddad stopped mid-scene when actors Michael Cristofer and Beth Malone, playing a family friend and Haddad's aunt Janice, summoned the real people so strongly that Haddad broke into tears.

The play is, in Haddad's words, a way 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."

What does the play change for Haddad's audience?

Disability is, by Haddad's own account, "a lesser theme in this play than in other works." The script runs on memory rather than polemic. For viewers who came to him through the more pointed Off-Broadway runs, that tonal shift will land as the evening's biggest surprise. Whether the gentler register reads as earned or evasive is the question the run at the Public will answer.