Tom Eyen, Taken for All in All

I am tardy in appreciating playwright/screenwriter/director Tom Eyen (1940-1991), but am gratified to redress the lapse today.

For some reason, Eyen is seldom included in capsule narratives of the fields he contributed to. I suspect the fact that he was significant across multiple areas has contributed to the omission. For example, he was one of the earliest experiment playwrights in the off-off-Broadway scene at La Mama, Caffe Cino etc, but one doesn’t usually see his name alongside the usual touted playwrights like Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Megan Terry, Maria Irene Fornes, Jean-Claude Van Itallie, et al. He was equally important in the drag and camp worlds, but you don’t often see him mentioned with the likes of Charles Ludlam, John Vacarro,Ronald Tavel,Charles Busch, etc. He was pivotal in supplying material to Bette Midler. He was one of the main writers on the hilarious soap opera parody TV series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. And, then he conquered Broadway by writing the book and lyrics to the hit show Dreamgirls (1981). Seems like he deserves a shout-out.

The son of Syrian immigrants, Eyen was raised in the small town of Cambridge, Ohio, which is roughly equidistant from Columbus to the west, and Akron to the north (about an hour and a half in either direction). His folks ran a restaurant. He studied at Ohio State before coming to New York to take classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1960.

From 1964 through 1974, there were over three dozen productions of his plays in the Off-Off Broadway scene. Some notable ones include The White Whore and the Bit Player (written in 1964, but revived nine years later starring Candy Darling); Why Hanna’s Skirt Won’t Stay Down, Or, Admission 10c (1964, set in a Coney Island funhouse); Miss Nefertiti Regrets (1965, with Jackie Curtis and Bette Midler); Cinderella Revisited (1965, with Midler); Sarah B Divine! (1967, a play about Sarah Bernhardt which he brought to the Spoleto Festival in Italy); and The Dirtiest Show in Town (1970, which ran for months, was transferred to bigger venues, and made into a 1980 television film). In 1971, a song he co-wrote was used in Milos Forman’s first English language film Taking Off.

In 1973 he took his act to Broadway with the musical Rachael Lily Rosenbloom (And Don’t You Ever Forget It), which played seven previews and closed before it opened. Nothing daunted, he went on to what became his most successful Off-Broadway play, the women’s prison picture parody Women Behind Bars (1975), which opened at the Astor Place Theatre, and has been revived numerous times ever since, often with major stars in the casts. Then came writing for TV: Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976-77), and Bette Midler’s first tv special Ol’ Red Hair is Back (1977). Work on Dreamgirls, loosely based on the story of The Supremes and other ’60s girl groups, began in 1979. The show opened to raves in 1981 and played for nearly four years, winning six Tonys.

In 1984 Eyen began working with Alan Menken on Kicks: The Showgirl Musical, but it never got beyond the workshop stage. He contracted AIDS some time after this. He died of complications from the disease in 1991. The hit screen version of Dreamgirls followed 15 years later.