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Saturday
Jun042011

Interview: Actor/Playwrights Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore on "You've Got Hate Mail"

Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore | Acting/Writing Partnersr | Stated Magazine Interview

Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore on Stated Magazine

Photo: Danny Sanchez

Acting and writing partners Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore have written 24 published plays together (so far…). Called the “masters of modern farce,” their enduring partnership has led them from their New Jersey roots to writing and producing in Hollywood for Newhart, Anything But Love, Martin, the I Love Lucy: The Very First Show special, and many others. They’re also consummate actors and physical comedians, appearing in nearly all of their plays Off-Broadway and regionally. Their 22nd play, You’ve Got Hate Mail is now in its second year Off-Broadway at The Triad in New York City. It’s a comedy of infidelities and misunderstandings in the information age, played almost entirely with the cast seated at laptops. The two actor/writers have been flying back and forth from LA for their now weekly appearances. We sat down with them after a recent performance and were charmed by their easy banter and ability to finish one another’s sentences, surely the mark of a long and successful relationship.

stated: We’ll be quick since you surely want to get to the bar.

JANE MILMORE: It’s mostly that we’re hungry.

stated: Of course! That’s the thing about having a 7 o’clock show…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: We have to eat at 4 everyday.

stated: Are you guys literally going back and forth from LA to New York to do this every week?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Not every week, but close.

JANE MILMORE: I’ve done that a few times. This month I’m staying here for a little bit, but yeah, I’ve done it.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Thanks to Spring Break at my kids’ school…they come here a little bit, I go there a little bit… It was better on paper.

JANE MILMORE: Yeah, on paper it sounded real easy.

stated: And it’s been since last Fall?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: We started this last June up here.

stated: Every week?

JANE MILMORE: No, every other week until March.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: We started out doing two shows and they sold out immediately so we added two more, and we sold them out immediately, and we kept adding. Since the beginning of March it’s been every week.

stated: That’s got to get expensive. Not to mention tiring…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Yeah…

JANE MILMORE: Well, Julia Duffy went on for me and Khrystyne Haje in March and April.

stated: That’s great.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Yeah, all those frequent flier miles are racking up.

JANE MILMORE: So we spread it out over different airlines trying to get more miles.

stated: So it’s…paying for itself…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Exactly.

stated: You live in New Jersey and LA—are you literally doing the bi-coastal thing?

JANE MILMORE: We literally do. We both have homes on both coasts.

Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore on Stated Magazine

stated: OK, wow. So taking it back to the beginning, you’re from New Jersey. How did this first start? How did you first meet and start writing?

JANE MILMORE: Well, I was born in Wyoming, but we met at The Barn Theatre in Rumson [NJ] acting in a competition…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: It was a high school competition. This little theatre in Rumson. Now it’s a gymnastics thing…

JANE MILMORE: Yeah, it used to a be a theatre.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Well, once a year she’d have all the high schools compete in their little “Tony’s” ceremony sort of thing. And she [Jane] came in from Keansburg with Plaza Suite and I came in from Middletown with…

JANE MILMORE: …with Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen

BILLY VAN ZANDT: And we met there and the following Spring we were in The Star Spangled Girl there together, which was our first show together. And we’ve been together ever since. 

JANE MILMORE: Yeah, this has been our whole life.

stated: Wow. So were you writing separately?

JANE MILMORE: We started writing children’s theatre…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Yeah, I wrote children’s theatre for there and we started writing together in ‘79. I was on the Star Trek movie [Star Trek: The Motion Picture]. And I was…

JANE MILMORE: Bored.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: I was bored. I was supposed to have a bigger role and then Leonard Nimoy came back to work and suddenly I had no role.

Billy in Star Trek: The Motion Picture

stated: Really.

JANE MILMORE: The new alien, because he wasn’t going to do it.
 

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Yeah, so I spent a lot of time waiting around.

stated: Was your role supposed to be sort of the “new Spock”?

JANE MILMORE: The new alien, because he [Nimoy] wasn’t going to do it.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: They told me I was a main character. So they kept me and I had all this elaborate makeup…

JANE MILMORE: He had yellow eyes with red x’s and big long antennae…

stated: Nimoy apparently had to be talked into it…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Well… I think that was what it was… [makes “money” gesture] 

stated: We’ll never tell…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: So they wouldn’t let me off the set, and I know it was illegal because I was SAG

JANE MILMORE: It was the first [Star Trek] movie and all the people were trying to see the starship…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Right. So I was trapped in my dressing room for lunch everyday, and Jane started bringing over the typewriter.

stated: So it was like an “NDA” situation, because they didn’t want anyone to know the production secrets?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Yeah. So I’m trapped in the dressing room and she brought my typewriter and we sat there and we wrote a show for ourselves called Love, Sex, and the IRS. And our friends, Kathy Reed and Dennis Lynch, owned The Dam Site [Theatre in Tinton Falls, NJ] and we came back and they put it on for us. And right after we did that, we went to publish it with Samuel French. We were in the middle of rewriting it, because it was a three-act play for the dinner theatre, so you had two intermissions to serve drinks and desserts and stuff. And we were gonna make it a two-act play and Samuel French said they’d publish it and we said “OK, let’s not rewrite a word.” So we published it, and they said they’d take our next two as well. We didn’t plan on writing two more, but we did. So now we’re 23…or 24 plays in. The first five or six are really atrocious but…

JANE MILMORE: We’ve gotta rewrite them. Touch ‘em up.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: If you read our shows in order, you can see the learning curve. We didn’t know how to write.

JANE MILMORE: We learned. Instead of going to school, we went to audiences…

stated: Wow. 24 published plays. Is You’ve Got Hate Mail number 24?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: No, this is 22. 

stated: So, there have been a few since?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: We wrote a musical, High School Reunion, and Wrong Window, which is our Alfred Hitchcock tribute.

stated: How have you managed to not kill each other after all these years?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Well, we have. 

JANE MILMORE: Sometimes, he’ll spit on me…

stated: Or is it the fact that you can kill each other but still keep working…?

JANE MILMORE: Well, it’s…a little of both, probably. 

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Well, the first couple shows were rather formulaic farces, and then we started challenging ourselves a little more. So now, every time we do a show it’s usually something we haven’t tried…

JANE MILMORE: Or something like…”Let’s try this! Let’s try something different.”

BILLY VAN ZANDT: So that keeps it moving.

JANE MILMORE: Like with Wrong Window, we wanted to tell a legit murder mystery but make it funny along the way. 

stated: And Silent Laughter, [a silent film performed live onstage in black and white] was definitely a strong concept.

JANE MILMORE: Yeah, some of them are really strong…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: …and a lot of ‘em just scare the hell out of ya, and you don’t really know until you’re open if it’s gonna work or not. Like this. “Are people gonna stand there and watch us read off laptops?!” It was very scary, especially opening night of the very first production—this was in 2007, I think—the very first performance, I didn’t bother learning my lines and I was reading it off the laptop…

Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore on Stated Magazine

You’ve Got Hate Mail (Photo: Danny Sanchez)

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stated: So you do have the script on your screen onstage?

JANE MILMORE: Some of them do, some of them don’t. 

BILLY VAN ZANDT: We all have it down, but you have it there.

JANE MILMORE: Even if you’re off-book, when your screen goes blank it scares you.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: It’s designed so actors can come in and just read it. But opening night, I hadn’t learned my lines and the sudden my computer started scanning, because I use my own laptop, it started scanning…

JANE MILMORE: The antivirus…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: …and all these pictures of my kids started flashing…

JANE MILMORE: I saw that and I was like, “Oh my God, what’s going on over there…?”

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Yeah, it was a little scary. I had to shut the computer down and boot it back up…

stated: …and just keep rolling.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Yeah. 

JANE MILMORE: Now that doesn’t happen. Everything’s taken off. Yeah, it’s what usually scares new people, too.

stated: Well, they say if you’re stuck on something like what project to work on next, you’re supposed to choose the one that scares you the most…

JANE MILMORE: Yeah, that’s exactly what we do. That’s literally it.

stated: It seems to work.

JANE MILMORE: It keeps us excited about it, so I guess that’s it. It’s not like, [groans…] “Oh, we’re going to do another one…”

stated: That’s a good sign. Now, you’ve probably answered this many times, but what is your writing process? Do you chunk things up into bits, like “You take this, and I’ll take that?”

JANE MILMORE: It depends on the show. 

stated: Or do you literally sit together?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: We eventually sit together.

JANE MILMORE: This one was more like that but others have been, “You take a section, I’ll take a section,” and we’ll switch them, then we’ll come back together…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: A couple of them, we’ve improv-ed together in front of the computer…

JANE MILMORE: And that’s a good thing and sometimes a bad thing. We have a couple of great beginnings where we couldn’t figure out where we were gonna go. And we usually try to read out the whole thing so we don’t get ourselves into corners. So we have some half-plays that no one’s ever seen…

stated: You can always go back to them…

BILLY VAN ZANDT/JANE MILMORE: We do! 

JANE MILMORE: Sometimes we’ve gone back.

stated: Now, You’ve Got Hate Mail was based on actual emails from Jane’s experience?

JANE MILMORE: Yes. Well, two things. We had seen Love Letters and thought that was a great idea. Then a friend said, “Wow, these are some emails during your divorce. You should save some of these. You’ll find them entertaining at some point.” And they were right.

stated: So how much of that made it into the show?

JANE MILMORE: All the names have changed and situations, but a few emails are almost word-for-word.

stated: Because “you can’t write that stuff”?

JANE MILMORE: Well, I think, “Wow. I was crying when I wrote this and now everybody’s getting a big laugh out of it!”

stated: Obviously you’ve now had some time and distance, but was that at all therapeutic?

JANE MILMORE: Well, at the time we wrote it, a couple times I thought, “Whoa, that’s a little close. We REALLY have to change THAT name. I don’t wanna get sued!” I have some friends who remember some of the things they said and I have all the emails, but once you put it together and you start to write it, the craft of telling a story takes over. He still is physically intact [contrary to in the play], so that didn’t happen. We actually had a different ending the first time. They got back together and the audience didn’t like it. You could just feel it…

Billy Van Zandt & Art Neil in Silent Laughter

Billy and Art Neill in Silent Laughter (Photo: Carol Rosegg)

BILLY VAN ZANDT: They were online dating each other and didn’t know it…

JANE MILMORE: Yeah the last line was, “OK, let’s finally meet. I’ll meet you at the St. Regis…” And the audience went “Oh, no!” He’s such a horrible character—based on a real person—but, we thought we had to punish him for the audience.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: The funny thing here is we started out pretty evenly split between women and men in the audience, and now we’re getting a lot of women’s groups and they hate me.

JANE MILMORE: And after the show, someone said to me, “You’re my favorite.” I said, “You’re divorced, aren’t you?” I knew.

stated: You did two shows initially. Was that here at The Triad?

BILLY VAN ZANDT/JANE MILMORE: Uh-huh.

stated: So this is pretty much where it’s lived its life so far?

JANE MILMORE: Well, we usually try everything out at Brookdale [Community College, in Lincroft, NJ, where they’ve tried out many new scripts]. We did this there twice. We did it with the old ending and with the new ending…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: We did it in 2007 and then we did it a year ago…

JANE MILMORE: …to hear all the changes we’d made. And then right from there it came here. So we’ve literally been doing this show for a year. 

stated: Did you have some kind of history or connection with The Triad?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Gary Shaffer, our director, suggested it. We did a TV show for Disney [Janet Saves The Planet] that we thought was going to go, so we didn’t really plan a new show to do at Brookdale in our slot. And we said, let’s do You’ve Got Hate Mail

JANE MILMORE: Because it’s so easy to mount…

stated: It’s a small production with a small cast…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: So we did that and the pilot didn’t go; they didn’t pick up the show. And Gary said, “While we’ve got the show, let’s take it up to to New York.” So he started the whole thing.

JANE MILMORE: I love this theatre. Everybody here’s great. The staff is great, and it’s a cute little theatre. I love it.

stated: It’s obviously a lot of work for you, but it’s nice that you can sort of parachute in every Friday night.

JANE MILMORE: Yeah, pretty much we do that.

stated: You can still maintain whatever else you’re working on.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: We’ve got a company of people to fill in…

JANE MILMORE: Yeah, we have understudies, because you can’t always trust the planes.

Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore in Merrily We Dance and Sing on Stated Magazine

Merrily We Dance and Sing (Photo: Danny Sanchez)

stated: Yeah, there were some familiar names in the program. It’s amazing, you guys have literally been working with the same “unofficial company” of people for what, 20 years? 

JANE MILMORE: Well, every show we try to get somebody new in, like Fran [Solgan] is new and we’ve had other people play her role. But it’s easy to write when you a have a cadence or a rhythm, and that’s what you use with people you know. After writing for TV, and then when you write a script like for a pilot, we’ll picture people here that are not going to do it. You know, we’ll picture their type. It helps to have that little voice in your head.

stated: “This is the Glenn Jones character for this one,” or whatever…

BILLY VAN ZANDT: It also helps so we don’t have five people in the show who are all talking the same, too. Everybody’s got their own cadence. I hate when you see shows where it’s like, “I might as well do your lines, and you might as well do mine, because it doesn’t make any difference.” 

stated: So right off the bat, you’ve got a sort of prototype for each character?

JANE MILMORE: Yeah, and even with the Disney show, there were little kids where we were like, “This could be a little Sherle [Tallent, regular collaborator]…” Or “What was Glenn like when he was a little kid?” But you do that, because it’s our unofficial repertory company, and it’s pretty big.

stated: That’s fantastic. There’s an astounding number of productions of your plays being presented at any given time…

JANE MILMORE: Yeah, I think our murder mysteries must be going down, and our comedies are coming back up. For a while, it was the other way. 

stated: But is it ever odd? Do you ever pop in and catch a production of one of your plays and is that strange having written them with yourselves or other specific people in mind?

BILLY VAN ZANDT/JANE MILMORE: Very rarely. 

JANE MILMORE: Because you can’t always get there.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: We rarely give the rights out in LA or New York, because people have done our shows in LA and we went and you can get blamed for a bad production. 

JANE MILMORE: And not only that. You’ll get reviewed and I don’t want to compete with myself, you know?! I don’t want another one doing it down the street. And in LA as TV writers, you don’t want a review that says “This is a terrible play…” I mean, I’ve seen people do things and been like, “whoa….” 

stated: Well, and it’s out of your control, right?

JANE MILMORE: Olympia Dukakis did a production of our Do Not Disturb and took it way more seriously. I should have known. What did she say to herself? “Antigone…or Do Not Disturb? Which should I do?” And I was like wow, I’ve never been compared to that. But people always just have a different take. Art is subjective.

stated: Is it odd to see someone take things a completely different direction?

JANE MILMORE: Yeah, we’ve seen that a few times.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: We saw one production out in LA where the director wrote what the meaning of the show is in the program and it was like, “Uh-uh. You’re not close at all….”

JANE MILMORE: “Oh, this is gonna be a long night…”

Billy Van Zandt & Jane Milmore on Stated Magazine

Photo: Danny Sanchez

stated: Have you ever been pleasantly surprised when someone’s taken it in a direction you didn’t expect?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: I saw a bunch of Junior High kids do a show we wrote called What the Rabbi Saw with a lot of thick Jackie Mason accents and it was hilariously funny. And we saw an all-black version of Bathroom Humor and that was just…

JANE MILMORE: Wild.

BILLY VAN ZANDT: I loved that. That was great.

JANE MILMORE: We had an Elvis impersonator and they changed it to James Brown. Yeah, it was wild, but it was funny. 

stated: Did they actually alter the script?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: No. It was the same dialogue.

JANE MILMORE: It was just a different song. He didn’t do “Hunk of Burning Love.”

BILLY VAN ZANDT: The dialogue was actually the same, but it was a whole different show. It was fantastic, I really enjoyed it. We ended up hiring one of these actors from that for one of our shows. 

stated: That’s great. So you’ve each managed to maintain acting careers at the same time as your writing. Is that a challenge to balance the two?

JANE MILMORE: It’s all in the timing and when something happens. 

BILLY VAN ZANDT: Most of the time when we do the TV writing, the acting career takes a backseat. But I like doing both at once. It’s more fun. 

JANE MILMORE: I’m probably happiest when I’m up there [onstage]. But I used to say—and I don’t know if it’s totally true anymore—I’m always happier doing the one I can’t. Like when I’m writing, I want to be acting, and when I’m acting, I want to write. I’ve done other people’s plays and been like “I have to rewrite this,” and I had a director on a TV show who was like, “You’re just the actor…do not say that.” 

stated: When you do it this way you can do both and you’re in control.

JANE MILMORE: We’re probably both control freaks, and we’re always aware of what is going on all around us [onstage]. Like when someone’s computer goes out. There are a lot of actors who only care just about their role, and that goes out the window when you have to do everything! I’m like, “Oh my God, that light went out up there…” I’m always worried about Glenn going under the table there and is he gonna make it, because sometimes they put the audience really close, and… You worry about it all.

stated: So what’s next for you?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: They’re offering some TV stuff at the moment we’re pretty sure we’re gonna take. But the plan is to run this through the end of the year here and we’re meeting with people about touring it and we want to start a company in LA doing it the same way we did here, one show at a time.

stated: With you both acting as well?

BILLY VAN ZANDT: I think so. Fly there, do a show…fly here, do a show.

stated: Sure. Wednesdays in LA and Fridays in New York! Exhausting just thinking about it. Well, thanks so much for doing this.

—-

Visit Billy & Jane at:
www.vanzandtmilmore.com
www.facebook.com/VanZandtMilmoreProductions

You’ve Got Hate Mail runs Friday evenings at The Triad in NYC
www.youvegothatemail.com

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