BY JERRY TALLMER
At the airport, uncommon characters get chatty
In the country I am from — in Iraq — there is no chi-ken. There is more chi-ken trown away here in one day, than is eaten in Basra in a year.
It is obscene waste-ful-ness. An uttarh disregard of abundancy, and it is my favorite tink of America…
In this country, sir, you create your own reality…I think positive. It is bitter to be bumper bumper on the Van Wyck Expressway than e-stacked naked upon odder man and photographed for the interweb!
— Cab driver, on the way to Manhattan from a locked-down JFK airport
Chaucer did it some 600 years ago. Thornton Wilder did it with “The Bridge of San Luis Ray” — brought a handful of disparate people together, each with his or her own story — 80 years ago.
Many others have done it, before and since. And now Alex Lyras and Robert McCaskill do it, quite smartly, in “The Common Air,” written by both of them, directed by Mr. McCaskill and performed by Mr. Lyras as all six interconnected storytellers.
You might look at it as Six Characters in Search of Two Authors.
There was a germination period, these two authors say, and the germs were those six separate characters — beginning with one based on the Middle Eastern cabbie who drove Lyras from Union Square to a midtown club called the O-Bar a couple of years ago.
“I didn’t know where to go, and this joyful guy, who was listening to wonderful music, said: ‘I wheel take you dancing, habibi habibi!’ He turned out to be a dancer himself, and he gave me the tape with that music.”
A second character would be an art dealer on his way to search for prehistoric cave drawings in the Grecian Isles. “But that wasn’t enough,” says McCaskill, “so I suggested that we make him a gay art dealer who’d witnessed the gay bashing of his lover — and had then abandoned that incapacitated lover.”
The third character would be a shifty corporate attorney; the fourth, a song-swiping DJ named PJ (also known as A-D-D-J for Attention Deficit Disordered Discjock); the fifth, a triple-talking philosophy professor with a broad West Texas accent — “like George Bush, only deeper” — a and the sixth and last, an Iraqi-born American entrepreneur who survived a sordid, terror-stricken return to his birthplace and is now in that dancing cab driver’s vehicle on the way back to town from the chaos at JFK.
Kismet.
“One of our central problems,” says Alex Lyras, “was why and where would anybody be talking like this for 15 straight minutes. All these monologues. And then we thought: An airport, these days, is where somebody can talk for three hours straight. Here’s a legitimate setting.”
Not that “The Common Air” runs three hours. Maybe half of that.
“There’s a lot of words in there,” says Lyras. “It’s a monster.”
“A mile a minute,” says press agent Susan Schulman.
“We warm up on Shakespeare before every performance,” says Robert McCaskill. “Cassius, Hotspur, and maybe Richard III.”
Of course, it’s easy for him to say. The other guy does the performing.
I’m sorry, I still didn’t hear you. Yes, it sounds like you’re really into chicken…I’m just a little out of it. I’ve been sitting in an airport for the last twenty hours, trying to get a flight back home to Detroit…
There’s a divider! I’m not…’cause you’re looking at me in the mirror!…Didn’t mean to offend. I tell you what. I’ll make sure you hear me and you keep your eyes on the road…I just made it out of Iraq alive, I really don’t want to die on the Van Wyck Expressway.
— Iraqi-born American in the catering business, cabbing it back to the city.
Alex Lyras, the son of first-generation Greeks from Chicago and Gary, Indiana, was born in the Bronx in 1970.
Robert McCaskill, a cooler type, was born in St. Louis in 1956 — though you’d never guess he could be anywhere near as old as that year tells you. His father, he says, ran a car wash. “And my mother was a debutante.” Period. Leave it there…
One of the more interesting and refreshing improvisational groups, when improv was all the rage, was The Second City — born and nurtured in Chicago. New York (and I myself) praised and enjoyed The Second City’s originality during the troupe’s seasonal gigs at Jan Hus House on East 74th Street.
Lyras was a law student in Chicago when he discovered The Second City, said to himself: “I can do that,” and put law school behind him forever. Instead, he took acting lessons from The Second City’s Robert McCaskill. That’s how they met, in 1993.
Who does what in the writing of “The Common Air?”
“We used to pass the computer back and forth,” says McCaskill, “but now, with Alex living part time in Los Angeles for television and film work, we go back and forth. Thank God for JetBlue. Four hours.”
McCaskill and his wife, actress Celia Schaefer, live in the West Village. Lyras has a pied-a-terre in Harlem.
Together, McCaskill and Lyras have made — produced, written, acted in — two films, “Mona,” a romantic comedy, and “Heterosexuals” — subtitled “Opposites Attack.”
I forgot to ask them whether they liked chicken. Or chi-ken.
