Homer and Langley Collyer, the inspiration for a play by Emmy award-winning writer Mark Saltzman, are infamous for one thing in particular, which should be obvious to anyone reading the stage production’s full title: Clutter: The True Story of the Collyer Brothers Who Never Threw Anything Out.
The Collyer brothers’ story provides a mid-20th century example of the phenomena well known today as hoarding. The Lompoc Civic Theatre is readying a production of Saltzman’s take on the epic hoarders, who really lived at 2078 Fifth Avenue on Manhattan Island.
“The Collyer brothers were two real hoarders who lived in New York up until 1947 when the city cleared out their five-story brownstone house in Harlem,” said Larry McLellan, director of the production and Lompoc Civic Theatre president. “They removed 150 tons of trash that had accumulated over the decades they lived in this house.”
The production essentially relates two parallel stories: much of the life of the Collyer brothers and their relationship, but also the story of an NYPD detective investigating the case of Homer Collyer’s death while dealing with his relationship with his brother, who is fresh on the force after returning from World War II.
“It looks at the relationship between the two cop brothers, and then the story of the two hoarder brothers is told in flashbacks,” McLellan explained. “Each time we see a scene with the two brothers, it’s somewhere getting closer to 1947.”
The play has been described as a kind of “pseudo-documentary murder mystery” as well as being a comedic drama, McLellan explained. While it’s often humorous, the play gets down to some serious subjects, whether it’s the cause of the Collyer brothers’ strange behavior, or the younger veteran/officer’s bouts with post-traumatic stress. Many of the conflicts in the play translate into the production, right down to set and stage design.
“I’ve only been involved with the Lompoc Civic Theatre since 2009, but there’s never been a set this complex,” McLellan said. “It has to keep changing throughout the show, which might be the most challenging thing we’ve done.”
The massive amount of accumulated trash and clutter found in the Collyer brothers’ home is legendary, so the depiction of it had to rival that near-mythic scale while also remain accurate to what was found. For instance, once Homer Collyer started losing his eyesight, his brother Langley began collecting newspapers with the logic that once his brother’s sight got better, he would want to read them all, McLellan explained.
“We are trying to have things look somewhat realistic, but doing it in a way that allows us to move things on and off the set easily,” he said. “Our stacks of newspapers that were collected over the years, they are basically created by covering cardboard boxes with newspapers, so it looks like a huge stack of newspapers but they aren’t heavy and can be moved quickly.”
Another interesting aspect of the play relates to the fact that the younger Collyer brother, Langley, was a frustrated classical pianist. When the police cleared the house, they found 14 pianos, and in Saltzman’s play there are several scenes in which Langley performs on the instrument. The Lompoc Civic Theatre cast William Koseluk to play Langley; he’s a graduate of UCSB’s music department, performs classical piano, and will be performing several selections live during the course of the play.
“When I talked to the playwright and told him about that, he said he was very excited,” McLellan said, “because he said that this is the first production that features real live performance of the piano by the actor.”
Playwright Saltzman was actually involved quite a bit for the Lompoc Civic Theatre production of Clutter, meeting with McLellan and going so far as to retool the script. Besides the four brother characters, McLellan explained, the rest of the supporting characters have historically been played by two male actors. McLellan requested that Saltzman include or make some of the characters female, which he was more than willing to do.
“Once we got our cast together, we sent him pictures of the actors and he rewrote some scenes specifically for the production,” McLellan said. “He added some new lines to one scene specifically, and it’s better than the first one.”
The cast includes five women, McLellan explained, each of whose onstage presence is so brief that each also fulfills a backstage role, from lighting to sound.
“Most of the backstage is run by women for this production—the sound, the lights, the stage management, the makeup, the props, and even some of the people doing artwork,” he said.
Depicting a hoarder house was met with plenty of enthusiasm, even by people who aren’t volunteers for the Lompoc Civic Theatre, McLellan said.
“Well, I’m a bit of a hoarder myself,” he said, “but I can’t tell you how many people have offered to lend us the stuff in their house or garage for this show.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne is going to clean out his home. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 20-27, 2014.
