Denis Johnson was well on his way to cult fame by the time the desperadoes and articulate lowlifes that populate his fiction attracted the attention of Hollywood. Over the course of the 90s, in addition to publishing novels and short stories, he worked on a half-dozen screenplays, only one of which (an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s A Swell-Looking Babe) was produced. Although his star was rising, he was frustrated.
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“I wanted more talking, a lot more talking than the producers,” Johnson says. “I would say to these guys, ‘I like those 1930s movies. They’re more like plays. . . . Why can’t we do that?’” In 1998 it occurred to him that he could. He quickly wrote one play, then in just four weeks drafted his second, Hellhound on My Trail. The first in a trilogy, it premiered in 2000 in a production staged by the San Francisco troupe Campo Santo and won the San Francisco Bay Area Critic’s Circle award for best original script. This week its Chicago premiere is also the debut of the Viaduct Theater company.
It’s not hard to find continuities between Johnson’s other work and Hellhound—disaster, imposture, fanaticism, drug deals gone wrong. It’s also not easy to say what the play’s about. Part of the difficulty stems from its lack of a discernible dramatic arc. Instead, three pairs of characters enact three self-contained scenes connected by offstage events that remain obscure. It’s more shaggy-dog than Preston Sturges.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Robert Drea, Cindy Johnson
