Jeffrey Lieber was a co-creator of the landmark TV series “Lost,” crafting the show’s original pilot episode, he was a writer and producer on “Charmed,” “NCIS: New Orleans,” “The Originals,” “Miami Medical,” and the miniseries “Don’t Look Deeper” and he is currently a co-executive producer of the “Matlock” reboot starring Kathy Bates.
But “a million years ago,” as Lieber put it, “I was a playwright and an actor.”
After 25 years in television, Lieber found himself longing for the old feeling of creating intense work that excites and involves both the actors and the audience in a live setting. So Lieber wrote a play, “Fever Dreams (of Animals on the Verge of Extinction),” that he carefully crafted to be the kind of script that live theater does best. The play opens TheaterWorks Hartford ‘s 2024-25 season Oct. 3 through Nov. 3.
“When I finished the play, I sent it to my agents. They said, ‘You know, people who do theater end up in film and TV,’” Lieber said with a laugh. It usually doesn’t happen the other way around, but Lieber knew that what he was looking for with “Fever Dreams” could only happen in the theater.
As a young writer and actor, Lieber was greatly affected by plays like Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” an daring and emotionally raw work which he remembers as “this incredibly brave thing, people onstage doing the high wire act of people being fully human, right in front of you.” Much of his theater experience was in Chicago, where theaters like Steppenwolf (where Lieber acted in a production of Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing!”) and the Organic Theatre (for whom he wrote a stage adaptation of the Dalton Trumbo novel “Johnny Get Your Gun”) were at the forefront of highly physicalized, psychologically deep and emotionally raw theater styles.
“Fever Dreams,” Lieber explained, is a three-character play “about people in really complicated relationships. Part of the fun of the play is that what you believe at the beginning and what you believe at the end is profoundly different. It’s about how much truth we are willing to believe without going insane.”
Lieber thinks of his script as “three plays in one, all told in one space, a cabin in the woods. In the first third, two people are having a relationship — it’s funny and sexy, then it turns into a thriller. Then the last part has deeply human stuff.”
He was reluctant to go into more detail because he doesn’t want to reveal any plot twists.
Lieber found a special level of control in writing for the stage. Playwriting tends to be less collaborative than writing for TV and film, where many writers (not to mention producers and studio executives) can add their ideas to a project. “I woke up with a palpable ache in my soul, thinking ‘I have to write something that is fully mine,’” he said.
The “Fever Dreams” script found its way to TheaterWorks Hartford through Lieber’s connection with the theater’s new managing director, Jeff Griffin. Griffin came to TheaterWorks from the Contemporary American Theater Festival in West Virginia, which gave the play its world premiere — with a different cast, director and designers — in 2023.
The playwright calls “Fever Dreams” “an actor-driven play,” so casting was crucial. He needed actors who understand the visceral passionate performance styles he recalled from his regional theater days in the 1980s and 1990s. It helps that he wrote characters who are who are about his age, so the performers are likely to have a good sense of what he’s looking for.
“If we do it right, what is required is the actors being fully present onstage,” Lieber said.
Lieber has been in Hartford attending rehearsals, which is exciting for him because the process is so different from television. “I love it. I also love watching a lot of performances. I’m attached to listening to the audience go silent at certain moments. That is worth everything to me.”
He’s also pleased that the 195-seat TheaterWorks Hartford venue is such an intimate space. “I’m glad it’s small. This is not a play that wants to be on a big proscenium stage.” He wants to see “Fever Dreams” done elsewhere, but right now he’s focused solely on how well it plays in Hartford.
The TheaterWorks Hartford production is directed by the theater’s producing artistic director Rob Ruggiero and stars Tim DeKay, Doug Savant and Lana Young. Like Lieber, the cast has a lot of TV experience among them but also love live theater and appreciate the distinctions.
Lieber has found that actors gravitate to a script with such special challenges.
“Everybody who reads it wants to do it,” he said. “From moment one, they need to engage in a human way.”
“Fever Dreams (of Animals on the Verge of Extinction)” by Jeffrey Lieber, directed by Rob Ruggiero, runs Oct. 3 through Nov. 3 at TheaterWorks Hartford, 233 Pearl St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. $33-$78. twhartford.org .
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