'Reel Stories' Brings True Tales From Set to Stage at Bay Street Theater

On its surface, the world of film and TV production may seem glamorous to the casual viewer. But as Dean Taucher can attest, behind the scenes it’s often mayhem, with plenty of unscripted drama, questionable motives and truly bad behavior to go around.

It’s not just the stars and starlets in front of the camera who act up, but often the crew members behind it as well, with off-screen antics that can be just as dramatic and disruptive — though viewers never see it.

Until now.

On Tuesday, March 6, Taucher’s three-character play, “Reel Stories — Made in New York,” will be presented as a one-night-only staged reading at Bay Street Theater.

Taucher, who lives in Sag Harbor, comes to his subject matter authentically. For decades, he worked as a production designer in film and television on shows like “Miami Vice,” “The Sopranos,” “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “New York Undercover.” During that time, he has been a firsthand witness to what goes on when the camera isn’t rolling.

“I always saw these things happening and wondered, ‘What are they thinking?’” explained Taucher in a recent phone interview. “It’s Teamsters, writers, crew people, the annual sexual harassment seminar that always goes off the rails.”

In short, this is material truly worthy of the stage — and now, that’s exactly where Taucher is bringing it.

“The premise of the play is that three actors are coming to a radio station to do a show called ‘Reel Stories — Made in New York.’ They’re real stories generated from backstage stories,” said Taucher. “But instead of it being, ‘I saw this and I saw that,’ I’ve taken the premise that the stories are all coming from the actual people who did the misbehaving.

“If this were a full production, there also would be a disembodied voice from the sound booth between the written bits, which is the actors fighting amongst themselves and recreating this misbehavior. The ‘on-air’ light comes on, and they have to behave again, this continues until some sort of chaos ensues.”

For this Bay Street reading, Taucher is tapping into the expertise of three actors who, truth be told, have probably born witness to some of this unsavory on-set behavior themselves.

Headlining the reading will be Obie Award-winning and Tony and Drama Desk award-nominated actress Charlayne Woodard, who stars, alongside Samuel L. Jackson, in the soon-to-be-released Marvel TV miniseries “Secret Invasion.” With this reading, she will be making her East End debut.

Also appearing will be Jay O. Sanders, who has had several starring roles at the Public Theater and, like Taucher, has worked on many projects with TV producers Michael Mann and Dick Wolf. Actor Michael Giese, a member of The Barrow Group Theatre Company, rounds out the cast.

“Reel Stories” was first presented publicly back in December 2021 with a reading at Theatre Row in Manhattan. Since that time, Taucher says he has put a lot more meat into the script and given the actors conversations providing additional context as they progress through the radio play construct.

“I wanted to make people think about these actions a little more. I structured it so there’s an ending to the podcast and an ending to the play,” he explained. “The conceit is they do this show live every week, and it’s all in there — the murdering Teamsters, drug dealing producers, the clueless starlets.”

And, Taucher notes, it’s all true.

When asked to share a story from his time in show business, he zeros in on “The Cotton Club,” the 1984 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola. As Taucher tells it, the production was forced to shut down midstream when the money ran out, and new “financiers” were found — including a drug dealer from Miami who ponied up a sizable investment with the caveat that his girlfriend be given a part in the film, one that couldn’t be cut from the final version.

Taucher recalls that he was instructed to paint the woman’s name on a director’s chair for her, despite the fact that her role was a minor one, as a cigarette girl. Unfortunately, he was given the wrong spelling of her name, and she flew into a fit of rage at the error.

“Two years later, she’s doing life in prison for murder,” he said.

When asked what made him decide to put these stories onto the page at this precise moment, Taucher explains that it all came down to a shifting of gears because of the pandemic. It turns out that the birth of “Reel Stories” marked the end of his production career.

“It was March of 2020. I was at that point where I had been on ‘Special Victims Unit’ for 20 seasons, and it was getting annoying,” he said. “It was a Monday in March. That Thursday, they shut down the entire business. I said ‘I quit.’”

Up to that point, Taucher said his work as a production designer had been all-consuming, and revolved around 24 episodes per season, two to five sets every day for nine months. “There was not a lot of time to sit back and reflect,” he explained.

But once the world came to a grinding halt in 2020, Taucher found he had the time to revisit all he had experienced during his years on sets. That also meant carving out a new life by relocating to the home in Sag Harbor that he and his wife, filmmaker and choreographer Gabrielle Lansner, bought four years ago.

“Most of the writing of this script happened in my teeny sailboat while the weather was calm,” said Taucher, adding that his ability to remember on-set dialogue from years ago provided the material.

He explains that he came up with the structure of his three-character play after realizing that it would work better than, as he says it, “monologues as memoir by a retired guy who just wrote down his memories.”

“I’m very gratified with the response I’ve gotten and the incredible cast,” he said. “This is a developmental reading, not formally rehearsed. If it was done as a real production, it would still be three actors on directors chairs with music stands, but there would probably be a fourth character — the engineer in the booth — and sound effects, miscued commercials, the ‘boop, 4, 3, 2, 1 and prop lights saying ‘on air.’

“It’s being done as an introduction and a live calling card,” said Taucher. “I’m hoping some other entities will like it enough that they will want to produce it.”

Actress Charlayne Woodard will be heading to Sag Harbor for this reading on the heels of spending nearly half a year in Vancouver where she was working on a new Disney+ production.

“People in Canada are so great. It’s all coming to an end, sadly, after five months,” said Woodard in a phone interview shortly before the production wrapped.

Ironically, though Taucher is East Coast-based and Woodard currently lives in Los Angeles, years ago the two knew one another as students at the Goodman School of Drama, now The Theatre School, at DePaul University in Chicago. As is often the case, they lost touch when they set out to pursue their own careers but later reconnected on — where else? — a television production set.

In addition to roles on Broadway and in M. Night Shyamalan films “Unbreakable” and “Glass,” Woodard has appeared in the TV series “Chicago Hope” — and on “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” the same show Taucher worked on for many years, where she portrayed the recurring character Sister Peg.

Though she is perhaps best known for her skills as an actress, Woodard is also a playwright and she admits that she has a special affinity for material written for the stage.

“Being a playwright, I love to originate a role in the theater, workshop it, look at the playwright work, and watch the process to structuring and focusing it,” she said. “I love the process. Working with living playwrights is very exciting. I’m not one who likes to do revivals — I prefer striking out in new plays.”

Though working in theater has long been her passion, it was the stark difference in the pay scale between theater productions and screen work that led her to Hollywood.

“When I was first out of conservatory, I went straight to New York City. But after 15 years, I noticed that I could do one film or television project that would pay more than the three plays I did for people in one year,” said Woodard. “I thought, ‘Let’s shake it up.’ I moved to L.A.”

Then, after reconnecting on the set of “Law and Order,” Woodard and Taucher rekindled their friendship and in between their TV work began supporting one another in their various theater ventures.

“It was kind of marvelous how he and Gabrielle came to my place, and they would come see whatever I was in, whether I wrote it or not,” said Woodard. “Then Dean retires from the business, and at dinner one night he says, ‘I have a reading of a play. I’ll let you read it.’ I thought, ‘Great!’

“I got such a kick out of the play. His heart and soul is in ‘Reel Stories,’ all those years that he spent on set, location scouting and working with crew and actors and producers,” said Woodard. “It’s a world that no one really knows. He is shining a light on an aspect of that world, and how women factor in this business that’s been so male-run.

“Working on the script, it makes me laugh, but there are some very painful truths that come out,” she added. “I’m very happy that Dean invited me to take part in this project. I love that he’s giving me the challenge of bringing this to life on March 6.”

“Reel Stories — Made in New York” will be presented at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Monday, March 6, at 7:30 p.m. The show, which runs approximately 70 minutes, is directed by Shannon Patterson of The Barrow Group Performing Arts Center and produced by independent producer Josh Gladstone. An informal meet-and-greet with the cast in the theater lobby follows the performance. Admission is free; reservations are strongly recommended, at Bay Street Theater, baystreet.org, or Eventbrite.com. Bay Street Theater is on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor.