Restaurateur Robert Durkin serves up a different entrée, on stage

Time was, back in the golden age of Hamptons real estate, when everyone from the butcher and the baker to the candlestick maker had two jobs: whatever they did for a living, and, armed with a real estate sales license and a link to a local broker, part-time work trying to connect prospective buyers to a coveted second home with a hefty price tag, in hopes of securing some portion of a princely commission.

Even if those days are now a ways back in the rearview mirror, just about every East Ender who isn’t involved in peddling real estate still knows at least one other person, if not four or five, actively pursuing the cash cow of commissions on purchases and rentals.

So when Robert Durkin, restaurateur and writer, says that the real estate broker who is the central—and only—character in his one-act play being staged at Stony Brook Southampton on Saturday reveals “the kind of experience that many on the East End know,” there seems to be very little reason to doubt his assessment.

In the play, “Alternate Sundays,” the character in question is Dorothy Reynolds, late 40s, divorced, partner in a real estate firm based in the Hamptons. The time is a Sunday afternoon in January. Although she is a senior partner in the firm and has been very successful, because of the changing (read: plummeting) economy she is forced to cover the office on alternate Sundays. Although she is alone on stage, she has interaction with others via her cell phone and land line, often bouncing between the two.

In an interview on Friday at Robert’s, Mr. Durkin’s Water Mill restaurant—he is also the owner of the New Paradise Café in Sag Harbor—the playwright described the situation he created for his character: “She is waiting for a deal to come in, but the client has gone south, to Florida, with his new wife, and it looks like the deal may be headed south as well. And, in the midst of this, her daughter 
calls from rehab.”

The play was given a staged read-

ing last spring by the Naked Stage company at Guild Hall in East Hampton, followed by a talk back, and the author said he was pleased by the very favorable reception. A degree candidate in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Stony Brook Southampton, Mr. Durkin said he was contacted by his department a while back after word went out that the organizers of a spring arts festival were looking for material to present.

The festival, a “student-driven benefit to aid children who are victims of the recent natural disasters in Haiti,” according to a release, gained new gravity last week when it was announced that Stony Brook University is now planning to close down the undergraduate program at the Southampton campus. “Hands for Haiti,” as the festival has been tagged, will feature original plays and poetry in a 2 p.m. matinee, with “Alternate Sundays” presented at 7 p.m. as part of an evening of “song, dance, art auction, music and comedy,” according to the same release.

Mr. Durkin has been in the MFA program for two years now, and considers it an exceptional experience. As he said, “Every semester, there are more people I want to work with than I have time to do.” Between intermittent commuting to New York City, running his two East End restaurants, and writing across a variety of genres—including a golf column for The Southampton Press and The East Hampton Press—he has been forced to make some tough choices when it comes to course selection.

He completed the requirements for his undergraduate degree later in life, receiving his diploma with the last graduating class at what was then Long Island University’s Southampton College. He said that he persevered to get his bachelor’s degree in part for himself, in part for his late mother, who was the first in her family to go to college and who wanted all her children to go, and in part for his young son, because he wanted his son to see that his parents completed their formal education.

Because of his age, many on the faculty were his peers, in terms of age, life experience, and achievement, and so he was able to befriend many of them. When some of his friends on the faculty of the MFA writing program encouraged him to apply, he filled out all the necessary forms and submitted his samples, and was very happy to be accepted.

“I was honored to have had time and friendship with Jules Feiffer,” Mr. Durkin said of his experience at the Southampton campus. “This is a man, that if things were as they should be, must be considered a national treasure. He is one of those very accomplished people whose generosity of spirit has increased over time, along with his openness and his willingness to give encouragement.”

“Jules teaches a class in ‘Humor and Truth,’” Mr. Durkin recalled with a laugh, “two subjects about which I know very little.” Despite his lack of familiarity with the topics, he signed up for the class, and was led by Mr. Feiffer through a series of assignments, ending with a request to write a one-act play. “When I said to him, ‘I’m not a playwright,’” Mr. Durkin recalled, “he told me, ‘That’s just what I said when they told me to write a play.’ And then, of course, he wrote ‘Little Murders’—which shows the difference between him and me.” The play won the Obie and Outer Critics Circle awards in 1967 in spite of a short run on Broadway, and was later voted the best foreign play of the year by the London theater critics when it was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was made into a movie starring Elliott Gould in 1971.

The play he wrote for Mr. Feiffer’s class, “Mary Nolan Takes a Drink,” involved a policewoman on her own, off the job, working as a skip tracer. After she shoots a man she’s trying to bring in, she stands over his body and muses on her situation.

He wrote “Alternate Sundays” for a class he was taking with Roger Rosenblatt, and when he had completed it, he decided that he had in hand the first two pieces of a three-piece evening of theater, all monologues by a woman who could be played by a single actor.

He went on to write the third play, “Analysis Terminable,” in which a woman prepares to make what she thinks will be her last visit to her psychoanalyst.

The three pieces have different characters, from different backgrounds, socio-economic as well as experiential. “What they share,” the playwright said, “is that they have their own problems and they also have circumstantial problems. Their conflicts are both internal and external.”

After he submitted “Alternate Sundays” to the Hands for Haiti organizers, acting dean of students Bill Burford passed it on to Steve Hamilton, director of the Stony Brook Southampton playwriting section of the annual Writers Conference, who will direct. Minerva Scelza stars.

“Alternate Sundays” by Robert Durkin will be presented for one night only on Saturday, April 17, at the Avram Theater at Stony 
Brook Southampton. Tickets by donation at the door, with all proceeds going to Hands for Haiti, a non-profit non-governmental U.S. organization providing prosthetic and orthotic services to the people of Haiti.