PASADENA, CALIF. — Scott Carter is in a bit of disbelief.
When he was a kid growing up in Tucson in the 1960s and ’70s, he would plop down in a seat at the Temple of Music and Art to catch the road shows that came there.
Next week, he’ll plop down in a seat to watch his own show, “The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord,” Arizona Theatre Company’s season-ender.
“I saw ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ and a bunch of other plays” at the Temple, said Carter, sitting in a Pasadena coffee shop, sipping a latte and looking nearly as young as when he left Tucson for New York City in the late ’70s.
“It was hallowed ground to me.”
Though Carter, 63, has long written plays — he was one of the initial members of Invisible Theatre when that company only did original works — this is his first piece to make it to big stages on the regional theater circuit.
When he left Tucson for New York City, he had a suitcase full of scripts and grand ideas about having them produced.
Instead, he became a proofreader for a magazine, wrote porn, did stand-up comedy, and finally settled in the television industry. Today, he is the executive producer with “Real Time With Bill Maher.”
But he never gave up on being a playwright. Still, the road has been a long, twisting one.
The early years
Carter’s asthma brought his family to Tucson from Kansas City when he was 7.
Not long after that he began to immerse himself in the local theater scene.
He racked up credits performing for the old Playbox and Corral theaters and won awards in speech tournaments while a student at Sahuaro High School.
It was during those high school years that he developed a one-man show about Mark Twain, putting on makeup that aged him about 50 years. He traveled around the Old Pueblo with the play, and once performed it for a Rotary Club in Kansas.
By the time he was 18, he was looking to expand his repertoire.
“I’d like to get away from the format of a one-man show,” he told a Star reporter in 1970, as he was preparing to perform his Twain show.
“It just isn’t so much fun anymore.”
the Invisible Theatre years
The next year, he started having more fun.
Carter was one of the first members of Invisible Theatre’s company. At that time, 1971, IT was presenting only original plays and performed out of the Cellar at the University of Arizona Student Union.
Carter first encountered the company, started by Dennis Hackin, as the arts editor of the Wildcat. He quickly became part of the young ensemble, eager to stretch his creative muscles.
In those early days, IT was a sort of theater cooperative, where everyone did everything and no one got paid. That wasn’t the point back then — making theater was.
Carter acted, directed and, especially, wrote and co-wrote plays with other early IT’ers such as Merl Reagle and Bob Campbell.
After founder Hackin left town, Carter’s energy was part of what kept IT going.
“We had what we called the Carter Charter,” recalled Susan Claassen, who joined the company shortly after Carter did and is now its managing artistic director.
“It outlined how a collective of 10 artists could raise money, do theater, write plays — do it all,” said Claassen. “The charter was ambitious and interesting and well thought out.”
“He was manic. He was always manic,” said Tim Janes, also an early member of the theater company. “He was constantly on the go, constantly having ideas, constantly selling his ideas to others.”
Carter’s passion for what he was doing is part of why Invisible Theatre survived, said Claassen.
“His energy was absolutely essential,” she said. “He’s a genius. I think when I first met him, he was one of the smartest, cleverest people I had ever met. I would say the same thing about him now. Now, even more, his heart also informs his head, and that adds such a dimension to the man.”
the NY-LA-Ny years
In 1976, Carter dropped out of the UA, packed up his original works and headed to the Big Apple.
He figured if his plays worked in Tucson, they might work there.
“It it hadn’t been for Dennis Hackin founding the Invisible Theatre, I wouldn’t have thought there was any avenue to get original plays done,” said Carter.
But he found that it wasn’t as easy to mount a play in New York as it was in the Old Pueblo.
“Because nobody was getting paid with the plays we did in Tucson, we’d have a cast of 30 and an orchestra,” he said.
“I got to New York and I had a bunch of plays that all had multiple sets, large casts, and would have been expensive productions. And I had no name.”
After about a year, his frustration moved him to Los Angeles, where he wrote for a trade publication and penned some porn scripts.
In 1983, he returned to New York, where the magazine he worked for had an office. He eventually moved to another magazine and dabbled in stand-up comedy.
His steady income disappeared when the magazine folded. He knew this offered a new opportunity to stretch those creative muscles.
“I had unemployment and a little money in the bank, and I had very low rent,” he said. “So I just made this pact with myself that I would go out every night I possibly could to do stand-up.”
He gave himself six months to get on stage at one of the city’s three major comedy clubs, Catch A Rising Star, the Comic Strip or the Improvisation.
If he didn’t make it, “I would give up performing and go back to magazines,” he said. “That would be the rest of my life.”
At the end of the six months, he had performed at all three.
The comedy years
Carter wanted to take control of his life. It’s one of the reasons he chose stand-up comedy instead of acting.
“I could do as many as six gigs a night,” he said. “I’m in charge of my bookings, I’m in charge of my props, I’m in charge of my wardrobe, in charge of content. During the summertime I would walk to as many as six different clubs in a night and maybe get $50 or $75. But there’s a sense of self-reliance; I was in charge of everything, just as we were at Invisible Theatre.”
Stand-up also allowed him to forge friendships that are still steadfast today.
“When you’re starting out, you’re waiting to get on, so you are hanging out in the bar with other people who are trying to get on,” he said.
“No one has any money and everyone’s hanging out. That’s where I met Chris Rock. Colin Quinn was the bartender at the Comic Strip. That’s where I first met Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. I played with Larry on the Improv softball team. He was always a very tense guy so I would help him stretch before the games.”
It is those friendships that led to his career in television.
“You meet these people and, years later, some of them are going to become famous and powerful and have jobs,” he said. “So I’ve now worked with Larry on three different jobs, but it’s all because we were hanging out in 1985 and 1986.”
The television years
A friend from stand-up landed a show on MTV, and he hired Carter as one of his writers. Another had a show at Comedy Central, and Carter wrote for that show, too.
Since then, he has done shows with Kevin Nealon, Lewis Black and Larry David — all friends from his stand-up days.
In 1993, Comedy Central signed on comedian Bill Maher to do the show “Politically Incorrect.”
Maher didn’t know Carter then, but he was one of the candidates he interviewed for the producing job.
“He was recommended. We met and hit it off and that was that,” said Maher in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “I don’t think I even spoke to anyone else.”
Carter and Maher worked together on that show until the end of 1999. By then, “Politically Incorrect” had moved from New York City to Los Angeles. Carter had done five shows a week, a total of 1,100, and won eight Emmy nominations before he moved on to other shows.
Producing a five-times-a-week show was grueling, said Carter.
“Usually you are working until 1 a.m.,” he said. “You never see anybody. When I got home my daughters would be asleep. So I took a vow not to do four or five shows a week. You are swallowed up by it.”
“Politically Incorrect” was canceled in 2002. In 2003, Maher called again.
“He said HBO was interested in doing a new show, and I said how many days a week because I didn’t want to go back to doing four or five nights,” said Carter.
“He said it would be just Friday nights, and I said I would be interested.”
The ‘Real Time’ years
On a Friday night last month, Carter, dressed in a suit and carrying folders full of papers, rushed around behind the “Real Time” set in Los Angeles.
The guests that night included Barney Frank, a liberal and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1981 to his retirement in 2013; Rick Wilson, a conservative GOP strategist; author and Catholic nun Sr. Simone Campbell; and jazz musician and singer Esperanza Spalding.
It’s the busiest time of the week for Carter, but he appears calm and smiling as he steps into the green room and asks Frank if he could have a few minutes of his time. Frank quickly finishes the crackers he was eating and follows Carter out.
He has a similar private chat with each guest.
It is Carter’s job to prepare them for the show by discussing issues that might come up. The guests and the topics are designed to spark conversation and even controversy.
“Very often, I’m in one room talking to one guest, hearing one side of things, and I’ll go to the next room and I’ll be talking to a person who’s got the exact opposite,” said Carter.
“My job is to get them both ready to be talking to each other.”
The show goes off without a hitch. Frank and Wilson spar back and forth, but it is a friendly war of words, and Sr. Simone gives her insight on the current political scene. Esperanza talks about her music and even sings a chorus of a song for Maher — something Carter had persuaded her to do before the show began.
“Briefing the guests is a really important job,” said Maher. “Scott is such a welcoming soul. Everybody who comes to the show feels good about it because he’s the guy who’s briefing him. Everybody is nervous on this show — especially conservatives. He makes everybody feel great. … I’ve been extraordinarily lucky that he’s part of this.”
Carter feels the same. He is working with a team of people who have been with Maher and him for at least 13 years, and some since the early “Politically Incorrect” days. They function like a well-oiled machine, and he is able to get home and have dinner with his family.
And best of all, he is able to find the time to write again.
Writing
Since “Real Time” started, Carter has written and performed two monologues on stage in Los Angeles and here in Tucson. “Heavy Breathing” was about his near-death experience from an asthma attack, and “Suspension Bridge” chronicled his search for a spiritual base. He performed both in Europe and across the country, including at Invisible Theatre, where many in his family who still live here heard him tell his tales.
The ferocious reader has also begun a number of other projects — he has two plays in progress now.
And he finished “The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord,” a project he started to think about in 1988 when Bill Moyers’ “A World of Ideas” show had Rev. Forrester Church on talking about the Jefferson bible.
The two — writing and television — complement each other, he said.
“In producing the guests in the two hours before the show, you are getting use to the dialectic, the center of drama, where somebody says one thing, and somebody else says the opposite,” said Carter.
New ideas are essential to a successful “Real Time” show. And they feed Carter’s writing.
“That friendliness toward ideas is something I feel my talk show background has increased in me.”
“Discord” has been Carter’s most successful venture in playwriting. The idea-packed comedy premiered at Los Angeles’ NoHo Arts Center in early 2014.
Later that year, it opened at that city’s Geffen Theatre, and was at the Chester Theatre Company in the Berkshires last year. It’s currently playing at the Washington Stage Guild in D.C. Other regional theaters have picked the play up for next season. Reviews have been uniformly great.
But it is the performance at the Temple, a building where his passion for theater was first sparked, that he most anticipates.
“To have a play that I’ve written be performed there … that’s like an incredible dream come true. That’s a great thing,” he said. “Then to have friends and family there — you don’t often get to have things work out the way you want them to.”
