Interview with Rick Cleveland

Cleveland, a long-time man of the theater, adds a gruesome twist to the working life with his dark sense of humor. We would like to thank Mr. Cleveland for his kind cooperation in answering these questions.

Who would you say has influenced you theatrically?
I mostly work in monologues now, self-performed. So I would have to say that Mark Twain and Spalding Gray were big influences.

Why create theater?
As far as subject matter is concerned, you can now tackle ANYTHING on television and film that you can tackle in theater. So that, in my opinion, is no longer a reason. The only reason left to create theater—and I believe it's always been the one truly important reason—is to establish a human connection between the performers and the audience.  The ritual of it reminds us that we're all in this together.

Describe Jerry and Tom in one word.
How about in three? Wildly, inappropriately, funny.

What interested you most in writing the play?
In a sense, Jerry and Tom was meant to be something of an answer to Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter. I thought it would be fun to have my version of these two characters not just talk vaguely about waiting for this never-seen third guy to show up, but to actually have the third guy show up, dispatch him with as much gruesome fun as possible, and then have him show up yet again. And again. (I'm a big Peter Sellers fan, and loved the movies where he played multiple characters.)

I also wanted to see if I could create two characters who were utterly loathsome human beings, but were at the same time extremely likeable and sympathetic. And I wanted to see how nasty and dark I could go, and still keep it, hopefully, very funny.

Could you talk a bit about the play’s original title?
The play was originally called Tom and Jerry—yes, after the cat and mouse. The cat was constantly getting killed in horrible ways, then jumping back up. And the way we had the actor playing all the guys Tom and Jerry killed jump up and immediately assume a brand new character was a little like Tom the cat getting killed and then jumping back to life.

On the last day of shooting the film, Warner Bros. issued a cease and desist order on us. We had to stop using a title associated with something they owned, and we had to come up with a new title when we took the film to Sundance. Thus, Jerry and Tom.

Why did you choose to represent hitmen as a couple of regular guys?
When I originally wrote the play we were still living with the legacy of the Reagan Era, an era in which you could kill people all day long, five days a week—just off the top of my head, think Oliver North—and still go home and practice good, solid “family values.” The Sopranos captured this hypocrisy very well.

The hitmen seem to run through a cycle: happen to join, learn the job, keep at it for a while, start to lose your touch, end up with a gun to your head….
I think the work life “arc” you just described for hitmen is exactly the same for any job.

In what ways is Jerry and Tom a play (typical or otherwise) about the daily grind?
Working guys are guys with “jobs,” and “jobs” are what make a person's life a daily grind. Occupations, however, are completely different. As Chris Rock says, and I'm paraphrasing, if you have a job you can bitch and moan about how hard it is, but if you have an occupation, you should just shut the fuck up because you're way ahead of the people who just have jobs.

Did anything in particular draw you to sprinkling the plays with major historical (not to mention conspiracy-ridden) occurrences?
I just love mixing in major historical occurrences, especially the ones with conspiracies surrounding them. Kind of the comic version of what James Ellroy does much better in his American crime trilogy.

Favorite hitman story?
In Bruges [2008 film written by Martin McDonagh] is probably my all time favorite.


And finally, just for kicks, what’s your favorite bad joke?
A guy comes home from work and finds a snail on his doormat. He picks it up and hurls it across the street. Two years later the doorbell rings. The guy answers the door, the same snail is right there on his doorstep. The snail looks up at the guy and says, “What the fuck was that all about?”