Upon seeing an excerpt from the HRDC production of Woods, Lapine said, "Seeing this reminds me of how much I've taken out of the show. I'm not sure that this is a better version. It's hard when you see your own things. Your except was terrific, except for my embarrassment over my own writing. It's hard to divorce yourself from being the writer. I try to forget that I'm the writer when I start to direct."
On working with Stephen Sondheim: "We discuss and work on things together. With Woods I developed the concept and the book and then he brought it to another level with his music. Sondheim dosen't write anything until the book is written, then he takes it all from the book. You get raped. But he's very respectful of the writer. More so than most composers out there. For Woods, I wrote monologues for three of the characters from which Sondheim wrote their songs."
On how Woods was conceptualized: "I went to see a friend of mine who had just had a baby and I asked, "Will you raise her to have good table manners?" And she said, "I want to raise her to know the difference between good and bad. Into the Woods came [out of that]."
On New Project
Lapine is working with Stephen Sondheim on a combination of two one acts, because, he muses, "I guess I like that form." (Sunday in the Park and Woods originated as one acts as well.) The first act is based on the 19th Century novel, Fosca, by Tanchetti, and the second act is based on a contemporary non-fiction book called Muscle by Sam Fussell. "They're both about beauty and self image," he said. "The first act is about an extremely unattractive, anorexic woman who gets a dashing, handsome man to fall in love with her. And the second act is about a guy who doesn't like the way he looks and makes himself bigger and bigger while at the same time shutting the world around him out.
"I was really intrigued by muscle and he [Sondheim] was really intrigued by Fosca, so we said, 'Hey, let's just do them together.' To me muscle is a metaphor for the eighties. My generation dropped out, did drugs, became very internal, in the same way that the eighties generation became external, more concerned with the outside than the inside. Usually I write the book, but on Fosca, Steve will be writing a lot as well.
"I'm also editing my film Life with Mikey, starring Michael J. Fox and populated with a lot of theater actors, and working on a play at La Jolla based on Cool Million starring Doogie Howser. It's a Horatio Alger story...but he gets dismembered at the end."