BY LESLEY LOGAN

Being clean and sober for 24 hours is a miracle by any addict’s standards. As the days, months and years unfold, you hear about the promises; you hear that your life will be “beyond your wildest dreams.” For those bouncing painfully on their rock bottom, those wildest dreams might be as simple as a warm bed, or as grandiose as becoming a billionaire. It’s all relative; and certainly it helps to be clean and sober enough to be alert to what that tantalizing “beyond” might be.

For a playwright in recovery after seven years in the stranglehold of crystal meth addiction, a pretty wild dream has to be getting a play on Broadway starring a world-class actor. But how’s this for the “beyond” part for writer Matthew Lombardo: two plays in one year on Broadway, with Valerie Harper as Tallulah Bankhead in “Looped,” and Kathleen Turner as an alcoholic nun in “High”? Way beyond the wildest dreams of any writer, much less a guy who had lost everything to the disease of addiction before crash landing on the flight deck of a psychiatric hospital in New York.

MATTHEW’S WOMEN
“Looped” was inspired by a recording Lombardo heard of Bankhead’s attempts to loop one (awful) line of dialogue she’d flubbed in a movie (equally awful) called “Die, Die, My Darling.” The endless hours she took to get the line down may have had as much to do with the star’s thirst for attention as for booze, and her breezy late arrival for the session so irritated the young man in charge of this simple task that his attitude raced from disenchanted to disgusted in record time. But all sympathy lay with Tallulah, even as she tormented the young man.

Bankhead fans (oh yes, our number is still legion) were showered with the larger-than-life histrionics of an old-school legend, the unrepentant reprobate, the alcoholic madwoman-in-the-attic, and the underlying vulnerability of a middle-aged woman struggling to remain visible, sexual and vital. Valerie Harper’s performance was pure genius, embodying all these sides of Bankhead, who was as seductive and funny as she was pathetic and infuriating. We know that Harper can hit any role, especially one as deliciously demanding as Tallulah, out of the ball park, but less predictable is how a man of a younger generation had the insight to express the particular sorrows and dark humor of this imperious yet needy alcoholic female fading star. “She was a woman who used humor and that great façade to cover the pain of addiction and alcoholism,” Lombardo says simply. “I was fascinated by that.”

This is the beauty of Matthew Lombardo’s work: he really likes the old broads. “I like women of substance. I like to write for women of a certain age so I always look to create a strong female lead between fifty and seventy.”

In “High,” his latest creation, which had a short run in April at the Booth Theater on Broadway, he has drawn a character based partially on a nun schoolteacher and his mother. Kathleen Turner plays Sister Jamison, a nun with a murky past who works as a substance abuse counselor. She lived on the streets for three years in an alcoholic whirlwind, reaping all its attendant horrors. But she managed to survive, getting sober and embracing the Catholic faith as a drowning person would clutch a life raft. She has not conquered her foul language, though, or fully accepted the pecking order of the Church, in which a priest’s power trumps a nun’s.

Sister Jamison kicks back when the Father in charge of the treatment center insists she take on the salvation of a suicidal, drug-abusing, trick-turning mess of a boy. The priest insists that only she can “save” him, an order along the lines of the fairy tale task of spinning hay into gold. And there is no Rumpelstiltskin to lend a hand. The older nun and the young addict’s initial mutual loathing is what drives the play, as horrible confessions are extracted and old scars split open.

In a neat reversal of the classical theatrical device of the “blocking senex,” in which the desires of the young are thwarted by the aged, Lombardo uses the juvenile roles to block the needs of the elders. It is at once gratifying and mystifying, and when asked about this dynamic, Lombardo replied, “I think that subconsciously I was referring to the disrespect for older women in Hollywood. Unless you’re a Meryl Streep, there is a very short shelf life for a woman’s acting career. But the men continue to work, and their co-stars and love interests are half their age. The English are better at appreciating the stars in their 50s and beyond, but we haven’t gotten there yet.”

ACT I
On a recent rainy day during previews for “High,” Lombardo was lounging in the back row of the theater, admiring the newly painted stage floor. His genuine appreciation of the work marks him as a real nuts-and-bolts theater guy. In fact, his entire personality seemed lit with grateful satisfaction, and not just for the glossy black paint on stage. He seemed very comfortable in his own skin. It’s clear that at least part of this sunniness came from his having been the baby of his large family, during what one might call a very long Act One of his life.

Matthew was the youngest of five – three girls, two boys – growing up in a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut during the ‘70s in an Italian-American family. He attended Catholic school; he was an altar boy; and no, he did not steal sips from the communion wine. At big family holidays, he gravitated to the kitchen, where the intimate conversations and roaring laughter of the women were far more enticing to him than the rapt attention of the men watching the game in the living room. This was a kid who appreciated women – how they thought, what they felt, how they expressed it, that they expressed it.

Early in his life he determined not to emulate his brother, who was 10 years older, and whose drug and alcohol use was more alarming than alluring to Matthew. “I was just a little kid when I was wakened by the flashing of police lights outside the house. My brother was totally inebriated and had to be led to the front door by a cop. I snuck downstairs and found my parents sitting in the dark, in tears. I vowed to myself that I would never be like my brother.”

The first act of Matthew’s life was to embody the Good Boy. He virtually chewed the scenery around that role like a demon … or could it be … addict? In any event, he was driven to pursue a life in the arts. His parents deserve a standing O for encouraging him. Plenty of the parents of the big baby boom families were exhausted and outnumbered, and by the time the fourth or fifth kid came along, the best they could do was leave the care of the youngest to wolves. But the Lombardos recognized the talent in their youngest boy and nurtured it: they took him to plays, opera, ballet, and museums, opening up a world not commonly available to your typical little-leaguer suburban Connecticut boy.

ACT II
In his twenties, Matthew Lombardo landed a job writing for “The Guiding Light.” Daily soap operas are like a PhD program for playwrights, and he did well at it. He continued to write plays (producing “Guilty Innocence”), ending up in Los Angeles, where East Coast playwrights go to die.

Act Two of Lombardo’s arc occurred there at the age of 36, which he managed to reach without the usual substance abuse that tends to crop up early in addicts’ lives. Of course there were bouts of food disorders, workaholism, and love addiction, but somehow he skirted around the perils of pills, booze and white powders.

Until one night in a hotel room in LA, when a friend showed up with a bag of crystal meth and offered some to Matthew. When Lombardo demurred, the guy turned around to go find someone more fun. “Wait! I’ll try some, please stay!” That which his brother’s example failed to produce in all those years, was accomplished in a flash – by love, lust, loneliness or co-dependence, which many substance abuse professionals believe is at the core of all addictive behavior.

Lombardo’s addiction took off like a rocket, as he and his lover lived and used together for years. In one of those awful twists of fate that feel like betrayal but can actually be salvation, his lover got clean and sober, and, as was prudent, moved out, leaving people, places and things behind. Instead of joining his lover in recovery, Matthew spiraled into the kind of meth madness that led him, Elvis style, to cover his windows with tin foil and blankets, and to peer at the light crack under the door to see if anyone was out there. But no one is ever out there at the door of a longtime meth-head, except the dealer or the landlord. All friends have fled; all contact with reality has gone on hiatus.

“I rarely slept, I hardly ate. My life was a tiny little pinhole of me and my meth. Hallucinations, paranoia, the whole thing. I thought I was done,” Matthew remembers. “But it was when I was strapped to a gurney and taken to Bellevue in New York, that I dimly recognized that this was not me; not my plan at all.”

ACT III
It took some time for Lombardo to get his health and sanity back, as it does for most addicts, but he is one of the lucky ones: he has all his teeth, he regained what can only be called rude good health, and his brains came out of hock intact, without the missing links and irreversible brain damage that are the usual consequences of crystal meth use and abuse. Thus begins the Third Act of Matthew’s life: recovery and its gifts.

Matthew Lombardo is neither incarcerated nor planted six feet under: that’s the simple miracle of being clean and sober, and it is clear that he gets that, and is grateful for it. But what is most appealing about this playwright is that during his stints on Broadway, most recently on 45th Street and Shubert Alley, in the Booth Theater, where eight times a week he listened to the lines he wrote uttered by a cast of three fine actors, headed by the magnificent Kathleen Turner, he knows that it all comes down to the humility and willingness it takes for him to walk around the corner to his support group every day.

Matthew’s other gift is to all of us women of a certain age, women who can become invisible to the world as we speed past our prime, the curtain falling in the middle of our second or third act – whether we are Tallulah Bankhead or an alcoholic nun, whether we are in recovery or at the bottom of a bottle of pills, whether we are compassionate or damaged beyond repair Matthew Lombardo thinks we women are vital and interesting, and even fabulous enough to write about. May his Third Act go on and on.

Lesley Logan has worked for many years in book and magazine publishing in all capacities. She is also the author of many guidebooks.