One-man show ‘Tru’ an intimate portrait of author Truman Capote

With apologies to Kevin Bacon, call it “Six Degrees of Tru.”

Longtime local drama teacher, actor, playwright and director Tom Frye feels sort of fatefully connected to flamboyantly “famous for being famous” writer, Truman Capote.

Frye, who will portray Capote in the award-winning one-man “Tru” this weekend at Roxy’s Downtown – a show he’s done around the country sporadically since 2000 – keeps crossing paths with people who have offbeat, sometimes weird, even creepy ties to Capote.

His friend and theater colleague John Boldenow, former theater head at Wichita Center for the Arts, played guide for Capote during an appearance at Emporia State University.

Frye is friends with a Topeka historian who ended up taking temporary custody of the stolen tombstones of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, the executed killers of Capote’s ground-breaking, non-fiction novel, “In Cold Blood,” which Capote wrote about the notorious 1959 Clutter murders in Kansas.

And when Frye was preparing for a 2001 Los Angeles performance of “Tru,” it was suggested he meet with Robert Blake, who played killer Smith in the 1967 movie version of “In Cold Blood,” about being his show’s director.

“It was right outside Vitello’s, the same restaurant where a few weeks later he (allegedly) shot his wife,” Frye says. “That was a little creepy when I realized it.” (Blake was tried but acquitted of murdering Bonnie Lee Bakley, but later found civilly liable for her death.)

Frye’s varied and prolific career includes high school and college drama teacher (mostly at Southeast High and Wichita State University), published melodrama playwright (3 volumes; more than 35 original shows for Mosley Street Melodrama), actor/director with virtually every local theater group and a professional national tour (the musical, “42nd Street”) during a three-year sojourn to New York. He first thought about doing “Tru” during the 2000 Christmas season at Center for the Arts.

“I needed a small-cast show because most local actors were already committed to other holiday shows that were running five and six weeks. I heard about ‘Tru’ (which won the 1989 best actor Tony for Robert Morse), but I couldn’t find where to get the rights,” says Frye, who officially retired from teaching last year.

But a friend of his, Ray Wills, a Wichita native then performing on Broadway, knew the playwright, Jay Presson Allen, who also penned acclaimed adaptations of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and “Forty Carats” for Broadway, “Cabaret” and “Prince of the City” for Hollywood and the beloved 1976-80 “Family” for TV that made a child star of Kristy McNichol.

Wills put Frye in touch with Allen and she OK’d the project. After the Wichita performance, Frye wrote Allen a thank you note. That began a correspondence that eventually resulted in Allen asking for a command performance.

“I had sent a videotape, but two weeks later I got a call from her husband, Lewis (Tony-winning producer of such shows as “Annie” and “Master Class”) asking me to see her the next time I was in New York. When I did, she wanted me to perform it for her right there in their apartment. She loved it and we made plans to take it on tour and then to Off-Broadway,” Frye says.

“But then 9/11 happened, and New York theater came to a standstill. A year later, we took it to Florida where it was a great success, and we made plans for Off-Broadway again. Then Bush started the war in Iraq, and we postponed again,” Frye says.

Later that same year – 2003 – the playwright’s husband died of cancer at age 81. Then the playwright herself suffered a stroke, dying in 2006 at age 84, shelving their Off-Broadway plans permanently.

“Well,” says Frye, “as they say, that’s showbiz.”

But the rights passed to the couple’s daughter, Brooke Allen, who has formed her own relationship with Frye. Interestingly, Frye says she has made plans to come to Kansas to see him in a performance at the McPherson Opera House in January as well as one in Sedona, Ariz., the same month.

The one-man show is a portrait of the witty, often self-destructive Capote, author of such acclaimed works as “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Other Voices, Other Rooms” and his masterwork, “In Cold Blood.” Using mostly Capote’s own words, it covers a dark and lonely period of his life right before Christmas 1975, says Frye, who at 5-foot-6 is a bit taller than the 5-foot-3 Capote, and at 67 is older than Capote, who died at 59 in 1984 from liver cancer exacerbated by excessive drinking.

“Truman was a master of structure. I was already a fan of his writing. This show lets the audience become his confidante. It’s not really gossipy. It’s a drama that has some tear-jerking moments,” the actor says. “But that reaction from audiences always surprised (playwright) Jay, who considered it a comedy because he was so witty and acerbic.”

The play takes place on Dec. 23 and 24 just after Esquire magazine published excerpts from his unfinished roman a clef, “Answered Prayers,” a tell-all in which he disclosed confidences and personal secrets of some high-powered, jet-setting friends. The outraged Manhattan socialites, fashion icons and celebrities immediately dropped him.

Through those two days before Christmas, Frye says, Capote muses about his life, from surviving parental neglect to being discovered as an elfin-faced wunderkind to creating a new literary form – nonfiction novel – to squandering it all through too much booze, too many drugs, too much partying and too much celebrity hob-knobbing. When his society friends ostracized him, he become a virtual parody of himself, reduced to life only as a permanent talk show guest.

“There’s a line in the show that sums it all up,” Frye says: “He became famous for being famous.”

This story was originally published September 17, 2015 at 4:59 PM with the headline "One-man show ‘Tru’ an intimate portrait of author Truman Capote."