By Hap Erstein
Chances are you do not know the name Daniel Maté, but if The Theatre at Arts Garage’s artistic director Lou Tyrrell’s hunch is right, you soon will.
He is so excited by the talents of this 38-year-old composer-lyricist-playwright that he has scheduled two of Maté’s show for this season. The last time he did that was in the 2001-2002 season of Florida Stage, when Tyrrell produced back-to-back plays by Lee Blessing, so Maté is in extremely good company.
Opening the season at the Delray Beach performance space is The Longing and the Short of It, a contemporary song cycle about characters in search of love or at least some human connection, what one of Maté’s musical numbers calls Something Like OK.
As he says of the show’s roots, “I’ve had the title, ‘The Longing and the Short of It,’ kicking around for a number of years. There’s one or two songs here that I’d call trunk songs, but at a certain time I found myself writing a lot of songs for characters going to great lengths trying to get what they want and making asses of themselves, while being very charming and lovable and neurotic in the ways they go about it.”
If that makes you think that some of this material might be autobiographical, you’d be right. Sort of.
“These characters all have parts of me in them,” concedes Maté. “The genesis of some of the songs is ‘Here’s how I’m feeling’ or ‘Here’s something I noticed in myself.’ One song is ‘I Don’t Think of You,’ and it’s a woman in an art gallery, running into an ex. Well, I’m not a woman, and I’ve never run into an ex at an art gallery. So I don’t know where that came from. I was just playing this piano riff and I started singing along to it. It started coming out in these short bursts of awkward small talk. And from there, I heard a character.”
Although he has yet to have a major New York production, Maté has already been recognized by the industry. He has received awards named for such musical theater luminaries as Cole Porter and Jonathan Larson as well as the most prestigious award for an emerging lyricist, the 2013 Ed (A Chorus Line) Kleban Prize, which also happens to have $100,000 attached to it.
Receiving the acknowledgement of the Kleban was a “game changer” for Maté. “It’s a real vote of confidence,” he feels. “When I got that call, I knew I was going to make a career out of this. I’m 38 years old, no longer interested in living totally hand to mouth.”
Tyrrell adds his praise of Maté. “I think he’s the next Jonathan Larson or even Stephen Sondheim,” he gushes. “I think this guy’s storytelling in lyric is as good as it gets. Daniel is the real deal.”
Curiously, although he is determined to make his mark in the musical theater, Maté did not grow up listening to musicals. “I thought of myself more as a folk singer, actually, back in my mid-20s,” he says. “Except I was too shy or sheepish to perform it, because I was writing very personal stuff. But somehow that didn’t feel very authentic.”
While two of his mentors are Broadway giants William Finn and Stephen Schwartz, Maté notes with some embarrassment that he had never heard any of their output before he started working with them. Ask him to name a musical influence and he will mention Steely Dan.
The many characters in The Longing and the Short of It brim with melancholic yearning, which Maté fortunately mitigates with his natural wry wit. “These days, I lean towards the humorous side and musical theater gives me a fantastic opportunity to get some distance from myself, to create characters who are reflections of me, but who aren’t me,” he says.
While he winces at the word “message,” Maté allows that ‘The Longing’ has one. “There’s certainly a statement, I guess, which is that being a human being is hard and we’re all doing the best we can. So A) don’t beat yourself up if you can avoid it, and if you do beat yourself up, take a look at it and see if you can laugh at it, because you’re not alone.
“I think what I’m offering is hopefully a compassionate portrait of how difficult life can get. And that underneath all that mental activity and that frenetic mind stuff that we all get into, and all of that striving and struggling, there is the possibility of peace and connection.
“It’s a wonderful thing when you can look back on all your years of futility and you realize that they may have been futile, but they weren’t in vain.”
In April, The Theatre at Arts Garage will produce The Trouble with Doug, a somewhat more conventional book musical with lyrics by Maté and music by his NYU writing partner, Will Aronson. The show is based loosely on Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the story of a young man who wakes up one day transformed into a giant talking insect.
Both shows, says Maté, “are interested in peeling away the surface of things to try to get to something deeper and more serious. They’re certainly interested in using humor as a decoy, a way of opening up the audience to experiencing more profound emotions.
As he puts it, The Longing and the Short of It “is about people in a lot of pain and they sing about it. And yet I’m very, very interested in the audience being thoroughly entertained and delighted the whole time.”
THE LONGING AND THE SHORT OF IT, The Theatre at Arts Garage, 180 N.E. 1st St., Delray Beach. Through Sunday, Nov. 24. Tickets: $30-$45. Call: (561) 450-6357.
