At 85, Lexington playwright hopes to see first work staged after surprise award
Mike Oppenheim had mostly given up on the idea of getting his plays produced.
The 85-year-old Lexington resident had been sending his play, “Angels,” to whatever contests he could find and theaters across the country for 20 years. It’s in the possession of about 500 organizations, he guessed.
“It’s my duty to send out my plays, and I do. You’re supposed to never give up,” Oppenheim said.
“But I pretty much thought I was never going to make it.”
Then last week, he was informed via email he’d won a prize that could change the trajectory of his career. At first, he thought it was yet another scammer looking to rip off an elderly man.
“I checked for the usual scam clues,” Oppenheim said.
No scam: Oppenheim had won the Beverly Hills Theatre Guild Julie Harris Award, a prestigious award that comes with a $3,500 prize. Similar awards come with a promise of production as well, but the Julie Harris Award does not.
So, Oppenheim still has an item to check off his bucket list: Getting a play staged.
“Theaters are not crying out for plays these days,” he adds. ”But hope springs eternal, although, in my case, my eternal is just around the corner.”
The prize puts Oppenheim in good company.
The last three winners have long Los Angeles pedigrees: a storied actor, recording artist and bestselling author; a playwriting professor at Dartmouth College; and a playwright whose work has been staged all across the City of Angels.
Oppenheim’s resume is different. After graduating from UCLA in 1964, he moved to New York with the dream of making it big as a writer. He had the good fortune of a friend who set him up with a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village for $80 a month, but his work never found a foothold.
After reading a book called “Intern,” documenting the struggles and intrigue of medical residency, he figured he might have more success going that route.
That proved to be true.
He took some pre-med classes, got into New York University’s medical school and never looked back, eventually settling into practicing as a Los Angeles doctor serving hotels. Now retired, he estimated he made more than 18,000 hotel visits to see patients.
Oppenheim moved to Lexington in 2016, where his wife, artist and writer Susan King, was raised. They live on the North side in a custom-built ranch home not dissimilar from the bungalows that line the streets of Los Angeles.
Through it all, he never stopped writing.
Outside of the two plays he’s finished, he’s published several medical writings and book reviews. He’s also kept a blog documenting some of the more interesting vignettes from his time as a hotel doctor.
There is little comfort in getting old, he said.
“I’m really old. You know, it happens overnight. You’re going to realize that when you wake up one day and you’re going to say, ‘Where did it all go?’” Oppenheim said. “I’m just really upset about it, only because my body is wearing down, and I know it’s not going to last all that much longer.”
Still, he keeps a schedule that allows him to write in the morning.
“I get up very early in the morning and I write for a couple hours, then I have breakfast. That’s basically it for the day, as far as things to do, because I find it hard to write after breakfast unless it’s an emergency or something,” Oppenheim said.
He thinks his winning play, “Angels,” may have gotten a boost from the current political discussion.
The play follows a group of residents at a struggling county hospital balancing their commitment to patient care with the demands of a profit-seeking official. Among the leader’s goals: reuse needles to cut costs, assist in deporting undocumented immigrants and reduce staffing levels.
That plot may have earned it a second look, given that cuts to Medicaid spending are looming from the President Donald Trump-backed budget bill passed by Republicans in Congress earlier this summer.
As for the audience experience, he expects some of it will be taken politically, but that shouldn’t be the primary lens to view it through.
“Mostly, I wanted to entertain the audience. I really resent people who don’t want to entertain me. I was in New York during the ‘60s and ‘70s, and I saw a lot of plays that were really political, but some of them were awfully boring,” Oppenheim said.
The 12-character play is not boring, he said. And the residents aren’t preachy in their commitment to their patients, they’re just, as Oppenheim put it, “not jerks.”
“I think it resonates because it’s so well written and witty and nasty and clever, but it also deals with a modern issue,” despite being 20 years old, Oppenheim said.
Oppenheim has only completed two plays: “Angels,” and a one-act play penned during his undergraduate years that also won a national award some sixty years ago.
That could change, Oppenheim said, if someone were to stage “Angels.”
“These days, I mostly spend time writing my book reviews. If there was some action on this play, then I might start thinking about another play,” Oppenheim said.
