After two decades as a production designer on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," Dean Taucher announced his retirement at the end of its 21st season. "The last season was feeling very difficult. It was a Monday in March and I just told them I'm done. I'm not doing any more. . . . And then later that week, they shut the entire film business because of Covid."
Even before the "SVU" gig, he was no stranger to series television and worked often with Dick Wolf, the creator of the "Law and Order" franchise, which includes several series. After an early career in theater set designs, Mr. Taucher moved to film and television, getting gigs on two shows that were distinctly defined by their sets, "Miami Vice" and "The Sopranos." Yet "SVU" was particularly grueling.
The show has as many as 24 episodes per season and multiple scenes and sets. "You don't know if you're on the freight train, or if the freight train is behind you, but you would have to keep in front of it for nine months" of taping, he said, from about mid-July to March or April.
While he might not have planned to retire entirely from set design, there were no plays, no films, and no television shows that needed sets during those early Covid days in Sag Harbor. That's where he and his wife, Gabrielle Lansner, have a house and where they sail and enjoy a quieter existence based more on Ms. Lansner's family ties to the area's local art scene than the New York and L.A. production realm. (Her mother, who died in 2010, was Fay Lansner, an artist who had a second home in Bridgehampton for many years.)
While Mr. Taucher was working, he started thinking about a piece inspired by the outlandish behavior he had seen all those years on set. "I started thinking about all these goofy, unpleasant, or crazy things I dealt with in my career." He realized writing a straight memoir wouldn't carry them well. Instead, "I wrote the stories from the point of view of the bad actors, the people who were doing the outrageous things" and considering their thoughts and motivations while they were doing them.
He still wasn't sure how to present the work as the story progressed, but "then I realized . . . wait a minute, I'm from the theater. I can write a play." And so he did, with names changed and composite figures used to keep the lawyers at bay. The stories themselves were written in his head while he was sailing off Havens Beach.
"Reel Stories -- Made in New York" takes the form of a podcast taping in which actors are recounting their exploits in the business and taking breaks in between that reveal even more about them and their character. A woman acting as host leads them on their sentimental and cocky journeys, and provides a comeuppance to them in the end.
Josh Gladstone, who is producing a free reading of the play at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on March 6, described it last week as "a dark adult comedy in the vein of an HBO show." The actors are Michael Giese, Jay O. Sanders, and Charlayne Woodard. (Kelly AuCoin, who plays Dollar Bill Stern on the Showtime series "Billions," had to pull out last week because of a change in the series taping schedule.)
Expect "strong content: sexual and violent stuff going on in the industry, drug use, organized crime," Mr. Gladstone warned. "That being said, it's funny, as long as you know you're coming in for an adult evening of saucy dark tales from the Hollywood and New York City entertainment worlds' underbelly." The material Mr. Taucher has drawn on comes from decades in the business, a behind-the-scenes look from someone who "had this life experience that not a lot of people have."
This is the play's second staged reading, after New York City in 2021. According to Mr. Gladstone, "it's a play that needs work. It's funny, it's stories. It's a lot of 'Canterbury Tales' -- you know, loosely based on a journey to Canterbury. This is loosely based on an industry podcast with three fictitious podcasters who are dishing about different stories from the industry that they have lived."
When he first read the play, he thought, "Oh wow, okay, this is just, this was nasty." Then he asked Mr. Taucher if it was all real. "And Dean said yeah, that's why the play is called 'Reel Stories.' . . . But people like this stuff, the nuts and bolts of showbiz."
For those who require a more universal theme, Mr. Taucher added that it's essentially about a workplace and a bad boss. "Except in the film business, just about anybody can be your boss. There are the five or 10 producers, the people from the network, the director, the stars. So you don't know who you have to kowtow to in order to get this thing to function, to get your work done."
Not all of the stories will be related to "SVU" or his other work in television. Mr. Taucher worked on films such as "Manhunter" and "Weekend at Bernie's" and was a scenic artist on "The Blues Brothers," "Trading Places," "Annie," and "Fatal Attraction" as well as in the theater before that. He has also created sets for Ms. Lansner's dance theater company and some short films she produced, allowing him to be more expressive and keep a foot in the theater world.
Some of his defining designs for "The Sopranos" included the logo, the rooms in Tony's house, his mother's house, the back room and sign from Satriale's Pork Store, the back room of the Bada Bing strip club, and Christopher's apartment.
He said as a blond-haired and blue-eyed guy from the Midwest, he didn't see much of a chance going in for his "Sopranos" interview. But he did grow up in Cicero, Ill., where Al Capone fled when "things got too hot in Chicago." His grandfather also delivered illicit goods for Capone, according to stories passed down in the Taucher family. "And when I met with David Chase, maybe that was slightly appealing to him," that he had some connections to that world.
"And then I said, 'Well, it looks to me like you're doing "I, Claudius" in New Jersey.' That sort of caught him by surprise." He added, " 'You even have Livia as the mother, that's the dynamic . . . the mother-and-son power struggle.' So I think those two things got me the job for season one."
Don't ask him what his favorite set or design was, he is not one to dwell on the past. "I was always looking for the next time, the next fun thing to do. When the scripts would come in, there was always a thrill in the chase, in the hunt, and getting it done and surprising people with what you can do and help tell the story with."
Seat reservations for "Reel Stories," which starts at 7:30 p.m., can be made at Eventbrite. The performance is approximately 70 minutes and will be followed by an informal meet-and-greet with the cast in Bay Street's lobby and bar.
