UCR playwright's 'Adopt a Sailor' screens at Palm Springs International Film Festival on Saturday and Sunday

By FIELDING BUCK • The Press-Enterprise

"Adopt a Sailor," a film written and directed by UC Riverside assistant professor Charles Evered, has been adopted by audiences.

Two screenings this weekend at the Palm Springs International Film Festival were sold out. Seats not taken by pass holders will be filled on a standby basis 10 minutes before show time.

Evered, who teaches playwriting, is expected to attend the screenings.

"Adopt a Sailor" is a study of three characters, played by Bebe Neuwirth, Peter Coyote and Ethan Peck.

During Fleet Week, when Navy ships visit New York City, a young sailor is hosted for dinner by a troubled Upper West Side couple. Over burned chicken and Cocoa Puffs, they learn a little bit about him and more about themselves.

The film combines drama and humor, as does the story of its making.

"Adopt a Sailor" began as one piece in a program of 10-minute plays written to commemorate the first anniversary of the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center. Neuwirth, who was involved in the project, became an advocate for its expansion. In expanding it, Evered took out explicit references to 9/11, although the characters speak of an unspecified war.

Neuwirth said in a phone interview that expanding the piece made it more universal.

"Now it could be any Fleet Week."

Peck, the grandson of Gregory Peck, radiates an otherworldly calm throughout the film, even when delivering a speech about falling out of a plane at 5,000 feet without a parachute to his astonished hosts. He said the script required him to walk a fine line between real and surreal.

He said filming takes lasted up to 10 minutes and were redone up to five times.

Interiors were shot a long way from the Upper West Side. Producer Kim Waltrip's Palm Desert house stood in for a New York high-rise apartment with a Manhattan skylight simulated in a window.

Evered said the film was shot in 11 to 12 days last August. He and Neuwirth had vivid memories of the 115-degree heat.

"Adopt a Sailor" has been screened at festivals around the country, and Evered said audiences respond to it, laughing in the appropriate places.