DENIS WOYCHUK’S office, in a creaky attic of a room upstairs from the KGB Bar on East Fourth Street, is packed to the gills with books, odd miscellanea like a pair of boxing gloves and two giant metal Soviet-made film projectors, and, in the middle of the floor, on a worn Oriental rug, an array of electric guitars, cables and amps.
Mr. Woychuk, the bar’s owner, admitted that he is not the world’s best guitarist, but he did get some use out of the old Gibsons lately. After careers as a teacher, a corporate lawyer and an attorney for the criminally insane, he wrote a rock musical, “Attorney for the Damned,” inspired by his experiences in the last profession and his memoir of the same name.
The show will open on Thursday at the 99-seat Kraine Theater, downstairs from the bar, and Mr. Woychuk, who has a round face, square glasses, and a way of piling sentences one on top of another, found himself busy last week with rehearsals and last-minute details. So busy, in fact, that he barely had time to finish a chicken salad sandwich as he recalled his strange life in the legal profession, including the events that inspired songs like “Take a Finger,” which includes the lyrics, “Wore her finger on a chain around my neck; I know it’s romantic but what the heck.”
“I never was attacked,” he said of the years he spent representing patients at several of the city’s psychiatric centers, “though one patient did try to show me the choke hold by which somebody died, which, quote, he didn’t do.”
Still, the job, which Mr. Woychuk did for more than a decade, was sometimes disturbing in other ways, as it was the time he was on Wards Island, outside Manhattan Psychiatric Center, talking with the first man whose release he had ever won.
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“He says: ‘I’ve got to kill my roommate. He’s coming on to me. Can’t you hear him?’ ” Mr. Woychuk recalled. “And we’re alone in the woods by the river. And I thought, ‘I just got this guy out?’ ”
On the other hand, the job put him in the unusual position of looking for the good in people who had done terrible things. His new musical, with plot twists that produce some unlikely heroes and villains, aims to suggest some of that complexity to the audience.
“The mental patient is like the vampire or the werewolf of yesteryear,” Mr. Woychuk said. “He’s the one who everybody wants to hate and fear. But just because you hear dead people doesn’t mean you’re a bad guy.”
Mr. Woychuk’s history with the building on East Fourth Street, an old Ukrainian social club, started in 1984, when he was a student at Fordham Law School and started a gallery there. Now that he has the bar and its frequent literary events and readings to deal with full time, his mind is back on the law.
He tends to toss off sharp one-liners about his old job — “It was quite interesting, but how many cannibals do you have to know?” he cracked at one point. But he adds that his musical, like his book, deals in weightier terms with a lawyer’s loss of innocence within the system.
“You’re complicit,” he said. “You get someone off who killed someone else, you can’t just say, ‘Wasn’t me.’ You have to live with what you do.”
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Not that Mr. Woychuk, who has two daughters, has written two children’s books and is a lively host generally stationed at the end of the bar, is at all gloomy in person. Still, there are some things he has not yet come to grips with. While he was trying to trim the musical, the director suggested cutting an episode about a client who is indicted for raping a child, then goes free after the victim, the only witness, commits suicide. The director thought the scene felt too far-fetched.
But Mr. Woychuk insisted that the scene, which was based on a true story from his own practice, stay in.
“This is part of the show, and it’s in there, and I won’t take it out,” he said. “I don’t care how unbelievable it might be — it happened.
“And now,” he added, “You see why I’m in the bar business.”
