Falling, Falling, Falling for the Footlight Parade
One of my favorite childhood memories is of my father’s acting debut in a community-theater production of “The Mousetrap,” the Agatha Christie murder mystery. I smiled in my seat the entire time as I watched my dad, an 11th-hour replacement in the role of Detective Sergeant Trotter, piece together the Christie puzzle, stealing glances at a script in his hat because he hadn’t had enough time to learn his lines. Theater seemed so fun and alive, an adventure. Soon I began writing plays and acting, both of which proved essential in overcoming my painful shyness.
It’s impossible not to recall such memories while reading “The Play That Changed My Life,” a valuable new collection of essays and interviews from the American Theater Wing, founder of the Tony Awards and a sponsor of theatrical education programs. Anyone working in theater probably would have something to contribute, but the Wing wisely chose to resist the commercial benefits of turning to stars for anecdotes. Instead it solicited insights from 21 of America’s best playwrights, artists equipped to write knowingly and movingly about the ways that plays and theater gave them a calling.
Despite its parlor-game title, “The Play That Changed My Life” is anything but a dry assignment in theatrical autobiography. Rather, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Paula Vogel (“How I Learned to Drive”) writes in her introduction,
“this book documents desire: the moment writers-to-be were caught in the tantalizing web of theatrical allure.”For
Edward Albee (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) it was seeing a musical called “Jumbo” — starring Jimmy Durante and a small elephant — at 6, and being hooked “by the total unreality of the experience becoming absolute reality.” For Charles Fuller it was conversations with a friend that inspired him to take Melville’s “Billy Budd” and rework it “inside out and upside down” into his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Soldier’s Play.” And for writers as diverse in style and background as A. R. Gurney, Tina Howe,
David Henry Hwang and Suzan-Lori Parks, it was when they began lifelong love affairs with playwrights from whom they learned dramatic structure, writerly self-confidence and a passion for live performance.
“The musical ‘Annie Get Your Gun,’ which I saw on my first trip to New York, indelibly impressed on me the excitement and pace of a good evening in the theater,” writes Mr. Gurney (“Love Letters”). “The plays of Harold Pinter, especially ‘The Homecoming,’ were lessons in stage silences and mysteries of plot which could remain unsolved at the end.”
Several transformational works are satisfyingly good matches with the playwrights.
The darkly funny Christopher Durang (“The Marriage of Bette and Boo”) recalls how, at 13, he became haunted by the frustrated puppeteer Paul in the musical “Carnival!” Paul’s song “I’ve Got to Find a Reason” reflects the pathos that so many Durang characters would become known for, though Paul’s language is blunter than what Sister Mary Ignatius or Miss Witherspoon would use:
I’ve got to find a reason,
For living on this earth.
I’ve got to find a reason,
For taking the space I take,
Breathing the air I breathe ... .
Mr. Durang writes: “The incipient existentialist in me identified with both Paul’s bitterness and his introspection. He knew he was troubled about life, and though he couldn’t talk to anyone else about it, he talked to himself.”
Sarah Ruhl traces some of her own dramatic forms and choices back to Ms. Vogel’s “Baltimore Waltz,” a farcical and moving story about the need to connect with another human being that has faint echoes in Ms. Ruhl’s “In the Next Room, or the vibrator play,” now on Broadway. Among the tools she might have “unconsciously absorbed” from “The Baltimore Waltz,” Ms. Ruhl writes, are Ms. Vogel’s “modern architecture for grief” and “how language itself can be a source of solace but also a mode of alienation.”
Other epiphanic responses are more like awakenings.
Lynn Nottage (recipient of the 2009 Pulitzer for “Ruined”) notes that for all the impact on her of the seminal African-American work “A Raisin in the Sun,” nothing compares to seeing a play called “Succotash on Ice” as a child.
“I still remember the extraordinary moment when this oversized refrigerator on stage opened up and inside there were talking lima beans and corn, and I was absolutely entranced,” she says in an interview with Ben Hodges, this book’s editor.
Ms. Nottage and Ms. Ruhl are among the youngest playwrights included in “The Play That Changed My Life,” which leans heavily toward esteemed and midcareer writers. The book would have benefited from including more emerging and more experimental playwrights, like Young Jean Lee or Tarell Alvin McCraney. And I also would have loved to hear from Tracy Letts and Tony Kushner, or perhaps an essay on the subject (if one exists) from Tennessee Williams. But this is being piggy; this book is quite fine.
The most moving essays are those that not only capture theater’s spark to the imagination, but also pay tribute to the people who helped light it.
David Ives, who has adapted more than 25 musicals for City Center’s Encores! series, has a delightful essay about seeing Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in Mr. Albee’s “Delicate Balance” in Chicago — and then meeting them 20 years later and sharing that memory. Donald Margulies (whose “Time Stands Still” and “Collected Stories” will be at Manhattan Theater Club in 2010) describes using his plays to give an empowering voice to characters inspired by his father, who in life “retreated into silence” out of fear of being a failure as a parent.
In his elegiac piece about two men who inspired him,
Doug Wright, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for “I Am My Own Wife” in 2004, describes the blessing of great art emerging from great suffering. Mr. Wright lost his best friend and theater companion, Bruce (an amateur painter), to AIDS, a disease that also claimed one of Mr. Wright’s idols, the avant-garde actor and writer Charles Ludlam.
“In my memory, Bruce and Charles are forever linked,” he writes. “They both taught me enduring lessons t
hat I still carry close to my heart. Our greatest work is often forged at our most perilous moments. The written word, the painted image; these are the only means we have to refute death. And sometimes, the bravest art lies in the fearless realm of the extreme.”
SourceArtsBeat is asking people for the play that changed their life. So, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif)
bwaydaily, what show changed your life? Mine would probably either be a community production of The King and I or...probably Annie.
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