Stratford 2012 - The Matchmaker

Maybe it's just me, but Stratford's production of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker didn't strike too many sparks.

For someone who grew up hearing the tunes from Hello, Dolly! done by everyone from Louis Armstrong to teenagers in high school theatre, it's easy to see why the play, originally called The Merchant of Yonkers (and a flop) in 1938 and then revised at the behest of Stratford's founding director Sir Tyrone Guthrie as The Matchmaker in 1955 and then to London and Broadway, made such a great musical: there's a lot of room for musical numbers in the plot. It's played as a farce with mistaken identities, slamming doors, people hiding under tables; all the usual elements that make plays like Noises Off work so well. But it's also a comedy of manners, poking fun at the conventions of society of the time (the 1890's), and while that kind of play can have great farcical moments -- the screen scene in The School For Scandal is a fine example -- it just seemed to run a little flat in this play. Maybe it's because Mr. Wilder allows for several moments of breaking down the fourth wall and having the characters speak directly to the audience, including Dolly's speech at the end of the play. That has a monumental impact in Our Town, but here it's a little disconcerting. It does not help that the characters are looking back at the people and the play with a hefty helping of cynicism.

Tom McCamus, who does characters with his voice the way some do them with their entire body, was Horace Vandergelder, the tightfisted half-a-millionaire. He controls his niece Ermengard (Cara Ricketts) with an iron hand, threatens her intended Ambrose Kemper (Skye Brandon), and terrorizes his employees, the adventure-seeking Cornelius Hackl (Michael Shara) and the shy and overreacting Barnaby Tucker (Josh Epstein). The set-up from the git-go is that he will be defied by everyone, including the title character, Dolly Gallagher Levi (Seana McKenna). Ms. McKenna brings a charm to the part that isn't overpowering, and she reveals some of the vulnerability in Dolly that makes her appealing, but the play really isn't about her; the real matchmaker is Horace.

As I noted earlier, it's easy to see how this could be a musical, and if you know Hello Dolly!, you'll hear the cues for the musical numbers that Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman picked up and turned into standards. And there is a musical theme running through this production: the lights in the show come up on Ambrose wistfully singing "The Sidewalks of New York," and that tune is the lietmotif all the way through to the curtain call. And while the song itself is a playful look at a town of long ago, one couldn't help notice that it was done in a slightly acidic tone, as if warning us that adventures can be perilous; even dangerous.

Stratford 2012 - 42nd Street

"The two most beautiful words in the English language: 'musical comedy.'" - Justin Marshall, the director of Pretty Lady.

That sums up the whole idea of 42nd Street, the musical comedy that pays tribute to all the other musical comedies by pulling out all the cliches of Broadway musicals, putting on their tap shoes, and hoofing their way across the stage of the Festival Theatre at Stratford. The story is so well-known -- a girl gets off the bus from Allentown and through luck and compound fractures becomes the toast of Broadway in the smash hit Pretty Lady -- that it's been done, re-done, and parodied (Dames At Sea). The cast has all the types: the young ingenue; the handsome boy tenor; the tough-as-nails/heart-of-gold chorine; the wisecracker; the hard-bitten director; the prima donna star; and even a few mob thugs. You hardly need a synopsis or a program. All you have to do is sit back and listen for the cues to the music, hum along to songs you know, and try to keep your feet from tapping along.

Stratford hasn't always done musicals. When I started coming on a regular basis in the early 1970's, the chances of seeing a show like 42nd Street were as rare as seeing palm trees along the Avon River. Yes, they have always produced modern plays by Canadian and American playwrights, including Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Robert Patrick's Kennedy's Children was done here in the early 1970's, and they've done stunning works with avant-garde and adventures like Treasure Island. They'd also done their share of Gilbert & Sullivan (The Pirates of Penzance is a regular) along with operettas like Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne. But they also realized that they needed to fill the seats with audiences that weren't into heavy or classical dramas; there was gold in the blue-hair crowd from Toronto, Buffalo, Detroit, and Toledo, and they wanted shows like Oklahoma!, Camelot, My Fair Lady, and for the aging boomers, Jesus Christ Superstar. They had the theatres, they had the talent, and they had the need. And it has worked: productions like Hello Dolly! pay the way for plays like Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, so while the grandparents enjoyed the Broadway show and mom and dad absorbed the culture of Henry V, the gay grandson enjoyed the not-too-subtle subtext of Mr. Marlowe. It's business... but it's also good theatre, and it brings in the audiences who might otherwise turn up their scholarly noses at something they might consider shallow and see what Stratford can do with it. It can be an eye-opener to a larger perspective on something as playful as the "Peanuts" musical, You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Or it could be just plain fun and dazzling as the production of 42nd Street. The music is by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin, with the book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, and based on the original production directed by Gower Champion. (There's a Broadway legend story that goes along with the original production: Gower Champion died the afternoon of opening night in August 1980.) Director Gary Griffin has a fine cast with Cynthia Dale as the prima donna star who dominates the show until her accident; Kyle Blair is the handsome young tenor, Sean Arbuckle is the tough director, and Jennifer Rider-Shaw is the starry-eyed kid from Allentown who pulls off the smash. The supporting cast is terrific, but it's really an ensemble show, and they can all sing and dance. And they do, right up to the second bow.

My only quibble is that this production was staged on the thrust stage of the Festival Theatre, which I doubt was intended for a full-tilt Broadway tap dance show. It doesn't leave you a lot of room for scenery -- although you don't need much -- and it must have been interesting to choreograph twenty or so dancers on the small space. But it does allow for imaginative and three-dimensional staging that you wouldn't get on the stage of the traditional proscenium house at the Avon, and there's something to be said for, in the words of my late dance teacher Paul Avery, "doing it up brown" on the same stage that saw William Shatner perform Julius Caesar and Irene Worth play Hedda Gabler. And there's not a wrong step or a sour note in the whole show. Sir Tyrone Guthrie would be proud, and I'll bet he would have been tapping along.

Stratford 2012 - A Word or Two

The stage is set with a desk and chair, a director's chair, a small podium, and a winding staircase of books that cantilevers over the stage like an impossible sculpture; in the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay, toppling to the skies. The lights come up on an elderly gentleman sitting at the foot of this literary tower, and the words come forth.

This is supposed to be a one-man show: Christopher Plummer, actor (everything from Hamlet to The Sound of Music to Star Trek VI) and director, but it is not really just one man there. He is in the company of Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, William Shakespeare, A.A. Milne, Stephen Leacock, Ogden Nash, Emily Dickinson, Christopher Marlowe, Oscar Wilde, the Bible, Archibald MacLeish, and many others. He tells us of his love for words, for language, for sharing the mysteries of life and longing and love through the words; of growing up in Montreal and of his family that read aloud after dinner when he was a boy, and discovering the stage and theatre. In his memoir, In Spite of Myself, Mr. Plummer is very candid about his faults, his excesses, and his ambitions, and he brings them with him to this tale as well. He's unfailingly honest, wistful, rueful, joyful, and all through his own words and those of writers he loves.

Even though it was in the Avon Theatre, a converted movie house that seats over a thousand people, it is an intimate performance, and even though I was in the fourth row center, I knew he was reaching and touching the people in the back row of the balcony. Not because he's that powerful an actor -- although he is, and a single raised eyebrow from him carries for miles -- but because what he was sharing was so deeply felt. And it should; this is a performance that he created and produced on his own and has toured with before. This is a labor of love.

Stratford 2012 -- Cymbeline

The program notes tell us that Cymbeline is thought to be the last play Shakespeare wrote. If it is, then it is a sort of grand finale of all of his works, combining elements of every style and genre that he used in the rest of the canon. There are hints of Hamlet, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Julius Caesar, and even a touch of A Midsummer Night's Dream; and probably a few I missed (oh, yes, A Winter's Tale seems to be in there, too).

The plot follows a typical Shakespearean route: a king banishes his daughter for botching an arranged marriage to a dolt; she chooses a nice but poor fellow, and then we get into jealousy, trickery, false accusations of adultery, cross-dressing as a boy as a disguise to hide out, stolen babies, old retainers who take pity on the banished, rustic rubes in the woods, crashing battle scenes, a deus ex machina appearance by a Roman god, the inevitable climactic scene where all is revealed and all are reconciled, and a few Agatha Christie revelations are thrown in for good measure.

Even the most dedicated Shakespeare scholar -- and I am by any measure not one -- would have trouble explaining the plot or filling in the holes, but this is the kind of play that Stratford does very well, and this production does not disappoint. As we were going in to the theatre, I warned my parents that the running time on this production was three hours -- and it was -- and we were seeing the play in the Tom Patterson Theatre, a converted curling rink with hard chairs. Wow, what a first night. But the play moved along quickly and the acting was up to their usual superb standards. Director Antoni Cimolino, who is to assume the duties of Artistic Director for the festival next year, chose wisely in his casting of the roles, including Cara Ricketts as Imogen, the daughter who is the focus of so many troubles. The title role was played by Geraint Wyn Davies, who has been with the company for nine seasons and has moved gracefully from playing the young hunk to the mature father figure. Graham Abbey has the unenviable task of playing Posthumus, the love interest for Imogen. I sometimes think Shakespeare wrote roles like that almost as an afterthought; he gets battered about, he's not got a lot of driving action in the plot, and in this case, he gets the daylights kicked out of him by both the Romans and the Britons. The course of true love never did run smooth, right? But he ends up with the woman he loves, and all's well that... well, you get the idea. (One thing Stratford used to fall short on was the casting of men with the builds to play the parts, and the PYSBO (Put Your Shirt Back On) quotient was high. I'm happy to report they're getting better at it, or they've added a gym to the green room.)

The supporting roles were also done well and in full dimension; Michael Sharo as the aptly-named Cloten plays the thick-necked dull-witted brute to perfection, and his comeuppance is shocking but not unsatisfying, and Tom McCamus plays an oily villain to perfection. The set design was minimal, as is necessary on the elongated thrust stage of the Patterson, but that didn't stop them from using lights, fog, and costumes to good effect.

If this was indeed the Bard's last work, it was a retrospective rather than a eulogy. There were no heavy speeches, few quotable or memorable lines, and rather than leave the stage strewn with corpses, he gives us a happy if not wistful exeunt omnes. Not a bad way to go.

How Firm A Foundation

This is the paper I presented at the 31st annual William Inge Theatre Festival's scholars conference at Independence Community College, Independence, Kansas, on April 21, 2012.

How Firm a Foundation

Faith and Practice in the Works of William Inge

One of the bedrocks of life in a small town in America is going to church. As an observer and chronicler of small town life, William Inge uses faith and practice as a subtext in his plays and novels. Although there is very little outward acknowledgement of expressed faith, it weaves its way into the characters and stories as a subtle presence. Through his writings, Inge expresses an almost wistful view of religion, as if he is an outsider with his nose pressed against the stained glass, wishing he could believe fully in the power of God as a guiding force in his life so that it might relieve him of his perceived failings, and a sense of envy in the apparent fulfillment found by those who do believe in making their life complete.

If you Google “churches in Independence, Kansas,” you will get about thirty-seven hits. That’s an impressive number for a town with a population of just over nine thousand souls; it works out to about one church for every 256 people. The churches run the gamut from mainline Catholic and Protestant to evangelical non-denominational, and there’s even a Quaker meeting. (If you’re looking for a synagogue, though, you have to go to Tulsa.) It’s not hard to imagine that there were probably just as many places of worship in Independence when William Inge was growing up, and according to the 1920 census, which was taken when he was seven years old, the population was over eleven thousand, so chances are there were probably a few more.

In many respects, that is not a remarkable fact. Small towns in America, whether they are in New England or New Mexico, have always had faith communities at their heart. Whether it is the iconic white steeple at the center of town in Vermont, the adobe mission in Taos, or the red brick Georgian on the corner here in Independence, we have made it the foundation of our culture to the point that membership is not required to be a part of the congregation. It provides a gathering place in times of joy or sorrow, celebration or commiseration, a shelter in the time of storms, and a refuge for the faithful when the outside world becomes overwhelming or a threat. And while the church itself may be open only on Sunday (or Wednesday night for bingo), it makes its presence felt in every corner of the town, even in places where religion or a profession of faith may not have be welcome.

It is impossible to imagine a more pervasive or defining force in our civilization. Everything we do, think, or learn, is instilled by the nebulous belief in a supreme being and the practice of worship, even if there is no formal schooling or professed acceptance of faith. It defines us as clearly as our race, our gender, our social standing or ethnicity. We are born into it and have it woven into the fabric of our lives and identity that it becomes practically inseparable. And yet… the sense of belonging and participating can be a distancing factor as well if, for some reason, either by instinct or learned behavior, we find that we are apart from this force, somehow at odds with the tenets and teachings, and subliminally ostracized from the rest of the flock. Somehow, something keeps us from fully accepting – and being fully accepted by – the practice of worship as a part of our lives. And it is not at all hard to imagine what it must have been like to grow up in a place like Independence in the 1920’s where worship was as natural as breathing and yet still feel estranged from it by some inner awareness that you did not find comfort or even felt hostility or bigotry emanating from this institution dedicated to unconditional love and peace… for those who believe.

That must have been what William Inge felt as he grew up here, surrounded on all sides by the faithful. Something deep inside him must have told him he was not unconditionally welcome, or he could not accept it if he was. In his autobiographical novel, My Son is a Splendid Driver, published in 1971, the Hansen family’s church affiliation is tangential – the denomination is not mentioned – and religion is given either lip service or used as a cudgel of bigotry against those who are Not Our Kind: for example, the Holt family across the street with their Catholicism, or the Jewish couple that owns the clothing store downtown. Oh, they’re nice enough people until they do something awful like marry one of your kids.

In the evangelical tradition that is pervasive in many of the faiths in the Midwest, a fundamental tenet is that the believer must develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Statements of faith begin with the declaration of the moment when the believer accepts Christ as their personal savior on a one-to-one basis in the same way someone might declare their relationship with a spouse. This foundation of faith takes on an intimate characteristic: you become one with Christ and therefore you define your relationship with God in those terms.

For William Inge, it seemed to be a strained relationship. If the narrative in My Son was his own life story, God was, to use one of his own phrases, “an ornery bastard.” God exacts a price for living a life of leisure and lust; he takes away precious children with the stroke of a razor blade, and he visits gloom upon an aging relative by prolonging her life to the point that she is begging to die. This is not the kind and loving God of the New Testament, but rather the vengeful and exacting God of the Old, who controls each life and promises destruction for those who are not suitably obedient. And yet this is also the God that delivers the peace and tranquility of the promise of everlasting life in the rainbow at the end of the Flood, and later on, in the name of his son Jesus Christ, whom God himself tested and punished while on Earth. It is the paradox of faith that you must be both afraid of the wrath of God yet also forgiven for all your sins in the name of his son. This contrast of hope and resurrection with fear and anguish was the undercurrent of faith in the eyes of a small-town boy who knew, deep in his heart and never spoken out loud, that he could never be acceptable in the eyes of the Lord as seen through the eyes of the faithful that surrounded him.

His mother sees God as a harsh and judgmental figure, cursing her personally with a faithless husband who infects her with a venereal disease, and punishes her for her lack of faith by burdening her and her family with hateful relatives and, worst of all, taking her beloved eldest son for no other reason other than what seems to be pure spite. If she had a distant relationship with God before, this cemented her estrangement from him, and she viewed others who went to church as hypocrites and show-offs. In a passage from My Son is a Splendid Driver, Mrs. Hansen lays out her feelings neatly in observing her neighbor:

“Every morning on the front porch we would see Mrs. Holt leave her house and start for the Catholic church, on her way to mass.

‘She doesn’t miss a day,’ Mother observed. There was a dedication about the woman that always gave us pause. ‘I wish I had a God to pray to now,’ Mother sometimes said, ‘but I don’t seem able to find Him.’

Mother had stopped going to church. ‘Church isn’t the place to go with your troubles. Church is just a place to go when you’re feeling good and have a new hat to wear.’ There was a little bitterness in what she said, a little self-pity, but there was also truth. Our minister would have been the last person in the world she could have talked to, to have lifted the curse she felt upon her and save her from feeling damned. She would have embarrassed the man into speechlessness had she gone to him with her story. He would have been unable to look at her or my father without coloring.

Most of our morality, I was beginning to think, was based on a refusal to recognize sin. Our entire religious heritage, it seemed to me, was one of refusal to deal with it.” (1)

When her son dies suddenly from blood poisoning, leaving a young wife pregnant with their son, Mrs. Hansen is inconsolable and finds no comfort in faith or in the inconsequential platitudes of “it is God’s will.” She cries out,

“‘Oh, my son! God give him back! He wasn’t meant to die!’
But God was stern, and unrelenting. He doesn’t end our griefs, Mother had to learn; He can only help us to endure them.”(2)

Of course Inge could not shake his fist at God in his plays and expect to see them performed. Instead, they are layered with the sense of presence of religion as the foundation of everyday life. Few of the characters are depicted as particularly imbued with religious fervor, and with the exception of Sammy in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, no one’s specific denomination is mentioned. Even then, because he is Jewish, he is seen as an outsider (and comes to an unhappy end.) But faith and practice is always present, and most of the characters in the plays and novels are, if not practicing members of a community, aware and respectful of it, if not terrified. In Picnic, Hal is welcomed into the community and told when the local bible study meets, taking it as a matter of faith that he is both a Christian and a Baptist.

In a more sobering aspect, so to speak, Doc in Come Back, Little Sheba is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, a group that is based in the belief in a Higher Power – God as we understand him – and that it is a part of the journey of recovery by relying in part on the spiritual power. It is not a religious practice; there is no service or ritual other than the meeting and sharing and spoken prayer, and it is open to all faiths or those who have none. But its members strive to turning over the problems and sorrows that led to the alcoholics’ behavior to God and thereby free themselves to work toward healing. “Let Go and Let God” is one of the more common aphorisms in the AA lexicon. And since Inge acknowledged his alcoholism by joining AA in 1948, it seems as if he found that if he could not find God in the pews of the churches of Independence, nor in the bottom of a Scotch bottle, at least the awareness of a spiritual presence gave him comfort and shelter that eluded him for his entire life. And when he saw the effect it had on the people he cared about, he marveled at it. He summed it up in a passage in My Son where Joey meets up with Betsy, an old friend from college while in a bookstore in Kansas City. They had become friends because they were both outcasts; Inge because of his shyness and repressed feelings, and Betsy because she was, in the words of the time, “a wanton woman,” who had flaunted the rigid mores and racial barriers of the time. When they meet years later, it is a heartfelt reunion, including her telling him of thrill of seeing A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. She tells Joey that she would have made a wonderful Blanche.

“After a moment, she said, ‘You know something, Joey? We never learn what life is all about until we fail.’

I asked her to explain.

‘Well, it’s as though I had wanted all the time to become an actress just to have my own way about something, and I really don’t know what the something was. But I was ambitious in the wrong way. It’s almost as though I wanted to be a brilliant success in the theater in order to have vengeance on someone… I don’t know who. Maybe the world. So I missed. I know I had talent, but I was using it in the wrong way. It was I who messed up my chances. I alone. I had to give up my conception of what my life was going to be, do you see? My will had to be overcome. I had to learn that there’s a stronger will that works behind the entire universe that sometimes stops us in our headstrong way and says No. And then you have to surrender to a real life, Joey. The life that’s really yours…. Understand what I mean? Or am I being too metaphysical, or something?’

‘I think I understand something of what you mean, Betsy. I think I do.’ After lunch, we parted. All the rest of the day, I thought of Betsy, feeling somehow I had witnessed one of Christ’s miracles.”(3)

If William Inge could not find comfort or acceptance in faith in God and his church, then at least he does see that faith is not something that is inherently religious. Faith is the belief in things unseen, intangible. You can’t put your hands on it; you can’t take it apart to see what makes it work. And yet, we all have faith in something. It doesn’t have to be in God. It can be faith in knowing that we have friends we can count on, a family who cares for us, or faith in our own abilities to make the right choices because we learned that we human beings rely on others and ourselves to be good and moral people with no need to prove it every time. It may be called “trust” or “love” or nothing more than just the basic human instinct that we all carry within us to take care of our fellow man and mankind. But to some degree we all have it, and even when we see horrible things happen – war, destruction, bigotry, and hatred – we are able to say that we have faith in knowing that that is not truly who we are.

But we speak of faith in the present tense. It is in the here and now: you have faith in God, or your friends or the other qualities, but when we look to the future, it isn’t so much faith that we rely on; it is hope. And hope is an even more powerful force than faith. You can rely on your faith, but you put your hope in the future. It is even more nebulous than faith, for in some cases, faith can be proven or disproven. A child may have had faith in Santa Claus, for instance, but at some point he will know that Santa is really a marketing gimmick exploited by F.A.O. Schwarz and your dad is the one who ate the cookies left by the fireplace. But that child never lost hope that he would get presents under the tree, whether they were brought by a jolly old elf and eight tiny reindeer or the guy in the UPS truck. Or we may have hope in the long term; that we will live a good and happy life and that no matter what comes along in the next year or four years or ten or so; no matter what demons and perils and tragedies and losses and battles we face, we have hope we will make it through, putting our faith in that hope. It is, as Emily Dickinson said, “the thing with feathers that perches in the Soul – and sings the tune without the Words – and never stops – at all.”

There is a kind of guarded optimism and hope is in Inge’s plays, even if it is but a faint glimmer. After all, God is still that ornery bastard. But we see Madge run off to Tulsa chasing a man we know will never amount to anything, hoping that she can change him and find happiness. In Bus Stop we see Bo and Cherie get on the bus and head for the West with little more than hope. In both cases, though, we see them leaving behind wistful and lonely friends and family. In Come Back, Little Sheba, Doc and Lola are barely able to speak to each other until Lola finally admits that Sheba is never going to come back, but life must go on. So many of Inge’s stories end with apparent sadness, yet each does seem to offer just a tad of hope because the people in them have their faith shaken but not lost, their hope dented but not destroyed, and a solemn acceptance that while the future may not be all roses and rainbows, at least there is something to live for.

After he parted from his meeting with Betsy, Joey muses,

“And yet, though she had asked me to come out to visit her and her husband, I know it was unlikely that I would. I could not help feeling apart from them, for they had already become a fixed part of what outsiders call with some derision, some envy, the normal world, the world of people who come home at night to ordinary meals, enjoy ordinary companionship, and suffer ordinary appetites and desires, a world I often curse, like Lucifer the heaven from which he had been expelled, knowing I am not Lucifer and that it is a false heaven I long at times to return to, wishing to God I could still find comfort in its solidarity and mirage of warmth, feeling at times I would be willing to hate Negroes, or condemn Jews, and pretend to worship God while I worshipped Mammon, if I could feel once again the assurance of belonging to the great mass of people who live their lives without conscience or reflection, and subscribe to mass opinion as my father subscribed to Time magazine, never challenging its precepts.

But once the mold is cast, the form cannot be changed. The shape of me could no longer fit into other people’s houses. I cannot claim that Betsy and her husband are hypocrites because they are happy. But sometimes, in spells of bitterness and isolation, happiness in itself has seemed an hypocrisy. And if I hated their happiness, it was because I felt a stranger to it, and a stranger to their welcome. It was a happiness that made me feel more alone.” (4)

Within two years of publishing those words, William Inge let the feelings of being the stranger win out. He tried to find solace in reaching out to the Catholic church, but it was not enough, and on a quiet evening in June of 1973, he went into the garage in his home in Hollywood and sat behind the wheel of his car for the last time. While he may have given his plays and his characters some sense of hope, he could never reconcile his own distance from his faith-filled hometown and friends. In the words of a character in a play by another author, hope was his greatest weakness.

Notes

1. William Inge, My Son is a Splendid Driver (Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1971) p. 152-153.
2. Inge, p. 110.
3. Inge, p. 214.
4. Inge, p. 214-215.

Bibliography

Inge, William. Four Plays. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. 1958.
--------------. My Son is a Splendid Driver. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1971.
Voss, Ralph F. A Life of William Inge. University of Kansas Press. 1989.

Stratford 2011 - Politically Incorrect

As a part of my annual pilgrimage to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, I put on my theatre scholar's cap to review the plays we're seeing.

Honesty may be the best policy, but it doesn't always work in politics and in affairs of the heart. At least that seems to be the point in Molière's brilliant and stylishly-produced comedy The Misanthrope at Stratford.

The story centers around Alceste, a man who has vowed to speak frankly about his opinions, foregoing the niceties of 18th century Paris society where politeness and social amenities are the Rule. It gets him into trouble with his friends as well as the woman he loves, and even when his honesty is put to the test both in court and in winning his love, he has to pay a price.

The timelessness of the play doesn't hurt, either. Today we seem to be awash in people offering their unvarnished opinions of everything, from (ahem) bloggers to the cult of personalities that develop around the folks on cable TV who claim to speak their mind and damn the consequences. Everyone from Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh to Keith Olbermann to presidential candidates hold forth and frequently get in trouble for their candor. And, as Molière proves in this play, it often becomes less about the moment of truth than it does about the person speaking it. Rather than "listen to what I'm saying," it becomes "listen to ME!" And when honesty becomes secondary to personality, both lose.

The production at Stratford is beautiful in all respects. The Festival stage is a gilded wedding cake of a Paris home at the hands of designer John Lee Beatty, and the costumes, by Robin Fraser Paye, are equally stunning. The translation is by Richard Wilbur, done in rhyming couplets, and it captures both the voice and the taste of the era in its wit and charm, and it is deftly directed by David Grindley.

The performances are all stand-out, including Ben Carlson as Alceste and Sarah Topham as Célimène, his love interest and exact opposite when it comes to social decorum. The pace is quick, the staging choreographed beautifully, and the points of the story are rapier-like, not cudgeled. Stratford may be renown for its productions of Shakespeare, but they know how to do comedy of manners as well.

Stratford 2011 - Falstaff 2.0

As a part of my annual pilgrimage to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, I put on my theatre scholar's cap to review the plays we're seeing.

Each year that we come to Stratford, we make an effort to see something we've never seen before. That's the case with Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor; it was a new one for me.

Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth commanded that Shakespeare write a play about Sir John Falstaff in love. According to scholarship, that's not exactly true, but it's a nice little legend, and it explains how a character from Henry IV can show up in England some 200 years after his death in Henry V. In this play, Falstaff has been rebooted from the hard-drinking rowdy confidante of Prince Hal to become a broke and dissipated sot without much of a touch of Harry in the night. The only connection between the two Falstaffs is the name. In this case, Falstaff is not so much in love as he is in lust and looking for money, and since both desires can lead a man to foolishness, the women he has set his sights on use him as their foil.

This play also serves as an outlier in Shakespeare's canon. It is the only play of his that takes place in Elizabethan England, in sync with Shakespeare's own life. The characters aren't named Antonio or Romeo, there's no magic spells or ancient curses to be fought or heeded, and the plot isn't based on a recycled story or rewrought history of English kings and dynasties (although it does contain elements of stories by translated by William Painter). It is, in many ways, a precursor to the comedies that would come along a hundred years later, after the time of Cromwell when public theatre was banned, and the stage was being restored and influenced by the Renaissance making its way to England from the continent. If you didn't know it was Shakespeare, you would think you were seeing something by such writers as William Wycherly or John Dryden.

The plot is not all that different than a lot of Shakespeare's previous comedies; there's mistaken identity, disguises, attempts at adultery, and strong women who pretend to be at the mercy of the menfolk but are really the ones in charge. Of course there are young lovers who are determined to marry against their parents' wishes, and of course it all ends happily, even if there are some loose ends left untied. (I guess even Shakespeare struggled with finding a good ending.)

The production on the Festival stage under the able direction of Frank Galanti is thoroughly enjoyable. Laura Condlin as Mistress Page and Lucy Peacock as Mistress Ford, are the nominal merry wives, and they have a great deal of fun. The plotting husbands are played to the hilt by Tom McCamus as Master Page and Tom Rooney as Master Ford. Geraint Wyn Davies hams it up well as Sir John Falstaff, who is treated more like the butt of jokes rather than the driver of the plot; he's painted almost like Malvolio in Twelfth Night and even has a couple of goofy companions to round out the company. The thankless roles of the young lovers, Fenton and Miss Ann Page, are played with winsome charm by Trent Pardy and Andrea Runge, but as in most of Shakespeare's comedies, they don't get to have as much fun as the rest of the intriguers.

This is not your Henry's Falstaff, but he's still a basketful of laughs.

Stratford 2011 - Harold Pinter's Comic Stylings

As a part of my annual pilgrimage to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, I put on my theatre scholar's cap to review the plays we're seeing.

I remember sitting through numerous graduate school seminars in theatre where we plumbed the depths of every line in a Harold Pinter play, trying to come up with the inner meanings of his long pauses and seemingly disconnected simple phrases. The plots were deceptively simple, we thought, because there had to be something more. How else could Pinter achieve the total heaviosity that we were told was there?

Even after working on two different productions of The Birthday Party, one under the direction of Emily Mann at the University of Minnesota, I was sure that there was some greater depth to Pinter's work than what we saw on the surface; maybe I had not achieved the elusive level of understanding, and all I saw was just the inane conversation between people I didn't care about. But all the wise and insightful articles and critiques of his work hinted that there was much, much more. And so I sought it out.

Well, I finally figured it out yesterday at the hands of a truly great production of The Homecoming here at Stratford: Harold Pinter was a comic genius. Not in the fashion of the Marx Brothers or Mel Brooks, but in crafting characters and situations that really are truly comic. Instead of being menacing, Brian Dennehy gives Max, the patriarch of his dysfunctional collection of sons and brothers, a blustery tone in an almost Homer Simpson way that lets you appreciate his ineffectualness. His in-home sons Lenny and Joey are echoes of their father; Lenny, the seething and conniving pimp, and Joey, the muscular, inarticulate, slightly goofy boxer who lives for the moment. All of them are perfect for playing off each other.

As in all Pinter plays, there is a menacing intruder who disrupts the flow. In this case it's the arrival of Max's son Teddy, a professor of philosophy who lives in the U.S, and his wife Ruth, who immediately sizes up the family dynamic and plays each of the men like a fine Stradivarius. It's all done in a claustrophobic set of a dingy home in London that cries out for more room, even after long-ago attempts to make the space bigger.

This production doesn't play for the broad laughs; director Jennifer Tarver and her cast knew just the right touches to bring about the laughter -- both broad and nervous -- in this production. The casting is perfect, and Mr. Dennehy, who has a presence on stage that is both vulnerable and menacing in everything I've seen him in, is the quintessential English working class dad. Stephen Ouimette is always a delight to watch for his understated archness, and Cara Ricketts as Ruth is just plain fascinating. Kudos also to Ian Lake as Joey and Mike Shara as the seemingly dense Teddy, the professor who appears to not know what is happening right under his nose, but really does get it.

I suppose it's rather Pinteresque that I learned more about Pinter's work in two hours yesterday than I did in all those seminars way back in grad school. Who knew?

Inge Festival 2011, Day 3 - Cool Times

After the thunderstorms swept through Independence on Thursday night, the weather turned cold, windy, and rainy. It did not, however, put a damper on the festival.

Friday morning for me began with a discussion of Inge's relationship with the press and drama critics, always a dicey area for playwrights, and for Inge in particular. For some reason he was viewed by several critics as lucky; he seemingly came out of nowhere in 1952 to conquer Broadway with four hit plays in a row and elbow his way into the stratosphere of American theatre next to Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Of course, he was not an overnight sensation; his ascendancy had been a long and winding trip, including stints teaching and other occupations and even spending a couple of years as the critic at large for a St. Louis newspaper. His first play, Come Back, Little Sheba, had taken years to get into shape and had endured a lot of rejection before getting to the stage. The same thing happened with Picnic, and when it finally made it to Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, it had been through a lot, including a stormy relationship with the director, Joshua Logan, and the version of the play that we've come to know was despised by the author, who felt that he was bullied into making the play have a "happy ending."

It would be inevitable that Inge -- like his fellow playwrights of the era -- would hit the wall and produce unsuccessful plays. For some, they accepted this with a begrudging awareness that they have done their best work. But for Inge, the combination of flops and his internal demons of addiction and repression became too much and he committed suicide in 1973. The common practice -- especially with Inge -- is to blame the critics for sneering at his works as dated and sentimental. But it was more than just rejection by the press; it was Inge's own inability to believe in himself and shrug off the critics. It's not easy to do, but he seemed to let it -- along with his own demons -- lead him to the end. And it was a terrible loss.

Friday afternoon I presented my paper for the scholar's conference; "Plain Speaking - The Voices of William Inge". I examined Inge's use of everyday dialogue and the sometimes clumsy way his characters speak as the reflection of the true heart and soul of the characters, and how Inge often used the silences between the characters as powerful moments in his plays. It forces the actors to examine their roles with more precision and care, and to listen carefully to what the other characters are saying.

Last night was the gala dinner with performances by Elizabeth Wilson, Sheldon Harnick, Daisy Egan (the youngest person ever to win a Tony for her performance in The Secret Garden), and reminiscences of the last 30 years of Inge Festivals. I'm glad I've been here for twenty of them.

Inge Festival 2011, Day 2 - Another Opn'n', Another Show

The 2011 William Inge Theatre Festival kicked off Wednesday night with a wonderful concert performance of A Doctor In Spite of Himself, a musical version of the play by Moliere. The entire production -- music, books, and lyrics -- were written by Sheldon Harnick, who, with the late Jerry Bock, gave us such theatre legends as Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello!, and The Rothschilds. With a cast made up of local talent and guest artists John Schuck and Alan Safier, it was a delightful evening of great music and Moliere's humor and satire.

Today we had workshops and classes, including session on acting and auditioning for local high school students taught by working actors from New York and Los Angeles, including Barbara Dana, and a look at the critics process as envisioned by Dan Sullivan, the former drama critic of the Los Angeles Times.

Tonight we had a staged reading Horsedreams by Dael Orlandersmith, winner of the New Voices award presented annually by the Inge Festival. It was a collection of monologues; an interesting approach to theatre and not exactly what I envision a play to be. However, there were some interesting characters, and I think the play -- if I can call it that -- has some potential if it can overcome the limitation of having the characters address the audience and rarely interact with each other.

And on a purely shameless self-promotion note, copies of Can't Live Without You are selling.

Inge Festival 2011, Day 1 - Welcome to Independence

Greetings from Independence, Kansas, home of the 30th annual William Inge Festival. This is my 20th trip here, starting in 1991, when Edward Albee was the guest of honor, and I've only missed one -- 2002 when I was directing a production of Grease (and would have been far happier to be here than doing that).

The flight from Albuquerque to Dallas and then on to Tulsa were uneventful (except for a child two rows behind me who was working her banshee audition), and the weather here is beautiful; clear and warm, and so likely to be for the rest of the week.

My first stop was at the William Inge Theatre on the campus of Independence Community College, which is the the host of the festival. There I dropped off the supply of Can't Live Without You scripts (on sale for the incredibly low price of $10) and greeting old friends. Tonight will be a performance of a new musical by Sheldon Harnick (Inge honoree in 2007), A Doctor In Spite of Himself.

Tomorrow begins the workshops and sessions with actors and guests. My big moment is Friday when I am at the Scholar's Conference.

Lanford Wilson -- 1937-2011

There have been a lot of influential people in my life. My parents, of course, and my siblings, my former partner, caring teachers, good friends, and, not surprisingly, writers. I can think of several who shaped my views and helped me form my own voice as a writer. One of the most influential was -- and will always be -- Lanford Wilson. He died Thursday at the age of 73.

The first play of his that I read was Fifth of July. I was in grad school at the University of Colorado in 1983 and had not yet decided what I would write my thesis on. I was kicking around some ideas about the realistic theatre movement and not really excited about it. Then one day I happened to pick up a copy of the play that was lying on one of my office-mates' desk. I sat down and read the entire play in one sitting, completely absorbed in the world he had created of the Talley family -- Ken, the gay Vietnam vet who had lost both legs in the war; and his lover Jed; June, Ken's sister and her daughter Shirley; Aunt Sally, who carried around the ashes of her beloved husband Matt in a candy box, and all of them in this rambling old farmhouse in rural Missouri. The voices were so real I could hear them, and when I saw the play filmed with love by his longtime collaborator and director Marshall W. Mason, I knew I had found not just a kindred spirit as a writer, but someone who knew the same people I did and felt as deeply about them.

I immediately sought out as many of his plays as I could find; Talley's Folly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play that tells of the romance between Matt and Sally in 1944; The Hot L Baltimore, an ensemble play about a run-down hotel and the characters who inhabit the lobby; Balm in Gilead; Serenading Louie; The Gingham Dog; The Rimers of Eldritch; The Mound Builders; Lemon Sky; Angels Fall; early one-acts from his days and nights at the Caffe Cino, scene studies and exercises for the Circle Repertory Company that he founded with Marshall W. Mason, Tanya Berezin, and Rob Thirkield in 1969. They ranged from wildly funny to scary dark and everything in between, all with his distinctive lyrical touch of wit, charm, and acidic bite when necessary. I never read a play of his that didn't instill a sense of wonder and enjoyment, even when he wrote characters that made me cringe. His world is not populated with grand heroes or dastardly villains; they're ordinary people learning to cope, love, care, and in many respects they are outsiders who know all too well that the world is not giving them some great reward. His plays deal with the dramas and traumas of life, but not on a grand scale; loss and sorrow as well as joy and love are expressed with a touch or a word, not with long heartfelt speeches, and that makes them all that much more powerful.

I knew almost immediately that I had found what I was looking for, and when I proposed to my doctoral committee a study of the collaboration of Lanford Wilson and Marshall W. Mason at the Circle Rep, it was accepted. I also knew I had to get in touch with him, so I wrote to his agent, Bridget Aschenberg, requesting to meet him and interview him. Ms. Aschenberg, who had a reputation for being terse, wrote back and said she would consider it but not to get my hopes up. I was disappointed, but then my adviser suggested that I simply go around the agent and contact Mr. Wilson directly through the theatre. I did, and within a week I had a hand-written response expressing delight that someone wanted to write about him and told me to let him know when I would be in New York and we could meet. In March 1985 I took the plunge and went to New York to begin my research and interview both Mr. Wilson and Mr. Mason. I remember distinctly walking up the flight of stairs to the offices of the Circle Rep, located in a slightly run-down Art Deco style building in Greenwich Village that also housed the rehearsal space. My appointment with Mr. Wilson was on the book, but -- oh no -- he was stuck out at his house on Long Island, laid up with sciatica. Sag Harbor was hours away and I was on a shoe-string budget. But then the phone rang. It was him. He apologized profusely for missing our appointment, and he said, "Please call me Lance; why don't we just chat for a while?" So we did, and we found out that we had a lot of things in common. We must have talked for an hour, and I stopped taking notes after the first five minutes because it was like talking to a friend.

Later that day I went to a local pub with Marshall W. Mason, who graciously answered all my questions into my little mini-recorder, and then invited me to watch a play reading of a new work the next afternoon. I got to watch him work as a director and learned more in one afternoon than all of the classes I'd taken on directing in my college career. I also took notes because back in Boulder I was in the middle of directing a production of Fifth of July. The notes were the first thing I unpacked when I got home.

Later that summer I drove all the way across country -- making a stop in Stratford, Ontario -- to see a performance of the final play in the Talley series, Talley & Son in Saratoga Springs, New York. It was the third of three and rounded out my studies of the Wilson/Mason collaboration. After the performance I sat up until two a.m. with them talking about their work, listening to their stories, meeting their company (including Helen Stenborg), and knowing that my doctoral thesis had now become a labor of love.

In 2001, with much prodding from me and several other fans of his work, the William Inge Theatre Festival honored Lanford Wilson with their Distinguished Achievement in American Theatre award. In one respect, Lance didn't want the award; he told me that he had a lot more to do and it was too early to be recognized for his work. Marshall Mason once said, "Lanford still hasn't written a play as good as [A] Streetcar [Named Desire]. He may not. Whatever. He will have written plays that no one else could have written... He'll find his own niche in history. We'll see."

"Matt didn’t believe in death and I don’t either.... There’s no such thing. It goes on and then it stops. You can’t worry about the stopping, you have to worry about the going on." – Sally Talley, Fifth of July.

Photo by Maxine Hicks.

Stratford 2010 - The Shaw Festival

We added a side trip this year to Niagara-On-The-Lake, Ontario, and our first visit to the Shaw Festival. It's been going on for almost fifty years, and we've always talked about it, so we finally made our way from Stratford to NOTL -- about a three-hour drive -- and went to see Shaw's 1904 play John Bull's Other Island.

The town itself is very charming, with its Victorian-style homes and shops, more of a New England flavor than the Midwestern ambiance of Stratford's cornfields. It is also very popular; that is to say, the sidewalks were packed with tourists from all over, including, I'm sure, those making sidetrips from seeing Niagara Falls or weekenders from Toronto. We stayed at the Prince of Wales Hotel, smack dab in the middle of all of the tourism. It's a charming place, rambling over several buildings on the main street, and the rooms are lovely in that genially overstuffed Victorian way.

We had dinner at a very highly recommended Italian restaurant -- Ristorante Giardino -- and then went to the play at the Court Theatre, one of several venues for the festival, and the original space for the festival. The name is true to the place; the theatre is on the second floor of the city's old courthouse. It's a black-box space, three-quarters thrust, with room for about three hundred in the audience.

The play itself was new to me. I've seen or read most of Shaw's best-known works, but this comedy, written in 1904 at the urging of William Butler Yeats, was one I'd never read or seen. Frankly, I don't know why; it's funny, touching, and as is the case with most of Shaw's plays, loaded with political commentary and insight. His views of the relationship between England and Ireland are sharp and pointed; his characters -- both the English and the Irish -- are fully drawn, and in doing so, he manages to explode stereotypes and exploit them as well.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Two civil engineers from England come to Ireland to see about transforming a small village into a tourist resort, replete with a golf course and a hotel (a nod to NOTL?). Tom Broadbent (Benedict Campbell) is a typical English businessman of the time; exceedingly polite and an easy mark for the doubting and deliberate Irish hosts. He is accompanied by Larry Doyle (Graeme Somerville), his business partner, and an Irishman from the town they're going to develop. Naturally Mr. Doyle is torn between his roots, his ambitions, and his feelings -- pride mixed with shame -- about his family and his homeland. Along the way, in typical Shaw fashion, we get comic scenes and political lectures about the struggle for Ireland's identity, and Shaw, being an Irishman who himself moved to London, much like Larry Doyle, makes the outcome a true question. And it is amazing how prescient he would be about the resolution and the revolution in Ireland years before came to be. More than a hundred years later, it's still a question.

Stratford 2010 - Evita

Day 3

Evita has been called a rock opera or, in the terms used here at Stratford, an "electric musical." But if we're going to go by the strict definition of what an opera is, then there's no need for an adjective. It's an opera in that it is all sung with only a few lines of spoken dialogue, and it certainly requires the talents of trained voices. That it uses contemporary musical forms -- or at least contemporary to the time it was written in 1976 -- doesn't disqualify it as an opera any more than the use of jazz does Porgy and Bess or Spanish folk music does in Carmen. (By the way, one of the other similarities Evita has with Carmen is that both of the composers were foreigners writing about other lands and cultures; Bizet was a Frenchman writing about Spanish workers, and Andrew Lloyd Weber is an Englishman writing about an Argentinian power couple.) So it's an opera. And I usually hate operas.

I have sat through several of them and despised them for their convoluted plots, the imponderable language, and the exaggerated characters and vocalizations. But Evita puts it in a different perspective. The plot line is straightforward, there are five major roles, no subplots, the music is both well done and appropriate for both the time and the action. Chilina Kennedy was brilliant as Evita, as was Juan Chioran as Juan Peron. Josh Young, who sang Che, the narrator/commentator, was excellent as well, bringing just the right touch of cynicism to a character that stands in for the people of Argentina and the outside world watching the pageantry of forced enthusiasm for a dictator.

The theme of Evita is, as director Gary Griffin put it in his director's note, "...our need for icons. Why do we worship people like Eva Perón – or, more recently, Princess Diana and Michael Jackson? What is it about us (for we create our icons as much as they fashion themselves) that causes us to invest so deeply in people we know only as public figures?" It's probably a search for something in common with them; after all, the biggest sellers in the magazine racks are the People magazines or the National Enquirers when they show us pictures of celebrities without the make-up and the glitz; when we see Brad Pitt shopping at the grocery store. Evita and the story behind it is that on a scale that touched millions of lives in real ways in a real place in our living memory. And it provides a cautionary tale for our own political celebrities: how soon will someone come up with a version of "Don't Cry For Me, Wasilla"?

Stratford 2010 - Dangerous Liaisons and The Tempest

Day 2

Every once in a while, just to prove they're like any other theatre company, Stratford will produce a clunker. I've seen lousy productions here, such as the 1973 Othello with an actor playing the title role whose accent was so thick that he was virtually unintelligible, and in the early 1980's they did Miss Julie by August Stridberg that set my teeth on edge. This year it is Dangerous Liaisons by Christopher Hampton.

It is the stage version of the novel Les liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos that has been filmed several times, including a version in 1988 with John Malkovich and Glenn Close, and a hip 90's version called Cruel Intentions with Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Whatever. What I saw today was a thoroughly unlikable production of a thoroughly unlikable play about thoroughly unlikable people. Even the glorious Martha Henry and the occasional flashes of humor from Tom McCamus as Valmont couldn't save this cold and jarring production. The settings on the Festival stage were a mixture of Rococo furniture and what appeared to be clear Lucite chairs in the Rococo style but see-through. I'm not sure whether this was done for effect or to give the audience a clearer view of the action. (They've been able to use non-transparent furniture on the thrust stage for as long as I've been going there without any ill effect.) The music was also a combination of period-style pieces interjected with what could only be called Queen on crack with harpsichords.

The plot revolves around a couple of bored rich French aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution making bets that involve sexual conquest and deception. It includes rape, sexual assault, subjugation, denigration, and driving people to madness for sport. At the end when they are held accountable, the regret is less about realizing they did wrong then it does about preserving their good name, and while the epilogue hints at the doom that lies in wait for all the aristocracy of France in 1785, it's overly dramatic and therefore silly.

I'm sure there is some reason the good people of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival chose this work, and I'm sure they thought they could do a production that makes the point about how cruel the rich can be. This wasn't it.

*
On the other hand, tonight's production of The Tempest was what made me fall in love with theatre in general and what keeps me coming back to Stratford year after year. Starring Christopher Plummer as Prospero, it had all the ingredients that make the Stratford festival what it has always been for me: a stunning production with all the joy and staging that make you forget you're sitting in a theatre, acting that is so natural that it makes the poetry come alive. Even the rather cookie-cutter roles of Ferdinand and Miranda, the young lovers, were played to full effect by Gareth Potter and Trish Lindström. Ariel, the sprite, was magically done by Julyana Soelistyo to the degree that she was, in many ways, the soul of the play and on equal footing with the power and presence of Mr. Plummer. Caliban, the half-human slave of Prospero, becomes a sympathetic figure in the portrayal by Dion Johnstone, and the comic relief parts of Stephano (Geraint Wyn Davies) and Trinculo (Bruce Dow) were wonderfully done. The bad guys -- Prospero's brother and usurper and his fellow conspirators -- were done with the touch of evil that is required of such roles, but unlike previous productions where they are treated as pawns of Prospero, there was some depth and even some softness in their plight of being stranded by the storm that Prospero called forth to bring them to him for his vengeance.

Christopher Plummer had some mighty large shoes to fill. The last man to play the role of Prospero on the Festival Stage was William Hutt in his farewell performance in 2005. I saw that performance and thought it was masterful, but Mr. Plummer more than adequately honored both the role and the memory of Mr. Hutt. Bringing his own touch to the role and playing Prospero as a father to Miranda that had touches of a dad in it (the scene where he blesses the engagement of Ferdinand and Miranda has Dad-meets-Boyfriend all over it) proves -- again -- that Mr. Plummer is an actor that not just plays the role but takes the character to his heart in a way that few actors truly do. Rather than dominate the stage, he knows his part and his place as one of the ensemble.

Thanks to this production, The Tempest is becoming one of my favorite Shakespeare plays.

Stratford 2010 - Jacques Brel...

The name of the show -- Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris -- is sadly incorrect. The Flemish songwriter died in 1978. But that doesn't mean his works are gone, and the song cycle that was put together by Mort Shulman and Eric Blau when the title was true is still alive and doing very well at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

The original format -- two men, two women, and a small orchestra -- hasn't been changed since the first time it was staged in 1968 and it is still effective. The direction of Stafford Arima and the powerful voices of Jewelle Blackman, Brent Carver, Michael Nadajewski, and Robin Hutton (subbing for Nathalie Nadon) handled the music and the lyrics very well. The musical direction by Laura Burton, using new orchestrations by Rick Fox, were impeccable. The stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre, which is a converted curling rink, served the staging well; Brel is a production best served in an intimate venue, and since Stratford is a long way from Greenwich Village, this was as good a place as any to do it.

There is no through-line or plot to the song cycle; each one stands on its own. But the overall theme of Brel's songs -- cynical, poignant, and often dripping with acidic commentary on life and love -- combine to give you a somewhat sardonic look at life through his eyes. But just when you think he's dug the scalpel in, he pulls you in another direction; giddy, distraught, mocking, and sometimes cruel. But just when you think you've seen his life through the haze of cigarette smoke in a boozy nightclub on the Left Bank, the final song, "If We Only Have Love," is an anthem to uplifting hope and promise. Gotcha.

Pictures From The Inge

I finally got around to downloading the rest of my pictures from the William Inge Festival... a week after. Here are just a few memories of good friends and good times.

Artistic Director Peter Ellenstein welcomes us to the Festival.

Tom Jones, lyricist of The Fantasticks and last year's honoree, teaches on the joy of writing great plays.

The Scholars Conference - Jef Petersen, Sue Abbottson, David Savran, Jackson Bryer, and host Lesley Simpson.

Marcel LaFlamme, curator of the Inge Collection at ICC, chats with Paula Vogel.

Barbara Dana entertains at the Gala Dinner.

See you in 2011.

From The Lobby of The Apple Tree Inn

The 29th Inge Festival wrapped up last night, and I'll have some pictures and notes from the events on Saturday a little later. At this moment, I'm waiting for my ride to the Tulsa airport to catch my flight to Dallas and then on to Miami.

This lobby could tell stories from the Inge Festival of years past. I'm sitting in the exact place where I met Edward Albee in 1991 after he came back from his morning walk. He sat next to me and we introduced ourselves. I also remember sitting here and seeing Jim Lehrer, Frank Rich, Stephen Sondheim, Neil Simon and Arthur Miller check in at the desk; not all at the same time, but spread out over the years.

This is also the place where we spent many a late night/early morning after the events at the college with snacks and drinks -- lots of the latter. I have memories of August Wilson, Gordon Parks, and Pat Hingle swapping stories while sitting on this couch, and singing camp songs with Shirley Knight and her daughter Kaitlin Hopkins. Director Daniel Mann told many stories about the New York theatre history going back to the early part of the 20th century, and he could tell the best jokes: my favorite was the old man going into the rest home.

A lot of the people who were a part of this festival when I started coming 20 years ago are gone now: the playwrights we've honored such as Jerry Lawrence, John Patrick, Wendy Wasserstein, August Wilson, and Arthur Miller; and dear souls such as Jo Anne Kirchmaier, niece of William Inge, dear friend, and keeper of the Inge family flame; and Robert Anderson, playwright and friend. I still see them here on the couch or coming around the corner, dressed for the tribute, or first thing in the morning, padding out in slippers for an eye-opening cup of coffee. The friends I've made here are my inspiration as a writer and scholar, and knowing that this group of dedicated and devoted friends will become even wider is the reason I keep coming back.

It's not goodbye; it's just intermission.

Inge 2010 - Day 3

This was a rich full day, beginning with an interview on stage with Paula Vogel, this year's honoree, followed by the scholar's conference where I delivered my paper to polite applause, and then the gala dinner at the Civic Auditorium. I'll update with pictures as soon as I download them.

So far it's been a lot of fun, and the best part is that the weather has cooperated fully. Over the last twenty years we've endured wind, rain, tornadoes, sleet, even a snow flurry or two. One year it rained so hard that my shoes got soaked through just from running from the college parking lot to the theatre. I had to go out to Wal-Mart and buy a new pair. (I still have them.)

One of the best parts of the festival is that we get the chance to mingle with people who know what it's like to work on a play or a piece of writing for weeks, months, or years and then try to get it produced... or even read. There's a lot of solidarity and commiseration, but there's also good advice and networking going on, too. I have already been asked for copies of Can't Live Without You from people who are interested in considering it for readings by their theatre group or even consideration for a full production. It's both gratifying and inspiring, because the next inevitable question is, "What else have you got?" So I am working on giving them more.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is the Picnic picnic, a master class with Paula Vogel, and the tribute to her.

Pictures from Friday:

Paula Vogel is interviewed by David Savran.

Mary Hanes shares ideas on playwriting.

I had some pictures of the gala dinner, but the quality isn't all that hot, so I'll see if I can nick some from the official photographer and post them. Suffice it to say that we all had a great time, and the program of songs put together by Tom Jones, last year's honoree, which included a tune from his work-in-progress, a musical version of the film Harold and Maude, was a delight.

Inge 2010 - Day 2

I spent the morning listening to two good friends -- Elizabeth Wilson and Barbara Dana -- read a portion of a work-in-progress by Barbara. It's a play about two aging actors working to come up with a play that they can do for a benefit and touches on the friendships -- past and present -- that they share.

Elizabeth Wilson and Barbara Dana
After lunch I sat in on a lively panel discussion with agent Peter Franklin, Gigi Bolt, and Mary Hanes on the current state of theatre and promotion of new playwrights in America. The consensus was that there are innovative ways to get new playwrights out to the theatres that are looking for new works, and there should be a means of providing support for theatre programs that nurture new writers. After all, where would theatre be without playwrights?

Peter Franklin, Gigi Bolt, Mary Hanes
Later there was a session with Dan Sullivan, the former theatre critic of the Los Angeles Times, and his view of the state of dramatic criticism and how the critics treated William Inge.

Tonight is the concert reading of The Mountaintop by Katori Hall. I'll have some thoughts on it later.

Update: My thoughts on The Mountaintop.

The premise of the play is that it is the night of April 3, 1968 in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. retires to his room after giving a speech to a Memphis church congregation during the sanitation workers strike. When a mysterious young hotel maid comes to visit him during the night, King is forced to confront his mortality and the future of his people.

When you have a story that depicts an event in history where you know the outcome, it takes a bit of ingenuity to make it interesting to the audience, and when you're writing about a man whose history and life has been so well documented, it takes some imagination to put an additional dimension on the character. In this case, Ms. Hall has accomplished both with a degree of success. No small credit goes to Anika Noni Rose who played Camae, the hotel maid, who gave the role a depth that went beyond the stereotype of the hip black woman of the 1960's. (There is a twist to her character that made it more interesting; think Touched By An Angel.) Gilbert Glenn Brown played Dr. King, and he had the added burden of taking him to a level that goes beyond the historical footage that we remember of him from forty years ago. The problem with playing him is that for the most part the only record we have of Dr. King is his famous speeches, including the one he gave in Memphis the night before he was shot, and the one containing the line that gives the play its title.

The performance was done in a concert version, which means the actors were reading from scripts on music stands, so there was no blocking or interaction. It didn't seem to hinder their performances, though, and at the end of the play, the audience gave them a standing ovation.

The other problem with plays that deal with an historical event is that we have our own memories to compare it to. The death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. struck a number of white people as not only a tragedy for the country, but there was inherently a sense of white liberal guilt; as if there was something we could have done to prevent it or done more to advance civil rights so that Dr. King would not have had to take his campaign to the streets and to the South. Perhaps there was an echo in that tonight in the applause at the William Inge Theatre, but I also think that the reaction and the accolades that the playwright and the actors received was in genuine appreciation of their work. But I also think that political theatre requires a measure of both timelessness and inclusiveness: the message cannot be merely to reflect the moment, because the shelf-life of those plays can be measured with an egg timer. And in order to go beyond preaching to the choir, it has to do more than emphasize a point of view that can only be appreciated by one segment of the society. Playwrights do not get to choose their audiences, and it takes a deft hand to make a play on such a topic reach across the aisle... including the ones in a theatre.

Inge 2010 - Day 1

Christmas in April

Last night we were treated to a staged reading of Paula Vogel's A Civil War Christmas. It's a combination of music and a very moving series of vignettes that depict, among other stories, a slave and her daughter slipping over the Potomac to escape to freedom, young soldiers dealing with being away from home during Christmas, assassins plotting against President Lincoln, and the Lincolns trying to find the perfect Christmas present for each other. They are all tied together at the end with happy endings and a harmonious blend of Christmas carols and battle hymns of the time.

Even though it was staged with actors reading from scripts, the performances were excellent, and the music, supplied by members of the Independence Community Chorus, was enchanting.

It was a great start to the Inge Festival, and a promise of good things to come.

Thursday's schedule includes workshops and the concert reading of The Mountaintop by Katori Hall, the Otis Guernsey New Voices winner.

Awakening...

For those of you who stop by here, the news is that I will be posting here from the 2010 William Inge Theatre Festival taking place in Independence, Kansas, April 21-24.

This is a little break from the past in that normally I would be posting at Bark Bark Woof Woof, but since this blog is dedicated to my literary output, I thought I would use it for that purpose. After all, Bobby Cramer is a fictional character; what better place to write about theatre, creative writing, dramatic literature, and other artistic stuff than here?

So check in this week and see what's going on in Independence. I'll even have pictures, and if you're lucky, I'll post the paper I'm writing for the scholar's conference.

See you in Independence.

What's Going On Here?

Seven months is a long time to go between anything.

Let me bring you up to date. Small Town Boys is on hiatus, in case you haven't guessed. It's not writer's block as much as it is other work -- including real life and my job -- have stepped in to put the story on hold. I do plan to get back to it, but for the time being, things are in stasis with Donny, Eric, Mike, Greg, and the rest of the STB gang. Meanwhile, another work in the form of a short novel has taken over my time. It began several years ago as a short story and, as is the case with a lot of my work, took off on its own. But it is drawing to a close and I hope to be able to get it done before the end of the month. It even has a tentative title -- Namesake.

I also plan to get back to writing here on a more regular basis and writing about writing. That's what this blog was intended to be about in the first place.

By the way, I'm still shilling Can't Live Without You, looking for a sophomore production or even a staged reading. I have hopes to get it done here in Florida -- after all, it does take place here -- but I will send it anywhere for consideration. If you or someone you know is interested, drop me a line.

Okay, enough chit-chat; back to work and back to writing.

Small Town Boys - Chapter 53

Chapter Guide

These Are the Voyages…

“Are you coming in to the office tomorrow morning, or are you going straight to the airport?” Eric wanted to know.

It was a three weeks later and they were finalizing their plans for their trip to Fairview, Colorado. They, Rudy, and Vinnie and Jordan, two of the code talkers, were going to spend a week at the school district familiarizing themselves with the current setup and meeting the people who were going to determine what was needed to get the program running in order to begin to write the company’s response to the formal Request for Proposal. He had not heard from Danny, and he had almost forgotten about Tyler until he spotted a small item in the Times, picked up from the wire services from the Traverse City Record-Eagle, about the Herlingers asking for any information about their missing son.

“Well, since the flight’s at noon, there’s not a lot of point to coming in here just to turn around and go back,” Donny replied. “Matter of fact, why don’t you come over to my place and pick me up in the morning and we’ll go from there?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Trish and Wanda were going to look after the house. Donny had had a meeting with them about Small Town Boys the week after New Year’s and looked at the resumes of some of the screenwriters that Aaron and Jack were “suggesting” he consider. Donny had the distinct impression that he had already been chosen and that this was just a formality. All of them had impressive credits, including one that had been nominated for an Emmy two years before. Samples of their writing were included, and Donny flipped through them. “So, which one does Gina want me to choose?” he said to Trish.

She laughed. “You learn quick.” She handed him the portfolio of Evan Gilmour. He was in his early thirties but already had been the head writer on several prime time series and had worked with Aaron on two projects. “And,” Trish added, “he’s also got a couple of off-Broadway credits. Plus he knows the subject matter.”

“He’s gay, then.”

“Um hm. Best part is he lives in Boulder when he’s not here or in New York, and so you can meet him when you’re in Colorado.”

“Like I’ll have time,” said Donny. “We’re going up there to work, not ‘take a meeting.’”

“Well, at least call him and maybe have dinner.”

“No promises,” said Donny curtly. He was already beginning to think that Small Town Boys was going to be shoved to the back burner as far as he was concerned. Trish and Jack were still working on rounding up investors, and that meant they were pushing back the start date for the pilot to May or June. Meanwhile, Starship Enterprise was beginning to grow almost exponentially. They had already decided to hire an outside consulting firm to handle the training of the school staff and merger with the old system, and the initial proposal had grown from a collection of file folders on Donny’s desk to a row of thick binders labeled Purchasing, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Grants, Budget, HR, Grades, and the thickest one that Eric had titled Everything Else. The binders spilled off the table and on to the floor, and as they grew, file folders and boxes were added.

“We’re gonna need a U-Haul to get all this stuff up to there,” Eric said as he looked over the pile of paper.

Donny held up a box of floppy discs. “We’ll only need these and a laptop for the RFP.”

“Yeah, okay.” Eric said. “You might as well plan on moving there if we get the job. Not permanently, but…”

“Fine with me,” replied Donny.

Eric looked at him. “Really? Had it with L.A.?”

Donny twiddled the pen he was writing notes with. “Nah, just…”

“Getting burned out,” said Eric, finishing his thought. “Yeah, I know. But hey, we’ll have a good time in Colorado. Do some skiing, maybe, see if there are any hot guys in Boulder…” He grinned mischievously. “Some of those mountain-climber and jogger types can be pretty hot.”

“Thought we were going there to work,” snorted Donny.

“Uh huh.”

Marc came in and dropped a large binder on Donny’s desk. “Here’s the projections you were asking for,” he said, and then caught Eric’s grin. “What’s up?”

“Oh, just teasing Donny about getting a little Rocky Mountain high, that’s all.”

Marc laughed. “Yeah a little motel sex is always fun,” he said. “I should know.” His demeanor had improved markedly since Christmas, and everyone in the office had noticed it. Eric had asked Donny if he knew what was making Marc so happy, not that he had any objections. Donny had shrugged and said it was probably because they’d had a thirty-seven percent increase in sales the last two quarters and Business Week had featured them in a story about business integration software. Eric had agreed, then added, “If you ask me, he also looks like he’s in love. You guys back together?”

“Nope,” Donny had replied.

“Well, whoever it is, maybe we should give him a bonus.”

It was snowing lightly the next afternoon when they arrived in Denver. It was a tight fit getting the five of them and their luggage into the Mitsubishi Galant, but with a little creative cramming, they got the trunk closed. The snow followed them all the way to the Marriott in Fairview. They checked in, and since the hotel was almost full because of a cross-country race, Rudy, Vinnie, and Jordan were in one room, and Donny and Eric were in another. Eric called Gordie Harwell. They were to meet him for dinner that evening at the Elkhorn, a well-known steak place in the middle of town.

Fairview was nestled in a valley in the Front Range of the Rockies, nearly seven thousand feet above sea level. The thin air was noticeable, and Vinnie, the code talker from New Jersey, got a nosebleed. He and his cohort, Jordan, decided to stay in the motel, order in a pizza, and put the finishing touches on the preliminary presentation.

Gordie was a tall, balding man with owl-like eyes and a bushy mustache, the color of which matched his sandy hair. Donny found it hard to believe that he and Eric had been in the same classes in college until Eric explained that Gordie had been in the Army for ten years before coming back to finish his degree and go on to get his Masters in education. Rudy nodded silently as he was introduced, and when they ordered drinks, he ordered iced tea. The waitress wasn’t sure if they had any, it being the end of January, but she said she’d look.

After some small talk, mainly catching up between Eric and Gordie, the conversation turned to the project, and Rudy, who had been silent up to then, started asking Gordie a number of intricate technical questions that left even Eric slightly breathless. But Gordie was able to answer most of them, and Rudy took extensive notes in his pocket notebook. When it came time to order dinner, Gordie recommended the New York cut, and Donny and Eric concurred. Rudy ordered a side salad and a baked potato.

The food was good and Donny had a glass and a half of wine. He was feeling pleasantly light-headed at the end of the meal, and walking out into the cold night air was a nice sharp contrast to the stuffy and smoky air of the restaurant. He took several deep gulps of air before lighting a cigarette. The smoke made him feel even more dizzy.

Eric noticed him swaying a little. “You okay?” he said with a grin.

“Yeah,” Donny muttered. “The altitude, I guess.” He took another drag on the cigarette then tossed it in the gutter.

Eric was a little glassy-eyed, too. He handed the car keys to Rudy. “Here you go; you’re driving.”

Donny felt a little better in the car, and by the time they got back to the hotel, he didn’t object when Eric stopped in front of the lounge and suggested a nightcap.

The bar was quiet except for some tinny piped-in Billy Joel instrumentals. They each ordered Scotch on the rocks and sat at a table under a large print of Longs Peak.

“So,” Eric said, “this is kind of cool.”

“What?”

“Here we are, nailing down a contract to basically re-write an entire government entity’s software system. This could be huge.”

“All we’re doing is plugging a whole lot of patches and modules into an already existing system using our software,” Donny said. “It’s not like we’re reinventing the wheel or coming up with a whole new language like those guys at FoxPro.”

“Yeah, but they don’t know that. ‘Sides, once we’ve got this going, a lot of other places will want to try it.” He smiled at the waitress who brought their drinks. “Thanks.”

“Yeah,” replied Donny, “unless we fuck it up.”

“We won’t. You won’t.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to Starship Enterprise…or whatever we call it.”

They clinked glasses and sipped their drinks. Eric smiled at Donny, and Donny felt warmth spreading through him, a pleasant tickle of horniness, made all the more immediate by Eric’s proximity and the faint scent of wool coming off his sweater. Donny gazed at Eric, the dim light from the bar making him look even more attractive, and he had to look away, over to where the bartender, a globular man in his mid-fifties was wiping down the bar and humming along flatly with the music, to try to take his mind off the tightness growing in his crotch.

Eric said something and Donny blinked. “Another?” Eric repeated.

Donny looked down at the empty glass, the ice cubes making little rainbows, and he shook his head. “Nah,” he muttered.

“’Kay, we’d better hit the rack; ‘morrow’s gonna be a long day.” He put a ten on the table, waved off Donny’s offer of cash, and they made their way to the elevator.

The room was dark, and Donny fumbled around until he found the light next to his bed. They wordlessly got undressed, each taking off their sweaters, shirts, and pants at the same time until they were both standing at the end of their beds facing each other in nothing but their underwear.

Eric caught Donny’s eyes and held them, a small smile making his lips part just a little, and Donny felt a roaring surge of passion, nearly making him groan, the thud of blood pounding in his ears and his cock. Eric leaned in a little and put out his hand for a moment, and said, “Man, I gotta take a gnarly piss.”

Donny nodded silently, and Eric brushed by him and went into the bathroom, closing the door. Donny got into bed and was asleep before Eric came back to his own bed.

*

They had an early breakfast and arrived at the school before 8:30, joining in the wave of students who were making their way to their lockers and first classes. Donny had a moment of flashback as the universal scent of high school – a combination of floor wax, pencil shavings, bathroom disinfectant, and the scent of teenagers: hairspray, gym sweat, bubble gum, and sneakers.

There was a large conference room behind the principal’s office and someone had put a large white power strip on the floor next to the movie screen. Donny set up the projector and the laptop while Eric, wearing a sports coat and tie, was introduced to the members of the school administration and two of the school board members. The locals all reminded Donny of people back home; middle-aged, very Republican-looking, the clothes all very business-like with faint hints of western wear: a turquoise brooch here, piping on the shoulder seams there, and all of them looking like they spent a lot of time outdoors. Everyone was very polite as the team was introduced, and then Eric went to the end of the table and flicked on the projector. A picture of a smiling little girl, her hands plastered with red, blue and orange finger-paints framing her face filled the screen. The title at the bottom said, “Making It Work for Her.” One of the ladies let out and audible “aw…”

Eric’s pitch was gentle and off-the-cuff even though Donny knew he had written it, revised it, and rehearsed it for a week. He took the approach that everything that the school system did in the office, be it ordering supplies, reconciling the budget, running the payroll, or even printing out the labels for file folders, was geared towards the kids. “The only reason you and your teachers and everyone else comes to work every day,” he said, “is for her and all the other kids in this school district. That’s it. Anything we can do to make it easier for her to learn and grow up is our goal.”

Donny was watching both Eric and the audience around the table, and he could see some heads nodding, some more vigorously than others, and several people taking notes. Eric paused, then started to go through the slides that outlined very simply what ERP was and how it could accomplish that goal. “In the first place, it would simplify things. That means less confusion, and making the process easier makes things go smoother. You are already using Pelican for some of the work, so all we would be doing is making it available to everyone: teachers, accountants, food service, and maintenance, all under one umbrella that many on your staff already know how to use. There would be very little change in what is already being done. Or,” Eric grinned, “there wouldn’t be much moving of the food dish.” That got a laugh from everyone, and Eric went through the rest of the introductory slides, showing the connections between offices and procedures, until he came back to the little girl. “And,” he said as he put down the remote, “I’d be glad to answer any questions you might have.”

The chairman of the school board, Walt Lyle, raised his hand. He was a solidly built man in his early seventies, his full head of silver hair combed neatly into a small pompadour, his expression and bearing that of a solid Ronald Reagan Republican. He cleared his throat with a deep rumble and said, “It all looks very good, and God knows anything we can do to cut down on the red tape is a good idea. But I would like to know how much this is going to cost.”

Eric grinned slightly and shot Donny a quick look and nod. The week before as they were putting together the presentation, they had both agreed that this would be the first question asked, and so they had come up with an answer, which Eric had honed and practiced as he had the rest of the presentation. He put his hands in his pockets and said, “Mr. Lyle, it will cost as much or as little as you want it to. We’re not proposing to do sell you anything you don’t want or need.” Mr. Lyle nodded but still looked a tad skeptical, which meant he was thinking something along the lines of “But we don’t know what we need, and therefore we don’t know what you’re proposing will be what we need…or just a waste of money.” He looked as if he was on the verge of saying that, so Eric jumped in before he spoke again and answered the question before it was asked. “The reason we are here this week – at no cost to you or the school district – is to find out exactly what it is you want and what you need.” That seemed to mollify Mr. Lyle, and after a few more questions, Gordie stepped in and said he had set up meetings for Vince, Jordan, and Rudy to meet with the people who were currently using Pelican, and Donny and Eric would be meeting with the IT staff. The members of the school board, including Mr. Lyle, smiled and shook hands all around, and when they had left, Eric let out a big sigh and said, “Okay, we made it past the first hurdle: they didn’t throw us out on our ass.”

At 11:30 they broke for lunch and Gordie took them to the school cafeteria where they stood in line with the rest of the faculty and students to get trays and plates of meatloaf, carrots, and mashed potatoes. Donny grinned inwardly at the sense of déjà vu; the cafeteria at this high school was not much different than the one he’d spent his countless lunch periods in back in high school, right down to the elderly ladies in white smocks and hats that ladled out the food. The kids didn’t seem that much different, either; all shapes and sizes – tall, short, big, small, most of them wearing the current fashions of t-shirts and loose pants under hooded sweatshirts or letter jackets. He wondered what they thought this group of strangers were doing in their midst, but if they did, they gave no sign; they probably thought they were new teachers or administrators and therefore not worthy of attention. Donny caught a girl looking at him for an instant. She was wearing a letter jacket that was a few sizes too large for her with “95” on the sleeve, so it must have been her boyfriend’s jacket; the boyfriend, a tall, gangly but athletic-looking kid with longish sideburns and curly hair stood behind her in just a CU Boulder football t-shirt and grey cargo pants. She cast an appraising eye over Donny’s button-down shirt, wool sweater, and khaki pants, then looked right through him as if he wasn’t there. Ten years ago, as a freshman, Donny had gotten the same look from the senior girls.

Gordie led them to a separate part of the dining room set aside for teachers and he introduced them to some of the faculty that were already there. If he didn’t remember the names, Donny remembered the types: the matronly English teacher, the frazzled-looking science teacher, the calm but stern-looking math master, and the art teacher who looked as if she had just gotten back from Woodstock, complete with the peasant blouse, granny glasses, and breathy voice that sounded as if she was always reading poetry. They ate quietly, and Donny looked across the cafeteria, seeing more proof that no matter where or when, the dynamics of the caste system of high school society were alive and well. The tables were clearly designated by groups: the Jocks, the Nerds, the Goths, the Heathers, the Snobs, the Hipsters, the Preps, even the Drama Queens, which consisted of both boys and girls. Donny wondered what it must be like to be gay in a small mountain community surrounded by big trucks, guns, and all the other symbols of masculinity that seemed as natural and as old as the mountains and glaciers that towered over the school. It was probably not much different than what it was like when he was in school, he thought. Anyone suspected of being gay or who did not conform to the stereotype of the average teenage boy was either invisible or preyed on by the bullies like Stan Tasker who lived by the axiom that any boy who didn’t demonstrate full heterosexuality was a threat to them and their way of life. Donny knew that no one questioned his apparent straightness; his years of football and his larger than average build, plus the fact that he had sat at the Jocks table during football season and never said anything was his own acknowledgment of his obeisance to the strict and inviolate culture of being a teenager in high school.

The impression was reinforced an hour or so later when Donny took a bathroom break. The nearest men’s room was down the hall from the administration office where he and Eric were discussing network capacity with Gordie. There was no door; just a tiled entrance that turned sharply to the left and led into an open space lined with sinks on one side, a row of urinals on the other, and two stalls. He didn’t hear anything as he approached, but when he walked into the room he saw three boys by the sinks. A skinny boy with long blond hair parted in the middle, thick dark eyebrows, and a “Les Miserables” t-shirt, was backed into the corner. The other two boys, one whom Donny recognized from the cafeteria by the CU Boulder shirt, towered over him menacingly. They all looked to see who was coming in, and when Donny returned the look, the bigger boys backed away casually, and one went to run water in the sink to wash his hands. Donny went to the urinal, and by the time he had finished, the two had gone, but not before one had hissed, “Such a fag, Whitzler.”

The boy was now at the sink washing his hands, making as much lather as he could with the thin liquid green soap that spurted out of the little plastic globe mounted on the wall. Donny glanced at him for a second and suppressed a desire to say something such as, “You okay?” because he knew what the answer would be: a terse nod of the head and silence. But the boy had a look of defiance on his face, and when they traded glances, he nodded at him as if nothing was wrong. He dried his hands quickly and scurried out of the room, leaving Donny rinsing his hands under the tepid water and thinking how much the boy reminded him of kids he knew in high school, and of Tyler.

*

Donny spent the rest of the afternoon with Bev, the school treasurer, a plump middle-aged woman with tinted hair and a wheezy giggle. She was an expert at Pelican, but when Donny admitted that he had been one of the people who had designed it, she beamed appreciatively and glanced at the pictures of her family that were lined up on her wall, including an Olan Mills glamour portrait of a girl in her early twenties. Donny smiled inwardly, knowing that Bev was sizing him up as husband material for her daughter Kim. Donny didn’t tell her that he was more interested in the picture of her son Will, a well-built redhead about his age, in a cowboy hat and tight jeans leaning against a split-rail fence.

He took pages of notes as Bev went through her routines of record keeping, including accounting and purchasing, and he saw how she used other programs to complement the database. He gently made some suggestions and showed her some built-in tools that she wasn’t aware of – “Well, I’ll be darned!” she said several times – and he wrote down all of her complaints about the program. By the time they had worked through all of his questions and seen the scope of the work she did, the office was empty and it was already dusk. Donny thanked Bev, and she grinned widely. “Come back any time,” she said.

He found Eric in Gordie’s office. “Oh, good,” he said. “Gordie has an idea he’d like to run by you.” Donny sat down, and Gordie steepled his fingers.

“The committee was very impressed with your presentation, and they wanted to know how soon you could start.”

Donny looked at Eric, then back at Gordie. “Start, as in design, build, and go live?”

“Yeah, pretty much. We were going to put off the decision until June, but there’s a huge technology grant out there that we’re up for, and if we can tell the funder that we’ve got a design ready to go, that will go a long way towards us getting the grant and start spending it in July. The grant’s for a year, so go-live would have to be by July of ’96.”

“A year and a half,” said Eric, “to basically build and implement an entire system. I’ve already talked to Rudy and the boys. What do you think?”

Donny flipped through a couple of pages of notes as he gathered his thoughts. Finally he said, “Think I need a beer and something to eat.”

Gordie laughed. “If you say yes, I’ll buy both.”

They went to a small Mexican restaurant on the edge of town. The food was good and the conversation between Eric and Gordie was lively, but Donny paid little attention to any of it. The thousands of details started running through his head, everything from using Pelican to redesigning most of it to finding out how to connect all the systems and upgrading the computers. If any of these thoughts were running through Eric’s mind, he didn’t say anything, and when Gordie dropped them off at the hotel, Eric said, “We’ll give you the answer in the morning, but right now it looks good, doesn’t it, Donny?” Donny nodded silently.

He was heading for the elevator when the desk clerk waved him down and handed him a pink message slip. It said, Please call Evan Gilmour before 8. It took him a few moments to remember who he was, then it came to him: the screenwriter Trish was recommending to take over the writing on Small Town Boys. He had completely put that part of his life out of his head.

Donny looked at his watch. It was 7:35, so he shrugged, found an outside line phone and dialed the number.

A woman answered, but when Donny asked for Evan Gilmour she said “Just a sec,” and put the phone down. He could hear distant water running into a sink, then a voice said “Thanks,” and the phone was picked up. “Hello?” said the baritone voice.”

“Hi, it’s Don Hollenbeck, returning your call?”

“Oh, hi! Hey, sorry to bother you while you’re working, but I’m here in Fairview visiting my sister – she and her husband just got back from a trip – and I wondered if we might, y’know, get together and just, y’know, chat?”

“Sure,” said Donny, thinking that a little chat about the fantasy world of TV shows might take his mind off the spinning universe of functional specs and conversion tables.

“Great. I can be at the hotel in about fifteen minutes; is that okay?”

“Sure. I’ll be there.”

Donny went up to the room to drop off his briefcase and put on a sweater. Eric was standing in the hall carrying on a quiet but intense conversation with Rudy, who responded by barely nodding his head. They didn’t even notice Donny as he went by.

He found a copy of the local newspaper on one of the tables in the lobby and was reading about the local high school sports team when a tall man wearing a well-worn Carhart coat came into the lobby. He looked at Donny, smiled, and strode over to him.

“Hi, I’m Evan,” he said. His grip was firm, and Donny was reminded of the actor Treat Williams. He was clean-shaven with a ruddy, wind-burned face, bright eyes, and thick brown hair over heavy eyebrows. He shrugged off the coat to reveal a grey flannel shirt over faded jeans and work-boots. He had a solid build, and as he sat down, Donny caught a faint whiff of a barnyard. Evan seemed to know he was giving off the scent and he chuckled ruefully. “Sorry about that; I spent most of this morning repairing the fence in the corral, and goats can be odiferous.”

“You raise goats?”

“Yeah, my partner and I have about fifteen or so. We sell them for their wool, and occasionally for other things. Once you get the smell in your clothes, though, nothing gets it out.”

“No problem,” said Donny. “I’m from Ohio and I know all about farms.”

“Good.” Evan smiled. “Well, it’s nice to meet you. He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket. “Look, I took the liberty of jotting down a few notes…y’know, some questions I had about the script. You mind if we go over them?”

Donny glanced around the lobby. Other than the desk clerk, it was empty. “Sure, no problem.

“Okay.” Evan smoothed the paper out and then put on some glasses. “Yeah, in the scene where Bobby is in the kitchen….”

It turned out that Evan’s questions were more about the interaction of the characters rather than Donny’s script-writing abilities, and Donny had to think back to what he was thinking about as he wrote them. There were a few questions he couldn’t answer, so he just shook his head and said, “I don’t remember what I was thinking about then,” to which Evan nodded solemnly and went on to the next one. He offered no suggestions as to how he would have written it, nor did he make any kind of indication as to whether or not he agreed with Donny’s answers. Finally he slowly folded the paper, took off his glasses, and looked at Donny with a sober expression.

“Well, I think you’ve a workable idea here, Don.” He paused and Donny wondered if he was supposed to say something, but as he was getting ready to reply with a simple “thanks,” Evan said, “I’m sure you’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people like your agent and stuff, but I gotta tell ya, as one writer to another, I think you’ve given us something to work with. Your dialogue’s great, the characters are believable and likable, and you don’t get into a lot of soap opera drama.”

Now Donny said “Thanks.”

Evan shrugged. “That may be your biggest problem, though. Aaron’s instinct – write what will sell – has proven to be true. People want edge-of-the-seat drama; they want to know what choices the character will make and make them tough enough to stick it out through the commercial break. I think it’s a great idea, treating gay guys as just guys, y’know, with all the usual stuff that people go through every day – work, friends, family – just normal people, that’s all, with all the usual dramas. Get rid of the stereotypes, the flamers, the queens, the disco babies….” Evan shrugged. “Hell, do we really know anyone who really fits into that category?” He stopped himself and grinned. “Well, yeah, actually, I do. But do you want to see them on TV?”

Donny nodded. “No, and that’s why I wrote it instead of Aaron.”

Evan shook his head. “Aaron wrote what he did because he thought he was writing what Jeremy Dixon would do. I hear that’s all over, though. Your deal with getting Jeremy to do the pilot, I mean.” Evan glanced at him. “I hear you had something to do with that.”

“Yep,” Donny said softly, flashing back to the afternoon in the conference room overlooking downtown Los Angeles.

Evan smiled a little. “Good. I hate that prick,” he said, meaning Jeremy. “But the tough part is turning this” – he tapped the paper – “into something that people will watch without turning it into that,” and he pointed to the large TV in the other part of the lobby that was silently showing a car chase from a rerun of The Rockford Files.

“Yeah,” Donny said, “so I’ve been told.”

“So, tell me where you went to school.”

“You mean college? Bowling Green.”

“In Kentucky?”

“Ohio. Bowling Green State University.”

“Huh. Didn’t know they had a film school there.”

Donny shook his head. “They don’t, as far as I know. I took a couple of English and computer classes a few years ago.”

Evan looked puzzled. “So where’d you learn to write film scripts?”

Donny told him about helping Mike out with the scripts for Return to Sender and writing Small Town Boys by following Silver Star from the shooting script. Evan listened silently, then shook his head. “Jesus,” he muttered, “if word ever got out….”

“What?”

Evan looked at him with bemused wonder. “Well, here are all these people who spend all these years in college and grad school learning about how to write the perfect film, and then hustle their ass off just to get a synopsis read at a studio, and you bat out a script in a weekend and are about to start shooting with Jack Magahee’s money.”

Donny replied, “I’ve heard that,” thinking back to the evening in Paul’s office with Aaron in Palm Springs.

“Well, I was all set to give you a hard time as to why – at least according to my agent – I shouldn’t be considering working for a low-budget pilot that’s going to end up on the ass-end of cable TV. But now that I’ve actually read the script….” Evan leaned back a little. “So when do you actually think you’ll get going on this?”

“I’m leaving that all up to Trish,” Donny replied. “I’ve got something a little more involved going on.” He gave Evan a brief outline of what he was doing for the school system and what the future looked like for him as far as Small Town Boys was concerned. “So,” Donny concluded, “for the next year or so, I’m going to be up to my neck in work doing my real job.” He glanced at Evan and added apologetically, “Not that what you do isn’t a real job. It’s just that…”

“No, I get it,” said Evan. “No offense taken. Frankly, I’m a little envious; I could use a steady paycheck rather than what this business pays you. The last steady gig I had got cancelled halfway through the third season because the co-star needed to go into rehab. Not what you call job security. Fortunately I still get royalty checks and I have a partner who comes from a rich family.” He stood up and started to pull on his coat. “Well, if you’re still interested, I’d like to give it a shot.”

Donny stood up and nodded. “Yeah, I’ll let Trish know. She kinda had decided anyway, but….”

Evan grinned a little. “My people will call your people, right?”

“Something like that.”

Evan handed him a business card. “Keep in touch.” He gave Donny an appreciative look. “I gotta say, you’re not exactly what I pictured when I heard about what you do for a living. I had this whole computer nerd thing going; y’know, skinny, geeky, glasses….”

“Yeah, I guess I’m sorta the exception that proves the rule,” Donny replied. He thought of Rudy, Vince, and Jordan. “But hey, we’ve got a couple of them with us….”

Evan laughed. “No, thanks. Listen, if you’re going to be in the area, maybe you could come down to my place for dinner or something.”

"Yeah, sure," he said. "Thanks.

Evan shook his hand, patted him on the shoulder, and said, "Talk to you soon." Donny watched him stride out of the lobby, and a moment later a rather battered Chevy pick-up truck pulled out of the parking lot. He was pretty sure he had just been hit on.

Donny watched him stride out of the lobby, and a moment later a rather battered Chevy pick-up truck pulled out of the parking lot. He was pretty sure he had just been hit on.

Eric was lying on his bed, talking on the phone. The TV was on, but the sound was muted. He had taken off his shirt and pants and was wearing only a t-shirt and boxers. He laughed as Donny came into the room, and said, “Oh, I think they’ll go for that. We can write it into the contract as part of the conversion.” He looked at Donny, pointed at the receiver, and mouthed “Greg.” “Oh, here’s F. Scott McStudly now. Yeah, he spent all day charming the staff. Yeah, sure,” Eric continued, then handed the receiver to Donny. “He wants to know when you can move up here.”

Donny took the phone and told Greg about his day with the administrative staff. Meanwhile, Eric took off the rest of his clothes and went to the bathroom to take a shower.

“So,” said Greg, “it’s up to you, Donny. The boys think we can do it and make the deadline. What say you?”

Donny heard the shower start up and Eric started humming, a little off-key. He sat on the bed, still fingering Evan’s card, glanced at the TV with the same episode of The Rockford Files, and said, “Sure.”