Dramaturg's Diary: Catching up with Alumni

I have been feeling immersed in Signature alumni playwrights lately, having had the honor and pleasure connecting and re-connecting with many of them at Signature’s Annual Gala on March 1st. Or, maybe they have also been on my mind because they have been positively ubiquitous these past couple of seasons, with new and past works being produced all over the country, as well as New York and abroad. Therefore, as we wrap up the 2009-2010 Season, I thought that a suitable subject for the revival of “Dramaturg’s Diary,” would be highlighting some of the recent work of our prolific past Playwrights-in-Residence.

This season saw a wealth of brand new work from our playwrights. In January 2010, Charles Mee (2007-2008) collaborated with the SITI Company and Martha Graham Dance Company on American Document, inspired by Graham’s 1938 piece of the same name. A workshop of American Document was presented in the Under the Radar Festival at The Public Theater and will be seen in June at The Joyce Theatre.

Lee Blessing’s (1992-1993) new play, When We Go Upon the Sea, opens at Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre Company on April 19th. Signature’s bookstore is now stocking Romulus Linney: Maverick of the American Theatre by John Fleming, a new study of Signature’s Founding Playwright-in-Residence’s (1991-1992) life and work. New York’s Abingdon Theatre Company presented the world premiere of Mr. Linney’s Love Drunk in April 2009. Next season Lincoln Center Theater will present the world premiere of John Guare’s A Free Man of Color, beginning in October in the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

And of course, Horton Foote’s (1994-1995) The Orphans’ Home Cycle continues to run at Signature’s The Peter Norton Space, in a co-production with Hartford Stage.

Many plays by our playwrights found their way to New York for the first time this season, or can be anticipated soon. Sam Shepard’s Ages of the Moon recently closed at Atlantic Theatre Company. Mr. Mee’s Fetes de la Nuit was presented at The Ohio Theatre in February, and Limonade Tous Les Jours will arrive in April. Next season, Edward Albee’s Me, Myself, and I will open Playwrights Horizons' 2010-2011 Season. Further afield, Paula Vogel’s (2004-2005) A Civil War Christmas was seen at Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company in November of 2009.

Revisits to our writers’ past work have been rampant all over the country (and abroad!) this season and next season. The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) School of Theater celebrated Adrienne Kennedy (1995-1996) with examinations of her plays Funnyhouse of a Negro, June and Jean in Concert, and Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder. Signature is also selling limited edition autographed hard copies of Ms. Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays in our lobby bookstore at The Peter Norton Space. The New Group gave another look to Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind, which closed this past weekend.

This week INTAR Theatre, in association with NYU’s Department of English, will begin the 2010 New York Fornes Festival, in honor of the upcoming 80th birthday of Maria Irene Fornes (1999-2000), with presentations of Ms. Fornes’s work all over Manhattan. Plays include Fefu and Her Friends, Successful Life of 3, What of the Night?, and a screening of the film, "The Rest I Make Up": Documenting Irene.

Currently running in New York is Arthur Miller’s (1997-1998) A View from the Bridge, which can be seen on Broadway at the Cort Theatre until April 4th. After that it will make room for August Wilson’s (2006-2007) Fences, which begins on April 14th. Also in April, Charles Mee’s collage ode to collage artist Robert Raushenberg, bobrauschenbergamerica, arrives at Dance Theatre Workshop.

Signature playwrights have been active overseas as well: if you happen to be in London, John Guare’s (1998-1999) Six Degrees of Separation can currently be seen at The Old Vic and Lanford Wilson’s (2002-2003) Serenading Louie is running at The Donmar Warehouse. Mr. Wilson’s Fifth of July will be seen at Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer, The Hot L Baltimore at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in March of 2011, and a revival of Talley’s Folly will hit Broadway next season as well.

Mr. Albee will also be honored at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage, who will celebrate Mr. Albee over the course of three months with readings of all thirty of his plays and productions of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and At Home at the Zoo. Finally, Chicago’s Court Theatre will present Samm-Art Williams’s (NEC Season, 2008-2009) Home in November 2010.

In addition to their thriving writing careers, many of our playwrights give of themselves as teachers, mentors, producers, directors, even performers. Leslie Lee (NEC Season, 2008-2009), when he has not been attending every Signature alumni event and opening night this season, has been managing director of The Negro Ensemble Company, who presented his Sundown Names and Night Gone Things at the Castillo Theatre in May 2009. Bill Irwin (2003-2004) was featured in Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of the musical Bye Bye Birdie, which ran from September 2009 until January 2010 at the Henry Miller Theatre on Broadway. Charles Fuller (NEC Season, 2008-2009) has been supporting new work and the rising generation of playwrights, mentoring The Belle of Belfast by Nate Rufus Edelman as part of The Cherry Lane Mentor Project.

I’m afraid this list does not even scratch the surface of our playwright’s activity this season and next. Suffice to say that it seems to have been a banner year for our writers. Congratulations to all of our past Playwrights-in-Residence on their current and future projects, and looking forward to seeing you at the theatre.

Dramaturg's Diary: Running the Orphans' Marathon

Saturday, October 17th, marks the world premiere marathon of Horton Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle at Hartford Stage. I have actually never participated in a theatre marathon of this magnitude and intensity before, though I do know the basics of marathon-watching. Eat protein. Hydrate. Stretch at the intermissions. And, according to Will Cantler, our Casting Director and an experienced marathon-watcher, “Don’t over-caffeinate.” Caffeine aside, there is a definite buzz of anticipation in the lobby of Hartford Stage, as HS staffers hand out marathon badges, pins, water bottles, peanuts, and other accoutrements to aide us on our epic Orphans’ journey.

At 11AM we take our seats for Part One of the cycle, The Story of a Childhood, which consists of the acts Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, and Lily Dale. Having seen this section performed a little over a month ago, it is exciting to see how it has progressed. Even though I have been reading, eating, breathing, sleeping these plays (as has everyone else involved in this project, both on and offstage) I still see new resonances every time I watch them. At one point in Roots in a Parched Ground, I catch my breath when one character says a – seemingly innocuous – line and the impact of what will happen to him five plays later hits me with full force.

After a boxed-lunch arranged by Hartford Stage at the Hilton Hotel, we resume with Part Two: The Story of a Marriage (consisting of The Widow Claire, Courtship, and Valentine’s Day) at 3PM. At this point in our journey, we firmly plant ourselves in Harrison, Texas and get to know a new generation of residents, as well as follow up with some already familiar from previous acts. Although Horace remains the central character, we meet some very strong, complicated women who drive the action, in the form of his two love interests, Claire Ratliff and Elizabeth Vaughn. I find this section unabashedly romantic and yet the more I see it, the more I recognize how Horton has woven bittersweet truths about family, adulthood, and sacrifice, amidst the joy and exhilaration of finding one’s soul mate.

We return to the Hilton for dinner after the close of Part Two and sit down to Elizabeth’s Crowd-Drawing Mac and Cheese, Miss Ruth’s Pecan-Crusted Tilapia, and Ed’s Ganado Barbequed Beef Brisket (all of the menu items for both lunch and dinner are named for characters in The Orphans’ Home Cycle). Everyone is dying to talk about Orphans’ with the first person they see. They have become quite attached to and invested in all of the characters, whom they have come to think of as friends or even family. After dessert, as we ready to return for Part Three: The Story of a Family (1918, Cousins, and The Death of Papa), someone says, “I hope no more bad things happen to Horace!” I just take a final gulp of my Admiration Coffee (“A cup of Southern Hospitality!”), knowing that Part Three is actually a particularly turbulent time for Horace and his family, as they face war, disease, and a harsh economy.

The breadth of this journey, both Horace’s and ours’, really hits home for me in this part. My head spins a bit when I see the matriarchal Corella Davenport and Inez Kirby (Annalee Jefferies and Pamela Payton-Wright) in their twilight years, sitting together on Horace’s porch in the final act, The Death of Papa. I recall them in Roots in a Parched Ground, which suddenly feels like a lifetime ago, when they were Corella Robedaux and Inez Thornton (Virgina Kull and Maggie Lacey) sitting on the Thornton porch, playing guitar and singing “Beautiful Dreamer,” with little idea of what the next twenty-six years would have in store for them.

Part Three also heralds the arrival of Horace, Jr., (Dylan Riley Snyder) the character Horton Foote modeled after himself. He appears only in The Death of Papa, but his birth is announced in 1918. When Mrs. Boone asks Mr. Vaughn, “Was it a boy or a girl?” and he replies, simply, “A boy,” I get chills, as even though we are nearly at the end of the cycle, one feels the beginning of something else. It is a boy, and he is going to tell all of your stories, I think.

And then it’s over. The giddy excitement of the occasion has transitioned into a sense of awe and profundity. I can’t help remembering the first reading of Parts One and Two at Lincoln Center Theater in January 2009, when Horton was still with us. I have been told that at that reading he knew for the first time that he had something, and that these nine adapted plays would work. Now we have proven him right. Yet although we feel this immense sense of accomplishment, we still have a long road ahead of us, as in two weeks the company arrives at Signature for their five month residency with us. But if Horton and The Orphans’ Home Cycle marathon have taught us anything, it’s that the journey can be as rewarding as the destination.

Dramaturg's Diary: Catching Up With Orphans'

Kirsten Bowen is Signature Theatre Company's Literary Associate, and the Signature dramaturg for The Orphans' Home Cycle

Well, when I last posted a “diary entry,” the crack dramaturgy teams of Signature and Hartford were hard at work researching the world of The Orphans’ Home Cycle. Since then, we table-worked and work-shopped all nine plays over the course of three weeks, leading up to a “marathon” reading of all nine plays that brought the entire staffs of Hartford and Signature together (a day which Orphans’ actor Bryce Pinkham reported on in his diary and which was also photographed). Following the marathon reading, which marked the official start date of rehearsals, director Michael Wilson began the complicated process of staging the plays, working sequentially from the first play, Roots in a Parched to Ground, to the last, The Death of Papa.

Meanwhile, back at Signature we’ve been supporting the process by researching questions from the rehearsal room (if Claire is sending a wire at four o’clock in the morning, would she send it from home or would she have to leave the house?) as well as preparing for when we take over hosting the cycle. For me, this includes assembling material for Signature’s elaborate dramaturgical lobby displays, writing and editing our quarterly newsletter, Signature Edition, and for the interns, crafting the three-part video that will honor Horton Foote and run on the television in the Peter Norton Space’s lobby throughout the season.

Periodically throughout the summer various members of the Signature staff and I have been leaving New York very early in the morning, either via train or ZipCar, to attend rehearsals in Hartford. I was most often in rehearsal during the first three weeks when the company was still reading the plays around the table and making initial investigations into the world and their characters. In addition to asking practical questions such as which neighborhood of Houston do Horace’s mother and sister live in, and how were lawyers educated in the late nineteenth century, Michael impressed into the actors the key themes Horton explored in all of his work, and which re-surface throughout The Orphans’ Home Cycle: the search for home and identity, how some people actively choose to remember while others choose to forget, and what makes some of us survivors and thrivers and others doomed to failure and disappointment?

Many of these characters are based on Horton Foote’s family – not only do his father and mother have alter-egos, but so do his grandparents, great-grandparents, and numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins, some of whom have morphed into a character representing a combination of several people (for example, Brother Vaughn, one of Bryce Pinkham’s characters, is a composite of three of Horton’s uncles). Although many events within the cycle did not happen in real life, and these characters were created to stand on their own, separate from their real-life counterparts, we do a lot of digging into Horton’s family history in order to find a model for these people’s histories. His memoir, Farewell, is an invaluable resource, but even more helpful is Horton’s daughter, actor Hallie Foote. Hallie has appeared in the majority of her father’s plays over the past thirty years and is known as the premiere interpreter of his work. Of everyone in the room Hallie’s involvement in The Orphans’ Home Cycle goes back the furthest – not only did she witness her father write them when she was a teenager (and help type the scripts), she created the key role of Elizabeth Vaughn when the plays were first produced on stage at New York’s HB Playwrights’ Foundation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and in their film adaptations in the 1980s. Now Hallie will play Elizabeth’s mother, Mary Vaughn, among other roles. In addition, since Horton’s passing Hallie has taken on the stewardship of his work and continues to collaborate closely with Michael on bringing the cycle to life.

Another challenge we faced during those early weeks was working on the plays out of sequence. We began with Lily Dale, the third play of the cycle, and for the most part jumped around, working our way towards the larger cast plays as more actors joined us throughout the three-week workshop period. While it was incredibly beneficial to be able to focus in-depth on one play at a time, it was tricky exploring these characters whose journeys had begun several plays ago. We couldn’t help but reference plays that we had not discussed yet, with characters (and actors) whom we hadn’t met.

What’s interesting however, is that although Horton wrote the basis for the first play, Roots in a Parched Ground, in the early 1960s, a decade later when he set out to write The Orphans’ Home Cycle as a whole he also wrote them out of sequence, beginning with 1918 (which is the seventh play and will begin Part Three of our cycle) and ending with The Widow Claire, the fourth play in the sequence (which is the first play of our Part Two: The Story of a Marriage). But despite the fact that Horton didn’t write them in order, all nine plays still follow a very lucid and consistent journey as events and themes of one play reverberate in another, sometimes three plays later. Recently, on a trip to Hartford to watch a run-through of Parts One and Two, I interviewed Michael for Signature Edition, and he commented on the cycle’s seemingly seamless ebb and flow, “Now that we’re at the point in the process when we’re beginning to put the plays together, we’re seeing characters an hour later in another act referring to an event that happened a couple of years ago. Those echoes, both thematically and emotionally, are very, very moving. It’s mind boggling how he created that, especially the way he wrote them out of order. It’s almost like he was a vessel, like he was channeling some kind of divine epic story that was coming though him onto the page.”

Dramaturg's Diary: Preparing for the Big Day and Beyond

Kirsten Bowen is Signature Theatre Company's Literary Associate, and the Signature dramaturg for The Orphans' Home Cycle

As Signature’s Literary Associate, one major aspect of my job is functioning as our resident dramaturg. Now a dramaturg can perform a variety of functions in the production and development of a play. We can be sounding boards for playwrights and directors, helping to track how the story is being told and acting as a sort of “in-house audience” during rehearsals. We also facilitate other lines of communication between the production and audience by creating lobby displays, newsletters, or writing program notes and blogs (like the one you’re reading now). Lastly, another large part of a dramaturg’s job is researching the world of the play and disseminating those findings to the playwright, director, actors, and you, the audience. This research will help the actors flesh out and more fully embody their characters, provide factual or inspirational references for the director and playwright as they create this world, as well as context for the audience member watching it.

Researching the world of The Orphans’ Home Cycle is at times overwhelming, but mostly fascinating and even fun. We also have quite a team assembled to get the job done: me, Signature’s Artistic Interns Elizabeth Carlson and Farrell Parker, and Hartford’s Senior Dramaturg, Chris Baker. I mentioned that there are nine plays, right?

Despite the two memoirs and many personal essays Horton left behind, as well as the first-hand stories about his family and childhood he passed on to the friends and family involved in this production, we dramaturgs still have our work cut for us. The Orphans’ Home Cycle spans the years 1902 to 1928. In addition to a detailed glossary of each play citing every obscure reference from the value of $11.50 in 1904 to the history of the Romany population in Texas, we created actor packets that include American history timelines, post-Reconstruction Texas timelines, information on the economics, music, education, political and social trends of the period, and other key topics like Texas’s convict lease system (one play takes place on a plantation that employs convicts as labor, a popular practice in the post-Civil War South), the 1918 Flu Epidemic, and copious sections from Horton’s memoir, Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood. Liz and Farrell also spent two days conducting visual research at The New York Public Library Picture Collection, combing through photographs and advertisements from the 1900s through the 1920s. Many of these images will be plastered to the walls of the rehearsal room in Hartford.

So we’ve done a lot of work to be as prepared as possible on the first day, but questions always come up in rehearsal that you never expect. For example, in the glossary we provided a thorough and rather graphic description of the symptoms of malaria (made all the more so by Chris’ dramatic reading of it during tablework), but director Michael Wilson wanted to know what time of year malaria is most prevalent in East Texas. This was not mere idle curiosity on his part – he needed to know in order to help determine in what season Lily Dale takes place, which is crucial information for costume designer David Woolard. These seemingly minute questions are just one ingredient to telling this story, as Michael, the actors, and designers build this world both in and out of the rehearsal room.

Now, I leave you with a sampling of some of our findings, selected by Liz and Farrell: etiquette tips from the 1905 handbook, Everyday Etiquette: A Practical Manual of Social Uses by Marion Harland and Virginia Van de Water.

“Expressions such as ‘God bless you!’ or ‘I love you,’ or ‘Love to the dear ones,’ are in shockingly bad taste except under cover of an envelope. Postcards are a solecism.”

“It takes very little to set tongues wagging. The married women should exercise extreme care in her relations with other men in public places such as a summer hotel or boarding house, while it may do no harm for a married man to flirt with other men’s wives. Promiscuous intimacies at summer resorts are a great mistake. A woman may be pleasant toward all, and intimate with none.”

“A proper young woman will never be proactive in the courting process. The girl who waits for the young man to ask if he may call her, and who waits for the young man to ask permission to write to her will be considered a prize that was difficult to win, and therefore more worthy of his true love and devotion. The apple that drops, over-ripe, at one’s feet is never quite so tempting as that which hangs just beyond reach.”

“In the home, the proper husband will always offer his wife the easy chair in which he sits when she enters the room, but “knowing that he is weary after a hard day at the office, [she] will not take the chair, but she will appreciate the little attention, and love him better for it.”

Dramaturg’s Diary: Countdown to The Orphans' Home Cycle

Kirsten Bowen is Signature Theatre Company's Literary Associate, and the Signature dramaturg for The Orphans' Home Cycle

I have been Signature’s Literary Associate for three years now and throughout that time have managed to always delegate the writing for Signature’s blog to a series of willing interns, whom I reasoned were more digitally in touch than I was anyway. So it seems fitting that I come out of hiding and make my blog debut by chronicling the world premiere of Horton Foote’s nine-play The Orphans’ Home Cycle, an epic event that will encompass Signature’s entire 2009-2010 Season beginning in November.

Grand events like this– a world premiere of nine plays spanning nearly thirty years with a cast of 22 actors playing over sixty roles – are rare, and everyone who will be involved in the undertaking, from the actors in the rehearsal room to the staffs in the administrative and box offices, will have the opportunity to be a part of something quite special and unusual. What’s more, Horton Foote was a beloved friend and colleague of Signature Theatre Company and our producing partner, Hartford Stage, and these plays tell the deeply personal story of the founding of his family. It’s extremely gratifying to not only be presenting works that tell a rich and compelling story, but also celebrate Horton’s history and legacy.

Horton Foote began writing The Orphans’ Home Cycle in the 1970s as nine separate plays to honor his late parents, Albert Horton Foote and Hallie Brooks Foote, basing the central character of the cycle, Horace Robedaux, on his father. The cycle begins in 1902 and takes us from Horace’s childhood in and around the fictional town of Harrison, Texas (Harrison, where many of his plays are set, is based on Horton’s hometown of Wharton, Texas), into his adulthood when he has established his own family and had his first son, a character based on Horton himself.

Many of the Orphans’ plays have been fully produced at other theatres, and almost half, Convicts, Lily Dale, Courtship, Valentine’s Day, and 1918, have been produced on television or as feature films. Two, Roots in a Parched Ground and Cousins, have never been produced in any medium. Horton had always wanted to see all nine plays presented together as a complete cycle. Two years ago that dream came to fruition when Michael Wilson, Artistic Director of Connecticut’s Hartford Stage and a frequent collaborator of Horton’s, approached him about paring them down into nine one-acts which would be presented together in three parts. Signature officially joined the project as co-producer in January 2009.

Over the course of the season, I and several others will be bringing you behind-the-scenes updates on the journey of bringing this monumental work to the stage. Right now casting is underway, design meetings are happening, and much reading and research on Horton and turn of the century Eastern Texas has been happening in Signature’s artistic office. This point in the process has been a long time coming for all of us – some have waited six months to get started, some two and a half years, and Horton waited for over thirty. We still have a long way to go until first preview but we’re well on our way.

Welcome to The Orphans’ Home Cycle…

ADDENDUM: I have recently been reminded that Roots in a Parched Ground, the first play of the cycle, was originally a teleplay entitled The Night of the Storm, and was produced by the “Du Pont Show of the Month” in 1961. Horton’s original title for it was A Golden String (from a William Blake poem), which the producers rejected as too ambiguous. They did like the second title, Roots in a Parched Ground (from a William Carlos Williams poem), but the advertising agency disliked it, and so they all compromised on The Night of the Storm, which, according to Horton, “None of us liked very much.” The play was subsequently published as Roots in a Parched Ground. Apologies for the oversight and no offense intended towards “Du Pont Show of the Month” producer David Susskind, Night of the Storm director Daniel Petrie, and actors Julie Harris, E.G. Marshall, Mildred Dunnock, Mark Connelly, Fritz Weaver, and Jo Van Fleet.