Genesis of an American Playwright

Genesis of an American Playwright

Genesis of an

American Playwright By Horton Foote Edited and with an Introduction by Dr. Marion Castleberry

Baylor University Press Waco, Texas USA

This volume is the forty-fifth published by the Markham Press Fund of Baylor University Press, established in memory of Dr. L. N. and Princess Finch Markham of Longview, Texas, by their daughters, Mrs. R. Matt Dawson of Waco, Texas, and Mrs. B. Reid Clanton of Longview, Texas. Cover design by Pamela Poll Cover photo of Horton Foote @ Keith Carter. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Division 101 Independence Ave., S.E. Washington, D.C. 20540-4320

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foote, Horton. Genesis of an American playright / by Horton Foote ; edited and with an introduction by Marion Castleberry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-918954-91-6 (alk. paper) 1. Foote, Horton—Childhood and youth. 2. Foote, Horton—Homes and haunts—Texas—Wharton. 3. Dramatists, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Screenwriters—United States—Biography. 5. Texas—Social life and customs. 6. Wharton (Tex)—Biography. I. Castleberry, Marion. II. Title. PS3511.O344Z469 2004 812′.54—dc22 2003019617 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Lillian

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Chronology

xi

Introduction

1

1

2

3

Genesis of a Playwright

17

Seeing and Imagining

17

Pasadena and Beyond

33

Learning to Write

46

On Being a Southern Writer

61

Wharton, Then and Now

61

What It Means to be a Southern Writer

66

The Trip to Paradise

75

The Artist as Mythmaker

79

Things Have Ends and Beginnings

86

Writing for the Stage

97

Dance and Broadway

97

Harrison, USA

100

Sometimes the One-Act Play Says It All

102

vii

viii

4

5

Contents Advice to Young Playwrights

104

Herbert Berghof

113

The Orphans’ Home Cycle Lecture

115

How To and How Not To

136

Introduction to The Young Man from Atlanta

152

Writing for the Screen

155

The Little Box

155

On First Dramatizing Faulkner

157

The McDermott Lecture

169

Writing for Film

180

Willa Cather

195

Thoughts on the American Theater

203

The New York Theater (1930–1940)

203

The Changing of the Guard

215

The Vanishing World and Renewals

229

Appendix: Cast Lists and Production Information

235

Bibliography of Published and Produced Works (1939–2003)

263

Works Cited

269

Index

273

Acknowledgments This book was made possible in part by a grant from The Institute for Oral History at Baylor University and by a Faculty Travel Assistance stipend from Baylor University Research. At Baylor, Dr. Robert Sloan, University President, Dr. David Lyle Jeffrey, Provost, and Dr. Wallace Daniel, Dean of Arts and Sciences, continually supported this project, as did Stan Denman, Kelly Russell, Steven Day, Diane Smith, DeAnna Toten Beard, and especially Carey C. Newman, who offered expert advice and suggestions on publishing. I appreciate the assistance of Russell Martin II, director and curator of the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University, and the other members of the library staff who were most helpful when I studied the Horton Foote Papers in the summer of 2002. A special appreciation is extended to Kelly Kline Vance, Horton Foote’s assistant and my phone buddy, for her invaluable help and inspiration during this project and to my graduate student Chris Day for her tireless efforts in research and proofreading. This book could not have been completed without the two of them. I am especially indebted to Horton Foote who believed in this book and trusted me to edit his writing. He generously read and responded to every essay and lecture in the collection as well as to my introduction. His kind words of encouragement inspired me throughout this project. Most of all, I want to express my affection and respect for him and my appreciation for his continued friendship over the last twenty years. Finally, I want to thank my wife and best friend, Terri, for her unconditional love. Her respect for Horton Foote is equal to mine and, consequently, she supported this project with her patience, her understanding, and her prayers. Marion Castleberry

ix

Chronology 1916

Born on March 14, 1916, in Wharton, Texas, to Albert Horton and Harriet Gautier Brooks Foote

1932

Graduated from Wharton High School

1933–1935

Studied acting at Pasadena Playhouse in California

1936–1942

Worked as an actor in New York; trained with Tamara Daykarhanova, Andrius Jilinsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, and Vera Soloviova (1937–1939) Joined the American Actors Company (1939)

1940

Wharton Dance produced by American Actors Company

1941

Texas Town produced by American Actors Company

1942

Out of My House produced by American Actors Company Only the Heart produced by American Actors Company at the Provincetown Playhouse, New York

1944

Only the Heart produced on Broadway by American Actors Company; starring Mildred Dunnock and June Walker Wrote briefly for Warner Brothers in Hollywood, California Daisy Lee, a dance play, choreographed and performed by Valerie Bettis Miss Lou, In My Beginning, The Lonely choreographed by Martha Graham; and Goodbye to Richmond produced at the Neighborhood Playhouse

xi

xii

Genesis of an American Playwright

1945

Married Lillian Vallish on June 4, 1945

1945–1949

Moved to Washington, DC; taught at King-Smith School; wrote Homecoming, People in the Show, Themes and Variations, and The Chase

1949

Returned from Washington, DC, to New York City

1950–1951

Barbara Hallie Foote born March 31, 1950 Celebration produced by ANTA (American National Theatre and Academy), New York (1950) Wrote for The Gabby Hayes Show (also called The Quaker Oats Show) Ludie Brooks presented on NBC’s Lamp Unto My Feet (1951)

1952

The Chase produced on Broadway by José Ferrer; starring John Hodiak, Kim Hunter, and Kim Stanley Albert Horton Foote III born November 7, 1952

1952–1964

Television plays presented by Philco-Goodyear Playhouse, Studio One, Gulf Playhouse, Playhouse 90, DuPont Play of the Month, and U.S. Steel Hour include The Travelers (1952), Expectant Relations (1953), The Old Beginning (1953), The Trip to Bountiful (1953), The Death of the Old Man (1953), The Tears of My Sister (1953), The Dancers (1954), The Oil Well (1953), A Young Lady of Property (1953), John Turner Davis (1953), The Midnight Caller (1953), The Dancers (1954), The Shadow of Willie Greer (1954), The Roads to Home (1955), Flight (1956), Drugstore, Sunday Noon (1956), A Member of the Family (1957), Old Man (1960), Tomorrow (1960), The Shape of the River (1960), The Night of the Storm (1961), and The Gambling Heart (1964).

1953

The Trip to Bountiful produced on Broadway by the Theater Guild; starring Lillian Gish, Jo Van Fleet, and Eva Marie Saint

1954

The Traveling Lady produced on Broadway by the Playwrights Producing Company and Roger Stevens; starring Kim Stanley and Lonny Chapman

1955

Walter Vallish Foote born December 4, 1955

1956

Harrison, Texas: Eight Television Plays published by Harcourt Brace

Chronology

xiii

The Midnight Caller and John Turner Davis produced by Sheridan Square Playhouse, New York City Worked on first screenplay Storm Fear for United Artists The Chase, a novel, published by Rinehart and Company Moved from New York City to Nyack, New York 1959

Daisy Brooks Foote born July 3, 1959

1962

To Kill a Mockingbird produced by Alan Pakula and Universal Studios; Foote received an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and the Writers Guild of America Screen Award for his adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel The Trip to Bountiful produced by Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City

1965–1966

Baby, the Rain Must Fall, screenplay based on Foote’s original play The Traveling Lady, produced by Alan Pakula for Columbia Pictures; starring Steve McQueen and Lee Remick

1965

The Chase, screenplay by Lillian Hellman based on novel and original play by Horton Foote; produced by Sam Spiegel and starring Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Angie Dickinson, and Robert Duvall Hurry Sundown, commissioned adaptation of K. G. Glidden’s novel, directed by Otto Preminger Moved from Nyack, New York, to New Hampshire

1968

The Stalking Moon, commissioned screenplay, produced by Warner Brothers Tomorrow, adapted from a short story by William Faulkner, produced by HB Playwrights Foundation, featuring Robert Duvall

1973–1974

Musical adaptation of Gone with the Wind performed in London and Los Angeles Tomorrow, film adaptation, produced by Paul Roebling and Gilbert Pearlman; featuring Robert Duvall and Olga Bellin (1973–1974)

1974–1977

Father, Albert Horton Foote passed away (1974) Mother, Hallie Brooks Foote passed away (1975)

xiv

Genesis of an American Playwright Wrote The Orphans’ Home Cycle, including Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, Courtship, Valentine’s Day, 1918, Cousins, and The Death of Papa A Young Lady of Property produced by HB Playwrights Foundation, New York City (1976) Night Seasons produced by HB Playwrights Foundation, New York City (1977)

1977–1981

Adapted Flannery O’Connor’s The Displaced Person (1977) and William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1980) for the American Short Story series on PBS television Courtship produced by HB Playwrights Foundation (1978) 1918 produced by HB Playwrights Foundation (1979) Valentine’s Day produced by HB Playwrights Foundation (1980) In a Coffin in Egypt produced by HB Playwrights Foundation, starring Sandy Dennis (1980) Became member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre; currently serves on the Executive Board

1982

The Roads to Home, three one-act plays: A Nightingale, The Dearest of Friends, and Spring Dance, presented at Manhattan Punch Line Theatre, New York City The Old Friends produced by HB Playwrights Foundation The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees and Blind Date performed at Loft Theatre, Los Angeles, California

1983

Tender Mercies, starring Robert Duvall and directed by Bruce Beresford, garnered an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, a Writers Guild of America Award, and a Christopher Award for Horton Foote as well as an Academy Award for Best Actor for Robert Duvall Cousins produced by Loft Theatre, Los Angeles Keeping On: A Drama of Life in a Mill Town, teleplay produced for PBS’s American Playhouse

1984

Courtship produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville

1985

Beginning of independent film production

Chronology

xv

1918, original screenplay based on The Orphans’ Home Cycle, released starring Hallie Foote, William Converse-Roberts, and Matthew Broderick; film shown at the Taormina Festival in Italy The Trip to Bountiful, screenplay based on Foote’s play, released, starring Geraldine Page who won the Academy Award for Best Actress; Foote and Page both won Independent Film Awards; Foote nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay and an award from the Writers Guild of America The Road to the Graveyard, a one-act play, produced by the Ensemble Studio Theatre Blind Date, The One-Armed Man, and The Prisoner’s Song produced by HB Playwrights Foundation Received Ensemble Studio Theatre Founders Award for contributions to the American Theatre 1986

On Valentine’s Day, original screenplay based on The Orphans’ Home Cycle play, released starring Hallie Foote, Matthew Broderick, and William Converse-Roberts; official American entry in the Venice Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, and the U.S. Film Festival Courtship, screenplay based on The Orphans’ Home Cycle play, released starring Hallie Foote, William Converse-Roberts, and Amanda Plummer Blind Date presented at Ensemble Studio Theatre; included in The Best Short Plays of 1988–89 The Widow Claire presented off Broadway at Circle in the Square Theatre, New York; included in The Best Plays of 1986–87 Lily Dale presented off Broadway at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, New York The Trip to Bountiful shown at the Edinburgh Festival in August

1987

The Story of a Marriage, a five-part series based on Courtship, Valentine’s Day, and 1918, produced by PBS television for American Playhouse Foote received Compostela Award, Brooklyn, New York Foote’s films honored at the Galveston Film Festival, Galveston, Texas (1987–1988) Courtship, Valentine’s Day, and 1918, three plays in The Orphans’ Home Cycle, published

xvi 1988

Genesis of an American Playwright The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees produced by Ensemble Studio Theatre The Habitation of Dragons premiered at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre, directed by Horton Foote and featuring Marco St. John and Hallie Foote Foote elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, and The Widow Claire, all part of The Orphans’ Home Cycle, published

1989

Dividing the Estate presented at McCarter Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey Foote received the William Inge Lifetime Achievement Award, Independence, Kansas Received the Evelyn Burkey Award by Writers Guild of America East Received the Dickinson College Arts Award The complete The Orphans’ Home Cycle published by Grove Press Screenplays, Tender Mercies, The Trip to Bountiful, and To Kill a Mockingbird, published by Grove Press in a single volume Selected One-Act Plays of Horton Foote published by Southern Methodist University Press, edited by Gerald C. Wood

1990

Convicts, screenplay based on The Orphans’ Home Cycle play, produced starring Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones Talking Pictures premiered at the Asolo Performing Arts Center in Sarasota, Florida (performed at Stages Theatre in Houston, Texas in 1991) A celebration of Horton Foote’s works for theater, film, and television held, including a production of Dividing the Estate, at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival The Trip to Bountiful performed by A.D. Players, Houston, Texas and Zachary Scott Theatre, Austin, Texas The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees published in The Best American Short Plays and presented at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York, starring Lois Smith and Horton Foote, Jr.

1991

Of Mice and Men, film adaptation of novel by John Steinbeck, is released starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich

Chronology

xvii

The Trip to Bountiful presented by Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky, and New Harmony Theatre, Indiana Talking Pictures presented by Stages Theatre, Houston, Texas Dividing the Estate presented at Roger Stevens Theatre, Winston Salem, North Carolina Received the Alley Theatre Award, Houston, Texas Received Headliner’s Club Award, Austin, Texas 1992

Habitation of Dragons, TNT teleplay for Steven Spielberg Productions The Roads to Home produced by Lambs Theatre, New York The Trip to Bountiful presented at a theater festival in Perth, Australia. Convicts, Courtship, and 1918 presented by A.C.T. Theatre (San Francisco) as part of “A Great Day with Horton Foote” Celebration Torch of Hope Award, Barbara Barondess Theatre Lab Alliance, New York Lillian Vallish Foote passed away in August

1993

Night Seasons produced by American Stage Company, Teaneck, New Jersey The Trip to Bountiful presented at TheatreFest, Upper Montclair, New Jersey and The Phoenix Theatre Company, Purchase, New York Three Trips to Bountiful, edited by Barbara Moore and David G. Yellin, published by Southern Methodist University Press Four New Plays, including Habitation of Dragons, Night Seasons, Dividing the Estate, and Talking Pictures, published by Smith and Kraus Laurel Award, Writers Guild of America West, Beverly Hills, California The Widow Claire included in The Best American Plays of 1983–92

1994–1995

Talking Pictures (September 1994), Night Seasons (November 1994), The Young Man from Atlanta (January 1995), and Laura Dennis (March 1995) were produced by Signature Theatre, New York

xviii

Genesis of an American Playwright Brigham Young University Horton Foote Festival of films and plays, Provo, Utah (Spring 1995) Received Lontinkle Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, Dallas, Texas (1995) Received Lucille Lortel Award, New York (1995) Received Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Young Man from Atlanta (1995) The Young Man from Atlanta produced by Huntington Theatre, Boston, and Alley Theatre, Houston, directed by Peter Masterson, starring Ralph Waite and Carlin Glynn (1995) Received Academy Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters (May 17, 1995) Received Outer Critics Circle Special Achievement Award for Signature Theatre plays (May 26, 1995) Received Lifetime Achievement Award at the Heartland Film Festival, Indianapolis, Indiana Tender Mercies published in The Best American Screenplays of 1994–95 The Young Man from Atlanta published in The Best Plays of 1994–95

1996

Lily Dale, film version of The Orphans’ Home Cycle play, presented on Showtime on June 9 starring Mary Stuart Masterson, Sam Shepard, and Stockard Channing Inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame (January 22, 1996) Collected Plays, Volume II, including The Trip to Bountiful, The Chase, The Traveling Lady, and The Roads to Home, published by Smith and Kraus

1997

The Young Man from Atlanta restaged in January by Robert Falls, with Shirley Knight and Rip Torn, for Goodman Theatre, Chicago, and in March at the Longacre Theatre, New York The Death of Papa produced by Playmakers Repertory Theatre, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; directed by Michael Wilson, and starring Ellen Burstyn, Matthew Broderick, Polly Holliday, and Hallie Foote Alone, original teleplay, presented on Showtime, and starring Hume Cronyn, James Earl Jones, Piper Laurie, Frederick Forest, Shelly Duvall, and Hallie Foote

Chronology

xix

Old Man, adaptation of William Faulkner’s short story, produced by CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame; starring Jeanne Tripplehorn and Arliss Howard Vernon Early, radio broadcast for Chicago Theatre on the Air, starring Mary Beth Fisher, Frederick Forrest, and Hallie Foote Foote received the Dallas/Ft.Worth Film Critics Association Lone Star Film and Best Teleplay Award for Lily Dale Received Humanitas Award for adaptation of Old Man (July 9, 1997) Telluride Film Festival, Telluride, Colorado Received Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries or a Special and the Christopher Award for adaptation of William Faulkner’s Old Man 1998

A Coffin in Egypt produced by Bay Street Theater Festival, Sag Harbor, New York; directed by Leonard Foglia, starring Glynis Johns Vernon Early produced by Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Montgomery, Alabama; directed by Charles Towers and starring Jill Tanner and Philip Pleasants Collected Works, Volume III, including The Day Emily Married, Tomorrow, A Coffin in Egypt, Laura Dennis, Vernon Early, and Getting Frankie Married–And Afterwards, published by Smith and Kraus Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters as a member in the department of Literature Received the Gold Medal for Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his body of work Received the RCA Crystal Heart, Career Achievement Award, Heartland Film Festival

1999

The Death of Papa produced by Hartford Stage, Hartford, Connecticut; directed by Michael Wilson, starring Jean Stapleton, Dana Ivey, Andrew McCarthy, Frankie Munis, Hallie Foote, and Devon Abner Received the Ian McLellan Hunter Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Writers Guild of America, East Farewell—A Memoir of a Texas Childhood published by Scribners Press (June) Received the Bookend Award from the Texas Book Festival for lifetime contribution to Texas Letters, Austin, Texas (November)

xx 2000

Genesis of an American Playwright The Last of the Thorntons produced by Signature Theatre, New York, starring Hallie Foote, Estelle Parsons, Jen Jones, Mason Adams, and Michael Hadge Awarded doctoral degree of letters from the University of Hartford Received the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama to a Master American Dramatist (May) Received the Last Frontier Playwrights Award from the Eighth Annual Edward Albee Theatre Conference, Valdez, Alaska (June) Received New York State Governor’s Arts Award, New York State Council of the Arts (November) Received National Medal of Arts Award given by President Bill Clinton in Washington, DC (December) Three Screenplays by Horton Foote, including The Trip to Bountiful, Tender Mercies, and To Kill a Mockingbird, published by Grove Press

2001

The Carpetbagger’s Children produced by the Alley Theatre, Houston, Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, and Hartford Stage, starring Hallie Foote, Jean Stapleton, and Roberta Maxwell Beginnings: A Memoir published by Scribners Press (November) Foote received Texas Medal of Literary Arts Award given by the Texas Cultural Trust Council (Austin) Foote received the Michaela O’Harra Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Theater by New Dramatists Alumni

2002

The Actor produced at the Royal National Theatre, London, England The Carpetbagger’s Children presented at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, Lincoln Center Theatre, starring Hallie Foote, Jean Stapleton, and Roberta Maxwell Getting Frankie Married—And Afterwards produced by South Coast Repertory Theatre; directed by Martin Benson; starring Nan Martin and Juliana Donald The Prisoner’s Song presented at the Ensemble Studio Theatre; directed by Harris Yulin, the production starred Mary Catherine Garrison, Tim Guinee, Marceline Hugot, and Michael Moran Received Special Achievement in Screenplay Writing Award presented by the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration (March)

Chronology

xxi

Received American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Award for The Carpetbagger’s Children; presented by the American Theatre Critics Association (April) Named “Visiting Distinguished Dramatist” by Baylor University, Waco, Texas and joined Theater Arts faculty (October) 2003

The Actor presented at the ACT Conservatory, San Francisco The 50th Anniversary Production of The Trip to Bountiful presented by Hartford Stage and Alley Theatre; directed by Michael Wilson and starring Dee Maaske, Hallie Foote, and Devon Abner Received The Texas Film Hall of Fame Award given by the Austin Film Society, Austin, Texas (March 7) Received Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Southern Methodist University, Dallas (May 17); Mr. Foote has also received Honorary Doctorate degrees from Drew University, Austin College, The American Film Institute, Spalding University, and University of the South Awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers (May) Named Moderator of the Playwrights Directors Unit at the Actors Studio, New York (September)

Introduction Believe it or not, the great writer Horton Foote got his education at Wharton— but not at the Business School. He grew up in the small town of Wharton, Texas. His work is rooted in the tales, the troubles, the heartbreak, and the hopes of all he heard and saw there. As a young man, he left Wharton to become an actor and soon discovered the easiest way to get good roles was to write the plays yourself. He has not stopped since. Among other things, he did a magnificent job of adapting Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird for the silver screen and of writing his wonderful The Trip to Bountiful and so many other tales of family, community, and the triumph of the human spirit . . . Today, we honor him for his lifetime of artistic achievement and excellence. President Clinton, December 20, 2000

On December 20, 2000, President Bill Clinton conferred the National Medal of Arts on Texas dramatist Horton Foote. In his speech, Clinton enumerated Foote’s many honors, including two Academy Awards, an Emmy, a Pulitzer Prize, the William Inge Lifetime Achievement Award, the Screen Laurel Award from the Writers Guild of America, and his induction into both the Theater Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The president declared that Horton Foote’s six-decade-long, award-winning career established him as an unquestioned master of American drama. Indeed, Horton Foote has enjoyed a remarkable career. Since 1939, when he penned his first play Wharton Dance, he has been writing what he calls “personal dramas,” timeless tales of family, home, and the mysterious resilience of the human spirit. Foote has written more than one hundred works for theater, television, and film, and he has been equally successful in all three mediums—a record of variety and productivity unmatched by any other American writer. The list of his plays and screenplays is staggering and includes such notable works as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Trip to Bountiful, The Chase, The Traveling Lady, Tender Mercies, The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Talking Pictures, The Road to the Graveyard, The Roads to Home, The Habitation of Dragons, Tomorrow, Alone, Night Seasons, Laura Dennis, Dividing the Estate, Vernon Early, and The Young Man from Atlanta, for which he won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. These and numerous other works are illustrative of the prestigious career that President Clinton chose to honor in 2000, and 1

2

Genesis of an American Playwright

Foote has not stopped writing since receiving the National Medal of Arts. In January 2001, his play The Last of the Thorntons received its world premiere at New York’s Signature Theatre, and The Carpetbagger’s Children premiered at Houston’s Alley Theatre before traveling to the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, the Hartford Stage in Connecticut, and the Lincoln Center in New York. In 2002, Foote’s Getting Frankie Married—and Afterwards premiered at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in California, and his one-act play The Actor premiered at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco before being performed at the Royal National Theatre in London. In 2003, the Hartford Stage and the Alley Theatre presented the fiftieth anniversary production of The Trip to Bountiful. Undeniably, Horton Foote has enriched and continues to enrich American culture with his truthful examinations of the human condition. Although his reputation will forever rest on his significant achievements as a dramatist, he has also produced an extraordinary body of nonfiction prose, including two fascinating memoirs: Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood (1999) and Beginnings (2001). He has also written more than twenty-five essays, dating from 1944 to the present. Like his memoirs, this collection of essays and lectures offers both a rare glimpse of the private man behind the renowned public figure and a vibrant picture of an artist who has been called a “national treasure” and “America’s greatest playwright.” Few American dramatists have written so extensively about their life and work as Horton Foote, and none have done so with such honesty and skill. In this collection of Mr. Foote’s writings, he provides a look back at his Texas childhood during the Depression and recalls significant events within his sixty-year career. He reflects upon his many influences (both personal and literary), upon what it means to be a Southern writer, and upon his own creative process. He sheds light upon the rewards of independent filmmaking, the difficulties of adaptation, and the joys and frustrations of writing for stage and screen. He speaks candidly about the changing roles of directors, actors, and playwrights and the evolution of contemporary theater and film. Collectively, these essays represent the single most important statement on the writer’s moral and social convictions, his dramatic craftsmanship, and his ideas about the future of the American theater. While preserving the memories of our nation’s most beloved dramatist, this collection chronicles the history of the American theater as seen through the eyes of a remarkable artist and offers a unique look at the making of an American playwright. Horton Foote and I have collaborated to select and assemble this collection. Several of the essays and lectures included in the collection, “Dance and Broadway,” “On First Dramatizing Faulkner,” “Writing for Film,” “The Trip to Paradise,” “Sometimes The One-Act Play Says It All,” and “Introduction

Introduction

3

to The Young Man From Atlanta,” have been previously published in studies dealing with a particular aspect of Foote’s work or in a newspaper or magazine. Foote personally contributed three previously unpublished essays, “Things Have Ends and Beginnings,” “Willa Cather,” and “How To and How Not To: Some Lessons Learned along the Way,” for this collection. The remainder of the essays and lectures in this book, also previously unpublished, are housed in the Horton Foote Collection at the DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University. Because of the scattered locations of this material, it has been difficult for anyone to see it as a sustained and comprehensive commentary on Foote’s work and career. Therefore, it seemed imperative that someone bring together these essays and lectures under a single cover with a mind toward familiarizing Foote scholars and enthusiasts with the work. As editor, I have tried to remain as faithful as possible to the author’s original writing. At Foote’s request, I have removed from the essays as many repetitive comments as possible, trying hard not to affect reader comprehension or the spirit of the original text. I have also titled a previously unnamed lecture “Advice to Young Playwrights,” and I have changed the title of “Richmond, USA.” to “Harrison, USA,” because the playwright felt that the original title might confuse readers who are not familiar with the mythic town of Harrison. I have divided the essays and lectures into five chapters: “Genesis of a Playwright,” “On Being a Southern Writer,” “Writing for the Stage,” “Writing for the Screen,” and “Thoughts on the American Theater,” because each section represents to me a unique and important aspect of Foote’s career and art. With few exceptions, the essays and lectures are arranged chronologically within each chapter. Because so much of Foote’s artistry has been shaped by his formative years, it seemed logical that the book should begin with three autobiographical essays that trace his childhood in Texas, his years as an actor in California and New York, and his apprenticeship with the American Actors Company. These three essays, “Seeing and Imagining,” “Pasadena and Beyond,” and “Learning to Write,” are precursors of Foote’s published memoirs; and so, in effect, this book takes up where Farewell and Beginnings left off. The title of the book, Genesis of an American Playwright, also reflects the name the playwright gave these three essays when he first presented them as lectures at Louisiana State University in the spring of 1989. Reading Horton Foote’s essays and lectures with an eye toward selecting those that best represent the writer’s remarkable career, I have been struck time and again by his devotion to family and home, by the intensity and clarity of his dramatic vision, and by his commitment to the American theater. In the first two chapters of this collection, Foote turns to the actual people, community, and events that lie behind his plays. Born in 1916, in the small Gulf Coast town of Wharton, Texas, Horton Foote grew up surrounded

4

Genesis of an American Playwright

by a large and loving family of gifted storytellers. At a very young age, he was fascinated by their tales of the past, of bravery and loss, individual courage, undaunted family devotion, and of relatives and friends who displayed extraordinary determination or sacrifice. From his family, especially his mother and father, Foote learned about the importance of place, about the sense of belonging to a noble tradition, and about the virtues by which to live—respect, loyalty, and dignity. Foote remembers that most of the stories were about friends and ancestors who had lived before his time, and yet, these people and events became as real to him as if he had lived among them. He admits in “Seeing and Imagining” that as a child he was spared nothing: “I was never told to leave the room no matter how gruesome or unhappy the tale and so, early on I learned to accept the tragic events as part of life.” The spirit of his ancestors has haunted him throughout his life, and their stories have provided the foundation for his artistry. In Wharton, Foote also witnessed the harsh realities of alcoholism, poverty, racism, injustice, and depression that have provided much of the background for his plays and films. He heard the “found music,” the ballads and hymns, that weave a tapestry through his dramas, and he discovered the simple, sparse, and unadorned Texas speech that is the basis for his authentic dialogue. He also saw the cotton fields, the pecan trees, the cemeteries, and the courthouse square—the images of his youth that move poignantly through his work. Some of Foote’s most vivid memories are of riding with his grandfather to check on his cotton farms. In his essay, “The Trip to Paradise,” Foote recalls that to get to the farms they would pass tiny dwindling towns, which had once bustled with the sounds of community life but were, by then, only deserted landscapes with no sign of buildings or houses. Here in this lovely agricultural region, were picturesque scenes and country people who later, in fictional representation, were to become the symbols of the memories of Foote’s childhood surroundings. In remembering this fertile community, he would find the original towns of Columbus, Richmond, Egypt, and other places of his plays. In his essay, “Wharton, Then and Now,” Foote admits that much has changed in his hometown over the years. The town of his youth has vanished, but it remains very much alive in Foote’s memory. Today, some seventy years after leaving his hometown to pursue a career in the theater, Horton Foote still clings to Wharton as a sacred place of creativity and renewal. He returns as often as possible to the house in which he grew up and which he now owns. Horton Foote has been called America’s Chekhov and his work has often been compared to that of other Southerners such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams because of its emphasis on the past, its attachment to place and family, and its awareness of the impact of religion

Introduction

5

and spirituality upon society. Gerald Wood has pointed out that much like fellow Texan Katherine Anne Porter, Horton Foote writes “real fiction,” works that consist of “thousands of things that did happen to living human beings in a certain part of the country at a certain time . . . things that are still remembered by others as single incidents.” However, while Foote’s work depends upon the people, voices, and incidents of a particular place and time, he is not merely a local colorist nor is he sentimental about life in a small town. In his essay, “The Artist as Mythmaker,” Foote declares that an artist must be “a truth searcher,” and that to arrive at that truth he must fashion the history and stories of his region into plays with both personal and universal resonance. Gerald Wood explains that Foote “uses his Wharton materials to create the Harrison, Texas, of his imagination.” In order to meet the demands of his fictional place, Wood adds, Foote “redesigns real stories so that they take the shape and nature of myth. He crafts them into tales of going away and coming home, grief and rebirth, despair and healing.” In her book, Orphans’ Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote, Laurin Porter states that Foote’s stories tap into what Flannery O’Connor calls “mythic dimensions,” a story “which belongs to everybody, in which everybody is able to recognize the hand of God and its descent.” Porter goes on to say that “Foote’s voice is that not just of the South, but of America at large. In the tradition of American writers before him, he explores the contradictions of self-reliance and mutual dependency, but with a twentieth-century understanding of alienation and loss of faith, of uncertainty and despair.” Social commentator Marian Burkhart declares that “Foote has assessed American character, American myth, and American ambiance more accurately than just about any other figure in the American theater,” and director Robert Ellermann concludes: “Horton Foote is an artist of the rarest form of theater. He is a dramatic poet: each play is the experience which formed it . . . Horton Foote is our mystic in the theater.” This is extremely high praise for a man who began his career without any thought of becoming a playwright. Foote explains in “Seeing and Imagining” that when he was eleven years old he got a call to become an actor: “Now, as far as I know, there had never been any actors in that town, and certainly not in my family. Nor had I ever known an actor, except for seeing some once a year when the tent show came to town and the actors came to trade in my father’s store. I had just awakened one day with the sure knowledge that I wanted to be an actor, furthermore, that I was going to be an actor. Of that, I had not the slightest doubt.” Shortly thereafter, Foote announced his call to his startled parents and he expressed his desire to attend professional acting school in New York. However, his parents were reluctant to let him take such a step. They decided that

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Genesis of an American Playwright

he would attend the Pasadena Playhouse in California, not because the school offered superior training but because Pasadena was “a more wholesome atmosphere for a young man away from his family for the first time.” In “Pasadena and Beyond,” Foote recalls the fear and excitement he felt leaving home for the first time at age sixteen. He remembers his experiences at the Pasadena Playhouse, the friends he made there, and the many classes he took at the school, classes in acting, scene design, and stage speech to cure himself of his embarrassing Southern dialect. Foote also recalls seeing Eva LeGallienne in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles. This was Foote’s first encounter with modern theatrical Realism, and he admits that he was so moved by her performance that afterwards he was compelled to seek his fortune in New York City: “I have seen many plays and many fine productions since, but none have made the kind of lasting impression on me that these first Ibsen plays did.” In New York, Foote sought acting jobs and enrolled at the School for the Stage where he worked with Tamara Daykarhanova, Vera Soloviova, and Andrius Jilinsky from 1937–1939. He was unaware of it at the time but these Russian masters, all trained by Constantine Stanislavsky, taught him his first lessons about playwriting. Foote recalls that their approach to acting was “unconventional, more deeply felt, more psychologically detailed, and more emotional” than anything he had ever experienced. Foote learned the elements of play structure and how to recognize the given circumstances of characters, their wants, and the through-line of a play. Most importantly, his training at the school gave him a deep respect for playwrights and an understanding of the collaborative nature of the theater. He developed a special confidence in the impact that good acting can have on drama, a sense that continues to influence his writing. Foote’s ear for authentic language and his ability to create fully developed characters has endeared him to many of America’s most distinguished actors such as Kim Stanley, Robert Duvall, Geraldine Page, and the late Gregory Peck. Horton Foote is an actor’s writer; he gives his art over to the actor and then trusts the actor’s ability to connect with the character and with the author’s sense of truth. Reynolds Price has called Foote the “supreme musician among our great American playwrights.” “More even than Tennessee Williams,” Price declares, “Foote’s method (and his dilemma) is that of the composer. His words are black notes on a white page—all but abstract signals to the minds of actors and audience.” In “Learning to Write,” Foote recounts his association with the American Actors Company, his collaboration with such legendary artists as Mary Hunter, Tennessee Williams, Agnes DeMille, Martha Graham, and Valerie Bettis, and how he finally came to recognize his true vocation. Foote wrote his first play, Wharton Dance, in 1939 at age twenty-three, soon after joining the

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7

American Actors Company, an ensemble company devoted to producing plays by American playwrights. In “How To and How Not To: Some Lessons Learned along the Way,” Foote explains that the members of the American Actors Company were from different regions of America, and they “attempted through a series of improvisations to show each other something of the particular sections from which [they] came.” Foote performed several improvisations about his life in Texas. Agnes DeMille saw his performance and suggested that he use some of the material he had created in a play. Following her suggestion, Foote wrote a one-act play, Wharton Dance, with a lead role for himself. In 1940, the American Actors Company produced the work along with one-acts by Paul Green and Thornton Wilder. Robert Coleman, a critic for The New York Mirror, came to see the play and praised the production. Suddenly, Foote found himself being hailed as a “promising new playwright” even though he knew little or nothing about writing plays. He had not admitted to himself that he wanted to be a writer; but when the American Actors Company requested that he write a three-act play, he accepted the challenge. Later, he revealed that he began to feel “a certain security” about accomplishing the task before him, a security he had never felt as an actor. Mysteriously, he had found his true calling. His maturity as a playwright would require years of practice, but his association with the American Actors Company provided a good portion of the necessary apprenticeship for the writer. Foote’s second play, Texas Town, was performed at the Humphrey Weidman Studio Theater in 1940. There, Foote met Doris Humphrey and they became friends. Later, he met and worked with other choreographers and musicians such as Pearl Primus, Valerie Bettis, Bernardo Segall, Louis Horst, and the great Martha Graham. Foote became fascinated by the seriousness of dance as an art form; and for a while, he followed Bettis’s advice to concentrate on writing plays for a nonrealistic, lyric theater that boldly used the elements of dance, words, and music. In 1944, Louis Horst asked Foote to write a series of commentaries on the state of modern dance in New York for his magazine Dance Observer. At age twenty-eight, Foote wrote “Dance and Broadway” at a time when he was experimenting with dramatic form and searching for a distinctly personal writing style that would convey the stories of his family and the world of his youth. In the essay, Foote reveals himself as a young, confident critic of musical theater and a writer with a deep respect for dancers and their storytelling talents. During the forties, Foote wrote several more dramas including Out of My House (1941) and Only the Heart, first performed by the American Actors Company in 1942 and later produced on Broadway in 1944. He also wrote a series of dance plays: Daisy Lee (choreographed and danced by Valerie Bettis

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Genesis of an American Playwright

in 1944), The Lonely (1944), and Goodbye to Richmond (1944), both choreographed by Martha Graham. Then, in 1945, he and his wife Lillian joined Bettis and director Vincent Donehue in forming a new theater company called Production Incorporated at the King-Smith School in Washington, DC. There, Foote was able to escape the commercial pressures of New York and to write plays that incorporated what he had learned from his dancer friends. From 1945 to 1949, he wrote no less than four new plays, including Homecoming, People in the Show, The Return, and Themes and Variations. The years spent at the King-Smith School were extremely productive; but by 1949, Foote realized that he had given enough time and energy to experimentation. He decided to rid his work of all the theatrical trappings, the score, and choreography with which he had surrounded his most recent plays. He wanted to develop a simpler, more realistic style of writing. However, it was not until he began to study the works of Texas writer Katherine Anne Porter that he started to develop that style. Before leaving New York for Washington, DC, Foote had been introduced to Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. After reading the story, Foote was intrigued by the writer’s ability to transform the memories of her past into a remarkable lyrical but realistic prose form. He immediately recognized the similarities between himself and Porter and was influenced not only by her technique but also by the territory in which she worked. Like Porter, Foote was drawn to the kind of poetic but true-to-life language and symbolic imagery of his native region, and he was interested, as was Porter, in depicting the mysterious realities of the human experience. In “Things Have Ends and Beginnings,” Foote admits that Porter helped him find a way “to use the particulars of time and place without being trapped in the quaintness of regionalism.” “For good or bad,” he admits, “that is the path I have chosen to explore ever since.” Although there are marked differences between the two artists’ work, Katherine Anne Porter continues to influence Horton Foote. In his writings, Foote often refers to her work when trying to explain some aspect of his own creative process. Horton Foote returned to New York in 1949, only to discover that Broadway was experiencing an economic decline. Audiences were dwindling, theaters were closing, the price of tickets was climbing, and Foote found himself struggling to find a place to perform his plays. Then in 1952, his career took an unexpected turn when producer Fred Coe hired him to write original dramas for NBC ’s Television Playhouse. His acceptance of Coe’s offer began one of the most productive periods in the writer’s career. Before the year ended, two of his plays The Travelers and The Old Beginning aired on NBC. By 1954, Foote had contributed ten new teleplays, and by the early sixties, twenty of Foote’s original plays and adaptations had been broadcast. His original works include The Trip to Bountiful, A Young Lady of Property, The Oil

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Well, Expectant Relations, The Death of the Old Man, John Turner Davis, The Tears of My Sister, The Midnight Caller, The Dancers, The Shadow of Willie Greer, The Roads to Home, Flight, Drugstore, Sunday Noon, A Member of the Family, The Night of the Storm, and The Gambling Heart. Foote’s productivity during this period is remarkable, but surprisingly, he never wrote his plays specifically for television. In his 1952 essay, “The Little Box,” Foote admits that television was indeed an exciting and challenging new form with which to work. The camera offered a greater mobility and freedom than the theater, yet there were more limitations of time and setting for television writers, actors, and directors than for theater artists. According to the playwright, however, “all this [did] not really matter because it [was] the content” that made this new technology worthwhile. For Foote, television was simply one more place where he could perform his one-act plays, a form to which he has always been attracted. “As a writer for the theater,” Foote stated, “I often felt that I had to waste a good deal of material that interested me simply because the material did not warrant a fuller treatment for the stage. Now, in the hour-long play, the writer has the opportunity to use just such material, and in a medium that presents this material with great honesty and emotional power” (“Sometimes the One-Act Play Says It All”). Foote’s contributions during the “Golden Age of Television” helped bring about a great respect for television drama. Along with Paddy Chayefsky, Tad Mosel, Gore Vidal, and N. Richard Nash, Horton Foote was recognized as one of the medium’s finest writers, and his work was considered among the very best of the era. His success in television spawned Broadway productions of three of his plays, The Chase (1952), The Trip To Bountiful (1953), and The Traveling Lady (1954), and earned him a reputation as a gifted playwright and adapter of Southern literature. By the time he wrote his essay, “Harrison, Texas,” in 1952, Foote had begun to develop his distinctive writing style and to clarify his dramatic vision: I like to think of my play as a moral and social history of Harrison. I try to choose for my characters problems which are specific to their particular section and yet will have some meaning for the outer world. In my writing of the past, I have concentrated mainly on the problems of the upper and middle classes and the old land-holding aristocracy. Actually, aristocracy as it is known in the rest of the South is just memory kept alive by the great aunts and the old men in Harrison. It did exist and the tradition is kept alive through tales of the past.

During the early sixties, Foote wrote a few more original plays for television but most of his work consisted of adaptations, including two short stories

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Genesis of an American Playwright

by William Faulkner, Old Man (1958) and Tomorrow (1960). Foote explains in his essay “On First Dramatizing Faulkner” that he felt a strong connection to Faulkner’s world. He was so touched by the writer’s depiction of the inexhaustibility of the human spirit that he decided to forge ahead with the two projects. His decision resulted in two of the most stunning adaptations of Faulkner’s work ever to appear on television. After seeing Tomorrow on television, Faulkner offered to share the copyright with Foote, an unheard-ofgesture within the competitive world of television and film. Foote scholar Rebecca Briley has pointed out that Foote’s strength as an adaptor is his ability to recreate “authentic Southern voices” without denying his own distinctive style and themes. “This Southern accent,” she proclaims, “regional in tone and universal in implication, is one of Horton Foote’s many contributions to the history of American filmmaking.” Foote’s talent as a translator of other writers’ work soon caught the attention of Hollywood, and during the sixties he became an active and successful screenwriter. In 1962, Foote’s screenplay of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was rewarded with both the Writer’s Guild Award for Best American Drama and the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Today, more than forty years later, the film is considered one of Foote’s finest literary achievements and is recognized as a classic of American cinema. Robert Mulligan’s sensitive direction and a host of impressive performances, including Gregory Peck’s remarkable portrayal of Atticus Finch, Mary Badham’s highly acclaimed performance as Scout, and Robert Duvall’s stirring film debut as Boo Radley, contributed in large part to the success of the picture. But it was Horton Foote’s ability to transform the disparate elements of Harper Lee’s story into a coherent and remarkably poignant script that elevated To Kill a Mockingbird to an exceptional level of artistic achievement. The success of To Kill a Mockingbird thrust Foote into the Hollywood spotlight, stimulated interest in his own works as potential movies, and established his reputation as a major screenwriter for the rest of the decade. During the next ten years, he worked on all or part of five motion pictures. When the work in film expressed his vision or he felt a kinship to the material, as was the case with To Kill a Mockingbird, Tomorrow, and Baby, the Rain Must Fall, Foote felt inspired and pleased; however, when he accepted commissioned work, such as Hurry Sundown or The Stalking Moon, he found the writing too formulaic and very unrewarding. Foote admits in “Writing for Film” that he grew to hate the term “writer for hire,” and after a disappointing experience with the movie The Chase (adapted to the screen by Lillian Hellman), he decided never again to sell his work to a Hollywood studio and never to work on a screenplay other than his own.

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To make matters worse, from the mid-sixties to the late seventies Foote’s true love, the theater, was not interested in his style of drama. During that time of political and racial unrest, realistic family plays gave way to new forms of theatrical expression such as absurdism, guerrilla theater, nudity, and rhetorical protest against the war in Vietnam. Although Foote was interested in these changes, he did not feel that he really belonged in this environment. So, Foote moved his family to the New Hampshire woods where from 1974 to 1977, following the death of his parents, he began writing the nine plays that would become his personal masterpiece The Orphans’ Home Cycle: Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, Courtship, The Widow Claire, Valentine’s Day, 1918, Cousins, and The Death of Papa. Based on the lives of his mother and father, these plays form a moral and social history of Gulf Coast Texas from 1902 to 1928. In his essay, “The Orphans’ Home Cycle Lecture,” Foote reconstructs an exact history of the cycle’s creation and discusses the inspiration behind the work that, in the words of Reynolds Price, stands “near the center of our largest American dramatic achievements.” Foote explains that The Orphans’ Home Cycle was inspired in large part by the early life experiences of his father: the death of his father, abandonment by his mother, and his subsequent search for a family and home. According to Foote, he took the title The Orphans’ Home Cycle from a poem by Marianne Moore, “In Distrust of Merits.” He explains that he adopted the phrase “orphans’ home,” because it “seemed very apt that this young man, who in a sense is looking for a home and looking for roots, always felt an orphan and always felt abandoned by his mother.” The cycle, Foote adds “is about change, unexpected, unasked for, unwanted but to be faced and dealt with or else we sink into despair or a hopeless longing for a life that is gone.” Above all else, The Orphans’ Home is an evocative and imaginative record of a place and time that unfortunately has vanished from the American consciousness. In writing the plays, Foote has preserved for us a vivid portrait of life in small town America while reminding us of the importance of family, community, and religious faith in our turbulent and chaotic world. Foote’s compassionate depiction of small-town family relationships is his unique terrain and his greatest contribution to American drama. By the late nineteen-seventies and eighties, Horton Foote had written more dramas than any time since the early fifties, when he was a writer of television scripts. He adapted two short stories for PBS: Flannery O’Connor’s The Displaced Person (1977) and William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1980). He also penned more than ten new plays, In a Coffin in Egypt, The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees, Blind Date, The Roads to Home, The One-Armed Man, The Prisoner’s Song, Night Seasons, Pilgrims, The Old Friends, and The

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Genesis of an American Playwright

Habitation of Dragons, which were later produced by such professional groups as the Loft Theatre, the Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Manhattan Punch Line Theatre, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Alley Theatre. Foote eventually returned to the New York stage in 1978 to direct Courtship, 1918, and Valentine’s Day at Herbert Berghof ’s Playwrights Foundation on Bank Street. Berghof ’s support during this time was significant in sparking a revival of interest in Foote’s work. In his memorial tribute to Herbert Berghof, Foote explains: “I worked closely with Herbert for a number of years at The Playwrights Foundation. He directed four of my plays there and produced a number of others. He gave me a theatre home and rekindled my faith in theater.” Berghof directed A Young Lady of Property (1976), Night Seasons (1977), In a Coffin in Egypt (1980), and The Old Friends (1982), but his most important contribution to Foote’s career was a 1968 landmark production of Tomorrow, which inspired a film version featuring Olga Bellin and Robert Duvall. Produced in 1973 by Paul Roebling and Gilbert Pearlman and shot on location in Tupelo, Mississippi, Tomorrow is the most authentic translation of a Faulkner work to have ever appeared on screen. When asked about his faithful rendition of Faulkner’s work, Foote said: “I think Hollywood has so often failed with Faulkner because they insisted on improving him, for whatever reasons: trying to make him more palatable, more popular, more commercial. I think it would be well for any dramatist to give up this approach. Faulkner can be dramatized. He can’t be improved” (“On First Dramatizing Faulkner”). Foote had a wonderful time filming Tomorrow; he helped with casting, and he was on the set and in the editing room constantly. Because of his experience, Foote felt inspired once again by collaborative film work. In 1979, Foote began writing Tender Mercies, an original screenplay about a down-and-out country western singer and his efforts to piece his life back together following the death of his daughter. The film, which starred Robert Duvall, Tess Harper, Betty Buckley, Wilford Brimley, Ellen Barkin, and Allan Hubbard, garnered Foote his second Academy Award in 1983 and catapulted him into the most active period of his professional life at age sixty-seven. He followed Tender Mercies with The Trip to Bountiful in 1985, a motion picture in which Geraldine Page became the third actor to win an Oscar in a Foote screenplay. After his success with Tender Mercies and The Trip to Bountiful, for which he received his third Academy Award nomination, Foote and his wife Lillian decided to test the waters of independent filmmaking. In 1984, they formed their own production company for the purpose of bringing to the screen The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Foote’s nine play collection. Foote explains in “The McDermott Lecture” that they raised a modest budget of $1.8 million, and began filming in Waxahachie, Texas, a small town near Dallas.

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Although he has not yet reached his goal of filming all nine plays, his vision remains unwavering. To date, Foote has filmed five of the plays, Convicts, Lily Dale, 1918, Valentine’s Day, and Courtship, and he has recently begun plans to film his sixth play, The Widow Claire, which legendary filmmaker Robert Altman plans to direct. Horton Foote’s commitment to independent filmmaking not only inspired other filmmakers during the 1980s, but his authentic, character-based movies have continued to serve as viable alternatives to the cinematic flash and fast-paced action of many Hollywood films. During the 1990s, the tempo of Horton Foote’s career quickened once more with a steady succession of television adaptations, screenplays, and award-winning dramas. His adaptation of Old Man for CBS’s Hallmark Hall of Fame earned him an Emmy Award in 1997, thirty-seven years after his initial adaptation of the short story had garnered a similar nomination. Foote also wrote and adapted other works for television such as The Story of a Marriage (1987), The Habitation of Dragons (1992), and Alone (1997). These productions proved that television can still provide a unique arena for Foote’s skillfully crafted plays. Horton Foote’s most significant achievement during the 1990s was The Young Man from Atlanta, which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play, which tells the story of a middle-aged couple faced with the suicide of their only son, premiered at the Signature Theatre, an off-Broadway company founded by James Houghton and dedicated to presenting a season of plays by a single playwright. Directed by Peter Masterson and starring Carlin Glynn and Ralph Waite, the play ran for twenty-six performances before moving on to the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and ultimately, to Broadway. The Signature Theatre season consisted of The Young Man from Atlanta, Talking Pictures, Laura Dennis, and Night Seasons, which was directed by the playwright. In his “Introduction to The Young Man from Atlanta,” Foote admits that this was a busy and happy time for him “because [he] was encouraged to be present at all casting sessions, to go to rehearsals, and to attend as many performances as [he] could.” “I’ve never seen months go by quite so fast,” he concludes. Although the nineties were very productive years for Foote, they also included moments of loss and immense grief. In August 1992, Lillian Foote passed away in Princeton, New Jersey, and was buried in Wharton, Texas, the town she had come to call home. Lillian’s death was a devastating blow to Foote, who for almost fifty years had depended upon her unwavering love and devotion. In a recent interview, Foote admitted to me that Lillian’s passing was a “tremendous loss, one that is still difficult to accept.” In recent years, Horton Foote has been busy traveling the country, lecturing, appearing at the many film and drama festivals dedicated to his work, supporting young writers and artists, receiving numerous honors and awards,

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and, of course, writing and producing new plays of his own such as The Last of the Thorntons (2001), The Carpetbagger’s Children (2001), and The Actor (2002). In spite of career frustrations, personal misfortunes, and grief, Foote, like so many of his characters, has managed to persevere somehow and prosper. He has succeeded in a competitive business that seldom rewards honesty and integrity; and through it all, he has remained the very model of kindness and generosity. Those who have worked with him admire him as both a writer of immense talent and a sensitive and loyal friend. He is a true master of American drama and a generous man who is both loved and revered. For more than sixty years, Horton Foote has remained true to his quest: to depict by poetic means the particular reality and the universal meaningfulness of a small Southern town and its people. Now at eighty-seven years of age, with more than thirty-seven teleplays, thirty-eight screenplays, and sixty dramas to his credit, Foote continues to explore the roots of courage in the face of devastating loss and misfortune. In The Actor, the writer’s most autobiographical play to date, Foote has written a poignant love poem to his family that suggests the sources of his remarkably resilient career. As young Horace, Jr. prepares to leave his family to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, he speaks directly to the audience: Daddy gave me my bus ticket and told me to be careful of pickpockets, and I said I would. He gave me a twenty dollar bill then, which he said I should save in case of an emergency of some kind came up. I thanked him and mother began crying then and said they were going to miss me. I said I would miss them too. Daddy said they were both very proud of me and felt I would have a wonderful success, but to always remember that if things didn’t work out in California or any other place, I could always come back to my home and be welcomed and there would be a place for me to work in his store. I thanked him for telling me that. I never did go back during their lifetime except on visits, though, many a time when I was lonely and discouraged I wanted to. But then I remembered about my call and kept on going somehow.

Horton Foote is still very much a man in motion, constantly writing new works and exploring new ideas about life in his hometown of Wharton, Texas. As a final note, this collection of essays and lectures has been prepared with the belief that Horton Foote’s commentaries on writing, film, and theater should be more accessible to interested readers than they have been in the past. As a continuing expression of the life and career of a major American dramatist, they represent a significant contribution to the literature of our time. The collection is of great historical significance to the citizens of Texas,

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to the American theater community, and to anyone interested in television or cinema, from the most casual viewers to the more serious teachers and scholars of literature and drama. It should also be obvious that in spite of his established position as a master of American drama, Horton Foote continues to be fully engaged and committed to the highest standards of his art and craft. As he admits in Chapter 5, “Thoughts on the American Theater,” the future of his art looks bright: “I think the here and now is great with promise.” “There is hope,” he declares, “because in spite of all the obstacles, and there are many, new writers, new directors, new actors, using all kinds of forms, are emerging. Theater, all kinds of theater, is finding its way and I am sure will continue to make its way all over America.” Currently, Foote is writing a new play, The Tax Assessor, based on the life of his great-grandfather, and he is adapting his play The Widow Claire for the screen. Plans are also underway at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, for the inauguration of The Horton Foote American Playwrights Festival, a yearly celebration that honors distinguished achievements in playwriting by recognized masters and fosters new voices in the American theater. Coincidentally, in 1845 Foote’s great-great-grandfather and namesake, Albert Clinton Horton, gave five thousand dollars to found Baylor University, while serving as acting governor of Texas. In many ways, the Foote family story has come full circle. As I reflect upon Horton Foote’s career and writings, I am reminded of a passage from William Humphrey’s The Ordways. The past “lives in that book of books,” Humphrey writes, “that collection transmitted orally from father to son of proverbs and prophesies, legends, laws, traditions of the origins, and tales of the wanderings of his own tribe. For it is this . . . feeling of identity with his dead which characterizes and explains the Southerner. In his time, he is priest of the tribal scripture, to forget any part would be sacrilege. He treasures the sayings of his kin . . . If he forgets them he will be forgotten. If he remembers, he will be remembered, will take the place reserved and predestined for him in the company of his kin, in the realm of myth, outside of time.” Horton Foote remembers, he always has, and his writing testifies to the beauty, brutality, and mystery of life. Marion Castleberry

Chapter One

Genesis of a Playwright These are my people and my stories, and the plays I want to write, the only ones I know how to write. “Learning to Write”

Seeing and Imagining I am sitting on the back porch of my house in Wharton as I begin to write this, thinking how is it possible that I got from this house in this quiet, selfcontained, provincial town to New York City to become a writer? I was brought to this house when I was not quite a year old. My first memory of this porch, it faces directly west, is as a place of extreme heat in the summer and cold in the winter. It was screened in so flies and mosquitoes could not get in, and it was tolerable in the milder days of Fall and Spring. At night, except for sweltering July and August evenings, it was pleasant enough, but never so pleasant as our front porch, which faced east and south, and where there was nearly always a breeze from the Gulf, my parents always said. From the Gulf, too, came the large white clouds that often scurried across the sky night and day. The back porch is glass-enclosed now: heated for winter and airconditioned for summer. My wife and I spend a great deal of time here reading and writing, or just looking out at our backyard with its seven native pecan trees and through to the backyard of what was once my grandparents’ house. From here, too, we can hear the occasional traffic noise from the paved road in front of my grandparents’ house, a road that was gravel when I was a boy. It has been a mild winter, and today, the day after Christmas, it is in the low eighties. The confederate rose bush has blossoms, another rose bush has 17

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two lovely coral roses, and the chrysanthemums are heavy with flower. A huge sycamore tree in a neighboring yard still has its leaves. The pecan trees have no leaves left, but pecans are everywhere on the ground. When I was a boy, our backyard was fenced in and we had a chicken house and a yard full of chickens. There was only one pecan tree then, and there were three fig trees and two chinaberry trees. My grandparents owned fifteen acres around their house. Out of that, they took a half-acre for our house and yard and gave it to my parents. To the left of our yard was my grandfather’s barn. When I was a very young boy, he kept a horse and a cow there. At the far end of their lot is a giant pecan tree, at least two hundred years old. I spent much time climbing this tree. I had to nail boards to the trunk to make a kind of ladder to help me reach its branches. To the right of our yard and across the street were cotton fields belonging to my grandfather, and beyond them were cotton fields belonging to my great-great-uncle. These cotton fields went right up to the back edge of the town itself, to the livery stable and a section known as the “Flats” that had black restaurants and a black barber shop and pool hall. There are houses on either side of my house now, and in front, where there once had been a dirt road, there is now a paved one. Across the street where there once were cotton fields is now the back of the huge complex that is part of the First Baptist Church. And to the side of that is a very small frame building that houses the Christian Science Society. When I was a child, the dirt road in front of our house was unnamed but the street in front of my grandparents’ house was called Richmond Road. Some of the most elegant houses in town were on that road. The two houses directly across from my grandparents had large acreages around them. In one of these houses lived a boy my age who became my best friend. His parents had come from Mississippi, and his father managed the cotton gin and oil mill. The land behind their house went down to the gin and my friend and I often played there, climbing up on the platforms where the bales of cotton were kept, racing each other across them. During cotton season, the gins were the busiest places in town. We had three in those days, and my friend’s father managed the most prosperous one. Often during cotton season as many as sixty wagons would be lined up on the dirt road fronting the gin, waiting to get into the gin yard. Also during cotton season and late into the fall and early winter the smell of cottonseed cake coming from the oil mill permeated our part of town. To me, it was always a very pleasant smell. I was turned loose to roam as I chose, through the land belonging to my grandparents and my friend’s parents. I wonder now what my parents were thinking; they were usually so protective and strict about where I went. I had

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no secrets from them and they knew we spent a great deal of time in my friend’s back pastures, which were crossed by Caney Creek, dry most of the year. Here we spent hours with older boys endlessly digging tunnels and caves deep enough for us to stand in. I do not remember when I first read or had read to me Tom Sawyer, but I do know that early on I envied Tom’s adventures in the caves around Hannibal. I don’t know if our inspiration for forming endless clubs and secret societies was inspired by Tom or whether we thought of it ourselves, but we dug caves, built clubhouses, climbed trees, and built tree houses. These pastures belonging to my grandparents and my friend’s parents were, in these early years, my contained world, my garden, my Eden, as it were. And when not in school, I spent most of my early waking days roaming its confines. When I did leave this world, it was to go visiting with my mother in the afternoons and occasionally at night, or on Sunday afternoons with my mother and father. Occasionally these visits would be to my mother’s girlhood friends, but usually they would be to my maternal grandparents or my father’s aunts. It was there I learned to listen, a habit, of course, that is very valuable to a writer, especially a playwright. At my great aunts there was much talk of their past and of the rest of the Horton family. At my grandparents, I would hear about the Brooks and Speeds families and about our neighbors’ and friends’ failures and accomplishments. I was spared nothing; I was never told to leave the room no matter how gruesome or unhappy the tale. And so early on, I learned to accept the most tragic events as part of life. I heard in lurid detail of hurt feelings, suicide, jealousies, passions, and scoundrels of all descriptions. I am not sure what my young mind made of it all, but I am sure I never got tired of listening. One of my favorite tales, told by both my aunts and grandparents, was of poor Henry Lowell who lived alone with his mother and was allegedly having an affair with their black cook. The Ku Klux Klan decided to make an example of what they considered his immorality and grabbed him in broad daylight, tarred and feathered him, and turned him loose on the courthouse square. Covered with the tar and feathers, he ran two blocks to his home. Everyone had his own version of the story; and long after the poor man’s death, the story was still told again as if it had happened the day before. When I was older and went to the picture show alone at night, I had to pass his house. I would see him sitting alone on his gallery, and I would try to imagine what it was like being tarred and feathered and set loose on the courthouse square. There were few streetlights in those days and I, imagining his house was haunted, would run by it as fast as I could. Most nights after supper my father and mother would sit on our front porch, which faced my bedroom. I would go to sleep listening to them talk in

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endless detail of what happened to them during the day, or of past friends and family who had died or moved away, or of the dances my father had attended as a younger man. (My mother, whose family was strictly Methodist, was not allowed to dance.) These were mostly tales of men and women I never knew. Sooner or later, my father would get around to talking about Willie Roseberry, his closest friend as a boy, and my father would wonder where Willie was now. He would tell my mother, as if she hadn’t already heard it a million times, what he and Willie did together as boys and what his friendship had meant to him. I never tired of hearing about Willie Roseberry; and years later, when I was allowed to sit up with them, I would ask him to tell me a story about his friend. Another character I never tired of hearing about was Aubrey Newsome, who died a young man. They said the lining of his stomach was eaten out from drinking too many Coca-Colas. “He was a coke fiend,” my father would pronounce solemnly each time he told his story. Father said Aubrey drank them first thing in the morning when he got out of bed and he continued drinking them all day. There were many drunkards I heard about, both men and women, and one lady who was a paregoric addict, but Aubrey Newsome was the only coke fiend. There were other men and women with less lurid histories than the alcoholics and coke fiends, long ago friends of my parents who I never knew but who are as real to me in some ways as the men and women I did know as a boy. There was music, too, of a kind, certainly hymns aplenty. My mother was a pianist and, later, organist for the Methodist church. At an early age I was taken to Sunday school where I learned to sing many of the hymns. For awhile my mother taught piano and tried to teach me, but I refused to practice. Besides the hymns, the songs I remember most were sentimental popular songs that she would play some evenings while my father sang. He had collected sheet music for popular songs since he was a young man, and he brought them all with him when he married my mother. She would play and he would sing “Goodnight Mr. Elephant,” “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon,” “After the Ball,” and “Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven.” After singing the latter, he would tell how he had heard Chauncey Alcott sing that song at the Wharton Opera House and he always added, “When he finished, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.” In my maternal grandparents’ house, a house then of great style and elegance, were two pictures. One was of the Natural Bridge of Virginia. This picture was long and narrow, a kind of collage really, composed partly with the materials taken from or around the real bridge.The other was a photograph of a large, white, two-storied house, with a wide front and upper gallery and a circle of oaks in the front yard. It was called Seven Oaks, and on the gallery were two women surrounded by a group of children of various ages. From the

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look of the children’s dress, I would guess that the picture was taken in the 1880s. This house was the home of my maternal grandfather, built by his father for his bride on the banks of the Brazos River in the town of East Columbia, a thriving river town in the 1850s. There was a family legend of why the house was wood instead of brick. It seems that my great-grandmother, before meeting my great-grandfather, was told by a fortune-teller that a man would come to her across the water and ask her to marry him, and that he would want to build them a brick house. The fortune-teller said that she was not to permit it, for if she did it would be a house of great sorrow. My great-grandfather came by boat from Virginia to Texas, met my great-grandmother, and after what I presume was a suitable courtship, asked her to marry him. She accepted his proposal. But when he said that he was building a brick house for them, she remembered that the fortune-teller had said that if he built a brick house, she was not to marry him. So, my great-grandfather built the frame house in the picture instead. I remember, too, relatives visiting my grandmother identifying the children in the picture. They were various older cousins of my mother. She wasn’t born when the picture was taken. Some of them were dead by the time I was a child. Others I knew, but to me then, they seemed to be old men and women. And I heard the story told many times of how poor the family in the picture became after the war and of the death of my great-grandfather. I heard how my great-grandmother and her two daughters, one widowed and one unmarried, lived there with the children of the widow until my grandmother died. Then, the two daughters and the children went to live in Galveston, leaving the house and its once handsome furnishings deserted. I was also told how various relatives living in the town came into the house and took what they wanted to grace their own homes. One item in particular that was taken by one of these relatives was a pair of elegant hurricane lamps. Whenever we visited a certain relative in East Columbia, a cousin would point out the lamps to me as being rightfully ours. In time, the house was torn down. My grandparents eventually copied the picture of the house and gave it to each of their children. This was the first abandoned house I was ever aware of, and it seized my childish imagination. I asked my mother endless questions about the house and the life in it. It seemed from the photograph to be so substantial, a house built to last forever, and yet all that was left of it was this photograph on my grandmother’s wall. My mother made me a copy of the photograph, and it now hangs on the wall of my house. The graves of my family are scattered all over the Texas Gulf Coast in East Columbia, Peach Point, Matagorda, on the banks of Caney Creek, and in the town of Wharton. The most illustrious, Governor Albert Clinton Horton, is

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buried in Matagorda, now a deserted coastal town. My wife and I spent one whole hot August afternoon in search of his grave, trudging through Johnson grass and Buffalo grass and darting around red ant beds in the unkempt, treeless Matagorda cemetery. So much of his life, except for the public occasions and events, remain a mystery to me. He died in 1865, at the close of the Civil War, in Matagorda, where he had a summer house. Through the years I have learned a great deal about his public life, but as a boy all that I knew of the governor and his part of my family came from my Aunt Louisiana Texas Patience Horton; I called her Aunt Loula. She was not a pretty woman, not even a handsome one. She was tall, held herself very erect, and was surrounded by her sisters who were beauties. But, she was loved by her family. She had a good personality and was a lively conversationalist, and I was told by my father that she never lacked for beaux. She was a graceful dancer, had a sweet singing voice, played the piano by ear with great authority and liveliness, and also played the guitar and mandolin. She was loyal beyond measure to anyone with “a drop of Horton blood in their veins” (her phrase), and she was the one that kept the family stories alive, not always with great accuracy, but with imagination, vividness, and gusto. Hers was a world of absolutes. The Hortons, particularly her immediate branch, were aristocrats, betrayed and cheated out of their birthright, but undaunted. They were all virtuous, even though they were surrounded by a world of knaves and thieves. When she told her tales, which grew more lurid through the years, she would cock her head to one side, close her eyes slightly, and her voice would take on a heightened chant-like quality as she recounted the history of her family. She never grew tired of telling it to any of the nieces and nephews who would listen. Her own child, Mary, would never listen and would deliberately leave the room whenever she began. I listened. I would spend entire afternoons at her white Victorian cottage built high off the ground to keep the frequent floodwater from entering the house. When I was eleven, I began to work in my father’s store. I worked most afternoons after school, all day Saturday, and all day everyday during the summer months. Business was usually slow, except on Saturdays. And even on Saturdays, once the Depression started and cotton was down to ten cents a pound, there were long stretches without customers. The store was a men’s clothing store. We sold men’s hats, shirts, underwear, socks, suits (both ready-made and tailor-made), and various accessories. Our customers were mostly male blacks and their wives and girlfriends. We had, however, many white visitors during the day, relatives or friends of my father’s, lawyers, fellow merchants, and planters who lived in town and visited their farms once or twice a week to see that the tenants weren’t cheating them. The store was mostly a male world and, unlike my great-aunts’ stories, I felt sometimes the men’s stories and the lan-

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guage they used were modified because of my presence. They talked of weather, of the crops and the prospects of the crops. They got into political arguments. They were all Democrats, but they disagreed about individual Democratic policies and politicians. When they talked of the past, it was often using unfamiliar names never mentioned by my aunts and grandparents. One day, a descendant of our ancestor who, according to my great-aunt, had stolen our house and lands, came into my father’s store. My father greeted him by calling him Cousin. The man bought a hat, and they talked together for awhile about the weather and the crops. When the man left, my father told me who he was and that he lived on the Horton plantation. I said hotly, “How could you talk to him, cousin or not?” My father said, “Don’t fill your head with all that. That’s done. Forget it.” “Have you forgotten it?” I asked. “Yes, I have,” he said, “That and a lot more. You have to if you don’t want to be swallowed up in bitterness.” Even on the busiest Saturdays, I had time to listen to the black and occasional white farmers who wanted my father to wait on them. I stood by to wrap packages or to get change for my father, listening to their country speech and their stories of weather and crops, of illnesses or hard times their friends were undergoing, or their personal tragedies. There was laughter, too, teasing and jokes. I learned to love these country people, their voices and accents so different from my family’s. Saturdays were long days, particularly during cotton season. We usually opened the store at seven-thirty in the morning, and we didn’t closed until the last wagon and car had left for the country, which was often as late as eleveno’clock at night. It was my job to sweep out the store. Some nights after closing, my father would take me to the Manhattan or Ray’s Cafe and we would order fried oysters and talk over the day’s events. I would question him about the different customers, black and white. And he would tell me their stories, where they farmed, whether they were industrious or trifling, drinkers or gamblers, who had been in the penitentiary, and who had not. There was one handsome, light-skinned black man who wore expensive clothes and had lots of money to spend. My father called him “Red” and always seemed glad to see the man whenever he came into the store. My father told me he was a gambler, a very successful one. And although he couldn’t read or write, he could buy and sell most people in town; but, as my father put it, “He always knew his place.” He had a gambling joint across the tracks in the black section, but there were some white men who traded at my father’s store and went to Red’s place to gamble. My father often described to me the horrors of gambling and what happened to friends of his that became victims of it. He would explain how his uncle, who had been a promising merchant, lost several businesses and all his money from gambling.

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Somewhere along the way, I became addicted to reading. My first favorite book was Miss Minerva and William Greenhill, which was the story of a spinster lady who had been left a nephew to raise. I read all the books I could get my hands on about Tom Swift and the Motor Boys and the Rover Boys. Then there was Treasure Island, David Copperfield, Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, and above all else, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I read and re-read these two books constantly. I had no guidance in my reading, not from my teachers or my parents. I read whatever interested me. In my early teens, I joined the Literary Guild and the Book of the Month Club. I read popular novels like Grand Hotel, The Forsythe Saga, The Old Wives Tales, and The Jalna Stories. Willa Cather’s novels also began to interest me a great deal at this time, and I still have a Literary Guild copy of Candide, which I didn’t read then. A friend of my mother’s who also belonged to the Guild warned my mother that she felt this book was unwholesome and I shouldn’t be allowed to own it. My mother told me of her friend’s objections but she didn’t try to stop my belonging to the Guild or reading the book. Until I was nine, death had no reality for me. I was aware that my father’s father was dead and that his mother had married again, to a man none of us liked very much, especially my father. But how or when his father died I was never told, nor was I ever told what had happened to his father’s people. The Footes were all vague blurs to me. Miss Lilly Outlar, who lived in the house across from grandmother’s, called me into her parlor one day and said, “I just want you to know that the Footes were a very distinguished, aristocratic family.” I knew, too, that my mother often spoke of her Grandmother Brooks, (hers was the house in the picture), but never spoke of her grandfather. When I questioned her about this she said, “I never knew him. He died when your grandfather was only twelve.” That worried me. My father’s father died when he was twelve, and my grandfather’s father died when he was twelve. I often wondered if my own father would die when I was twelve. John and Jenny Speed were the names of my Grandmother Brooks’s parents. They were dead before I was born. Grandpa Speed, as my mother called him, came to live with my grandparents until his death. My mother used to tell me how her Grandmother Speed, a few years dead, had come to her in her sleep and said, “Hallie go see to your grandfather.” My mother woke up and went to her grandfather’s room to find him dead. Then, too, there was a lady in white who appeared at various times to my father’s relatives at Louisiana Texas Patience Horton’s house. When she appeared she would always comb her long blond hair. My great-aunt said the lady resembled her sister Mary who died of tuberculosis in West Texas. There were various other theories about her appearances. One theory was that she was trying to tell the family that there was buried treasure under the house, another that oil might be in the ground

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there. I never spent the night at my great-aunt’s house for fear the lady would appear to me; and sometimes in my own house, I was afraid to go to sleep for fear someone dead might appear and tell me one of my living grandparents had died. I sometimes tried to imagine what death or dying was like, but I soon tired of it. Then in mid-March of my ninth year, I came home from school one day and went all through our house looking for my mother. When I couldn’t find her, I went next door to a neighbor who met me in her yard and said, “I think you’d better go over to your grandmother’s.” I went back through our silent house, through our backyard, and slowly into my grandparents’ backyard. My grandparents’ cook, Eliza, and her sister, Sarah, were there. I went up to them as Eliza was saying, “I knew someone in that house would die today when I saw a dove, a mourning dove, land on the roof of the house.” I stood looking at them until they noticed me, and Eliza said, “Go in and look in the house. Your Mama is in there.” I started slowly toward the house. When my mother appeared at the back door, she saw me and came out to me. She was crying, and she put her arms around me and asked if I wanted to see my grandmother. Still not knowing what had happened, I said I did. She led me into the house, which was filled with men and women dressed like it was Sunday, all standing about and talking in low voices. Mother led me through the people to my grandparents’ bedroom. The door was closed. She opened it, and we went inside the room. I saw my grandfather, his eyes closed, lying on a couch, and my grandmother sitting beside him. My mother said, “Little Horton’s here Mama,” and my grandmother turned to me. I saw she was crying. She held out her arms to me, and I went over to her, and as she held me, she began to sob. When I looked at my grandfather, I realized that he was dead. I did not learn how he died until the day of the funeral, which I was not allowed to attend. I was kept at home with my baby brother, watched over by my father’s mother (whom I called Big Mama), and one of her sisters, my Great-aunt Lida. We could see the funeral procession from our porch and, as we watched the slow movement of the hearse and the cars that followed, they told me that my grandfather had been seized by a heart attack in town, collapsed on one of the main streets, and had died before a doctor could reach him. My Grandmother Brooks visited his grave every day, often taking me with her. She would stay for an hour or so tending flowers on the grave or just sitting. The only other two graves in the plot were those of two little girls, Jenny and Daisy. I had never heard their names mentioned, and I asked my mother endless questions about them. They were her sisters. Jenny was born a year after my mother, and Daisy was the sixth of my grandmother’s eight children. Jenny died before reaching a year, and Daisy was only two years old at the time of her death. My grandfather was very religious. He had attended

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church regularly and supported it generously with his money; but for some reason he had never become a member. Mother said that when Daisy died, one of the neighbors came to him and asked, “Mr. Brooks, did it ever occur to you that the death of this child is God’s judgment on you for not joining the church?” His face, my mother said, flushed. But he answered very simply, “No, Mrs. Davidson, it never did.” Unless I asked about the two little girls, they were never mentioned, and there were no pictures of them anywhere. This puzzled me greatly. Often when I was with my grandmother at the graveyard, I would wander among the other graves to see how many other children had died in infancy. Or I would find the names of people my family often spoke about or relatives of our living friends. My grandmother was always too grieved for me to question her about what I had seen there, but when I got home I would question my mother and father and they would patiently tell me the history of each one and how they died. I began to be curious about the deaths of everyone then. I began to question my father about the death of his own father, but he wouldn’t say much except that it was a sad time. His mother and father were separated, and his father, only thirty-six at the time of his death, was considered a brilliant lawyer. He told me that his father’s best friend took him in his lap on the day of the funeral and told him that his father was a fine man and that he should always be proud of him. My mother, however, told me that my grandfather had died of dissipation. Later, my father’s sister, who was very bitter toward her father and his family, said he was a drunkard and a cigarette fiend. I spent many days over the years trying to imagine what he was like. Gradually, and through various sources, I learned that his family had moved to Galveston from Virginia before the War Between the States, and that they were left destitute at the collapse of the Confederacy. The older children were all formally educated. One in particular, Robedeaux Foote, was a Latin and Greek scholar. The younger children, born during or soon after the War, were more practically educated as lawyers and doctors. For some reason, my grandfather, who was a lawyer, was the sole supporter of his family, and when he married my grandmother she moved in with his mother and brothers and sisters still at home. There were quarrels between mother and daughter-in-law. My grandfather began to drink, and soon after the birth of their second child, a girl, my grandmother moved two blocks away to live with her own mother and father. When my Grandfather Foote died there was not enough money to buy a tombstone for his grave. It was unmarked until my father took his first savings and bought the tombstone for his father’s grave. At that time, my father was twenty-seven, married, and with a child of his own.

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I remember taking walks in the evening with my parents when I was a very young boy, and we would pass the house of a Mr. Armstrong, a distinguished, white-haired gentleman, who would often be sitting on his porch as we would pass the house. After greeting him, my parents would always whisper, “That’s Mr. Armstrong. He had a call in the cotton fields of Mississippi to go to Texas and preach.” Now, Mr. Armstrong was a Baptist, and at that time we were Methodists and Episcopalians, so I imagined the call had come to Mr. Armstrong because he was a Baptist. But my mother explained that she had heard of such things happening to Methodists too, and even to Presbyterians and Episcopalians, which at the time were the only denominations in our little town of three thousand. I was full of questions about what “getting a call” meant, but my mother was rather evasive in her answers, so I sensed she didn’t really know. I often wanted to ask Mr. Armstrong what it was like, but never got the courage to do so. As it turned out, some years later, when I was ten, I got a call. But it wasn’t to preach; it was to become an actor. Now, as far as I know, there had never been any actors in that town, and certainly not in my family. Nor had I ever known an actor, except for seeing some once a year when the tent show came to town and the actors came to trade in my father’s store. I had just awakened one day with the sure knowledge that I wanted to be an actor; furthermore, that I was going to be an actor. Of that, I had not the slightest doubt. In time, I announced my calling to my startled family; and from then on, I was determined to be an actor. It was fortunate for me that at that same time a young woman came to teach speech and dramatics in our high school. She was very sympathetic to my ambitions. She cast me in all the high school plays—about three a year. In one of the one-act plays, I played a college student who, during the course of the play, confesses to his college roommates that he is addicted to drugs. With much excitement, we entered the play in our state’s one-act play contest. After the performance, the judges took my director/teacher aside and asked if I was afflicted or was that acting. She said, “It was acting,” and the judges said, “In that case, we are going to give him the Best Actor award.” I also acted every chance I got with the local Little Theater. Talking pictures, as we called them then, arrived in Wharton during this time, and I began to go to the “talkies” as often as I was allowed to by my parents. My uncles and grandmother even drove us into Houston to see Al Jolson in The Singing Fool. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember watching my father, overcome by emotion, sobbing as Jolson sang “Sonny Boy” to his dying child. I remember, too, my father saying afterwards, “There ought to be a law against showing pictures like that and upsetting people.” I also remember the Queen, our local movie house, being closed for a week so

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its sound system could be installed. The theater was packed the night it reopened. I believe the name of the film played that night was Drag, and its theme song was “Weary River.” Richard Barthelmess and Lila Lee were in the picture, but I remember nothing of the story, only that the theater had been redone inside to accommodate the talkies and that the lady who played the piano for the silent pictures was gone. I knew that piano-playing lady and her son, and many years later I wrote a play in part based on my memory of her called Talking Pictures. Then radio invaded our homes and became a real competition against the movies. Except for Amos n’ Andy, I never listened to the serials, but I did listen to the comedians and all the popular singers. I knew all the songs of Little Jack Little, Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith, Bing Crosby, and Russ Columbo, particular favorites of mine. When I was fourteen, I read in the Houston papers about a Hollywood scout coming to look for acting talent. I talked my parents into letting me go meet him, and my grandmother and one of her sons drove me in for an appointment. I don’t know what I expected from all this, but there was little talk of a screen test when I had my interview, only of lessons, including, as I remember, tap dancing. I had rather conventional ideas of what a Hollywood scout should look like, and the young man who interviewed me looked very un-Hollywood to me. Instead he looked like one of my uncles and talked as if he had never been out of Houston, Texas. What real use all of this was to me I was unaware of at the time, but the experience, given to a young girl eager to go to Hollywood, was used in one of my early one-act plays A Young Lady of Property. I graduated from high school in the early summer of 1932, when I had just turned sixteen. My high school Speech teacher had given me a list of drama schools I might attend, but when I broached the subject with my parents, I found them very reluctant to let me take such a step. As I think now, they very sensibly argued that I was too young to choose such a drastic way of life and that I should first go to college for at least two years. I refused, and so we compromised. They promised to send me to drama school if I waited a year and took a job. Around that time, my grandmother decided in the late summer of the year of my graduation to move to Dallas to make a home for two of my uncles, and I was invited to go with them. Speed, her middle son, had failed in the cleaning and pressing business she had bought for him in Wharton and was going to Dallas to look for work, work that he never found and, as I remember, for which he never looked. Billy, her youngest son, had failed at the University of Texas and was enrolling in a night law school there. In Dallas, I studied drama (really elocution) with a Miss Woodward and ushered at the Majestic Theatre, the kind of large, handsome movie palace so

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prevalent in all major cities in those days. The movies usually played for a week; and because on week days there was little business, I was able to watch the current movie over and over. It seems strange to me now that the only one I remember with any kind of clarity was Philip Barry’s The Animal Kingdom, with Leslie Howard and Ann Harding. Although I remember the general outline and thrust of the story, I have forgotten all the dialogue except for one line, “Who but you, Daisy, and strangers are honest with me ever?” My grandfather, when he had a grocery store, was asked how he kept his clerks from eating all of his profits. He said it was very simple: When they first came to work, he invited them to eat anything in the store. After the first few days of stuffing themselves, they got so sick of the food they never went near it again. One might think after watching so many movies over and over, that I might, like my grandfather’s clerks, get sick of the whole business. However, I didn’t. I was more determined than ever to become an actor. At the end of Billy’s school term, my grandmother closed the Dallas house and we all went back to Wharton. I went to work for the summer in my father’s store in order to make money for my trip to California in the early Fall. 1932 was the height of our most serious and devastating Depression. Banks were failing, the stock market plummeted, the savings of many were wiped out, and homes and farms were being foreclosed on in Wharton and all over America. But all I could think of that summer of 1932 was going to California and, I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind, getting into the movies. It seemed to mean nothing to me that at the end of most weekdays the cash register in my father’s store registered as little as two dollars, and that he had to go to the bank to renew a loan he had taken out several years before. I could hear by the conversation of the men who continued to come into the store that they were worried about economic conditions, but they had always been worried about such matters, generally summing up all their talk by saying, “There is nothing that a good cotton crop won’t fix.” One day I heard my father announce in the store that the price being paid for cotton was so low that even a good crop wouldn’t help. There were arguments, too, about President Roosevelt. My father, ever a loyal Democrat and a passionate defender of Roosevelt, quarreled so bitterly with two of his friends, one a cousin, that they never came back to the store. It never occurred to me that there was danger of my father not being able to come up with the money for my drama school tuition, the cost of my board and room, plus a weekly allowance, and my bus fare to and from Los Angeles. I was aware that during this time he sold a house, the only real estate he ever owned, for three thousand dollars, but I was not aware until many years later that he did it so he would be sure to have the money for my two years of schooling. I learned, too, that the day he sold the rent house a friend came to him and asked if he’d like to invest in an oil

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pool with the amount he had received for the house. He declined, giving me the money for my schooling instead. The oil pool was a successful one and made all of its participants wealthy, but if my father ever had regrets, he never burdened me with them. Many years later, I heard him say that during this period he would often come home from the store and see me and my two brothers sitting at the dining room table waiting for supper to be served and thinking how little he had taken in at the store that day; he would want to turn around, go back uptown, and open the store to try and take in a few more dollars. My father tried, in a negative way, to teach me the value of money, always stressing to me how hard it was to make a dollar and reminding me that “someday I would appreciate the effort it took just to put food on the table.” As I think back now, I’m sure his preoccupation with the difficulty of making a living grew out of not only the realities of the Depression, but also the fear of my going into an unknown, and from all accounts, most precarious profession. I am sure he worried, too, that because our grandmother was rich and indulging, we would get the idea that one could get by without working diligently. At sixteen, I found all of this tiresome and I pretended that my life would surely be different and unmarked by such realities. But I wasn’t as oblivious to all the ravages of the Depression as I pretended. Later, in writing my plays, I often went back to that time and tried to find, not in any agitprop way, a truthful sense of people trying to make their way and being faced with what seemed like overwhelming financial obstacles. My parents were true to their word, and when the year ended, they sent me to study at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. I am afraid that my parents did not choose the Pasadena Playhouse because of its superior methods of teaching, for, of course, my parents were very provincial about such things and didn’t realize there were many different approaches to acting. It was chosen, I’m sure, for my safety and protection. Pasadena, they felt, would be a more wholesome atmosphere for a young man away from his family for the first time. It was agreed that my mother and I would be driven to Houston in my grandmother’s car where I would take the bus to California. I remember the day, early in September, as a day of brilliant sunshine. I don’t remember telling my father or my brothers goodbye. My brothers, of course, were in school, and my father had gone down to the store long before my departure. However, I do remember my Grandmother Brooks standing in her front yard crying as she waved goodbye to me. There was an even more depressing scene at the Houston bus station. Here Aunt Lily and Big Mama, my father’s sister and my paternal grandmother, were waiting to see me off on the bus. My Big Mama cried openly as if I were leaving to be executed. She sobbed so loudly

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that her daughter had to lead her away for a spell to comfort her. My mother kept her emotions under control until after I boarded the bus and we were pulling out of the station. I turned to wave goodbye, and I saw her crying, too, as she waved farewell. The trip to California took three days and two nights and I rode straight through. My Aunt Laura, who was then married and living in Dallas, came to meet the bus when we stopped there for twenty minutes or so. I had never been out of the state of Texas and never farther away from my home than Houston, except for the period I lived with my grandmother in Dallas. When we left Dallas, I was in a most unfamiliar part of the state; the faces and the voices around me seemed familiar, but what I saw outside the bus window seemed strange. As the people starting the journey from Houston began to leave the bus and new passengers arrived, even the voices and faces told me I was leaving my familiar world far behind. When we crossed the border into New Mexico, I realized there was no going back, and I momentarily felt sad and very homesick. That mood was shattered by my first sight of hills, and then mountains, neither of which I had ever seen before. I was excited by the sight of them, of course, and I wrote my first postcard home describing my reaction to my parents. My father had never seen a mountain either, and my mother had seen one only once while visiting her sister in school in Virginia. Bus travel can be exhausting, even for the very young and eager, and by the end of the second day, we were hot and dirty. We never stopped long enough to really wash. I even got tired of the mountains and of talking to my fellow passengers, who were nearly all by now as tired and dirty as I was. There was one girl, though, who continued talking even when I half-listened. She had joined the bus in Dallas and had learned early on that I was on my way to California to study acting. She told me that she was the sister of James Hall, a well-known actor in films. Since she was the first person I had ever known who knew a movie actor, much less was the sister of one, I was thrilled. I began asking all kinds of questions about Hollywood, the movies, her brother, and the actors and actresses he had appeared with. All through West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, she kept chattering on about Hollywood and the movie stars she knew, but as the stories became more and more colorful, I became suspicious. She was a plainly dressed girl. What, I began to reason, would movie star James Hall’s sister be doing riding on a bus? My spirits began to revive when we crossed the California border. I began again to watch the sights out the bus window. My most lasting memory was of the orange groves that seemed to be everywhere. I remember, too, when I later took the train, or the Interurban, from Los Angeles to Pasadena, the acres and acres of orange groves. They’re all gone now, swallowed up by urban sprawl, and though my time in California was after the years Randall Jarrell

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spent there as a young boy, I am reminded when I read his lovely poem “Thinking of the Lost World” of what it was once like and what it has finally become: Back in Los Angeles, we missed Los Angeles. The sunshine of the Land Of Sunshine is a gray mist now, the atmosphere Of some factory planet: when you stand and look You see a block or two, and your eyes water. The orange groves are all cut down . . . My bow Is lost, all my arrows are lost or broken, My knife is sunk in the eucalyptus tree Too far for even Pop to get it out, And the tree’s sawed down. It and the stair-sticks And the planks of the tree house are all firewood Burned long ago; its gray smoke smells of Vicks.

I was to be met at the Los Angeles bus station by my Great-aunt Mag, my Grandmother Brooks’s sister, and her husband Walt. I had met them when they came to Texas on a visit one summer. I was assured they would take me to their apartment for the weekend (I was arriving on a Friday, and school registration didn’t begin until early the next week). I had, however, a room reserved for me at the Pasadena YMCA until I could find a permanent place to stay. My great-aunt and great-uncle were waiting as the bus arrived and seemed genuinely glad to see me. They were warm and friendly souls devoted to their Texas kin. They drove me around a bit in downtown Los Angeles, which I could quickly see was bigger than even Houston or Dallas, and then took me to a cafeteria for supper, the largest cafeteria I had ever seen. After supper, they drove me down the Miracle Mile of Wilshire Boulevard, past the original Brown Derby, which any reader of movie magazines knew about, and then past the Coconut Grove Ambassador Hotel, also mentioned by those same movie magazines. All the time my great-aunt and great-uncle were asking me about our Texas family. I was talking away, giving them all the news of home, when they announced it was time to drive me to the Y in Pasadena. I was very disappointed as I had fully expected to spend the weekend with them. I had mentally made a list of places I would ask to see: Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the handprints of movie stars, the movie studios, and the houses of movie stars. Later, when I did visit them for a weekend, I think I understood why they hadn’t asked me to stay. Uncle Walt was out of work and they were living, temporarily they assured me, in a very modest tourist court.

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This happened frequently because of his drinking, and I suspect they were ashamed for me to see them in such circumstances, not wanting me to tell my Texas family how they were forced to live. I spent the next two days alone, the first time I had ever been alone in my life. I wrote optimistic letters to my parents, walked five blocks to look at the Pasadena Playhouse, and took a swimming lesson at the YMCA. And I had much time to think. In spite of my optimistic letters, I was, in truth, lonely and scared. There were palm trees and flowers aplenty in Pasadena, a small, provincial city in those days, but it all seemed aloof and uninviting to me. I longed in my heart for the dusty cotton fields of Texas. On Saturday night as I sat in my small room at the Y, I thought of my father’s store, always busy even in Depression times. I thought of the black and white farmers who would be coming into the store, always cheerful even when there was little money. It was also the time when cotton pickers and their families flooded the county and swelled the always crowded Saturday night streets. But, lonely or not, I knew somehow I would never fully go back to that life again.*

Pasadena and Beyond The Pasadena Playhouse, at 39 South El Molino, was just half a block off Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena’s main thoroughfare. The building was twostoried, of Neo-Spanish architecture, with a large patio, which we crossed to get to the theater proper. A side wing on the patio floor had shops and a restaurant; above this wing, reached by open stairs, was a small second theater called the Recital Hall. The larger theater was called the Main Stage. Also in the building were a vast wardrobe department and a shop for building scenery. There were two houses near the Playhouse that had been turned into classrooms for theater students. It meant nothing to me at the time, but the school advertised the practicality of its training, saying “Training is not confined to theory. Students learn by doing! Assistant direction, costuming, stage managing, scene designing, even the actual construction and painting of settings, and the work of stage crews.” Advertising in national magazines, the school listed former students who had gone off to be in movies against the background of a palm tree, klieg lights, stars, a section of the patio, and the theater building itself. In 1933, the Main Stage had been operating for nine years but the theater had been in Pasadena for seventeen years. This unique institution was an outgrowth of the enthusiasm for amateur theater that swept across America in the 1920s. Many of these amateur or “little” theaters built handsome homes for

*Lecture presented at Louisiana State University on April 19, 1989

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themselves and had large subscription audiences. Their desperate earnestness was satirized in a popular George Kelly play of the time, The Torchbearers. The Pasadena Playhouse called itself a community theater, but by the time I arrived, it was that in name only. Occasionally, it did use nonprofessional or semiprofessional actors, but most often brought in professional actors from Los Angeles and Hollywood. Gilmor Brown was the artistic director of the theater. He had been an actor in minor stock companies around the West and, seeing the vitality of the “little theater” movement, had come to Pasadena to start one. By the time I arrived, Pasadena Playhouse had the Main Stage, the Recital Hall (used by the senior students), the Play Box (as far as I know, the first theater-in-the-round in America), and the Padua Playhouse (run in a nearby town by students who returned for post-graduate work). During my time there, I saw many interesting productions on the main stage of the Playhouse. I saw Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Sidney Howard’s Alien Corn, and Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. I saw an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov and several adaptations of Dickens’s novels. I saw Victor Jory in Lynn Riggs’s Road Side and Lee J. Cobb, then a very young actor, in Oscar Wilde’s Salome directed by Benjamin Zemach of the Habimah Theater. I also saw Walter Hampden, then our leading Shakespearean actor, in a play by Martin Flavin. He played a zookeeper in black face. Additionally, there were many Shakespeare productions. In fact, by my second year the Pasadena Playhouse claimed to have produced more Shakespeare (thirty-two productions) than any other theater in the world except for Stratford-upon-Avon. Our classes started at nine in the morning and continued until five. We had classes in fencing, eurythmics, diction, costume design, makeup, theater literature, styles of acting, and scene design. We also had play rehearsals. Once a week, Gilmor Brown met with us, mostly giving inspirational talks about what a rewarding life the theater could be if one had the proper dedication. For our first play productions, we were divided into two groups. One group was assigned the play Shakuntula, a classic East Indian drama. My group was assigned a Roman comedy. The directors were two of the five staff directors at the Playhouse. At that time, I had read very few plays and was completely unfamiliar with Roman comedies. The rest of the students were just as ignorant of the material and the period as I was. Our director was bored with the play and with us. Not knowing how in the world to approach the material and afraid to admit that he didn’t understand a word of it, he put us on our feet the first day and watched wearily as we stumbled about the stage. To make matters worse, I discovered I had a Southern accent that was difficult to understand. The rehearsals lasted six weeks and then, without props, scenery, or costumes, we presented our play on the main stage for our fellow students.

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Classes were not a happy time for me, either. I had no talent for drawing, so I got nowhere with costume and stage design. Diction class was torture. All I heard was that to be an actor, any kind of an actor, I had to get rid of my accent. However, the one class I enjoyed from the start was the theater literature class. Our teacher was passionate about plays as literature and very knowledgeable about Greek, Roman, Elizabethan, Noh, Chinese theater, and the theater of Molière. During class breaks, I would go to him and we would talk about literature of all sorts—plays, novels, poetry, essays, and short stories. One day in mid-November, my speech teacher told me that she felt I needed special help. She said she knew a wonderful private coach named Blanche Townsend who agreed to coach me for an hour each week. To pay for my lessons I went without lunch. In our first lesson, she assigned Browning’s “Last Duchess.” Although I did not agree with her methods of teaching, it was at least a system. She had her rules, and she was able to explain them. She based everything on phonetics, and I had to agree to write out all my acting roles phonetically before learning them. She was a great fan of George Bernard Shaw and, of course, thought Pygmalion a masterpiece. She was encouraging, and at that stage in my life, encouragement was something I badly needed. There was a young man in one of my classes, John Forsht, from Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. He had been to college for two years and had done quite a bit of college acting. He wasn’t interested in movies. He wanted to go on the New York stage; his ambition was to play Hamlet. He told me of all the great Hamlets he had heard about: Alexander Moissi, Edwin Booth, John Barrymore, and Henry Irving. I began to study Hamlet too, and I started to memorize the soliloquies. I asked Miss Townsend for help. She would only hear me do “Speak the speech, I pray you . . .” and I had to say “trippingly on the tongue” over and over until it almost ruined Shakespeare for me forever. Soon we had two camps in our class: those who wanted to be New York actors and those who wanted to be in pictures. We were all sure, as we argued amongst ourselves, that we would get what we wanted. Few of us ever did. My Grandmother Brooks came to California to visit two of her sisters. She thought the boarding house I was living in was unsuitable, so she took rooms for us in Orange Grove, a very expensive part of the city. There was a lovely garden behind the house, and I used to go out there after dinner and practice my diction exercises. One night a man from next door called out in the dark, “Are you ill?” “No sir,” I said. “I’m just practicing my diction exercises.” “Well,” he said, “Cut that out. This is a respectable neighborhood.” That winter, Eva LeGallienne announced that she was bringing three Ibsen plays to the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles. John Forsht and my knowledgeable professional theater friends were all excited about the event. I

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had never heard of her or the Civic Repertory she had founded in New York City, but I pretended I had, and I listened to all they had to say about her. I asked my grandmother if she would take me for my birthday. We took the Interurban into Los Angeles for the Saturday matinee performance of Hedda Gabler. They set the play in the late twenties, and I will never forget LeGallienne’s entrance, her hair bobbed, wearing a short skirt and smoking a cigarette. I thought she was extraordinary in the part, and the play made a very deep and lasting impression on me. My grandmother sensed this I am sure, and she asked if I would like to see the evening performance of The Master Builder. I did, of course, and that night I saw my second Ibsen play with LeGallienne again in the lead. Though I have seen many plays and many fine productions since, none have made the kind of impression on me that these first Ibsen plays did. Eva LeGallienne was thirty-three at this time. She had been a star on Broadway in her early twenties, and she was said to have been exquisite in the two Molnar plays, Liliom and The Swan. She could have continued in the commercial theater but she felt an actress could only reach her potential by playing parts in great plays, classic and modern, and in repertory. Still in her twenties, she found backers and bought a run-down theater on 14th Street in New York City. She gathered a company of actors around her and for a number of years she performed Chekhov, Ibsen, Shakespeare, and modern European classics. She acted, directed, and produced. Her productions of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan were legendary. She worked tirelessly and unselfishly, and though it was difficult and expensive to keep so many actors and technicians employed, she was able to find patrons to make up all deficits, until the Depression. Then she lost her backers and patrons, and she was forced to close her theater just before she began her California tour. My grandmother bought her book At 33 for me. In this book, LeGallienne tells the story about the founding and the running of her company. At the close of the book, I felt she was determined to start her theater again one day. She did try two more times, once in New York and once on the road. Both times, she failed, or really, I think the theater failed her. She continued acting, directing, and producing, always preaching the gospel of a repertory theater that produced serious and important plays. In the late spring, my grandmother went back to Texas and I was cast in our final production at the school, a one-act play. I liked the play and felt comfortable performing my role. Consequently, I took the bus back to Texas for summer vacation feeling much better about my talent and determined to speak properly and phonetically. I later learned it was this summer my

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brother, Tom Brooks, began charging his friends money to come hear me talk in this new strange way. For our senior year, we were put in charge of the Recital Hall Theater. We had Janet Scott as the director for all our productions, and we were each cast in four plays. The rest of the time we were assigned to stage crew work. We built our own sets, painted them, found our props, stage-managed the shows, were the stagehands, and found or made the costumes. First, I was cast as Earnest in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. I went from that to building and painting scenery, to stage managing, and assisting Miss Scott in her directing. I worked all night some nights. I do not know how good we were at any of it, but most of us tried very hard and we were certainly better carpenters, stage managers, and prop men at the end than when we started. There was grumbling, of course. Some people felt they had come to study acting, which meant they wanted to act all the time, not build scenery or stage manage or work props. Miss Scott took a liking to me, and she urged me to learn all the technical skills I could. She said she had gone to New York to be an actress (She had a small part and had understudied for the Theater Guild when LeGallienne did Liliom). She said I needed all the skills I could get to survive. Miss Townsend taught during the summer in a school connected with the Rice Players, a summer stock company on Martha’s Vineyard. This year, she was taking three boys from Pasadena with her to do scenes with the girls who had signed up for the school. They would get room and board and a few dollars a week for spending money. Besides doing scenes with her paying students, they were expected to work backstage at night at the Playhouse, and they might be cast in small parts. She invited John Forsht and me to go. That summer John came with me to Texas before we took off for Martha’s Vineyard. We took the bus together, and my family made us welcome; all my relatives had us over for meals. The day we were to leave for our work my father took me aside and said, “Here’s fifty dollars. When this is gone, don’t ask for any more, because I won’t give it to you.” I took the money and thanked him, and for good or bad, I believed him. I think now if I had ever really needed anything he would have helped, but I chose at the time to believe he would not, and so I never asked, even when I was hungry, and I went hungry many times in my first days in New York City. Anyway, I knew that John, whose father had died when he was an infant, had no one to give him even fifty dollars. At that time, stock companies were all over America. A company of actors, including a leading lady, an ingénue, a juvenile, a leading man, a character man, and a character woman, was hired for a season and they would

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perform in the popular plays of the day, usually advertised as “Broadway hits.” When talking pictures arrived, these theaters began to fail and they gradually disappeared. Then in the thirties, they reappeared in the country, usually in or near towns where people went for their summer vacations. Miss Townsend decided to do two one-act plays with the students, and we presented them on a free afternoon at the Playhouse. One of the plays, No ’Count Boy by Paul Green, is a southern variation of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. All the characters in this play are black, and I played the lead. Today we would find it strange to cast a play about blacks with an all-white cast; but in those days, there could be no alternative. Black actors and white actors simply did not work together, eat together in restaurants, or sit together in the audience. This role was one I did not need to write out phonetically. I had been around provincial blacks all my life and felt very secure in how they spoke and acted. We had a small triumph. The theater was packed, and I am sure not many in our audience had ever seen a play about blacks, and certainly not one about provincial blacks. I haven’t read No ‘Count Boy in a long time and I don’t know what I’d think about it today; but then, for the audience and me, it was a welcome relief from the usual summer stock Broadway play with its unreal situations and characters. The third actor Miss Townsend brought from Pasadena was Joseph Anthony. He had been a post graduate student when John and I were seniors. He also had some professional experience acting on the main stage in Pasadena and in Los Angeles with Helen Gahagan in Maxwell Anderson’s Mary of Scotland. In time, he was to become one of our foremost Broadway directors and had a distinguished career as an actor and a teacher of acting. The three of us decided to try New York together. I had twenty-seven dollars left of my fifty after buying boat fare to New York, and Joe and John had nothing. A wealthy friend had taken an apartment for us for a week, so we had a place to go, and Joe borrowed a few dollars from some place. The apartment rented by our friend was too expensive to keep, so we spent the first days looking for one we could afford. We found it on MacDougal Street across from the Provincetown Playhouse over a small, dingy nightclub called the Welcome Inn. The actors in the company at Martha’s Vineyard taught us how to look for work in the New York theater and how to make the rounds. In time, “making the rounds” became a very familiar phrase to me as it was to all actors of that period. It meant arriving in the Broadway district at around ten in the morning when the agents’ and producers’ offices were beginning to open, going up and down Broadway and the side streets from 39th Street to 57th Street, and asking the receptionists of the agents and producers if any casting was being done that day. If the answer was yes, then came the next question:

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Is there a part for me? If the answer was no, you went on to the next office. If the answer was maybe, you took a seat and waited, sometimes as long as five hours, for someone higher up to come look you over. Then you would find out if the receptionist’s response had been the right one or whether you would hear the curt “not right.” Sometimes there would be no comment at all, just a negative shake of the head. If you were lucky, they would say, “Come back and see Mr. So-and-So tomorrow,” or luckier still, “Wait here and I’ll give you a script to read.” I got up faithfully every morning, put my nickel in the subway slot, headed for uptown, and made the rounds in winter cold and summer heat. The quality of the theater was probably no better or worse than that of today, but there were many more theaters and active producers, and though I’m not sure it ever did any good, the assistants were usually accessible to your question: “Any casting today?” When I got to New York, I religiously called on the offices of Arthur Hopkins, Guthrie McClintic, Crosby Gaige, Oscar Serlin, Max Gordon, Sam Harris, John Golden, Herman Shumlin, the Theater Guild, William Brady, the Shuberts, Brock Pemberton, Alfred DeLiagre—the list goes on and on. Each of them did, or tried to do, one or more plays a year. Each of them had an office staff that was usually polite and considerate to the actors who asked the same question repeatedly: “Anything for me today?” By the time I arrived, the legendary Frohman, Belasco, and Winthrop Ames were gone. However, their theaters, the Belasco, the Empire, the Lyceum, and the Little Theater, were still in place. And the legends about their lives, their productions, and their stars were repeated again whenever actors gathered. It was also the custom then to call on the agents, as one did the managers and producers, and ask the question: “Anything today?” I got my first job in this way. I had been making the rounds all day and I was cold and exhausted, but I had promised to meet John Forsht at three and had a half-hour to kill. I decided to try one more office, and the agent said no to my question, but as I was walking out, he said, “Wait a minute.” He made a phone call and handed me a slip of paper with an address on West 55th Street. It was Fox Pictures’ New York studio. I met John at three, explained why I could not go back to the apartment, and headed for the Studio, my hands wet with perspiration. They gave me a scene to look over and then called me in for a reading. It was the part of a waif, a scissors grinder in the fourteenth century, in an industrial film. No matter, it was three days work, and the pay was fifty dollars a day. I read for the director and he said they would be making a decision before seven that night, and if they wanted me, they would call. Our apartment was on the first floor, and the phone for all the tenants was on the fifth floor. Seven o’clock came, no call. Seven-thirty came, still no call. I was extremely discouraged; then I heard a phone ring and someone with

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an Italian accent call “Foote.” I ran up the five flights of stairs and grabbed the phone. I was told to be at the studio at seven in the morning for costume and makeup. My next job was as prop boy for a revue being performed at the Provincetown Playhouse across the street from our apartment. I was paid fifteen dollars a week. I worked at Provincetown at night and made the rounds faithfully every weekday. The renowned producer, Arthur Hopkins, had a small office in the Plymouth Theater building on 44th Street. There were only two rooms to his office, an outer room where his receptionist usually sat and an adjoining room that was his. I discovered early on that when the receptionist was out of the office, the door between her office and his was often left open. Mr. Hopkins could always be found reading the manuscript of a play, wearing a hat. He seldom looked up when anyone entered the office and asked the question “Anything today?” but he would shake his head and keep on reading. Still, I thought, he might look up one day, and there might be a part. He never did. Some years later when I had my first play on Broadway, June Walker, who was the star, invited him to a run-through before our opening. I got to meet him at last. He was very kind and supportive, but the kind of theater he had been part of had fallen on difficult times by then, and he seldom produced plays. I was going to the theater as much as my time and very limited budget would allow. I remember seeing The Old Maid with Helen Menken and Judith Anderson at the lovely Empire Theater (now torn down). I also saw Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour at the Maxine Elliott Theater (also now torn down). I always bought the second balcony seats, which cost fifty-five cents. I soon learned to look about the house for empty seats in the more expensive sections, and at intermission, if the seats were still vacant, I would claim one of them as my own. From my fellow actors, I learned that when I was completely broke I could wait outside until the first intermission, mingle with the audience who had come out for a smoke or a breath of fresh air, walk nonchalantly in with them when the intermission was over, stand in the back until the lights went down, and then scurry to an empty seat. It was in January of 1936 that I went to see Pauline Lord in Ethan Frome with Raymond Massey and Ruth Gordon. I do not remember what good fortune enabled me to buy an orchestra seat for this play, but I do remember sitting there from the beginning. From the moment the fragile but overpowering figure of Miss Lord appeared on the stage, I was transformed. From then on, I was dissatisfied with much of the acting in the American theater. By what magic she accomplished what she did, I am still not sure, but I felt that the life she brought to the stage that day, and the truth and beauty of it, made most other acting trivial. For all the excitement of New York, Wharton, Texas, was never far from my mind. My mother was an inexhaustible and excellent letter writer, every

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day writing long chronicles of my family and friends and their activities. She wrote as if I had just left the day before, never, however, punishing me or making me feel guilty about obviously enjoying my new life. I have kept many of these letters. They are all witty, compassionate, and insightful. In my lonely times, and there were many—even in busy, bustling New York—I would read them over and over. She also had a penchant for describing all their meals in great detail, and since food was always excellently prepared in our house and in the houses of all our relatives, her descriptions of their meals made me ravenously hungry. I had to write and ask her to stop those descriptions, as I often had little enough money for food and the food available after reading her descriptions seemed almost inedible. In the winter of 1936, I ran into Rosamond Pinchot, whom I had known at the Playhouse. She was one of the great beauties of her day, from a rich and distinguished New York-Pennsylvania family. She had starred some years before in Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle. I had met her somehow at the Playhouse when she was doing a play about John Brown. She told me that she was studying with Tamara Daykarhanova at her School for the Stage and that she needed a scene partner. She said that if I were interested in working with her, she would pay for the lessons. For the next three years, I spent a great part of each day at this school located at 29 West 59th Street on the sixth floor of a long, narrow building. What I learned there was to influence my writing greatly. There were three acting teachers at the school: Tamara Daykarhanova, Vera Soloviova, and Andrius Jilinsky. Daykarhanova had been the leading lady in Balieff ’s Chauve-Souries that had been produced first in Russia and had had great success in subsequent American and European tours. The company had disbanded some years before and Daykarhanova and her husband, Sergei Vassiliev, stayed on in America. She had been associated with Maria Ouspenskaya in her school, and when Ouspenskaya left New York for Hollywood, she began her own acting studio, asking Jilinsky and Soloviova to join her. Jilinsky and Soloviova were married and had been members of the Moscow Art Theater. Soloviova had replaced the original Nina in The Seagull and had performed it many times at the Art Theater. She had also originated the part of the blind girl in Stanislavsky’s production of Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth. Jilinsky, too, had played roles at the Art Theater. However, the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution had interrupted his career. On his return, they were both members of the Second Studio. After their marriage, the Lithuanian government invited Jilinsky to head their State Theater, and he and Soloviova did so for several years. In the meantime, Michael Chekhov, one of the world’s great actors and Anton’s nephew, had left Russia and started a theater in Paris. He asked Jilinsky and Soloviova to join him, and they toured with Chekhov across Europe and finally in America. The company disbanded here, and Jilinsky and Soloviova both decided to remain in New York and work with Daykarhanova.

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They had classes in scene study, acting technique, makeup, voice, diction, and fencing. Rosamond was in the scene study class, and I began to work with her. Madame Soloviova and Daykarhanova were in charge of this class. Our first scene was from Candida. After we finished our scene, they conferred for several minutes in Russian and then Daykarhanova, who spoke the clearer English, began the criticism. They began by asking me a number of questions: where I had trained before, what parts had I played, etc. I told them as best I could how I had trained, and they shook their heads and looked doleful. My heart sank. Then they said that I was not without talent, but I had the wrong kind of training. If I continued working as I did, they assured me that I would develop very bad acting patterns that would take years to overcome. They suggested I take technique classes with Jilinsky; but in the meantime, I could continue in the scene class and they would help me as much as they could. They then gave us specific criticism about the scene. I heard the strange words “beats” and “colors” for the first time. I went away thoroughly confused, but I sensed this was a place I could learn something of value. Rosamond and I rehearsed our scene two more times, but before we could bring it back to class, she got a job in Hollywood. I continued in the scene class with other partners and began Acting Technique with Jilinsky in the mornings. To pay for my extra classes, I took turns with the regular elevator man running the elevator and helped the schools’ business manager in the office. Jilinsky was a tall, vital, handsome man of great energy and enthusiasm. He was a thorough and rigid taskmaster and he based his technique partly on his study with Stanislavsky, partly from Vakhtangov and the Second Studio, and partly from his work with Michael Chekhov. I worked every day with him from nine to eleven. Many of the concepts of his teaching have become commonplace, either through his students, Boleslavsky’s students, Ouspenskaya’s students, or the teaching members of the Group Theatre who trained with Ouspenskaya and Boleslavsky at the Actor’s Lab. Part of these exercises in concentration, relaxation, sensory work, and improvisation are now in some form used by many acting teachers. Now even those that totally oppose the so-called “System” are forced to deal with it and to explain why they ignore it. Back then, it was revolutionary and much resented by many theater professionals. It was a time of revolt in the American theater and in American Society, and those of us who became dedicated to this way of work felt we were turning our backs on the past system. When I heard Jilinsky say that all good actors know instinctively what he was trying to teach us, and that Pauline Lord, Laurette Taylor, and Walter Huston, whether they were aware of it or not, worked this way, I was willing to make any sacrifice to try and learn, too. In a letter he wrote to playwright Lynn Riggs, Jilinsky explains his way of working:

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The Moscow Art Theater was one of the stepping-stones of my life, and in many ways sacred to me. The acting there is in Russian and the interpretations are Russian. For instance, if O’Neill is performed, the actors will interpret him as Russians and not as Americans. But here is one important aspect of this theater that makes it different from all the best theaters in the world. For while the psychology is Russian, the means of acting are international— that is to say, fundamental—for they are based on the universal elements of truth. Our director, Stanislavsky, used Salvini and Duse as the best examples of acting—and neither of these artists was Russian. There is a quality in their creativeness, which convinced and fascinated him and led him to seek out the principles of their art so that other actors might act with the same truth. Thus, it was that Stanislavsky created a so-called “system.” Here in America you call his system the “Technique of Acting,” “Stanislavsky method,” etc. First of all, it does not teach you how to act, but how to work—how to train yourself and to organize your creative apparatus—that is all. There is only one way to act: act well.

I don’t remember now whether Daykarhanova or Jilinsky actually asked those of us in the technique classes not to look for acting work until the first semester of training was finished, or whether those of us in the class decided on our own not to work professionally. There was little time to look for acting jobs in any case as I was busy all day in either the technique or scene class. I spent my spare moments preparing for class work. However, I needed some kind of job to support myself. I found a job ushering at night at a movie house on 42nd Street, where I also doubled as a barker marching up and down in front of the marquee telling the pedestrians the name of our movie. In Jilinsky’s class, we were still working on exercises; we improvised any language we used. However, I continued working on scenes from plays in the Daykarhanova/Soloviova class. I was kind of the in-house juvenile. I did scenes from Ah, Wilderness, Come of Age, Candida, Cherokee Nights, and The Seagull. Burgess Meredith was a great success in Winterset the season before. I had seen him in the play twice and thought he was electrifying. I began to attend every play that he did. I saw The Star Wagon with Lillian Gish and Russell Collins (one of the Group actors). It was the first time I saw Lillian on stage. Then I saw Burgess in High Tor and he became my idol. I immediately wanted to work on all his parts, but the Russians would not permit it. I went back to Martha’s Vineyard for the summer, but their method of working was so different from what I was being taught at Daykarhanova’s, that I was in constant inner conflict. I soon found an excuse to get back to New York before summer was over. When I arrived, I was told that Warner Brothers was starting to do Broadway plays and one of their scouts, who had seen

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me at Daykarhanova’s in a scene from No ’Count Boy, wanted to talk to me about a part. I went for an interview, and I was cast in a small part in a play called Swing Your Lady. It was my first real taste of Broadway, and it was not a pleasant one. My part was only in one scene, so I wasn’t called to rehearsal until the day my scene was to be rehearsed. I arrived not knowing any of the actors, nor anything about the play. I was called on stage and was told when and where to move and that was all. I panicked as I had in those first weeks in Pasadena; I froze. I couldn’t remember lines; I couldn’t hear cues. In those days, Actors’ Equity allowed a management to rehearse an actor five days for free. If, at the end of that period, the management wanted you to continue, your contract went into effect and you went on salary. At the end of the fourth day the stage manager called me aside and said, “You are going to be replaced.” I was humiliated. Not only would I have to go back to tell my teachers I had been fired from a job they didn’t want me to take in the first place, I also had to write my family and tell them of my failure. I had the regrettable habit of writing extremely optimistic letters to my parents back in Wharton. I was so eager to reassure them that I was about to achieve success and financial security. This letter was a difficult letter to write; I still feel the pain of it as I recall it. As it turned out, I would have only gotten rehearsal pay and one week’s work from the play anyway because it closed the night after it opened. I was soon busy again at Daykarhanova’s and supporting myself by ushering. Benjamin Zemach, who had directed Salome in Pasadena and whose wife now studied with Jilinsky, came to the studio looking for actors to use in the ensemble and dance scenes in The Eternal Road, which he was choreographing. He asked permission of Jilinsky and Daykarhanova to take some of us for these scenes. There had to be much skillful pantomime done, but we would have no lines to say. They agreed that it would be a good experience for us, and I was one of the actors hired. The Eternal Road was a gigantic spectacle of the history of the Jewish people told through Biblical stories. It had been written by Franz Werfel; Max Reinhardt was directing, Norman Bel Geddes was designing the sets, Kurt Weill writing the score, and his wife, Lotte Lenya, was acting in it, along with a number of actors from Reinhardt’s theater in Germany as well as several prominent American actors, including Rosamond Pinchot. Zemach had a company of trained dancers, in addition to those of us whom he had brought from Daykarhanova’s school. Although we had no lines, we appeared in many scenes with many changes of costumes. It was an enormous production, the kind of spectacle for which Reinhardt was famous. The dress rehearsals, coordinating the set, lights, cast, cues, dancers, and actors, were long and arduous. I remember one lasting until four in the morning. Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya were unknown names to me then. I think back now and realize that I was rehearsing with three major influences of Ger-

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man and European Theater, and I regret that I did not spend time listening and watching them work. I looked upon it merely as a job that fed me and left my days free to work at Daykarhanova’s. The Eternal Road did not have the critical success it needed to ensure enough ticket sales to keep so expensive a production going, and it closed after four months. In the summer of 1937, I was hired for eight plays at the Maverick Theater in Woodstock, New York, where I at last played Mio, the Burgess Meredith role in Winterset. That fall, I was cast as a lead in two one-act plays, The Coggerers (by Paul Vincent Carroll) and The Red Velvet Goat (by Josephina Nigli). Both productions were for the One-Act Repertory Theater, and performed at the Hudson Theater. Studying with me at Daykarhanova’s was Mary Hunter, a remarkable woman, older than most of the students at the school and ten years my senior. In California she had become friends with Agnes DeMille, and in New Mexico with the playwright Lynn Riggs, whose play Green Grow the Lilacs, had had a successful production by the Theater Guild with Franchot Tone, June Walker, Helen Westley, and Lee Strasberg. Later, in Chicago, she had become active with an experimental theater group and had become friends with the novelist James T. Farrell and the great black dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham. She was hired in Chicago for a part in what turned out to be a very successful radio program at the time, Easy Aces. When NBC decided to bring Easy Aces to New York, Mary came along and began studying theater, first with Ouspenskaya and later with Daykarhanova. At first, she was interested in directing, but because the commercial theater rarely hired women directors, she realized her chance for Broadway employment was dim. At Daykarhanova’s, we were indoctrinated with the ideal of group acting. They taught us to believe that Broadway, with its dependence upon stars, ruined real creativity. The Group Theatre was about to disband; but at our studio, we felt that the group ideal was the correct one and that the failure of the Group was only a result of Broadway economics. The following spring a number of us were asked if we would like to be a part of a permanent company. It was to be called the American Actors Company, and we were to go away for the summer and work on a play and exercises that would help strengthen us as a group. In her preface to my play, Only the Heart, Mary Hunter described the company by saying: “The American Actors Company was founded by a group of young theater people for the kind of experimental development that the creative artist in every field must have, and that is most difficult to achieve in the theater as none of its arts can be practiced in solitude.” I was not involved in any artistic decisions concerning the company at its beginnings, and so I don’t know why our first play was not an American play but was instead Edith Hamilton’s translation of The Trojan Women. It was

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performed in the fall of 1938, with Mildred Dunnock as Hecuba. The New York critics savaged the production. In the meantime, we rented a space over a garage on West 69th Street, built a stage of sorts, and brought in platforms for seating. We began rehearsing Lynn Riggs’s Sumpin’ Like Wings and four one-act plays by E. P. Conkle and Paul Green. Our primary intention was to share our cultural roots, and because the members of the company represented almost a regional survey of the United States, the sources were rich and varied. Mary Hunter felt it important that the members of the company show their regional backgrounds through improvisation. She asked every member to do an improvisation bearing on some specifics of their part of America. I found all this very exciting and did an improvisation based on a family during a Texas Gulf Coast hurricane. Agnes DeMille had come down to watch us work, as she and Mary were planning a future company production of American Legend. After my improvisation she said quite casually, “You seem to be in touch with some interesting theatrical material. Did you ever think of writing a play?” I hadn’t, of course, but somehow the suggestion took root, and I wrote a one-act play, Wharton Dance, with a lead role for myself. I no longer have a copy of the play, but my memory of it is that it, too, was very improvisatory in form, based on a real situation, and used the names of the boys and girls in what we knew back in high school as “our crowd.” The company produced the play along with one-act plays by Paul Green and Thornton Wilder. Robert Coleman, a drama critic for The New York Mirror, came to see the production and wrote very favorably of the evening, particularly of my play and my acting. I did want to act and I am sure I thought that one way to get good parts was to write them for myself. Whatever my motives, I decided to go to Texas and work on a three-act play. I got a job for the summer working in a pageant called “Railroads on Parade” at the New York World’s Fair. I saved my money and when the Fair closed for the winter, I took the money I had saved and went home to Wharton to write my play. Even though I knew little or nothing about playwriting, had not even admitted to myself that I wanted to be a playwright, I felt a certain security about accomplishing the task before me, a security that I had never felt in all my years as an actor.*

Learning to Write I had already made one visit back to my home in Texas, directing and acting in a production of No ’Count Boy for the local Little Theater. It was on my second visit that I realized my brothers, Tom Brooks and John Speed, were no *Lecture presented at Louisiana State University, April 20, 1989

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longer little boys but young men. I was five when Tom Brooks was born and seven when John Speed arrived. Both my brothers and I were born at home, but I have no memory of either event. How could I not be aware of it? I had been enrolled in school at five; Tom Brooks was born in November and John Speed in October, so I was off at school when their births took place. But I can’t account for my having no memory of the preparation for their births: the baby beds, the baby clothes, the arrival of the doctor and midwife. Nor do I have any memory of being called to my mother’s bedside and being shown a new brother. I have some vague memories of Tom Brooks as a baby but none of John Speed. I heard in later years that my mother was momentarily disappointed that, after having two sons, John Speed was not a girl, but she never said that to me. I did often hear her say, however, that Tom Brooks was very demanding of her time as a young child, and she felt she had neglected John Speed as a baby. I think maybe I shut both of them out of my early consciousness because for five years I had been not only my parents’ only child, but also the only grandchild and the first nephew and great-nephew in our family. I felt the love and devotion of all these good, kind people, and I’m sure that I simply didn’t care to share it. I was closer to Tom Brooks growing up because we were nearer in age, and he later followed me to New York to study acting. He was drafted early on in World War II, became a radio pilot, and was killed flying over Germany sometime in 1944. His body was not identified until after the war. John Speed was never interested, as I was, in the stories of our family’s past. He loved and still loves country-western music. As a young boy and man, he would sit by the radio for hours listening to his favorite country singers and instrumentalists, tapping his foot and pretending to play one of the band instruments as he listened—a guitar, a violin, or a banjo. Later, his son, named Tom Brooks after our dead brother, inherited his father’s love of this music and, along with the now-famous George Strait, started a countrywestern band in college. It was their early touring experiences as a band that started me thinking about Tender Mercies. My Grandmother Brooks was living permanently in Houston when I returned home and was renting her house in Wharton. It seemed strange not to be able to wander into her yard and house anytime day or night that I wanted. The two servants’ houses were also empty, and my uncles and aunts had all moved away. At a suitable age I had been given roller skates and a bicycle, but the real joy of my young life was a horse, given to me when I was twelve for Christmas by my Uncle Tom. The whole family knew of the gift in advance, and early Christmas morning my mother, father, grandmother, uncles and aunts, grandmother’s cook Idella, and her daughter Katie Belle, gathered in our

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backyard to watch as my Uncle Brother led the horse into the yard. I got on her at once and rode her around the yard. My brothers wanted turns riding, and they were lifted onto the saddle one at a time and led carefully around the yard. We then asked Katie Belle if she had ever ridden a horse. Idella, her mother, said proudly, “Many times,” so she was helped onto the saddle. And before anyone could take the reins to lead her around the yard, the horse took off. Idella screamed in terror but Katie Belle held on somehow as the horse galloped down the dirt road in front of our house, finally, mercifully coming to a stop in one of my great uncle’s cotton fields. I named my horse Minnie, after the heroine of the popular song of the day “Minnie the Moocher.” I would come home many afternoons after school, saddle Minnie, and take off. My idea of riding was racing down unpaved country roads as fast as I could. The river of our town, the Colorado, was mistakenly named. Colorado means “red” in Spanish, but our river had not a trace of redness. The Brazos, some thirty miles away, is red and was originally called “Colorado” by the Native Americans and the Spaniards, while our river they named the Brazos. But some early American settler got them mixed up and called ours the Colorado and the other the Brazos. They are so named now on all the maps. When I was a boy, the Colorado would flood at least every two years, covering the town. The water often came up to the porch of our house, but never got inside because the house was built high off the ground. At those times, we had to use rowboats to get to town and back. The floods were very destructive, ruining the cotton crop and causing great property damage. But to the children it was an exciting time riding around in boats, wading waist deep in the water in our yards. My father had been raised only a block from the river and, like my uncles, had fished and swum in it a great deal when he was a boy. Later, there had been a number of drownings in the river and now my father considered it a dangerous place, forbidding me to go near it. Other boys my age were also forbidden, but they defied their parents and went to the river to swim anyway. I never did, not even to fish. I wonder now if his fear of the river was a fear of my drowning or a fear of what I might learn from the older boys about drinking, gambling, and whoring. So many men of his generation had ended up as tragic victims of their vices, and there was always the example of my uncles before us. I think perhaps he thought that if he could keep me occupied and within eyesight he might spare me the consequences of all that. Of course, a few years later he had to let me go my way, but while I lived in Wharton he always kept a very tight rein. Change had come, too, to my other grandmother living in Houston. She had never seemed to be in good health, but now I was told that she hadn’t long to live. I had taken off from the store several summers to visit her in Houston.

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She had remarried years before, and I called her new husband Uncle Pete. He worked for the railroad and was up and gone from the house by five in the morning, so I rarely saw him except for brief visits at suppertime. I was fond of my Houston grandmother and enjoyed my visits with her, and she seemed fond of me. I liked, too, riding the streetcars of Houston and going to the large department stores and picture shows. Once a year, she would come to Wharton for a week’s visit with her sisters. One of these days was always spent at our house visiting with my mother. She always arrived after my father had gone to his store and would leave before his return home at night. “How was Mama?” he would ask on his return home, opening the evening paper and beginning to read before my mother could call out in her cheery voice, “Just fine.” My father was never close to his mother. After his father died at thirty-six and she remarried, he was not allowed to live with them. He was raised by his grandparents until their deaths, and then by his aunt, Louisiana Texas Patience Horton. I don’t know if his mother was aware of the resentment he felt toward her and her husband, but I sensed it, and my mother was certainly aware of it. It seems to me now that my father spent much of his early life searching for a home and family. The Orphans’ Home Cycle, my cycle of nine plays, is based on this search. My mother was always very close to her family and, in time, my father felt close to them as well. My Grandmother and Grandfather Brooks had eight children. Besides Jenny and Daisy, who didn’t survive infancy, there was my mother (the oldest), Laura, Rosa, Tom (called Brother), Speed, and Billy. Billy was only six when I was born and fifteen when his father died. Growing up, my uncles were always kind and attentive to me and I was fond of all three of them, especially Speed, who was considered the wit of the family. My Grandfather Brooks was enterprising, gifted, very successful, and always a generous man to his friends and to anyone less fortunate. The town invariably turned to him in times of crisis. He was genuinely loved and respected in town, and when he died he left a considerable estate for 1925: farms, rent houses, a brick building, and a great deal of cash. Everyone expected my grandmother, who knew nothing of business, to be helpless in dealing with the complexities of such an estate. At first, she let two of her children manage her affairs; but realizing they were unable or uninterested in doing so, she took over. With the help of my father, who managed the farms, she soon increased the estate’s value. She continued to do so until her death many years later. Her sons, always gracious and amiable, had no interest in business at all. From an early age, they drank and gambled a great deal and failed at whatever business or profession they attempted. Brother Tom was the first to be asked

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to manage the estate, and my grandmother deeded one of the farms to him to give him an extra incentive. In less than a year he had mortgaged it, and she had to pay off the mortgage to get the farm back. He left Wharton not long after, wandered around the world as a merchant seaman, picked fruit on an Arizona ranch, and died a drunken derelict at fifty. For Speed, the witty one, she bought a cleaning and pressing shop in Wharton. My father sent all his store’s suit and pant alterations to his shop, and it was my job on Saturdays or after school to take the clothes to be altered. There was Prohibition then, but usually there would be men with him in the back of the shop gambling and drinking bootleg whiskey. When he would see me watching, he would give a wink as if to say, “I know you won’t tell on me.” The business soon failed and he left Wharton, too. Many years later, he was arrested for selling drugs in California and sent to San Quentin. He was in his late fifties when he was finally paroled and returned to Houston. When he died, he was living in a room at the Milby Hotel in Houston, supported by the income from his share of the estate left in trust by his mother. Billy, the youngest, died a few years later in the same hotel. He had been sent to the University of Texas where he flunked out the first year. He then went to a night law school in Dallas, got a degree, and came back to Wharton to open a law office. After two months, he started drinking and never went back to his office. He never thought of law or any kind of work ever again. Their sisters, my mother and aunts, were remarkable women who were loyal to each other and to their brothers all of their lives. Whenever they got together, one of them would inevitably ask, “What do you think went wrong with the boys?” The earliest settlers arrived in the present vicinity of Wharton in the 1830s to start their plantations, but the settlement didn’t become a town until 1845. When I was a boy, many of the settlers’ descendants still owned the farms and the lands surrounding the town, and many of these families had sons as lost and defeated as my uncles. Among them were murderers, drunkards, and suicides. Their mothers, sisters, and wives were mostly genteel and led orderly lives, playing bridge, going to church, and raising their children. As a child and a young man I was puzzled by all this. I remembered the order and stability that seemed so much a part of my grandfather’s life, yet here were my uncles and their friends riding around town, nearly always with the smell of whiskey on their breath. Often my uncles would come home drunk, and my grandmother would cry and take to her bed. Even as a young boy I could sense the futility of their lives and began asking, like my mother and aunts, “What went wrong?” I had no answer then; I have none now. I still ask myself the question, and I often attempt to explore it in many of my plays. When I got back to Wharton, I noticed that everyone’s life continued to revolve around the cotton crop. The town had settled into the Depression.

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W. Lee (Pappy) O’Daniels was either governor or running for governor. He came to Wharton with his string band courting the voters by singing on the courthouse lawn his country-western songs, including “Beautiful Texas.” In our busy house with two active teenage brothers and their friends trooping in and out and relatives coming by unannounced at all hours for a visit, I don’t know how I found time to write a three-act play, but I did. I called it Texas Town, and in the late Fall I returned with it to New York City. I had set my play in a small-town drugstore. Two brothers, vastly different in temperament, were in love with the same girl. One of the brothers wanted to stay in the town and lead the most conventional life possible, while the other found life there stifling and wanted badly to leave. There were a number of other stories involving minor characters that were explored as a counterpart to the central story. The American Actors Company agreed to produce the play in the spring of 1941. Mary Hunter directed, and I again played one of the leads. We began rehearsals in our studio on 69th Street, but our subscription audience was growing so large that for my play and American Legend, which we were doing with Agnes DeMille, we moved down to 16th Street and shared the larger studio belonging to Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. In spite of our growing subscription, our budget was still very small. The male members of the Company designed and built the scenery, lit the show, changed the sets between scenes, and ran the light board. Texas Town only had one set, so it needed only a prop man to make changes between the acts, but American Legend had a number of sets and all the male actors had to double as stagehands. All of our subscription money went for theater rental, sets, costumes, props, and advertising. No one got paid, not the actors, administrators, nor the director. Texas Town opened in early spring. Beulah Weil, who played my mother in the production, says that she had such stage fright on opening night that she thought she was going to faint on her first entrance and surely would have if she hadn’t first seen the terror in my eyes as I waited onstage for her to speak. My nervousness rallied her in some way, and she was able to play the scene. In the audience that night were Lee and Paula Strasberg, Clifford Odets and his sister Florence, and Brooks Atkinson, who was the dean of the New York Drama Critics. Florence Odets was a friend of the company and afterwards, she came backstage to tell us that her brother and the Strasbergs had liked the play and the actors. She didn’t know, of course, what Atkinson thought. Atkinson reviewed for The New York Times, and everyone respected him as a critic. In those days, the edition with the review didn’t appear on the newsstands until three in the morning. Most theater people involved in a production waited up for his review. A group of us from the Company went to a

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bar after the performance. Promptly at a quarter of three, my brother Tom Brooks, who by then had joined me in New York to study acting, went to Times Square where the first copies of the Times appeared. He came back in great excitement to read us the review. It said in part: Texas Town is an engrossing portrait of small town life. Mr. Foote’s quiet play is an able evocation of a part of life in America. It is something to walk in out of Sixteenth Street into the waiting and idle atmosphere of a small town in Texas. Mr. Foote and the American Actors Company have performed that feat of magic.

There was no off-Broadway or off-off-Broadway in the structure of the New York theater of that day. No play, even if well received, had any kind of lasting performance life away from the commercial theaters. The Humphrey Weidman Studio Theater was only available to us for a limited time, and part of that time had to be shared with American Legend. Commercial producers came down to see the production and Edward Choate, on behalf of the Brothers Shubert, took an option on the play. I went to visit him in his office in the Shubert Theater after I signed the option. To my disappointment, our talk was not about the play or the productions of the American Actors Company, but a pep talk about the monetary rewards of the Broadway Theater and how best to reach a vast audience. In order to do that, he let me know that my play would have to be greatly changed. He was very blunt and straightforward and said he was treating me like a professional Broadway writer. Today, I would be equally blunt and ask why he was interested in the play at all; but then, I was in awe of that world of commercial power and nodded my head as if I agreed with all he was saying. In my heart, I didn’t, and later when I tried to execute a few of his suggestions, I realized it was no road for me to travel as a writer. As little as I knew then about the writing of plays, I had some primitive instinct that would never let me indulge in using formulas or pandering to an audience, a producer, or a director. That summer, the American Actors Company contracted with the Montowese Playhouse in Connecticut to do a season of plays. We had guest stars, mostly young movie actors like Anita Louise and Eric Linden. I was cast as the lead in a number of the plays, and I began to think about writing another play for the Company. It was then that I lost my interest in acting and began to think of myself as a playwright. By the next Spring, I had completed four one-act plays, which the Company presented under the title Out of My House. This time, because of Atkinson’s interest in Texas Town, all nine of the daily reviewers came to the opening. Many were respectful, but none as enthusiastic as Atkinson’s review

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had been for Texas Town. He, however, felt the last of the plays was the best writing I had done. When Agnes DeMille joined us for American Legend, she brought with her a group of dancers that included Jerome Robbins, Katherine Litz, and Sibyl Shearer. I became interested in their rehearsals and their way of working. I found my interest in dance growing as I got to know Doris Humphrey and began to attend the rehearsals and performances of her company. Doris Humphrey was a strong lyric dancer and a master choreographer. Her dances were sometimes abstract, but more often had a strong narrative line. She told her stories precisely and movingly. Humphrey’s contemporary, Martha Graham, was an equally gifted choreographer, and perhaps even a greater dancer and performer. Often in her dances, Graham presented a dark world of anguish and conflict. Humphrey’s world was brighter, more lyrical, and its tragedies somehow more immediately understandable. Both dancers, in their own way, were great storytellers. Humphrey, at that time, was more epic, less subjective in her approach. Martha’s greatest period of creativity was still ahead of her, and it continued even into her nineties. It was my privilege to get to know both of these remarkable women and to watch them at work. Three years after Texas Town, I was to work directly with Graham on a production of my play, The Lonely, commissioned by the Neighborhood Playhouse. By then, because of all I had absorbed from watching Humphrey’s rehearsals and performances, and by the generosity with which she answered my many questions about her approach to dance, I had some knowledge of dance and choreography. My work with DeMille had been of great value, too, as was my later association with Valerie Bettis. At the time, I also became friends with Jerome Robbins and through him began to learn about ballet and to respect the work of another great choreographer, Anthony Tudor. Certainly during this period, there were no playwrights being produced that could equal the seriousness of purpose and the storytelling talents of Graham, Humphrey, and Tudor. I was also very influenced by the use of music in the work of these choreographers, and later I tried to incorporate it in my more experimental plays. Modern dance, in all its early purity, was everywhere in New York in these days. Young dancers frequently hired a hall for one night and gave a solo concert. These solos were often danced to narrated poems. I narrated a Carl Sandberg poem for a solo by a young Humphrey dancer, the poem “Strange Fruit” by the black dancer Pearl Primus, and John Brinnin’s poem, “The Desperate Heart,” for Valerie Bettis. Valerie and I began our rehearsals together in her studio, and from the first day we found working together exciting and challenging. Our association and friendship was to continue for many years. She was twenty-four at the

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time and at the height of her beauty and power as a dancer and performer. “The Desperate Heart” received an ovation at its first performance, and we repeated it many times over the next few years in dance recitals around the city. Valerie was very much against what she considered “the realistic theater” and she wanted to see a theater created that more boldly used the elements of dance, words, and music. I began to spend more and more time with her and the composer Bernardo Segall, who later became her husband, and we would talk and argue our theories of dance and theater way into the night. Many of the avant-garde artists of the day were in the Village where I also lived: Merce Cunningham, John Cage (he was often at Valerie’s and composed a score for one of her early dances), Martha Graham, Louis Horst, Tamiris, Hanya Holm, Sibyl Shearer, and Harry Holtzman (Mondrian’s disciple and controller of his estate). Everyone had opinions about new concepts of art and how to make radical changes in the art of our time. I listened. I observed. And once in a while I expressed an opinion. With Valerie and Bernardo, however, I was much more assured, and we would sometimes argue until three or four in the morning. I spent the summer of 1943 working on a new play, Mamie Borden. In order to support myself while writing, I took a job as an elevator operator in a Park Avenue apartment building. I had the night shift and because most of the tenants were home by eleven, I had all night free to write. Oscar Serlin, producer of Life with Father, was one of our tenants and he soon found out what I was up to and made daily inquiries about the play’s progress. I finished the play by the autumn of 1943. Mary Hunter was enthusiastic about it, and she began looking for an actress to play the leading role of Mamie Borden. Hilda Vaughn, who had been working in Hollywood but was now in New York wanting to do a play, was suggested to us. She read the play and agreed to do it, but she wanted the title changed. She felt that Mamie Borden would be confused with Lizzie Borden and suggested Only the Heart, a phrase from a Heine poem. I thought it was much too flowery and had nothing to do with my play, but since I could think of nothing better and wanted her for the part, I finally agreed to her suggestion. The American Actors Company was beginning its fourth season. The United States had entered World War II, and although I had been exempt from the draft because of an injury, many of the men in the Company (including Joseph Anthony) had been drafted. The members that remained were finding it increasingly difficult to support themselves with outside jobs and still do all the work the Company required. We had much critical support for the idea of the Company, as well as for our productions, but we were still unable to pay salaries and we all had to find other means to support our-

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selves. I still have the brochure we put out to prospective subscribers. It says: “A full membership ($6.00) entitles you to four $1.65 seats. Tickets are also available at $1.65, $1.10, and $.85.” We raised enough money to rent the Provincetown Playhouse for a two-week run, so you see, the engagement was not calculated to make anyone rich. For the first time we discussed the possibility, if our play succeeded, of moving it to Broadway, where there would at least be a chance for the members to earn a living of some kind. Once again, Only the Heart was a critical success and again the managers and producers came down to look it over. Luther Green was one of them. An adventurous producer in his day, he was married (or soon to be married) to the actress Judith Anderson. He was very taken with my play and wanted to move it uptown to Broadway in a new production that he would direct and recast with Pauline Lord in the leading role. He had brought Miss Lord to see the play and wanted me to meet with her. I had seen every play she had appeared in since Ethan Frome, and I thought she was our greatest actress. She was very gracious to me and praised my play, but she felt the part was not right for her. Luther Green had known this before the meeting, but he felt I might be able to change her mind. I can’t remember if I tried to or not. I think not, as I was too much in awe of her to try. I only saw her perform twice after that, both times in The Glass Menagerie in Washington, DC, in 1946. I can see her still as Amanda, trying to bring order and meaning into the Wingfield lives. Miss Lord died soon after. Jacques Therie, who introduced himself as the George Kaufman of Paris, came to see the play and asked to talk to Mary Hunter and me. He was very enthusiastic about the production but felt the play needed further work. Somehow he convinced us that by my working with him on the play, we would have a great Broadway success. After four years of financial struggle, all of us in the Company were ready for that kind of change. Jacques and I went to his house in Hollywood to work the play. We made extensive changes, but he was unable to raise the money for a production, so I returned to New York with the new version of the play. I pretended I thought it was an improvement, but in my heart I wasn’t so sure. Helen Thompson, who had worked as a fundraiser for the Group Theatre, began to work in the same capacity for our company, and soon found the backing for a production on Broadway. June Walker was cast as Mamie, and Mildred Dunnock was cast as her sister. The critics didn’t like the production, and although we were able to run for six weeks through the generosity of one of our backers, I had to agree to take no royalties. I was asked by Sanford Meisner to take over his second-year students and rehearse them in a play whenever he had to leave the Neighborhood Playhouse

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Theater School for an acting or directing job. I did two of my new one-act plays there, but the work didn’t pay me enough to live on so I had to find other income. I had read somewhere that Faulkner once worked in a New York bookstore to support himself while writing, so I decided to try and find a job selling books. I wanted to have my days free, so I went to work on the night shift at the Doubleday Book Store in Pennsylvania Station. I first met Tennessee Williams when he brought his play You Touched Me to the American Actors Company to produce, and I had seen him again in California where he was under a writer’s contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After I had returned to New York, he had written me that he had a new play, which he felt was uncommercial, but had a part for me. I was no longer interested in acting, but I read the play, then called “The Gentleman Caller” and was very taken with it. I asked if I could do the Gentleman Caller scene from the play in a production at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and he agreed. Two days before the scene was to be performed, a friend, who had seen the rehearsals, met Tennessee and told him how pleased he was with what he had seen. He said Tennessee had a stricken look on his face and said, “I’ve just sold the play to Eddie Dowling.” However, he let me continue with our production, and so I directed the first production of a scene from the play that would be known as The Glass Menagerie. The Neighborhood Playhouse commissioned me to write a one-act play to be performed by the graduating students that would incorporate the different disciplines taught at the school: dance, acting, and music. I was to direct, Martha Graham was to choreograph, and Louis Horst was to write a score. Earlier, I had written a one-act play, Daisy Lee, that Valerie Bettis had performed and for which Bernardo Segall had written a score. It required performers who were both actors and dancers. I was anxious to go even further in my experimentation with dramatic form so that the acting and the dancing were never separated, but continuous. Martha Graham had by now created Letter to the World and Every Soul Is a Circus, both theater pieces of great power. Letter to the World had a dancernarrator reciting Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and Every Soul Is a Circus, was structured like a play but without text. I have worked with many gifted, creative people, but none quite like Martha. She came to our rehearsals bringing the kind of creative energy she would bring to work on one of her major ballets. She was never overbearing, always interested in my ideas, always inspiring everyone in the company to work at their fullest. We both lived in the Village, and after rehearsals we would often take a Fifth Avenue bus together to our apartments. We talked a great deal about theater and dance, and although I have no specific memory of what was said, I know that I always left her inspired and anxious to work harder than ever at my writing.

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It was while working at Doubledays that I met my wife Lillian. She was in college and had taken a semester off to come to New York to work. By then, I was the night manager at the bookstore and I hired her as a clerk. She loved writing and books, and we soon became inseparable. If Martha inspired me to make any sacrifice to achieve my best work, the New York theater counseled me to be practical, to stop writing about smalltown Texas, to stop experimenting with dancers and new play forms, and to turn my attention to writing successful Broadway plays. These people meant to be kind and helpful, but I was only depressed by what they had to say. In addition to the discouraging advice I was getting from theater professionals in New York, the American Actors Company decided it was best to disband, and I was left without a theater to do my plays. It was a lonely feeling. Then one day Howard Lindsay, a most successful director, producer, and playwright, called and asked to see me. I went down to his townhouse in the Village. He said he loved the theater and that the theater needed playwrights badly. He thought I had great promise and he wanted to share with me two things that had been of help to him as a playwright. The first was never to write a play about a character you wouldn’t care to entertain in your own living room, and the second, never watch the actors when you take a play out of town for a tryout. Instead, watch the audience to see when they got bored or restless. Lillian and I married in the summer of 1945 and she joined Valerie, Bernardo, and me in our talks about theater and its future. Valerie and Bernardo were concentrating entirely on works for a lyric theater, a totally non-realistic theater. I finished a play that Valerie was to do called In My Beginning. I heard Darius Milhaud was in town, and I called and asked if he would read the play. He read it, liked it, and agreed to do a score. We found a producer who took an option for a hundred dollars a month while he tried to raise money for a production. The Neighborhood Playhouse asked me to write another one-act play for their graduating students, again using all three disciplines. I did, and this time Mary Hunter was engaged to direct it. The war ended and the actors, directors, and writers who had been in the army began to return to New York. Through the Partisan Review and other literary magazines, we began to hear of the vitality of the European theater, especially the modern French theater. Sartre, Camus, Ionesco, and Anouilh began having their productions reviewed and their plays translated. In contrast, the New York theater seemed grim and uninspired. Valerie Bettis had been offered a job with her husband teaching at the King-Smith School in Washington, DC. She asked me to go, too, and I said I would if I could have the use of a theater to do plays. They agreed to find me space, and so with Lillian and a director friend, Vincent Donehue, we

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decided to go to Washington with Valerie and Bernardo. Valerie would come to teach once a week, but my wife and I, with Donehue, were to be in charge of running the school and forming the theater. We stayed there for four years. I was allowed to write my plays and to produce them, as well as direct productions of Lorca, Sartre, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Gertrude Stein. It was a fruitful time for me. I was able to experiment with many forms of theater far away from the commercial pressures of New York. By 1949, after four years in DC, I decided to go back to New York. I had enjoyed my years there, but I felt the duties of teaching, directing, and running a theater were leaving me little time for writing. By this time, I had been writing for ten years. I had written ten one-act plays and eight full-length plays. Most had been given productions of some kind. I had experimented a great deal with various theatrical forms, but I now felt that was over. In all the plays, no matter how experimental, I had returned again and again to the people and themes of the world in which I grew up. Just before leaving New York in 1945, I read Katherine Anne Porter’s three short novels in her collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider. These short novels had a profound and lasting effect on me. Here, it seemed to me, was a supreme prose stylist, yet with no trace of artifice. Porter was no local colorist, nor was she sentimental about the past. Yet, she drew from her past and region of her birth to create her imagined world. My wife and I went away to her family home in the Pennsylvania countryside. I was working on my play The Chase, and I had a great deal of time to think and reflect. I needed this quiet time. I had learned much these past years from my Russian acting teachers, from the great dancers and choreographers Graham, Bettis, DeMille, Humphrey, Tudor, from the many writers I admired, and from the productions of my plays. I was tired, too. I felt that instead of having a steady goal, I had an improvised one. I had been constantly learning on the job, as it were. I had learned from many rich, varied and unexpected sources. Now, it seemed to me, it was time to be quiet, to assimilate, and to make sense of what I had learned. The first questions I asked myself were: Why did I have no desire to write topical plays about the many social issues of the day? Why was I uninterested in finding a formula for a successful, well-made Broadway play? Why was I now tired of constantly searching for new theatrical forms? I welcomed all the experiences of the past, felt that each had played an important part in my development, and was certain that a great deal of it would remain with me always, informing in some vital way whatever I wrote.

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I felt that I had not chosen the characters and the stories of my plays so much as they had chosen me. These are my people and my stories, and the plays I want to write—the only ones I know how to write. I rarely give advice of any kind to young writers, but if pressed I will say, “Find out what you have to write and write it.”*

*Lecture presented at Louisiana State University, April 21, 1989

Chapter Two

On Being a Southern Writer As a writer, a playwright, and screenwriter, my goal is always to establish a true sense of place in my work. “What It Means to Be a Southern Writer”

Wharton, Then and Now In returning to Wharton in late January of this year, I found that the frost had been light and had browned only small patches of the grass in the yards, and the narcissuses, the first of the Spring flowers, were in bloom all over town. The pecan trees are still leafless, their gray branches stark and serene against the gentle, January day. I return to this place to stay in the house to which I was brought before my first birthday. Since my parents’ death, it has become my permanent Texas home, a home I retreat to whenever I can. I have been here ten days now, the temperature mostly in the upper seventies. My house and yard have changed little through the years, but the neighborhood surrounding it and the town itself have changed a great deal, so there are always two worlds with me, the one that was, or my memory of it, and the one I see around me now. My house was built on part of a fifteen-acre plot belonging to my mother’s parents. My grandparents bought the plot in the late 1890s. The land was originally part of the Kincheloe plantation that was granted to William Kincheloe, one of Texas’s first settlers, by the Mexican government in the 1830s. My grandfather grew cotton on part of the acreage, as well as some corn and sugar cane. A large barn was behind their house and behind the barn a pasture, where horses and cows were kept. The first intimation I 61

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had of the changes to come was when my grandfather sold the horses and cows, dismantled the barn, and built a garage for his car. In 1916, my grandparents gave my mother and father half an acre directly behind their house, between the pasture (for the cows and horses) and one of the cotton fields. They built my parents a house of pine and cypress, and it has withstood innumerable floods and hurricanes. In the front yard of this house, there are two pecan trees that my father planted in 1916. In all these years, they have rarely failed to produce an abundant crop of pecans. Today the backyard of the house still faces the backyard of the house that belonged to my grandparents. When I was growing up, part of our backyard was fenced in so my father could raise chickens, and another section was fenced so he could have a vegetable garden. The dirt road in front of our house had been given to the town by my grandparents. It ran through their cotton field, across Alabama Street, through the cotton fields belonging to a great uncle, across Caney Creek, and ended finally at Milam Street, which runs parallel to the court house square. The house and land across the road from my grandparents’ house belonged to the Wilsons, the family of a childhood friend of mine. The Wilson’s boy and I were allowed to run wild on this land. We dug caves, built treehouses in the tallest pecan trees, and strung wires from tree to tree, placing a piece of iron pipe over the wire so we could slide from branch to branch. At the back of the Wilson’s land was a cotton gin and an oil mill, which Mr. Wilson managed. When the cotton season was over we were allowed to go there and play on the cotton bales that were stored on an open platform or jump in the wagon filled with cottonseed in the late summer and early Fall. During cotton season, the cotton gin and the oil mill ran night and day. The oil mill made cottonseed cakes, and the pleasant odor from the cakes permeated our part of town. Wharton was first settled in 1828, and from then until its incorporation as a town, it had only a few crude stores surrounded by plantations. Produce and goods were shipped up the river from the Gulf port of Matagorda some forty miles away, and boats carried the cotton, sugar cane, and corn back down to the river to ships waiting at the Gulf. Wharton is the county seat of Wharton County, fifty-nine miles from Houston and forty-five miles from the Gulf of Mexico. The Texas Colorado River, which is the southern boundary of the town, comes south from Austin to the Gulf of Mexico, passing through Wharton on its way. It looks serene and placid today, but when I was growing up it was often unpredictable and dangerous. Floods were frequent; sometimes the floodwaters would reach our porch and we had to use rowboats to get out of the house. My father was raised in a house only a block away from the river, and he learned to swim in it at an early age. Sometimes, he made his spending money

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by selling the fish he caught there. I was never allowed to go to the river, and I was often told of its terrors: suck holes, swift and unexpected currents, alligators, snakes, cottonmouths and water moccasins. These fears were reinforced by the occasional wail of the fire siren telling us that some poor soul had drowned there. When I was a child, Wharton had an estimated population of three thousand; at least half of it was black. The blacks lived mostly in two sections. The larger of the two sections was known as the Quarters, and it was located across the railroad tracks outside the city limits. The other section, within the city limits, was called Freedman’s Town. The white section of town began near the banks of the river and continued east and west for a number of blocks. Around the court house square, continuing west on Milam and Burleson Streets, were a number of dry goods stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, two “racket” stores (our term for today’s dollar store), a picture show, three drugstores, two white restaurants, a black restaurant, and three hotels. Two of the drugstores had doctors’ offices on their second floor; and when they were not busy, the doctors would sit or stand in front of their respective drugstores and talk among themselves. They would talk to the other men of the town, most of whom owned land worked by tenants. These men had ample time to visit, swap stories, remember the past, and play practical jokes. Most merchants and store workers made frequent trips to the drugstore for cokes or coffee. Mail was delivered three times a day and there was no home delivery, so the post office was a busy place. Many people went to the depot every day to meet the train, whether they were expecting someone or not. At least two of the hotels would have cars there waiting to take the drummers with their wares back to the hotels. In 1925, streets were still unpaved. The main streets were graveled, the rest were dirt. Horses, mules, buggies, and wagons were still in great use among the country people, and torrential rain often made the roads impassable. On Saturdays, the horses and buggies could be seen everywhere. The little sleepy town came alive on Saturdays! Stores were open by seven in the morning and most merchants, my father certainly, stayed open until eleven at night, sometimes as late as twelve. My father owned a men’s store. He sold dress and work shirts, dress and work pants, overalls, coveralls, ties, collars, handkerchiefs, cuff links, tie clasps, collar buttons, hats, and ready-made and tailor-made suits. I began working Saturdays in my father’s store when I was eleven years old. He had mostly black customers, from both the town and the country. The town blacks usually were not finished with their jobs until midor-late afternoon. The country blacks began arriving somewhat earlier, and by eleven or twelve, joined by the country whites, the sidewalks and streets were crowded and noisy and the stores filled with customers. The crowds continued until eight or nine at night, when the country people took their children

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and their purchases, got their buggies, wagons, and cars, and left until the next Saturday. Saturdays were exhausting, punishing days for my father. I was the only clerk he had and many of the blacks did not want me to wait on them, so he often was trying to help five or six customers at a time. On the busiest Saturdays, there would sometimes be a line of fifteen or so country people standing, waiting patiently for him. After the last straggler had left the streets, my father would close the door and the two of us would attempt to straighten up a bit. Then he would check the cash register, put the money in his safe, lock the store, and we would go to one of the two restaurants in town and order a dozen or more fried oysters. He didn’t own a car until much later, so after finishing our oysters we would walk home through the cotton fields to our house, talking over the day’s activities. My father was born in 1890 and when he was a boy, practically all the businesses were in wooden buildings. Wooden rails and hitching posts were set up in front of the stores for riders on horseback and those that came to town in buggies. There were no sidewalks, and occasional planks were set over mud holes. Fires occurred frequently, and in 1902, a fire virtually wiped out the west side of the Square. There was no stock law until 1916 and until then, cows, sheep, goats, and pigs often roamed the town. The Depression was particularly difficult on towns that depended on cotton, as we did. There were fewer country people in town on Saturdays then, and those that came had little money to spend. My father loved to talk. He was born in Wharton, and except for a brief period when he went to business school in Houston and spent a year on the road as a traveling salesman, he had lived here just as his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had before him. He was aware of the changes in the town through the years and often vividly described them to me. So early on, I realized that Wharton had not always looked as it did now, and consequently, I was not surprised when I began to notice changes myself. The cotton fields around my house have long since disappeared, and there are houses on both sides now. My dirt road was paved some years ago and named North Houston Street and across the street is part of the evergrowing Baptist church complex. My wife and I often get in our car and drive down Houston Street to the square and drive around it. Over half the stores in town are now empty, only one drugstore and one dry goods store owned by a merchant family from the thirties remain on the square. There is only one grocery store left in the old part of town, and the second stories of the brick buildings that housed the offices of the doctors and lawyers are now empty. There is no movie house. The hotels are closed. Tractors and cotton-picking machines have replaced the

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tenants on the farms, so Saturday in town is like any other day now, only quieter, and the stores are all closed by six. What is new? There is a shopping center a block off the Houston Highway, which has a supermarket, a restaurant, and various other stores; and at the other end of town, there is an even smaller shopping center. There is a growing and impressive junior college that provides educational opportunities for young men and women from all over our part of southeast Texas, and there is a brand new hospital/clinic complex on the outskirts of town. Near it is our only factory, owned by a gentleman from Taiwan, where plastics are made. The town’s characteristic architecture grew out of the needs of its time and place. The summers were long and severe, the winters relatively mild. The buildings built after the fire occurred were brick, two-storied, with high ceilings and porches out from their second stories providing shade from the relentless summer sun. As the stores put in air conditioning and the second stories became tenantless, the fronts of the buildings were “modernized” and the porches torn down; the stores now have a strange hybrid look, not of this time certainly, and no longer of the 1890s or early 1900s. My grandparents’ house used to face Richmond Road, which was first dirt, then gravel, and finally paved. When Richmond Road became part of the Houston Highway, its lovely old homes were gradually abandoned. Now, it is littered with used car lots, drive-ins, and filling stations. A new superhighway now bypasses the town, and Richmond Road is only a shoddy, ugly, alternative route. Driving past the abandoned Santa Fe Railroad depot, I can see that there is only one cotton gin left where once there were three. Across the railroad tracks in the black section, the streets are now paved, but little else has changed. In the country, just outside the town, is the new hospital, and near it are two brand-new motels: The Inns of Texas and the Home Place Inn. Near the hotels, off the new Houston Highway 59, is Hinze’s Barbeque Restaurant, where my wife and I often go to eat. Sausage, pork ribs, beef, black-eyed pea salad, baked beans, cole slaw, and regular black-eyed peas are all part of the fare; also wonderful homemade pies are served daily including pecan, chocolate, and coconut. Recently, a couple from New York City called Hinze’s and wanted to know if it was going to be open on a certain day, as the two were coming to Houston and had heard so much about the barbecue that they didn’t want to miss it. The town I knew is gone, but there are remnants of it everywhere in the altered and empty buildings. Many of my friends and relatives and their children and grandchildren still live here. Some have abandoned the houses they

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grew up in, and have built houses in the new additions. Their abandoned houses have been torn down or converted into beauty parlors, flower shops, or boutiques. That is the nature of things, I suppose. I am sure my great-greatgrandfather, who came here in 1835 and established his plantation, would have found the town I grew up in strange and unfamiliar. When I get home I sit on our back porch and watch the birds circling in the sky, and I can hear an occasional car on the now old Houston highway. From my front porch, I can see the Baptists filling their parking lot for a meeting of some sort. I look toward the town, sit on the porch rail, and think of those sights and sounds of an earlier time: the music from a jukebox in a black restaurant, or a waltz from a faraway Mexican dance, or children calling to each other in the night as they begin their after-supper games. There are no children in the neighborhood now, and the town population, now over ten thousand, has spread in all directions, filling up the surrounding cotton fields with new houses of all sizes and descriptions.*

What It Means to Be a Southern Writer I have just come from a visit to my house in New Hampshire where I lived for twelve years with my wife and four children. I had not been there for more than a year. The house, a modified saltbox built in 1760, has been virtually untouched through the years, except for the addition of a few conveniences. There are fields surrounding the house that are separated by stone walls, wonderful to behold. I arrived in early May, May 5th to be exact. When I arrived, it was cold and rainy. I had a fire in the enormous fireplace, which warmed the room enough so that I could sit to read and write. Outside, only a few trees had timidly begun to leaf and only the forsythia had begun to bud. This was slightly disconcerting to me, because by early May, my house in Texas had gone through these same beginnings of Spring, only there the temperature was in the seventies and early eighties and had been so for most of the Winter. By early February, the hyacinths in Texas had already bloomed and faded. The years I lived in New Hampshire were unbroken except by trips to visit my parents in Texas, three months in Mississippi making my film, Tomorrow, and occasional brief trips to California for conferences about film work. Because of my children, I was active in the local schools. I went to town meetings dutifully; eventually I could drive in the snow with the best of them. It was a quiet, peaceful time. Then, our house was on a dirt road and our nearest neighbors were a quarter of a mile away. I did a great deal of writing, and *Written in 1987 for Conde Mast Traveler magazine

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I enjoyed being with my family and the few friends I had made. Yet, the whole time, something in me was profoundly restless, thinking of another place, another time. I never once felt it was or could be my home. And so it is with New York. I have lived there off and on for a great deal of my adult life. I love the city and I am happy there, but I never feel it is home. I own my family home now in Wharton, Texas, forty miles from the Gulf as the crow flies. I was brought to this house when I was not quite a year old, grew up in it, and now I frequently return to it with my wife. My great-great-grandfather came to Wharton from Alabama in the early 1830s. Born in Georgia, he had moved to Alabama as a young man, married, and then went out to Texas and settled on the coast. Out of that coastal wilderness, he carved two houses, one on the coast and one in the middle of a large plantation. He died at sixty-five, the year the Confederate army surrendered. My mother’s people came to Texas from Virginia at about the same time. They settled in East Columbia on the Brazos River, which is twenty-five miles from Wharton. Other families from all parts of the South joined these two families in East Columbia. Families from Georgia, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky made this part of Texas their home. A number of the families were mixed, by which I mean that a mother might be from Tennessee and a father from South Carolina or the father from Kentucky and the mother from Louisiana. I have written all this personal history in an attempt to explore the answer to the question “What does it mean to be a Southern writer?” I suppose the easiest answer to that question is that it means to be born in the South and to write about the Southern. That answer includes all Southern writers, good and bad. I am sure it is no secret that there are bad Southern writers. Therefore, in my vanity, I have taken the question to ask what it means to be a good Southern writer, or at least a Southern writer who takes writing seriously. I think the answer to that is easy, too, because that means the writer must have talent and be willing to work at his craft with great diligence and seriousness of purpose. But, of course, that definition would also apply to Chicago, New England, or mid-western writers. I suspect if you put in a room twelve different writers from the South, you might get twelve quite different answers to that question. I certainly can only speculate about the subject with no assurance of a definitive answer. To many, the South is just one vast undistinguishable region; but what could be more different in its particulars from Reynolds Price’s North Carolina, or Peter Taylor’s Tennessee, or Elizabeth Spencer’s Mississippi? The Georgia of Flannery O’Connor is vastly unlike the Georgia of Carson

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McCullers. Peter Taylor expertly instructs us on how each story’s particular town or county is different from any other town or county in Tennessee. And many differences can be noted in the Mississippi of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty or the Texas of J. Frank Dobie and Katherine Anne Porter. Each of these authors has a unique style and vision and a vivid sense of his or her particular region. Each of them has a keen sense of place in their stories, plays, and novels. Just as non-Southerners often characterize the South geographically as one vast region, so do they with its speech. Try as one might to make them understand that Virginia and Tennessee speech can be quite different matters (even within the regions of Tennessee there are differences), they insist on lumping it all together. When I was starting out as an actor, most theater artists were horrified of Southern speech of any kind. So violent was their antipathy that I literally cursed my fate for being born in the South. The first comment I heard when I arrived at the Pasadena Playhouse was “Get rid of your speech. You are forever limited with those abominable sounds.” The speech I was then hearing in the streets and the shops of Pasadena, California, was not my speech, and so I timidly and half-heartedly asked if I was to learn that speech? Again, I was greeted with a thunderous reply of “Certainly not!” When I persisted in finding out how I was to talk in order to be an actor, I was informed it was to be stage English with strongly pronounced consonants and lovely vowel sounds, something like a modified English accent. In order to acquire this, I had to study phonetics. Much like Eliza Doolittle, I had to write out all my lines phonetically. The purpose of this, I soon discovered, was to make me sound as much like every other actor as possible and to prepare me for parts in the plays of that period, which had no sense of place at all and were mainly concerned with unbelievable characters in made-up situations. Later, when I got to New York, I joined up with an off-Broadway company called the American Actors Company. It consisted of people from all over America and the director, Mary Hunter, was certainly not interested in anyone talking stage English. She wanted American plays by Paul Green, Lynn Riggs, Thornton Wilder, and E. P. Conkle, and she wanted us to use the kind of speech native to these plays. Agnes DeMille came to do a show with us, and she felt that because we all came from different sections of the country, it might be useful to help each other get to know our different backgrounds through improvisation. All my improvisations were about Texas. One day Agnes came to me and said, “You have a very dramatic sense. Have you ever tried writing?” And so I wrote a one-act play with the lead for myself. I called it Wharton Dance. It was reviewed favorably, and I went back to Texas to write a full-length play called Texas Town. My passion for acting left me, and my passion for writing began.

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Most of my plays and screenplays are set in Texas and I am usually classified as a Southern writer, although recently I heard a television reporter saying with great authority that I wrote tales of the Old West. However, as a writer, a playwright, and screenwriter, my goal is always to establish a true sense of place in my work. The town in which I most often set my plays and screenplays is forty miles from the Gulf of Mexico (as the crow flies) in what, when I was a boy, was sugar cane, rice, and cotton country. Now, the sugar mill is closed and dismantled, and no more sugar cane is planted. Where there were three cotton gins, there is now only one; and cotton is giving way to the planting of soybeans and maize. The cultivation of rice is still flourishing, which is one thing my country seems still to do better than the Japanese; however, the sole manufacturing plant where they make plastics of some sort is owned by a Taiwanese company. My plays and screenplays are often set in a much earlier time than now. For example, I have been involved recently in writing and producing, on stage and in films, a cycle of plays I call The Orphans’ Home Cycle that begins in 1902 and ends in 1928. I write all of my plays out of my own experiences and observations. In the beginning, my desire was to be as truthful as I could of the people and places that I chose to write about. Although now looking back, I don’t think I chose what I wrote about so much as it chose me, and so it continues even today. Fortunately, I had guidance and advice from Mary Hunter, my first director. She made me understand that relying on a sense of place was not enough. Writers must not be content with quaintness and parochialism, so I studied Synge, Yeats, and Joyce in order to understand what lifted them above the merely quaint and regional Irish writers. It was a difficult task then and it is a difficult task now. How is it possible that certain writers are trapped by the place they are writing about so that they finally become tiresome and superficial, while other writers can use the same material as a basis for universal myths and truths that transcend all local barriers? Is it genius perhaps? It takes a particular kind of talent certainly, because merely being born in Mississippi or Louisiana or the Carolinas is no guarantee that one has the ability to write about them. Katherine Anne Porter attempted to analyze how the writing of her short story, “Noon Wine,” came about. This story has been a great inspiration to many writers, Southern and non-Southern. I was making notes on stories—stories of my own place, my South—for my part of Texas was peopled almost entirely by Southerners from Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Kentucky, where different branches of my own family were settled, and I was almost instinctively living in a sustained state of mind

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Genesis of an American Playwright and feeling, quietly and secretly, comparing one thing with another, always remembering; and all sorts of things were falling into their proper places, taking on their natural shapes and sizes, and going back and back clearly into right perspective—right for me as an artist, I simply mean to say; and it was like breathing—I did not have consciously to urge myself to think about it. This short novel, “Noon Wine,” exists so fully and wholly in its own right in my mind, that when I attempt to trace its growth from the beginning to follow all the clues to their sources in my memory, I am dismayed; because I am confronted with my own life, the whole society in which I was born and brought up, and the facts of it. My aim is to find the truth in it, and to this end my imagination works and reworks its recollections in a constant search for meanings. Yet in this endless remembering which surely must be the main occupation of the writer, events are changed, reshaped, interpreted again and again in different ways, and this is right and natural because it is the intention of the writer to write fiction, after all—real fiction, not a roman à clef, or a thinly disguised personal confession which better belongs to the psychoanalyst’s séance. By the time I wrote “Noon Wine,” it had become “real” to me almost in the sense that I felt not as if I had made that story out of my own memory and real events and imagined consequences, but as if I were quite simply reporting events I had heard or witnessed. This is not in the least true: the story is fiction, but it is made up of thousands of things that did happen to living human beings in a certain part of the country, at a certain time of my life, things that are still remembered by others are single incidents; not as I remembered them, floating and moving with their separate life and reality, meeting and parting and mingling in my thoughts until they established their relationship and meaning to me.

I did not know it at the time, but my early call to be an actor was really leading me to be a playwright. Considering my training and experience, from any conventional point of view, I was woefully unprepared to be a writer. A conventional preparation would have been college and then perhaps graduate school at a university like Yale where I would have studied all the current forms of playwriting of that period. There were certainly sound craftsmen of that time that I could have studied, but to my way of thinking now, few of them had a particular style of their own, no sense of place. When I first began to write, the writers I was most interested in—Green, Conkle, and Riggs—had all left for teaching positions in universities, and the New York theater dismissed them as provincial. I began to read the Southern novelists, poets and short story writers, and began to study them, not so much for style or form, but to try and understand what made certain ones transcend their regionalism without being untrue to the place and people about whom

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they wrote. There was a great wealth of material to study: Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Stark Young, Mark Twain, and later, Flannery O’Connor, Peter Taylor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price, and Tennessee Williams. There is great continuing vitality in Southern writing. Every few years or so a learned critic, usually from the East, will write an essay on the demise of the region as a source for writers—yet Southern writing continues. I have just named a few of its writers and could easily add as many more. No other region in this country has given us so many talented writers, black and white, for such a sustained period. Reynolds Price wrote to me recently, “Horton, I continue to be amazed— and moved—by how nearly you and I work the same patches. And I’d worry, if I didn’t know that the patches are in fact vast rich prairies, endlessly fertile fields, with plenty of room for the two of us and a horde of others.” And what is the patch that all Southern writers, black or white, rich or poor, have in common? For one thing, we were, by virtue of Southern custom, different from the rest of America and for a while, for good or bad, we were a separate nation that fought to remain separate. We lost the war, we were then reconstructed, and until the days of the Civil Rights struggles, we continued to practice segregation openly. Since then, we have been asked to go through many changes—some willingly, some unwillingly—and although this experience has been different for all the states that were part of the old Confederacy, as a region the South’s problems were unlike those of other sections of the country. Young Southern writers today, black and white, are not growing up with the same experience that I grew up with, or my father or grandfather. The South is being homogenized like the rest of America. Our houses are like all suburban houses. East or west, north or south, our fast food chains give us all the same food. Our television sets all have announcers with the same blandness of speech. Yet, when I go home and the television sets are turned off, we still begin recounting the stories of our past and present. Only, the storytellers are different now. Instead of my mother and father, and my great-aunts and great-uncles, or my grandparents, I am telling the stories to my nieces and nephews, and my great-nieces and great-nephews. There is still an oral tradition here in the South, and I think surely that is one of the continuing strengths of its writers. As a writer, I am most interested in exploring the possibilities of language. The language given to me is not abstract, but made up of imagined and remembered particulars. Now, in my writing, I do not try to reproduce literally these individual sounds, but I do use the color, phrases, and rhythms of the speech. Of course, I filter these through my own sensibilities, attempting

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to be as accurate as possible. So, when actors come to me and ask how these long-ago people sound when they talk, I try to explain to them the curious mix that has formed the speech of these characters, always pointing out there is no one Harrison accent, just as there is no one Texas accent, or Georgia, or Mississippi accent. Lately, in the last five years, I have begun taping the voices of local people so actors can hear for themselves the variety of accents available to them to use as their own. Actors often listen diligently, but what finally comes out is an entirely different variation of the real speech. The only actor I know who is totally demanding about the particular sound of his character is Robert Duvall. When he was preparing for Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies, he went all over Texas listening for the accent he thought best suited his character. He found it in a small town in East Texas. The man whose accent he used would record all of Bob’s scenes on tape and send them back to him during the shooting of the film. Now, I have never heard those tapes, but I am sure Bob did not literally copy what he heard. Instead, he used it in his own way to illuminate his character. To help actors establish a sense of place, you have to be sure to communicate the social mores and customs to the actors, always making sure that what you give the actor will stimulate his creativity and not stifle it with too many details. How best to do this? When the author is living and with the actors, he can share his knowledge of place with them. As I mentioned, one of the first questions the actors ask me is how the characters talk. That is a difficult question, because the speech of Harrison at the time The Orphans’ Home Cycle takes place, for instance, was polyglot. Blacks, mostly ex-slaves and descendants of slaves, were a majority and most of the whites had come directly from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, or Kentucky. Now, you mix all these accents up and something very special and entirely its own is bound to occur. That is why, to be truthful, the characters in my plays should sound quite different from other sections of Texas. The actress who most naturally found this speech was Kim Stanley. She and her mother were both born in Texas, but her grandmother came from Alabama or Mississippi. Now those early accents and their variations are disappearing, and children who have descended, let’s say, from one parent from North Carolina and one parent from Georgia have each made interesting variations of what they heard at home. Language is not the only aspect of the Southern culture that actors need help in understanding. Fred Coe, with Lillian Gish as Carrie Watts, first produced my play, The Trip to Bountiful, in 1953. The play is set in the late forties and when it was first produced, all references to popular songs (singer Johnny Ray was the rage at the time), movies, economic conditions, and such were easily understood by the actors. When it was produced years later as a

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film, all these references had to be explained to the younger members of the cast. However, the central ideas of the play, the displacement of human beings and the search for some kind of stability, was more easily understood. Geraldine Page, who played the lead in the film, strives for a deep connection with the world of her characters and searches always to clarify the particulars of this world. Another reason it is essential that the actors understand the world of the play is that in our modern theater the sense of place can be defined visually only in a limited way, usually because of economics. The scenic extravaganzas of Belasco’s day are no longer economically possible for us, even if we wanted to make use of them. Today the most effective visual theater seems to be the abstract, subjective world of Robert Wilson (a Southerner). His work is hailed by some people as the guiding light of a new theater and condemned by others as decadent nonsense, costing God knows how much to produce. More often our modern theater is, of necessity, as austere in its scenic effects as Shakespeare’s Globe. Like Shakespeare, the modern dramatists must increasingly use language to establish a sense of place. In the production of my play Lily Dale, performed on the tiny stage of the Samuel Beckett Theatre, a small section of a train car opened and closed the play, but most of the action took place in a living room. The set they used was successful and was certainly appropriate for the action of the play. However, the exterior that was supposed to be seen from a door and a window, which would show Houston in 1909, was not even attempted. In a situation like this, the actors must assume much of the burden of establishing the viable particulars of place. Films, of course, have none of the physical limitations that might prevent a director from placing the story in the actual place where it occurred. With film we can go anywhere, in or out-of-doors, that our budget allows. There is a moment in On Valentine’s Day that might help us to understand the advantage of film. An emotionally disturbed character, George Tyler, runs away to the river bottoms. In the play, the event must be told to us by another character that had seen him down by the river. In the film, we could go with Mr. George to the river and witness his deeply troubled behavior ourselves. This stunning moment added greatly to the texture of the film as a whole. When the play is performed in the theater we are just as involved in this moment, but we are involved in a different way because rather than witnessing it ourselves, it is reported to us by another character. I had been involved in a similar search for authenticity during the making of To Kill a Mockingbird. Alan Pakula, the producer, and Robert Mulligan, the director, were determined to make the film in Harper Lee’s hometown in Alabama. They called me soon after visiting the town and said in despair, “It

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has all changed and looks nothing like the town Harper describes in the novel.” In those days, studios were much against location filming, and the studio persuaded Alan and Robert to make the film on the back lot of Universal. Now, I had a strong sense of the house, yard, and town of Harper Lee’s novel. It was not unlike the town and the house in which I grew up. In my ignorance, I thought everyone knew what such places looked like. However, to my horror, when I saw the designer’s sketch of the house they were going to build, I found myself looking at the drawing of a Southern mansion that would outrival Scarlet’s Tara. I went to Alan and Bob and told them how wrong it was, and they stopped the plans at once. The house that was finally used in the film was found in an older section of Pasadena and was about to be taken down to make way for a highway. Universal had the entire house moved to the studio’s back lot, and although the yard was much too small and the tree in the yard was like nothing I’d ever seen in Alabama, it served Atticus and his children quite well. I was not so fortunate with The Chase, a film based on my play and adapted to the screen by Lillian Hellman. Sam Speigel, the producer, asked me to come on the set the first day of shooting to check everything for authenticity. The set for that day was in a drugstore and it seemed adequate, but I saw an Indian squaw sitting in the drugstore. I went running back to Sam’s office and said, “What is an Indian squaw doing in a drugstore in Harrison?” He had no idea and called the scenic designer, who said the squaw was in the drugstore because he had seen a picture in a book with an Indian squaw in a Texas drugstore. The drugstore in the picture turned out to be one in faraway West Texas. In the meantime, the scene had been filmed, squaw and all, and Sam said it would cost fifty thousand dollars to redo it. To this day, that scene in the film has a squaw sitting in the drugstore. Pete Masterson felt a field of bluebonnets would establish a sense of the Texas he wanted to show in The Trip to Bountiful. In the spring, he sent a crew to Texas to film the bluebonnets (since when we arrived in late June to film, the bluebonnets would be gone). Similarly, Bruce Beresford wanted to establish a sense of the barrenness of Texas in Tender Mercies, so he waited two weeks for the loveliest field of cotton you have ever seen to be picked and plowed under to get his barrenness. As you can see, achieving a proper sense of time and place in theater and film is no easy matter. Unlike poetry or fiction, plays and screenplays are a collaborative art; during production, the author is often literally at the mercy and talent of the designer, director, and actors. The playwright hopes his play or screenplay will guide everyone to the vision of his reality, to the truth of the place about which he wrote. However, he always knows, if he is wise, that given the acknowledged, even welcomed, limitations of theater and film, his

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reality will finally have to make peace with a reality true to a collective vision. However, when I am alone, writing, imagining the world, as I want it to be, I remember Yeats’s words. How very unlike Ireland this whole place is. I only felt at home once, when I came to a steep lane with a stream in the middle. The rest one notices with a foreign eye, picking out the stranger and not, as in one’s own country, the familiar things of interest— the fault, but the way, of all poetry about countries not the writer’s own.*

The Trip to Paradise and Other Texas Towns Just This Side of Make-Believe One of the pleasures of making Texas films is riding around the state with the director and the art director, looking for towns that can help establish a sense of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Texas towns like Waxahachie, Palmer, and Ennis. Venus, in North Texas, is a particular favorite. We used it in filming 1918 and On Valentine’s Day. Venus’s Main Street has a number of brick buildings, half of them in use, the rest abandoned. On one corner is a brick building that used to be the local bank. It was used as one of the banks that was held up in Bonnie and Clyde. Venus once was a prosperous cotton town, but cotton has moved on and so have the people. You can find Venus’s counterparts all over rural Texas, abandoned or halfabandoned main streets with buildings that were once useful and handsome but have now been left to decay. Thinking of those houses and towns, I am reminded of these lines from Robert Frost’s poem “Directive”: There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town.

Last spring I was in Galveston to attend a festival of my films. At a party, I met a man named Keith Carter who asked me to write an introduction for a book of his photographs of rural Texas. He had the photographs with him, and I was very taken with them. According to his wife, Pat, on the eve of their tenth wedding anniversary, Keith suggested an interesting way to celebrate the event. “What about a trip all around Texas,” he proposed, “leaving the highways, the *Lecture delivered to the Southern Educational Communication Authority in Winston Salem, North Carolina, May 19, 1987

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Interstate 10s or Interstate 35s, and messing around the back roads and taking pictures?” That suited her fine, so they got out maps and found towns to visit with names that intrigued them. A moving company’s master list of Texas towns proved useful, and friends gave the Carters a sesquicentennial set of maps for all the counties in Texas, showing all the churches, byroads, and cemeteries. And so, they began their year-long anniversary celebration of visiting those towns and taking pictures of what interested them. They did much of the traveling over a summer, with other trips on weekends and holidays. They traveled many miles, with Keith taking pictures and Pat making penetrating notes and observations of the people and places he photographed. She wrote of Looneyville, in Nacogdoches County, “On the counter at the Looneyville store they keep an open spiral notebook which serves as the town newspaper. Every day they write the date at the top of a fresh page. Anyone who has news comes by and writes it in the book.” Of Dialville, in Cherokee County, she wrote: Wanna buy a town? This one is abandoned but intact. Two-story brick building was the bank, the adjoining one-story brick units housed grocery, drugstore, and post office. Red dirt road runs up the hill alongside the bank. Iron plate on step bears the date 1894. It’s a monochromatic scene. More than ninety years of red dust has settled and turned everything the same color. As we drove into town, I noticed an old man sitting on the porch of a once grand house. Same man now has circled us twice, driving by slowly in his car. On the third pass, I try a wave and a smile and he pulls up beside me under the big sycamore tree in front of the bank. He is Clarence Moore, born in that big house more than seventy years ago. His father was the town doctor. He just happens to have with him a book—A History of Dialville, written by his brother, Jim Moore . . . Book says the town was settled in 1835, and was named for John Dial, who served in the Confederate Army and was appointed first Postmaster in 1885. Clarence’s car, inside and out, is the same rich red color as everything else here. Clarence, himself, wears the stain on his hands and fingernails. He stands quietly and leafs through the book and then begins to speak to me about the town as he knew it in his childhood and youth. There is no attempt in his narrative to entertain or amuse, and our conversation has a peculiar, stately rhythm with long moments of silence. I feel a great solemnity. If I am to understand, I must listen to his pace. It is a melancholy and dignified grief. Clarence is keeping a deathwatch for this town.

A persistent and pleasant memory from my boyhood in the twenties is of riding around with my grandmother and grandfather in their Studebaker to

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check on their farms scattered over Wharton County in Southeast Texas. The roads then were dirt or gravel, and it was difficult to visit all the farms in one afternoon or even one day, especially because every farm visited meant getting out of the car and talking with the tenant farmers, inquiring about their health and the health of their wives and children, and walking a ways into the fields to inspect the present state of the cotton or corn crops. To get to those farms (seven in all), we would pass tiny, dwindling towns with names like Iago, Burr, Glen Flora, Lane City, Egypt, and Hungerford, and one completely deserted area with no sign of a store, building, or house. My grandfather always said that somewhere in this vicinity (he was never exactly sure just where), there had been a town called Preston. Somehow it had vanished completely; how it had was a mystery to him, and I was never able to find anyone who knew. Leaving the highway at West Columbia to take the back road to East Columbia, we would pass a deserted store surrounded by weeds and with its roof falling in. My grandfather said he once clerked in it as a young man. Next, we would see an empty lot with live oaks, and he would say, “This is where our house used to be, and if it had remained standing, the Brazos River would have gotten it because it has taken half of the yard it once stood on.” And he would always add, “This was a thriving river town once, East Columbia. Boats went from here up the river. Once . . .” “Once” was a word I heard often—once this was so, and once that was so. In riding around with my grandfather and grandmother and passing these dying and forgotten towns, or towns that never were more than a store or two, “Why” was added to my vocabulary. Why did this town never prosper? Why was it never more than a church, a grocery store, and one or two houses? Why did the people leave this town and go to another place? Why? My grandfather would patiently explain how towns came to be and for what purpose, how circumstances changed so that towns were abandoned, how some towns (like Egypt) were never meant to be more than a store or two, serving the tenant farmers and the one or two families who owned the surrounding farmland. He said that originally the railroad almost went through Glen Flora instead of Wharton, and if that had happened why . . . Then he would pause, and we would all contemplate what that would have meant for Wharton in those days. God knows it was no metropolis, but it was the county seat; it had the courthouse, a respectable Main Street, and two railroad stations. If Glen Flora had gotten the railroad station instead of Wharton, it would have had the main street, the courthouse, and the two depots, instead of a handful of stores that dwindle year after year. Katherine Anne Porter takes us to an earlier Texas in her story “Noon Wine.” She tells us in her notes about writing that story:

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Genesis of an American Playwright This summer country of my childhood, this place of memory, is filled with landscapes shimmering in light and color, moving with sounds and shapes I hardly ever describe, or put in my stories, in so many words; they form only the living background of what I am trying to tell, so familiar to my characters they would hardly notice them.

Yet, because of her selection and her choices, “Noon Wine” became one of the great short novels in American literature. Like Katherine Anne Porter, Keith Carter has the gift of taking things we have seen all our lives—a watermelon stand, a black country church, a yard, a clothesline with chickens beneath, a country store—and giving them another dimension, a beauty that can’t easily be forgotten. Some of the names that graced these towns—Omen, Ding Dong, Hoard, Art, Sweet Home, Circle Back, Rosebud, Noonday, Poetry, Fairy, Elysian Fields, Grit, Dime Box, Pluck, Sublime, Industry, Cost, Bessmay, Call, Uncertain, Looneyville—no writer would dare invent for his fictional towns. There is often much wit and playfulness in what Keith Carter chooses to show us. Do I have favorites? I look often at Climax, where we see a background of overpowering trees, and in front of the trees are small tombstones leaning in all directions. And I think of the man in the town of Art who looks like the Marlboro man gone to seed, sad beyond belief. And I’m intrigued by the irony implied by the photo of the field in Mount Calm with bales of hay stacked upon each other, and on the hay is a large paper target of a deer, riddled with holes. Circle Back also intrigues me, with its stretch of huge pipe held up by metal trestles, one end pointing toward the sky, the opposite end on the ground and disappearing beyond the camera’s range. And so it goes—houses, clouds, people, buildings, fields—things I have seen countless times and paid no attention to in all the Texas towns I have ever known or been in. And here comes Keith Carter, with his lack of sentimentality, with not a trace of condescension or superiority, but with humor and a deep and honest respect and affection for what he has observed. He comes with his ever-discerning eye, a poet’s eye really, and makes us see these familiar things in a fresh way. He has fixed all of this with an exactness that not only defies time but also seems to welcome it, the way that Walker Evans did with his photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It has been many months now since I first saw Keith Carter’s photographs. I have had my own copies of them with me in New York City. Barely a day has passed that I have not looked at them, and they are as moving to me now as when I first saw them in Galveston. They bring vividly to me here in the midst of this city, so far away and so different from the world of the pic-

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tures, a happy reminder of that Texas so little known in these parts, a Texas unlike the crude stereotypes so often paraded before us here in the Northeast. I hope the towns and places in these photographs will be with us for a long time, giving us some sense of what our past was like. But even if all of that vanishes, we’re fortunate indeed to have this sensitive and powerful evocation as a record of what these towns, and life in these towns, were like.*

The Artist as Mythmaker When the title of this lecture was suggested to me, I was in the middle of rehearsals for a play of mine that I was directing at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and at that moment I was not thinking clearly about anything else. Several days later, when I glanced at the suggested lecture title, I almost called back to say that I would prefer talking about something else, as this seemed much too intimidating and abstract a subject for me. As a writer I felt then, as I do now, that if I sat down at my desk with the intent of making myths, I would probably not write another word. Soon after, I received the proofs of an introduction to my collection of one-act plays and I came upon this comment by Gerald Wood: Foote does not write local color. And he is not sentimental about the past. Instead, he uses his Wharton material to create the Harrison, Texas of his imagination. In order to meet the demands of this fictional world, he redesigns real stories so that they take the shape of myth. He crafts them into tales of going away and coming home, grief and rebirth, despair and healing—tales for all places and times. His love of order leads Foote to create patterning, feeling, and experience, which connect one person with another, one place with another. In the process, his place gives birth to stories that are both from their place and beyond it. They are the artist’s gift to a broken, chaotic world.

Not long after reading that, when I was going over some early correspondence, I found the following letter, which had been sent long ago to Lillian Gish. At the time, she was appearing on Broadway in The Trip to Bountiful, and she forwarded a copy to me. It reads in part: As a graduate student of Temple University, Philadelphia, I am writing a thesis on Mr. Horton Foote’s plays. My interest is rather selfish as I grew up *Published in Texas Monthly magazine, December 1987

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Genesis of an American Playwright in a small town in Texas, as he did, and identify intensely with his plays. As far as I can tell, he is the only dramatist who has destroyed the Texas myth and brought reality to the common people found there.

So you see, one person calls me a mythmaker and another says I am a destroyer of myths. Anyway, I became intrigued with the word, and I went to my dictionary and found: Myth—a traditional story or tale dealing with ancestors, heroes, supernatural events, etc. having no proven factual basis, but attempting to explain beliefs, practices, or rational phenomena—the myth that told how mankind was given the gift of fire by the gods.

Of course, we are all familiar with the Greek myths that attempt to do this. I would say that Joyce’s Ulysses is the most famous modern attempt to use such myths in the novel, but I think, too, of the Cantos of Pound, and Eliot’s The Waste Land. Couldn’t we say that the Biblical account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is an attempt to explain creation and the beginning of evil in Man’s experience? Could not one say the story of the Tower of Babel is an attempt to explain why there are so many diverse languages in the world? Or, to go to one of our great modern writers, aren’t Flannery O’Connor’s stories—her myths if you will—often an attempt to explain the grotesque in life? Aren’t they also an attempt to explain the mystery of grace and redemption in the most unlikely places? Another dictionary definition of “myth” reads: Any real or fictional story, recurring theme or character type that appeals to the consciousness of a people by embodying its cultural ideals, or by giving expression to deep or commonly felt emotions (Oedipal myth—the myth of Horatio Alger).

Given these two examples of Oedipus and Horatio Alger, we might conclude that myth can have literary and artistic value, or it can have none whatsoever. Certainly, from 1914 through the 1950s, the greatest purveyors of the modern American myths were films. The recent book by Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, tells in fascinating detail how the Mayers, the Cohns, and the Warners helped to form the myths that became, in great part, the world’s perception of America. Mr. Gabler writes: The most striking similarity among the Hollywood Jews was their Eastern European origins. What united them in deep spiritual kinship was their utter and absolute rejection of their past, and their equally absolute devo-

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tion to their new country. For immigrant Jews to want to assimilate, particularly when they had been victimized in their home countries, was nothing exceptional, but something drove the young Hollywood Jews to a ferocious, even pathological, embrace of America . . . By making a “Shadow America,” one that idealized every old glorifying bromide about the country, the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas—so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination. Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies Jews made . . . the Jews re-invented the country in the image of their fiction.

Whether or not Mr. Gabler’s theories are correct, America and the world were inundated with myths from the Hollywood studios: the myths of the Old West, the gangster, maidenly innocence and virtue, the flaming youth, and the Andy Hardy American family. Rarely was virtue left unrewarded and evil left unpunished. These films were often a simplistic and unrealistic view of life—a fantasy world. One of our chief Hollywood mythmakers was the director Frank Capra, an Italian immigrant. Mr. Gabler writes of Capra’s film It Happened One Night: The film’s theme, which bridged class divisions during the Depression, suggested that the rich had a good deal to learn from those in the trenches. It was a theme that Capra would sound again and again throughout the repression in a string of successes: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe. In all of these Capra, a lapsed Catholic, popularized what one could call a theology of comedy—a secularized displacement of Christ’s tale in which a commonman hero, blessed with goodness and sense, overcomes obstacles, temptations, and even betrayals to redeem his own life and triumph. If he was occasionally sentimental, and over-idealized the virtues of small town Americans, Capra also created a powerful myth for the nation—one that would help sustain and, define Americans for decades . . . .

One of my favorite films, Dodsworth, with a startling performance by Walter Huston, certainly attempts to explain in mythic terms the innocent American finding his own worth and value in a decadent Europe. It will be interesting to see what happens now that Sam Shepard is writing and directing his own films. In his later plays, he takes one of Hollywood’s favorite themes, the myth of the West, and imbues it with his own vision, a vision that I am sure would bewilder and horrify the cinematic pioneers. In the theater, his West may not be one that exists outside of his personal vision, but it is a compelling, if sometimes horrifying, landscape full of surprises and

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abounding in startling theatrical imagery. So far, I feel film directors have not translated this mythical West of Shepard’s successfully to the screen. To me, what is troubling, mysterious, and poetic in the theater flattens out and becomes obvious on film. It will be interesting to see what Shepard, the director, does with his screenplays. Joseph Campbell, who spent his adult life gathering and comparing the myths of cultures from all ages, all over the earth, concludes that myths constantly reinvent themselves from one age to another, from one culture to another. As I think back on my early plays and my beginning as a writer, I feel I was attempting to redefine the Texas myth for myself. I did this, whether consciously or not, by being as exactly true as I could to a particular place and time. That is why when I am asked where I am from I don’t say “Texas” or “the South” or “Southwest.” I say, “Wharton, Texas.” Now, my friends and relatives at home think I do this out of pride for my hometown. I do like my hometown, but that is not really why I do it. I think I do it to emphasize that Texas is not just one large myth. We do not all descend from cowboys who lived for cattle drives and fought Indians, or from rich, greedy, vulgar cattlemen building impossible empires and mansions on the vast plains. Ironically, these myths have been handled most successfully, at least in commercial terms, by non-Texans like Edna Ferber and James Michener. Even when the southwestern myths and legends are dealt with sensitively by writers like J. Frank Dobie, I read them as if they were about another culture, another world. I suppose instinctively a writer seeks out another writer who will be helpful to him in clarifying the vision he is trying to share. The Texas writer I return to repeatedly is Katherine Anne Porter. When I first read “Noon Wine,” “Old Mortality,” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” I thought, “Now, this is something I hope I will someday learn to do.” “Old Mortality” is a collision of myth and reality, perhaps finally creating a new myth: the artist as truth-searcher. It is a story told from many points of view. A young girl who has been brought up on tales of the idealized past is told a very different version of the same events by a kinsman she meets on a train taking them both to a family reunion. It ends with the girl pondering these things: There are questions to be asked first, she thought—but who will answer them? No one, or there will be too many answers, none of them right. What is the truth, she asked herself as intently as if the question had been asked, the truth, even about the smallest, the least important of all the things I must find out? And where shall I begin to look for it? Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past but the legend of the past, other people’s memory of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic lantern show. Ah, but there is my own life to come

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yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond. I don’t want any promises, I won’t have false hopes, I won’t be romantic about myself. I can’t live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don’t care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.

Although I have always liked to read, I grew up in a time when there was no radio, no television, no VCRs, and no movies on Sundays, so people entertained themselves by talking. In my family, the talk was often about the past as in Miss Porter’s “Old Mortality.” My mother had been to Kid Key College and was certainly bright enough, read occasionally, but mostly she loved to talk. And my father loved to talk, and my grandmother, my great-aunts and great-uncles, my aunts and uncles, and my cousins all loved to talk. I often found their talk more interesting than the books I was reading. Their families had all come to Texas early, none later than 1836, and they seemed to remember everything that had ever happened to their families in their part of Texas, and even way back in time to Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, or wherever their parents or grandparents had come from. They told their stories endlessly and so when I began to write, I wrote these stories—never the actual stories, but the essence of the stories. I left Wharton, my home, when I was sixteen, and though I spent some part of every year there, from then on, the world that I spent most of my time in was very different. All my friends were actors, writers, painters, dancers, choreographers, and composers. And almost all my adult life has been spent writing, in theaters, or on film sets. Yet, I never write about this world, but I always return to the world of my boyhood, which seems to bear out Campbell’s theory about the power of myth. I would think that myths could not be phony or synthetic. They must be truly rooted in a time and place to be useful. How we use them as artists, I suppose, depends upon our talent. However, there is always the danger of the myth degenerating into a stereotype. Two of the most vivid and colorful storytellers that I knew as a boy were sisters. I will call them Lottie and Sally. Now, Miss Lottie taught Sunday School all her life at the Baptist church. Since my parents were Methodists, I was not privileged to attend her class, but I wanted to, because I was told she really brought the Bible stories to vivid life, that her telling the story of Adam and Eve, for instance, was a real experience. She brought a wooden snake from the dime store and had a cardboard garden, and a boy doll and a girl doll, and an apple, and she would imitate the voice of the snake tempting Eve, and Eve tempting Adam, and Adam talking to the Lord. She had her class spellbound,

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and I can tell you that if it was half as dramatic as when her sister Miss Sally described the Yankee soldiers descending on their plantation home during the Civil War it had to be most effective. Miss Sally’s story always culminated in the Yankee soldiers drawing their pistols or their swords and demanding “blood or gold!,” which she always acted out with the most blood-curdling yells. Miss Lottie would mutter as a kind of accompaniment, “That’s true, that’s true, every word of it is true.” Although I could not go to their Sunday school, I often visited their home, which was across the street from my grandparents, and Miss Lottie and Miss Sally in many ways were my instructors in the inherent virtue of Southern manhood and Southern womanhood. We Southerners, I was told, white Southerners of course, were generous, courteous, kind to our children and to our parents, and honest, loyal to our country, etc. It came as quite a shock to me when I was nineteen or so and living in New York City, and I wandered down to the Village and heard Billie Holiday for the first time sing “Strange Fruit,” which you may remember is about a lynching. Later in that same nightclub, I met Leadbelly, who had been in the prison farm at Sugarland, not more than thirty miles or so from my home. I am telling you all this because it helped me realize that myth can easily degenerate into stereotype. Just as the noble and chivalrous Southern male and the unselfish and pure Southern woman had become a stereotype, so did the portrait of the white Southerner as a prejudiced reactionary. Miss Sally and Miss Lottie’s grandfather was Colonel Rogers. He was killed at the Battle of Corinth, and the town of Corinth revered him as a hero. Many years later, when I was in Mississippi filming Tomorrow, my producer and I wanted desperately to use a certain courthouse controlled by the Corinth Historical Society. This was in the seventies when the South was being depicted on film and in books in a very violent and sensational way, and the wary citizens of Corinth, who controlled the use of the courthouse, were not about to let any filmmakers use it. Our film had nothing to do with any of the issues of the day; it explored the capacity for love in the most unexpected places. So we sent them the screenplay, and they saw it had no rapes or lynchings, but they were still wary. I then remembered Miss Lottie and Miss Sally and the stories they told me of their grandfather, and I called on members of the committee and assured them that I had lived all my life across the street from Colonel Rogers’s granddaughters and that nothing improper would take place in that courthouse. They welcomed the friend of Colonel Rogers’s granddaughters, and we were able to use the courthouse. Katherine Anne Porter wrote: No legend is ever true, but I believe all of them are founded on some germ of truth; and even these truths appear in different lights to every mind they

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are presented to, and the legend is that work of art which goes on in the human mind, adding to and arranging, harmonizing and rounding out, making larger or smaller than life, and holding the entire finished product in a good light and asking you to believe it.

And it is true that no memory is completely faithful. It has too far to go and too many changing landscapes of the human mind and heart to bear any sort of trustworthy witness, except in part. At age forty, Willa Cather was struggling to write fashionable stories about fashionable people. It wasn’t until she went back to the Nebraska of her memory that she found the real source of her art: the myths of the pioneers and the myths of the immigrant facing a new and hostile landscape. I have just finished dramatizing Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for BBC and HBO. Emma Bovary was the victim of sentimental and romantic myths of her day. These myths had no basis in reality and fostered impossible romantic ideals in Emma. The novel is also an accurate and devastating study of provincial life, of those who can adjust and flourish in that kind of milieu and those that cannot. When I was a young writer, there was an acceptance, at least by me, of the myth of the small town as an arid and dull place, stifling to all creativity. Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and other writers of the period saw it that way. In my early plays, the leading character had to leave his town in order to fulfill himself, and the other characters often took sides for or against his decision to leave. However, I soon realized this idea, which at one time was fresh and inspired, had become predictable and cliché. I wonder now if Flaubert’s Madame Bovary influenced Lewis’s and Anderson’s view of small towns. I read an essay recently by Malcolm Cowley; he felt that it did. I haven’t read Main Street or Winesburg, Ohio in many years. It would be interesting how these books stand up today. I can tell you that in all the weeks I spent reading and rereading Madame Bovary, while dramatizing it, I never ceased to be in awe at the power, I suppose mythic power, of this great work of art. I am about to begin filming Convicts, which is an attempt on my part to recreate a plantation worked by convicts in 1904. It was a world I never knew, of course. As a boy, I heard many stories of the use of convict labor on plantations. It is interesting that I have been able to enter Flaubert’s world through the written word and my convict world through the remembered stories told by my family. We Southerners, I think, are very blessed in that we are surrounded by people who love to talk, who love to remember, who love to share their remembrances. For they are artists too, I feel, and in some ways, they are the real mythmakers.* *Lecture given at the University of Texas at Arlington, November 16, 1988

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Things Have Ends and Beginnings I often think of the trees growing in my yard in southeast Texas, live oaks, pecans, crepe myrtles, and a magnolia. Each is a unique expression of the tree form. Moreover, I have observed through the years that each individual tree has its own particular shape, leaf, time to leaf, and time to shed leaves. It is amazing to think that all this magnificence comes from an acorn or a pecan. Pecan trees multiply, at least in my yard they do. My wife and I now have ten pecan trees that started from the pecans of one. Marianne Moore says in her poem “Nevertheless”: The weak overcomes its menace, the strong overcomes itself. What is there like fortitude! What sap went through that little thread to make the cherry red!

One dictionary definition of individuation is: “The process by which social individuals become differentiated one from the other.” What is that process? In my lifetime, many theories have been put forth to explain this process. When I was a young man living in New York City, everything was explained in terms of society. Social forces, I was told, controlled us body and soul. When I was a little boy, I was told, “God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.” Today we hear that it is our genes that control us, that a mysterious force programs us in advance as if run by computers, a theory that seems to me as heartless as the old Calvinist theory of predestination. What is it then? Do we really know anymore today about what forms us— what causes the development of the individual? Is everything about us predestined, as the Calvinists once so firmly believed? Is it our genes? Does some giant computer program us? Do social forces shape us? I think often of James Joyce, first in Zürich and then in Paris, writing about Dublin almost obsessively. Could he have written as well, if he had stayed in Dublin? I think about Samuel Beckett, self-exiled in Paris, writing often in French, but finally, unmistakably Irish. These were both men of unusual intellect who set clear goals for themselves as writers and deliberately chose exile. I think of the poet Randall Jarrell, sent from the South as a young boy to live with his grandparents and great-grandparents in the Hollywood of the 1920s. Was that so he could write the lovely poems “The Lost World” and “Thinking of the Lost World” about his boyhood in that city? I think of Katherine Anne Porter, wandering all over Mexico and the United States,

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finally, at nearly forty years of age, writing about them both. What would her writing have been like if she had stayed in her small Texas town? Eudora Welty, of course, did stay home. She returned to her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, after college and a brief time working in the North, never to leave home again. William Faulkner stayed in Oxford, going to Hollywood only to earn the money to go back to Oxford and write. Reynolds Price did not stay in his hometown, but he stayed in North Carolina, not far from where he was born; and its people have been the inspiration for most of his novels, plays, poems, and short stories. Illness forced Flannery O’Connor back to her ancestral home in Georgia. Had she stayed in the East or in the Midwest would she have written the same? Would Eliot have found the Church of England had he remained in America? What if he had never seen the London of Prufrock and The Waste Land ? What if Marianne Moore had become an exile in Paris like Gertrude Stein and never settled in Brooklyn? What would her poetry have been like? And what if Elizabeth Bishop had never left Canada, met Marianne Moore and her mother, and visited them in Brooklyn? What would her poetry have been like? The music of Charles Ives is a product of New England and the place of his birth. The period in which he grew up informs all his music. John Cage, from the American Northwest, was certainly a product of his place and time, but he was discontented with their influence and traveled relentlessly about the world searching for new attitudes, new sounds. His collaborator Merce Cunningham, also from the Northwest, found his inspiration from that region. But as his dances became increasingly abstract, one could only gather the source from its titles. Martha Graham was born in Pennsylvania. Had she stayed in Pennsylvania would she have met Ruth St. Denis and become part of the Dennis Shawn Group? Would she have danced at all? Ezra Pound deliberately, aggressively chose exile from America. London, Paris, and finally Italy became his resting places. However, the Cantos, for all its erudition and cultural explanations, remains unmistakably the voice of an American. Would his economic theories have been the same if his father had never worked for the United States mint? One of the lines from his Cantos states, “. . . things have Ends and Beginnings.” I have spoken of writers, dancers, and composers because they are the people I know best. But when I think of the town I was born and raised in and the people I have known since birth, I realize that none of them are composers and dancers, but are instead doctors, lawyers, merchants, and farmers. One or two I remember decided early on what they wanted to be. One wanted to be a doctor, one a lawyer, and they achieved their goals with great tenacity and devotion. However, most others seemed to have no vocation, no desire to accomplish any specific task beyond finding a good job in work that was

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pleasant and profitable. Often, too, they wanted work that would keep them outdoors, physical labor such as farming or carpentry. Then I think of the blacks I knew and their experiences in this same town. We seemed to have lived in two separate worlds then so that I knew very little of what they wanted or did not want. Did they have goals? Did they become what was in them to be? Or were they so frightened and intimidated by the social mores and repression of those years that they didn’t dare assert themselves and were thus unable to find a way to fulfill themselves? Some did become all they were meant to be. Bessie Smith, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, in an earlier, even more repressive time, found a way to sing for the world. And in some ways, she is more appreciated and popular today than she was when she was alive. She found a way to make herself heard— “The weak overcomes its menace, the strong overcomes itself.” There’s the novelist Richard Wright, too, and the dancer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham. They found a way to make themselves heard: “What is there like fortitude?” I remember now, too, that once in Los Angeles a man asked to see me. He had been born in my hometown of Wharton, but was only a boy of eight or more when I left at sixteen. He had become the minister of a large Baptist church in Los Angeles with the Quaide brothers and other Texans as his parishioners. He had been into all kinds of trouble growing up in Wharton. As a child, his best friend was the Methodist minister’s son and they were both rebellious. They joined the Marines together. The Methodist preacher’s son was killed, and this young man was so moved by his death that he was shocked into changing his life radically. He began studying, to the surprise of his friends and family, for the ministry. I think of my brother who followed me to New York to study acting and was drafted into the army and killed in a flight over Germany. Life is, finally, a mystery isn’t it? Do we choose our paths and our destiny? I think of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there

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Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

When I was a young boy, I realized I was meant to be an actor. I had no voices speak to me as Joan of Arc did, but I distinctly remember waking up one day with a great assurance that I wanted to be an actor. Now, why was that? There I was growing up in a town of three thousand, a town dependent upon cotton, sugarcane, corn, and rice. It was a provincial, isolated town. The only theatrical entertainment we had were medicine shows and tent shows. Medicine shows I hardly remember, but tent shows I recall vividly. In my earliest years, once a year, the Dubinsky Brothers brought their tent show to town for a week. Later they were supplanted by Dude Arthur and his comedians. The tent was put up in a vacant lot owned by my great-uncle, only a half block from my house. I remember three of the players particularly: Dude Arthur, his wife Minnie, and Mickey Arthur, his brother. Mickey always played the juvenile roles; and before the show began and during intermission, when candy and popcorn were sold, he played the drums in the small orchestra that traveled with them. Mrs. Arthur played the ingénue roles until one year she put on a gray wig and began doing character parts. Dude Arthur played the comic characters, usually a red-haired rube. At the age of ten, eleven, and twelve, I thought this was the finest life there could be, traveling around the country with a tent show and performing. It must have been very simple and crude, but there was something about it that appealed to my young imagination. My father had a store, and Mr. Arthur was a customer of his when he came to our town. I always made it a point to be in the store when he came to trade. I thought he was like a figure from another planet. My father, seeing my infatuation, said that Mr. Arthur was all right if he would leave the booze alone. The day after the tent was dismantled and the actors left town was always a day of depression for me. The empty cotton field looked lonely and forlorn.

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Then one day I read that Florence Reed was coming to the Palace Theater, a Houston stock company, to do The Shanghai Gesture. I had heard that this play was about prostitution and I knew my parents would not allow me to see it; but at the same time, the Ben Greet Players were performing Shakespeare and I felt sure they would approve of my seeing Shakespeare. They did approve and I got to go to Houston, but instead of going to the Ben Greet Players, I went to the lurid, but absorbing The Shanghai Gesture. If the dramatic literature I was being exposed to was simplistic and banal, I had discovered novels and short stories. Although my taste was very eclectic, it included some fine writers: Willa Cather, Mark Twain, John Galsworthy, Dickens, and Thackery. At fourteen, I joined both the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild, which in those days published some great books along with obvious best-sellers. It was in a guild anthology of British authors that I first read Noël Coward’s Private Lives and an essay by Virginia Woolf. Books at that time were really my only education. I must have learned something from my public school teachers, but except for my drama teacher, I have little memory of anything I was taught. At that time in my life, I was also learning something that would prove very valuable later. I was learning to listen. My father, out of a desire to train me in the practical ways of the world, had me join him at his store everyday after school and all day on Saturdays from my eleventh year until I left Wharton at sixteen. Although he never confided his motive to me, I suspect he was hoping that one day I would go into business with him and eventually take over the store. There were times, of course, when I resented the confinement of working afternoons and on Saturdays. I particularly grew resentful on hot days of summer when I was required to be there all day, every day except Sunday. But mostly, I didn’t mind. I liked being with my father, being allowed to use the cash register, collect bills, make his deposits at the bank, and do general errands for him. Best of all, I enjoyed listening to his friends of all ages who visited with him in the store. Because these were days of the Depression, there was little trade except on Saturdays and there was plenty of time to talk. And talk they did. They would chronicle the events of the day and speculate about the future. There were men of all ages, and they remembered everything. Who killed whom and why? Who stole and got caught? Who stole and was never caught? Why did one man prosper and another one didn’t? They argued religion and politics. They argued the virtues and vices of their absent friends. The same stories were told over and over again, and I was never tired of listening to them. I learned one thing that served me well later on as a writer: No person told these stories the same. Sometimes my mind would drift off, fantasizing about the life of an actor, but not often, for I found

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myself enthralled by these tellings and retellings. I am reminded of those days when I read Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose.” Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods, hairy, scratchy, splintery; moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb’s wool on bushes in a pasture. The passengers lie back. Snores. Some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle, auditory, slow hallucination . . . In the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us, but recognizable, somewhere, back in the bus: Grandparents’ voices uninterruptedly talking, in Eternity: names being mentioned, things cleared up finally; what he said, what she said, who got pensioned; deaths, deaths and sicknesses; the year he remarried; the year (something) happened. She died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes. She went to the bad.

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Genesis of an American Playwright When Amos began to pray even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. “Yes . . .” that peculiar affirmative. “Yes . . .” A sharp, indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance, that means “Life’s like that. We know it (also death).”

Often at night I would go with my parents to visit my great-aunts. They, too, were great storytellers, mostly talking of a time before my birth. They made men and women long dead vivid to me. And in some ways, these men and women are as real to me as the men and women I actually knew. My mother and father were also vivid storytellers. They were both born in Wharton. My father was a fourth-generation Whartonian, and my mother’s family came to Wharton before she was born. Her father was from East Columbia, and her mother was from a plantation on Oyster Creek. By the time I was born, East Columbia was a “ghost town.” West Columbia had displaced it as a commercial center. There were only six houses left in East Columbia, all inhabited by relatives of my mother, and the Brazos River was slowly eroding the land that had been separating those houses from the river. The land where my grandfather’s boyhood home had been was almost entirely devoured by the river. My parents’ memories and the memories of my great-aunts and grandparents went beyond Texas to places they had never seen, but where their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had come from: Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, and Georgia. My paternal great-great-grandfather had been a member of the Senate in the Texas Republic, the first lieutenant governor of Texas, and acting governor for a year during the Mexican War. Strangely enough, his descendants, my great-aunts and my father, knew little of him, except that he had owned a vast plantation at the edge of town with a hundred and seventy slaves and that he had died the year the War Between the States ended. The plantation house and the land in Wharton were now possessed by another branch of the family, and my great-aunts intimated dark stories of our branch being illegally dispossessed. Any real information about Governor Horton (as he was called by my family) I had to get many years later by hiring a graduate student at the University of Texas to do research about him for me.

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In the evenings, sitting on the gallery with my parents, I heard the sounds of that time and place. There was the blues and jazz music from the jukeboxes in the black restaurants two blocks from my house. On Sundays and Wednesday evenings, I could hear the choir from the white Methodist and Baptist churches simultaneously with the jazz and blues like a composition by Charles Ives. There were also the sounds of a radio from a neighbor’s house and a child practicing the piano, the saxophone, or the trumpet from another house. When I sit on the same gallery now, there is silence. The Methodists moved their church two miles away out by a shopping center. The Baptists air-conditioned their church; consequently, their windows are always shut, and there is never heard a sound from them except when their cars come and go to their parking lot. The flats have been leveled, and the black restaurants torn down. I miss those sounds. They are now in my plays. I didn’t choose to go to Pasadena, California, to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse rather than New York City. The decision was made for me. My father thought New York was no place for a sixteen-year-old boy. In Pasadena, I suddenly found myself in a milieu where wanting to be an actor was the most natural thing in the world. When I arrived in California, the word “actor” was a very nebulous term since most of my fellow students had a very definite desire to be actors in motion pictures. But by chance, my grandmother, who was visiting in California, took me to see Eva LeGallienne in a repertory production of three Ibsen plays: A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, and The Master Builder, and I knew that I wanted to act in the New York theater. Two years later, I got to New York and I met Rosamond Pinchot, whom I had known in California. She made it possible for me to study at Daykarhanova’s School for the Stage, and a group of students from Daykarhanova’s started an acting company and invited me to join. We wanted to do plays by American playwrights, and because we came from all parts of the United States we decided to try to acquaint each other with the region we came from through improvisation. I, of course, did improvisations about Texas. Agnes DeMille, who had come down to do a musical play with us, saw my improvisations and suggested I think about writing. I went back to Texas that summer and wrote a full-length play called Texas Town with the lead for myself. The American Actors Company produced it, and Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times came to see it and suggested I stop acting and stick to writing. By this time, I had spent six years studying and working to be an actor, and his opinion sent me into a tailspin. However, that summer I went away with the Company to a theater in Connecticut. I played the lead in six plays and was well reviewed but when the season was over I knew I wanted to write and not act. The point is, if I hadn’t gone to Pasadena to study acting, would I have seen Eva LeGallienne in the Ibsen plays and found the impetus to go to New

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York? If I hadn’t gone to New York, would I have gotten to the School for the Stage in time to join the American Actors Company? And if I hadn’t joined the Company and done improvisations, would Agnes DeMille have seen my work and suggested I write? We are told, “God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.” Is it God? Is it fate? At twenty-four, I had no experience as a writer; I had no technique. But I had been trained by the Russians and through studying plays and in working as an actor, I gained knowledge of dramatic structure. To support my work as a playwright, I began to teach acting and continued getting acting jobs. One of my teaching assignments was at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. There, I was commissioned to write a play that would include all the disciplines taught at the Playhouse: dance, acting, and music. I was to write and direct the play, Martha Graham was to choreograph, and Louis Horst was to do the score. Martha Graham, of course, was one of the great creative talents of our century and working with her was a transcendent experience for me. I found myself suddenly surrounded by dancers, composers, painters, and sculptors, all talking about the death of the Old Theater. I was swept into their experimentations. I was married by then, and my wife and I went to Washington, DC to start a theater dedicated to the new and the experimental. Even then, all my plays had their roots in some experience or story I had heard or known in Wharton, but they were abstract and written non-realistically. I experimented for five years. Then one day, something spoke to me as it had when I was eleven, and it said to stop. This wasn’t for me. Basically, I was a storyteller and I wanted to speak with clarity and narrative interest. I suddenly realized that dance and movement were lovely, but my weapon was language. It was then that I began reading Katherine Anne Porter, and I saw a way to use the particulars of time and place without being trapped in the quaintness of regionalism. For good or bad, that is the path I have chosen to explore ever since. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

After more than fifty years of writing, I realize that I have acquired a recognizable style, for good or bad, pleasing to some, unpleasing to others. I am often asked how I achieved it. Was it conscious? Not really. Yet, there had to be choices. There are writers, even writers that I recognize as fine writers, whose styles I don’t admire and couldn’t conceive of following. Willa Cather’s

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style appealed to me at fourteen before I had any idea of what the word style meant. I still read her work with a great deal of admiration. She has written: Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there— that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself . . . Art it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

Elizabeth Bishop does this in her poetry; Katherine Anne Porter in her stories. I try to do it in my plays and films. Part of the process of becoming whatever it is I have become started when I decided to be an actor. Another part began when I decided to stop using theatrical forms derived from dance and to return to a simpler, more direct way of saying what I felt I needed to say. There were times when I was aware of making choices that affected my life, my work, and the kind of person I am. There were also times when I felt I had no power at all to choose or to activate. These times called for enormous patience. For example, my play The Trip to Bountiful was first done on television and later on stage in 1954. It had many admirers, and everyone said it would make a wonderful film. We had many offers through the years, but I felt that Lillian Gish, who played the role in the theater and on television, should repeat the role on film but no studio would accept her. They felt she wasn’t bankable. Other actresses were suggested whom I didn’t think right for the part. Then one day, after Lillian was ninety and too old to play the part, my phone rang and Pete Masterson, the director, asked permission to make the film. We agreed that Geraldine Page (who was in her thirties when it was first done) would play the part, and the production came together quickly. Sometimes it does take patience doesn’t it? And sometimes the results are surprising. I am writing this in the house I was brought to when I was one year old, thinking of that young boy of ten that declared he wanted to be an actor and wound up many years later a playwright. Perhaps you can help me find the process by which social individuals became differentiated one from the other. I do know this for sure: “Things Have Ends and Beginnings.”* *Essay written in July, 1997

Chapter Three

Writing for the Stage What if a man from Mars suddenly appeared and said to me, “What do you do” and I said, “I’m a playwright,” and he said, “Oh, what does that mean?” I guess I would say, “I write plays which I hope will be produced and acted by actors.” How little that would tell him of a profession that, for westerners, began with the Greeks and encircles the civilized parts of the earth, changing forms in different periods and in different countries until today we have many different kinds of plays, dramatists, and theaters. “Advice to Young Playwrights”

Dance and Broadway During the war years of the twentieth century, the dancer and the choreographer became two of the most important players in Broadway productions. Everyone knows of that spring night when the critics found the naïve charms of Oklahoma to be the freshest thing in years. They had the good sense to recognize that Agnes DeMille’s ballets were largely responsible for its popularity. Many people, including myself, felt her work was the only real improvement over the original Green Grow the Lilacs. Since that time, the craze for dance and ballet in theater has grown. Now there are serious plays employing the medium, and any full budget musical comedy or operetta calls for several ballet numbers. Producers are asking playwrights to write dance numbers into their scripts. One of our best-known dance critics says that the musical comedy is the only interesting form of theater on Broadway.

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The arguments for and against the participation of “serious” dancers and choreographers in theater have been going on ever since Broadway began its raid for talent in every conceivable place. Some dancers and choreographers feel that Broadway is the beginning of a vast new audience for dance. Some believe the serious dancers will be able to transform the musical comedy, giving it a dignity and depth it now lacks. They are positive that this means the death of the dance-concert stage. Others point out that a similar flurry of dance in theater took place in the thirties, but it proved just a fad, and musical comedy producers and audiences soon abandoned the idea. The musical comedy went back to its old clichés, unregenerated. Some say that dance theater is a form intrinsically different from concert dance, and that there is no reason for one to reform the other or even that they should compete. I saw four shows using dance this past season. The only one that attempted anything new in form, content, or style was Dark of the Moon. This story of a witch boy who would be human has the basic stuff of real theater. Its conception is poetic; its thematic material rich and alive. The authors have brought a good deal of imaginative skill and taste into the telling of their story. Esther Junger’s staging was at its best and had a life and vitality that was certainly welcome. The settings by George Jenkins were bold for Broadway, which had been seeped in a stagnant cycle of interior realism. The music, when not being spoiled by a brassy and undisciplined orchestra, had a feeling for the legend and the imaginative elements of the play. Richard Hart’s performance as the boy set a very bold and creative acting pattern, especially for Broadway. However, after it was all over and with all its positive elements, the production as a whole failed miserably as serious theater. Time after time, authenticity was thrown overboard for cheap comedy effects. The costuming was a cross between Tobacco Road and any of Shubert’s gaudiest musicals. Clutching it all is the old, old hand of 45th Street that seems inevitably at war with whatever attempts to be creative and new. Whenever a difficult point presented itself or when the director, cast, or choreographers tried something unexpected, one can imagine the producer shaking his head and saying, “The public wouldn’t understand. Let’s make it sexy. The public only wants sex.” And the dismal truth is that the producers won out and the show was overloaded with 45th Street’s juvenile and unpleasant idea of sex. So, I spent another weary evening seeing a talented author, director, cast, and choreographer being sacrificed to someone’s idea of the public’s taste in sex. Bloomer Girl, as Louis Kronenberger and PM remind us every day, was one of 1944’s best musicals. I did not see it until 1945. It was one of the dullest evenings I have ever spent in a theater. This production used the sure-fire laugh theme of the-frustrated-female-and-how-she-becomes-unfrustrated. Only,

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instead of one frustrated female, it seemed as if the producers had a hundred, and just to show the audience that they don’t feel all women are frustrated, they had a maid who served as the unfrustrated female. The dialogue was clumsy and dull, the score was undistinguished and badly played, and the acting was of a style I hoped was only found in the road companies of The Student Prince and Blossom Time. Many feel that Miss DeMille’s Civil War ballet in this production was one of her best works. Often I find Miss DeMille’s dancers to be charming and inventive. I recognize her boldness in attempting such a theme in a Broadway musical. However, as a serious creative work the production did not come off. War’s destruction and the tragedy it imposes upon human relationships are too close to us to have any effect as a ballet unless they are matched by depth of feeling and illumination within the text. Obviously, someone was afraid of the theme. DeMille contented herself with sentimentalization, rather than pursuing the reality of the tragedy. This production was played for speed, the orchestra did its best to bring out all the banality of the score, and the ending was sentimental to an extreme. I hope someday Miss DeMille redoes it in surroundings that would give her a chance to bring the dignity, meaning, and compassion the theme calls for. Of the shows in this season during World War II, On the Town was, as a whole, the best. I didn’t care for the book. Its humor and satire are obvious and juvenile. However, the Broadway production had the decided asset of two very fresh and vital talents: Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein. Mr. Bernstein’s music, though often derivative of Gershwin, has vitality and earthiness. Robbins did very well with the choreography and staging and what they lacked in depth and originality, they made up with color, speed, and some exciting moments during which the stage came alive. Robbins seemed at home in the musical comedy medium and made its limitations appear much less than they are. He has an excellent visual and theatrical sense. In this instance, I preferred his staging of numbers to his actual choreography. I wish that choreographically he had used On the Town to broaden his scope. The dancers were excellent; they showed enthusiasm for the material given them and performed it with real style. Concert Varieties has a ballet by Mr. Robbins that is the nearest thing to concert material on Broadway. Included in the Varieties are numbers from Katherine Dunham’s Tropical Revue. The latter material was strongest when it gave the impression of improvisation. Unfortunately, over time, the material seemed anything but fresh or improvisational. It became a gaudy, bizarre, costume affair, endlessly resorting to the pelvic. The Robbins ballet Interplay had little of the warmth and excitement we had come to expect from him. To begin with, the notes accompanying the program were dry, pretentious, and misleading. The costuming, which I

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believe was eventually changed, unfortunately gave a Simple Simon quality to the male dancers. Robbins attempted to capture youthful exuberance in his ballet, but because of the nature of the activities he explored in his movement, the choreography seemed infantile. Consequently, when the production repeated the theme song “I Am Lonely” in a boy-girl duet, it seemed grotesque in the context of their surroundings. At times, the ballet transcended these limitations and set an abstract quality of design and movement that is the best Robbins has done. Perhaps this trend of using dance in theater is just the beginning of something new and unprecedented. Maybe, in time, the choreographers will transcend the producers’ perverted views of the public’s mentality and the banalities of the surroundings. So far, they have been successful only spasmodically. At present, they are doing their best to enlighten what are, for the most part, arid surroundings. For really serious dance, though, the concert stage remains the only place where it can be seen.*

Harrison, USA When you leave Houston for the Texas Gulf Coast region, you go through a chain of small towns—Stafford, Missouri City, Sugarland, Kendleton, Hungerford—small towns and cotton fields and grazing lands decorated here and there by an oil or gas well. The cotton trucks whiz by on the highway. Fifty miles of this and you will find yourself in the town of Wharton. This is always the end of the journey for me. Wharton is my home. As I leave the highway behind, I enter into the heart of the town. I always stop and take another look. I am struck first by the sounds. I nearly always arrive at night and think if you blindfolded me and took me there without telling me, I would know where I was because of the sounds. First, there is the quietness, or the lack of sound, and then very faintly I begin to hear the tree frogs, the katydids in the pecan trees around the courthouse square. I hear the waltz of a Mexican dance hall, the blues from a black restaurant, a woman saying good night to a neighbor, a whistle from some mockingbird that mistakes the brightness of the night for daylight. I was born and raised here. I know the people. I have heard a hundred times the tales of the town’s beginnings, the events of its life from the time it was established. My plays are generally placed in a small town in Texas. The town is not Wharton. It is a town of my imagination; and it combines characteristics of small towns I have known on the Texas Gulf Coast. I call my town Harrison.

*Article published in Dance Observer, 1944

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It is the county seat and has two cotton gins, an oil well, and stores built around the courthouse square. Harrison is populated by people who trace their arrival to the 1830s: Black families who came as slaves, Mexicans who have crept in as “wetbacks” during cotton-picking season, and Central Europeans who arrived in America in the early 1920s.

The Terrain The town is sustained by its cotton farms, its grazing herds, its rice fields, and its pecan groves. The country surrounding the town is physically a land of great contrast. There are areas of flat, ugly prairie land, and there are miles of bottomland dense with trees and foliage. Nature is very kind to this section of the state. Its people can grow crops three times a year. Its land is rich with oil and sulphur. However, there are the hazards as well—hurricanes in the fall before the cotton is picked, drought, too much rain during planting time, and too frequent showers while the cotton is maturing. The people in the town spend a great deal of time watching the skies—a year’s work, a year’s income can be wiped out in a day by a hurricane or too much rain. A great deal of change has taken place in this town. At one time, the plantation system flourished; now the plantations have been broken up into small farms or ranches. The “White Man’s Union” is defunct, and black men and women are beginning to vote and are slowly gaining admission to the universities. The segregation of the Mexicans is also breaking down. Of course, like most small southern towns, Harrison is taking sides on all this. There are the farmers, oil crews, cotton buyers, doctors, cooks, beauty parlor operators, landowners, and bankers whose lives in some way are influenced by all these social changes. I have given them names. The white families are Mavises, Weems, Strachens, Robedauxs, Bordens, Damons, and Stewarts; the black families are Splendids, Lesters, and Leroys. The sheriff of Harrison is a man named Eldon Hawes. He is the central character of my play The Chase.

The Broader Aim I like to think of my plays as a moral and social history of Harrison. I try to choose for my characters problems that are specific to their particular section and yet meaningful for the outer world. In my writing of the past, I have concentrated mainly on the problems of the upper and middle classes and the old landholding aristocracy. Actually, aristocracy, as it is known in the rest of the South, is now kept alive only through the memories of the great-aunts and the old men in Harrison and through their tales of the past. But economically, such a way of life has rarely been feasible for twenty-five or thirty years.

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I saw the last of it go when I was a child. I heard it mourned and glorified and the passing of it finally accepted. The middle class now reigns supreme— their thinking, their tastes, and their culture. The prosperity of the region has made them flourish. Surrounding them, serving them, are the poorer groups—the tenant farmers, the servants, the day laborers. These worlds rarely meet. They do meet in The Chase; they are brought together by the dehumanization of one man, Bubber Reeves, and a sheriff struggling to escape dehumanization. I have tried to make Harrison true to itself, true to the towns I have known. It has its tragedies and comedies, its rich and poor, its great virtues and terrible injustices. Harrison has my heart.*

Sometimes the One-Act Play Says It All The one-act play has always had its ups and downs. When I first came to New York, I shared an apartment on MacDougal Street across from the Provincetown Playhouse. The theater was rarely used in those days, but I knew that in earlier times it had been home to Eugene O’Neill and other talented playwrights and their one-acts. And not long before my arrival in New York, Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty had been produced and had inspired many of the playwrights of his day who were interested in social change. Later, word began to spread about the unproduced one-act plays of Tennessee Williams. All who could get copies of these unpublished manuscripts read them avidly, and many writers at the time were heartened and inspired by them. Of course, Tennessee’s work has been known to us for so long now that it is almost impossible to describe what it meant to read those plays for the first time. Original work such as Tennessee’s always has many imitators, and his one-act plays of the rural South were models for young playwrights for many years. Then came Edward Albee’s Zoo Story and his other urban oneact plays that showed us, once again, the versatility and vitality of the form. I have been writing one-act plays off and on for most of my writing life. The American Actors Company produced my first one-act play, Wharton Dance, in 1939. Two years later, the same company presented Out of My House, which was a series of four of my short plays, in one evening. In 1944, I was commissioned by the Neighborhood Playhouse to write a one-act play to be performed by the dance and acting students. Louis Horst, head of the music department at the Playhouse, wrote some music for it, and

*First published as “Richmond US,” in The New York Times, April 13, 1952, prior to the opening of The Chase on Broadway

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Martha Graham, then head of the dance department, did the choreography and codirected with me. I might add I was never to be in such exalted company again. Several years later, the ANTA (American National Theatre and Academy) Experimental Theatre produced one of the four one-acts done by the American Actors Company, along with two other one-acts. For a while after those productions, there seemed little interest in my one-acts and I kept myself busy on a long play, although ideas for one-acts continually came to me and I would make notes about them. So, in the early fifties when Fred Coe asked me to write fifty-minute plays for The Philco-Goodyear Playhouse television show, I got out my notebooks and went to work. I wrote nine short plays for that program, and I published eight of them as one-act plays. It was in one of these plays (The Midnight Caller directed by Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse) that I first saw the work of Robert Duvall. I know of no one who makes any kind of living writing one-act plays, and a practical, get-ahead sort of person would ask why write them at all. I am reminded of the advice given to the young poet in Ezra Pound’s “Mr. Nixon”: “. . . and give up verse, my boy. There’s nothing in it.” Yet, one-act plays continue to be written in fashion or out of fashion just as the short story continues to be written. I suppose anyone writing them has his own reasons for that. I know I do, because there came a time when there did not seem to be much interest in any of my plays, short or long. I had to decide whether to quit or to continue writing, even if no one but my friends and family was interested in reading what I wrote. I decided to continue, and I went away to the country and stopped thinking about production, working only on what I wanted to write, salable or not, producible or not. As I read over my ideas for plays in my notebooks, I realized that a number of them could only be one-act plays. I began to work on them as vigorously and with as much joy as I did the longer plays. I began to think back over the plays that I had written, and I realized that my one-act plays were as important to me and what I was trying to do as a writer as my longer ones. I am not always sure what finally makes me decide the material is right for a one-act play. Certainly, it is not because the story or characters are any less complex than those I might use in a longer play. Perhaps it is because the crisis or the event unifying the characters pushes them toward an immediate solution. There is, of course, a great challenge in fitting a complex character or situation into one act. It demands concentration, great clarity, and economy. While I was away in the country, one-act plays were being written in abundance in New York and were produced in the most unlikely places: coffeehouses, bars, and improvised theater spaces off-off-Broadway. Israel

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Horovitz, Lanford Wilson, and Sam Shepard were some of the writers, and later David Mamet, who began producing his one-act plays in Chicago. In the late 1970s, I was offered productions of my one-acts again: first at the HB Playwrights Foundation, then at the Manhattan Punch Line Theatre and the Ensemble Studio Theatre One-Act Marathon. For nine years, the One-Act Marathon has asserted that the one-act play is alive and well. It does plays by young writers, as well as those by established playwrights. Each year the Marathon does at least twelve and sometimes as many as fourteen productions; Marathon ’86, which opens Saturday, comprises twelve such plays. This renewed interest in the genre leads me to recall my only appearance as an actor on Broadway. It was for the One-Act Repertory Theater, which lasted briefly at the Hudson Theater in the late 1930s. William Kozlenko, Em Jo Bashee, and Alfred Kreymbourg, all of whom wrote one-act plays, had started it. Their hope was to establish a permanent home for the form. I appeared in two of the plays: Paul Vincent Carroll’s Coggerers and Josephine Nigli’s The Red Velvet Goat. In the first, I played the statue of Robert Emmett that came to life on the eve, I believe, of the Easter Rebellion. In the latter, I played a young Mexican boy. The third play, in which I did not appear, was by Giraudoux. William Kozlenko was also editor of the One-Act Play Magazine. He had a great love for the one-act plays and high hopes for their being a force in the commercial theater and a vital part of dramatic literature. He preached the gospel of the one-act play with great fervor and conviction. Unfortunately, the Repertory had only a brief run, and the magazine lasted only a few months longer. I am sure it would please William Kozlenko to know that his dream of a producing company devoted to the one-act play has at last come true. It certainly pleases me.*

Advice to Young Playwrights In preparing this essay, I thought it might be interesting to look up in a standard dictionary a definition of “playwright.” I found this: playwright—a person who writes plays; a dramatist. Not much to go on there, I thought, and so I looked up the word “dramatist” and I found: dramatist—a playwright. I then looked up the word play, and there were fourteen or fifteen definitions for that word. Near the bottom of the list of definitions I saw: play –a dramatic composition or performance, a drama. Suddenly, I started thinking. What if a man from Mars suddenly appeared and said to me, “What do you do?” and I said, “I’m a playwright,” and he said, “Oh, what does that mean?” *Article published in The New York Times, Sunday, May 4, 1986

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I guess I would say, “I write plays that I hope will be produced and acted by actors.” How little that would tell him of a profession that, for Western civilization, began with the Greeks and encircles the civilized parts of the earth, changing forms in different periods and in different countries until today we have many different kinds of plays, dramatists, and theaters. In fact, when I first started thinking about writing plays, I found all the varying accounts of what plays could be and the rules laid down of what plays should be, so confusing and intimidating that I hardly dared write at all. When Walter Kerr was a theater critic in New York, every now and then he would write an article on how our plays, like the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Greeks, should fill vast theaters with characters of great nobility taking part in great events. That worried me considerably until I read that Strindberg, on the other hand, wanted an intimate theater with characters anything but heroic. When I first began to write for the stage, there was constant talk of someone writing the great American novel and the great American play. The trouble was that no one could decide on what the great American play should be, any more than he or she could decide what made the great American novel. Of course, there were playwrights who were not at all bothered by this need to be great or serious. They just wanted to find a formula for success that would get their plays produced and earn them as much money as possible. Many producers encouraged this attitude. I remember when a successful Broadway dramatist earning heaven-knows-what called me on the phone after my first play on Broadway had not had a very successful run (although it was a critical success off-Broadway) and he asked if he might have a talk with me. He said he thought I was talented, that the theater needed playwrights, and that perhaps he could give me some helpful advice: When a play is trying out, never watch the actors; watch the audience. If you sense they are restless or bored, change the play. Now, he meant this to be helpful, and so I thanked him and left. But his advice meant nothing to me. No, that is not quite correct; it did mean something. It meant that I began to understand that there are a great many approaches to playwriting, as well as a great many reasons for writing. I was reminded of Ezra Pound’s poem “Mr. Nixon:” In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht Mr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer Dangers of delay. “Consider Carefully the reviewer. I was as poor as you are; When I began, I got, of course,

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Genesis of an American Playwright Advance on royalties, fifty at first,” said Mr. Nixon, “Follow me, and take a column, Even if you have to work free. Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred I rose in eighteen months; The hardest nut I had to crack Was Dr. Dundas. I never mentioned a man but with the view Of selling my own works. The tip’s a good one, as for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There’s nothing in it.”

Likewise, a friend of Bloughram’s once advised me, “Don’t kick against the pricks; accept opinion. The 90s tried your game and died, there’s nothing in it.” A few years ago when I was in California a young man asked to talk to me about writing. I asked him how much he wrote each day, and he said he was not writing at all at present. He wanted to write for television, and he had been told in order to do that one should decide on the series for which one wanted to write and study the programs over and over to learn the formula used by them. Similarly, when I briefly taught playwriting many years ago at the American Theater Wing I was astonished at how many writers taking the class wanted to discuss plays and the problems of playwriting, and how few wanted to really write. Many came with a play that had been written much earlier, and I learned later that they went from playwriting class to playwriting class with the same play. I was an avid reader in my early years, and as I think back, the authors I was fondest of then (Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and John Galsworthy) are the kind of writers that have continued to sustain and encourage me all my life. When I was young, no one I knew read or thought about plays, and so I didn’t. My idea of entertainment was the movies and the tent show that came to town once a year. I am sure most of you have never heard of tent shows, but in those days a group of actors would travel from town to town, stay a week in each place, and put on a different play every night in the tent they

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carried with them. The plays, I am sure, were dreadful melodramas and farces. And the acting was probably worse; however, the town would pack the tent almost every night. There was a company called the “Dude Arthur Players,” and it came to my town every year until I was about fourteen. By the time I was ten I had decided I wanted to be an actor, and I announced the fact to my parents. I became very determined in my pursuit and, limited as my opportunities were, by the time I was sixteen and graduating from high school, I had been in three school plays and two with the recently formed local Little Theater. Of course, none of these plays was much above the level of the tent shows’ repertoire. I received my first formal training as an actor at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. When I finished with Pasadena, I went to New York where I continued my studies as an actor. My teachers were Tamara Daykarhanova, Vera Soloviova, and Andrius Jilinsky. They taught me to study the whole play when working on a role in order to find out what the spine or the throughline of the play was, then break the scenes into beats and actions and try to understand the author’s intentions. We spent a great deal of time trying to understand a play’s essential structure and what motivated the words and the action. Without knowing it, I was getting a lesson in playwriting. The New York theater at that period was vigorous and active. Talking pictures and the Depression had eliminated a great deal of mediocrity. Though I have never known a time when the theater was not in a crisis, there were many theaters then and most of them were owned or managed by active producers. Now, I am not sentimental about those days. There was activity, but there was a great amount of commercial trash and superficial acting. If I had to choose a period for beginning to write, I would choose the complexity of today over those days in a second. But that was the time I was given to begin, and like many young artists, I banded together with others of like persuasion and began a theater on a shoestring. What was it like to be a promising playwright then? There was no offBroadway, no off-off-Broadway, and no regional theater as we know it today. The Theater Union had failed, the Civic Repertory had failed, the Group Theatre had failed, and the Theater Guild had become a producing organization with no permanent acting company. So for a promising playwright wanting to become a successful playwright, it meant that his play first had to be optioned by one of the New York producers, taken out of town for a tryout to Philadelphia, Boston, or Washington, and then brought into New York for the critics to say whether the play would run or not. There were some great success stories. Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and William Inge not only won the Pulitzer and Critics Circle Award, but their plays ran one or more seasons, and there were astronomical movie sales.

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However, that era ended. Theaters began to close and the buildings were sold to make way for parking lots and office buildings. The producers of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s died or retired, and Broadway began a slow decline to what it is today with only two serious American plays to be seen in the Broadway district. However, I am not here to analyze the ups and downs of our theater, but to discuss playwriting. I have gone into it this far only because the theater, of course, affects the playwright. Every playwright helps to form the theater of his or her time and is in some measure formed by it. Think of the conventions of the Greek theater, the Roman, the Noh, the Medieval, the Elizabethan, the theater of Sheridan and Congreve, and what it would be like to write plays in those times and under those conditions. Think of the extreme difference in approach of two of our most respected contemporary playwrights: Beckett and Brecht. Beckett, the minimalist, almost totally eliminates words and plots; Brecht uses the theater to teach and explain, always wanting to alienate us emotionally. How did these two artists arrive at such different approaches in the same period? Both writers now have their imitators and champions. Both have found a personal style and voice. Neither writer has ever had a Broadway success. What creates a writer’s style? The styles of other writers’ plays, novels, stories, poems, I’m sure. We know that Ezra Pound, through his work with Ford Maddox Ford, simplified and clarified his own style, and in turn influenced the great Yeats to do the same. One of the mysteries of the creative process is what makes us choose what we write about and the style we choose to share with others. I wonder if the themes and material we are drawn to as writers are not given to us at a very early age, before we have done much reading of the works of others or even begun to think of writing. I wonder if we are later drawn to a certain writer because we are instinctively searching to reinforce the sense of style inherent to us. I wonder, too, if writing style can be changed in any profound way, any more than the color of eyes or skin. The perfecting of style, of course, is consciously cultivated throughout our writing lives. Katherine Anne Porter wrote in a letter to a friend, “Chaos is—we are in it— my business is to give a little shape and meaning to my share of it.” Only the writer himself can have any real knowledge of how other writers have influenced him, and even then, I think it is partly guesswork. For instance, in thinking over what playwright had influenced my early writing, I thought of Eugene O’Neill. Then, I asked, “How?” I was in a production of his, The Emperor Jones, back in Pasadena, but that hardly influenced me. I later read all of his plays with interest, but with no particular emotional involvement, usually wondering how they had been so effective on the stage. Much later, after having written a number of years, I saw The Iceman Cometh, Moon for the Misbegotten, and Long Day’s Journey into Night. I was deeply moved by all three;

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however, by then I had already formed my style, for good or bad. Then I remembered seeing John Ford’s film of O’Neill’s one-act sea plays before I began writing. I do not know how I would like them today, but back then they meant a great deal to me. It seemed to me that they created a poetic mood, an affecting atmosphere, and a sustained reality. And so I suspect many of our influences are hidden away, gifts to us, unrecognized at the time. These are some of the things that I believe have influenced what I choose to write about and things that informed my style before I had any notion of being a writer. I was born in a place and a time in Texas when the oral tradition was still very strong. We entertained ourselves, as often as not, by talking to each other; or in my case, because I was very young, by listening to the talkers. There was no radio then, motion pictures were silent, and theater rarely came to us, so our own voices were the sounds we most often heard. At an early age, I found myself listening to the stories and asking myself: “Why?” Why did this person end this way and not another way? Sometimes I think all my writing is trying to answer that question of why. My father had a store and I worked for him afternoons after school and on Saturday, and every day in the summer. Merchants from the other stores and men who owned farms that were worked by tenants often had lots of spare time and wandered in and out of the store remembering the past, telling the news of the day. These stories of the past were fascinating to me. The men often told essentially the same stories, but each teller, I soon observed, had his own embellishments. It was like a theme with variations in music. So it was with the stories my family (grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, cousins, and mother and father) told of their family history; and here, too, each teller had his own embellishment, his own style, as it were. Many of the stories that I heard endlessly told and retold have found their way into my plays and screenplays. Like recurring themes, they are sometimes only alluded to; sometimes they form the central action. However, it was not all listening about the past. There was the present, too, that I observed and listened to as the others interpreted what I observed. And these stories are used as well; they are rethought, of course, and sifted through my imagination. Stark Young, in an introduction to my play The Traveling Lady, wrote: “We need not invite comparisons with immortality exactly; but we may at least be reminded of Aristotle’s remark that ‘Homer,’ deserving to be praised for many things, is most to be praised because he knows what part to take himself.” W. B. Yeats has written: How very unlike Ireland this whole place is. I only felt at home once— when I came to a steep lane with a stream in the middle, with a foreign eye,

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Genesis of an American Playwright picking out the strange and not, as in one’s own country, the familiar things for interest—the fault, by the way, of all poetry about countries not the writer’s own.

Of course, I warm to that, because I try to write about my own true country. I cannot say, of course, that this is right or profitable for all writers, but it has been for me; for I have felt most fulfilled as a writer when I have followed that long-ago advice of Agnes DeMille’s to write about what I know, in the deepest, truest sense. When young aspiring writers ask me how to find material to write about, I always tell them, “By watching and listening.” Then begins the endless objections: “But what I have and see is so dull, so uninteresting, not exciting enough.” My answer to that: “You are not looking and listening deeply enough.” Another question that is often asked me: “Do you write down what interests you?” Sometimes I do, but often I do not. I certainly did not up until the age of twenty-four, since until then I had no idea of writing. I must tell you this; I am very anti-formula. I think it is well to acquaint yourself with all the conventional modes of playwriting, then forget them. I do not know about today, but when I began, there were several books on playwriting, each very popular at the time, that told you exactly how to write a play, and young writers read them endlessly and used them as a basis for their own writing and criticism of the work of others. I found them stifling to all creativity then, and I am certain I would find them so today. You simply cannot reduce playwriting, or any other writing, to a formula. This is not to say that a teacher of writing with a very fine critical mind can’t be of help to a writer—he can, but only, I feel, if he is interested in helping the writer to discover his own voice and particular talent and to not be swallowed up in formula. When I wrote for early television, it was done much as plays are done. It was not pre-recorded, and it went out on the air as performed. The plays I did for them were really one-act plays and have since been restored to that form. One of the plays, A Young Lady of Property, was given on Philco Television Playhouse with Kim Stanley, and it was a great popular success at the time. Just before we began rehearsals, Fred Coe, our producer and a gifted man most supportive of writers, came to me and said, “The play is lovely, but you’ve left out the obligatory scene.” Now I, essentially a self-taught playwright, did know what the “obligatory scene” meant, and I explained that I purposely had left out the scene because I thought it more effective to have the character describe the scene from her point of view as it had taken place, rather than to dramatize the scene itself. I explained further that to dramatize the scene, which was a dramatic confrontation ending in tears, was not the tone I

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wanted for the play; but having the character tell about the scene from her point of view made it a warmly comic moment. Whether Fred agreed or not I don’t know, but he allowed the play to be performed as I wanted. It has been performed many times since in theaters everywhere without any mention of an obligatory scene. Beginning writers always seem to want rules. We want someone of authority to say, “Do this” or “Do that” and everything will end up perfectly: a perfect play perfectly received by the press and public and winning all the prizes. But trust me; that is not what happens. Take all the council and advice you can get, but remember, finally, it is you alone in a room with a blank piece of paper staring at you. How then, can you know what advice to take and to whom to listen? That, too, is something you cannot be told. That is something every writer has to discover for himself. Sometimes writers are badly advised, they listen to that advice and are harmed. Yet, even then you are learning. Essentially what you are learning is who you are and how you are different from other writers. Cherish that difference, not in arrogance, but in humility and in gratitude that you are allowed such differences. For wouldn’t it be awful if every talent was the same, if we all wrote alike? To help support myself as a beginning writer, I sometimes taught acting and occasionally took acting jobs. This led me, for a brief time, into the dance world. I began by narrating dances for Pearl Primus and Valerie Bettis, and then I wrote a ballet with words for Miss Bettis called Daisy Lee. Sanford Meisner, head of the acting department at the Neighborhood Playhouse, always asked me to take over his advanced acting class when he was away doing a Broadway play, and I would direct the students in a play. This led to the Neighborhood Playhouse commissioning me to write a play that would include all their disciplines: music, acting, and dance. They also asked me to direct it, and I was told that Martha Graham, head of the dance department, was to codirect and choreograph with me. Now, I don’t know what I would do today if I was told that, but I took it then very much in stride, as if that could happen every day. It was one of the great learning experiences of my life. Martha took my play and my direction, and through her great imaginative powers, transformed it into something quite undreamed of by me. I later wrote a ballet for Jerome Robbins that Nora Kaye danced in a Broadway review, and last year I wrote a ballet incorporating words for Twyla Tharpe. I learned a lot about playwriting from these experiences, too. How? By being forced to rethink the playwriting form. What can only be conveyed by words? When might movement be more effective than words? How does the structure of dance relate to the play’s structure? What are the irreconcilable differences? I think playwrights can learn from all the arts: painting, sculpture, and

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particularly music. Often when I was resting from working on the nine plays in The Orphans’ Home Cycle, I would listen repeatedly to the music of Charles Ives. I got to know intimately all the symphonies, the songs, the sonatas, the concertos, and the piano pieces. I did not just listen passively, but I questioned why this quote from a hymn, why this choice from a march, and why this structure? What I am trying to say is that everything should be used by the playwright: life, art, everything. I do not know what would have become of me as a writer if I had begun writing films early in my writing life, but I wasn’t asked and so I never had to meet that temptation. I think it is a difficult temptation for a young writer, because the conventional Hollywood approach relegates the writer to the role of adapter. That approach is gradually being done away with, and young writers are being allowed more and more freedom to write original screenplays. However, even in those rare instances, those who remain in Hollywood will finally be forced into adapting. Now, David Mamet has taken on adaptations and I dare say if anyone can change his habits, he can. In general, it is not an atmosphere conducive to creativity. As for television and what it has become, I know very little. What I see is often very disheartening, for at one time—ever so briefly as it turned out— creativity was welcomed and sought out in its writers, just as it is being sought now in England. In my time, I have seen playwriting influenced—sometimes for good and sometimes for bad—by both mediums. Film, of course, had its influence upon all forms of present day writing, not just playwriting. It has many strengths for the writer, I feel, if he can use it creatively and not be used by it. Some day, I’m sure, some adventurous writer will take on American television and use the medium to enlighten and delight once again. For you see, I am not despairing for the playwright. I have said I felt this is the best of times for a beginning playwright. My daughter, who is a beginning playwright, looks at me as if I am insane when I tell her this, because she feels all the frustration of a beginning playwright and the fear that she will never sell anything or support herself by her writing. Really, I suppose, to begin is always difficult, but the contrast between now and when I first began to write is quite startling to me. It is true that the conventional route I followed as a young writer—play optioned, rehearsed, tried out of town, and opened on Broadway, which was commonplace at the time—is gone. But think of what has taken its place. Think of all the known and unknown groups in cities all over America wanting new plays; think of the renaissance in Chicago made possible by groups of actors, directors, and technicians banding together to form their own theaters. When I began to write, no one wanted one-act plays. Now they are sought after, and there are several one-act play festivals each year by respected

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New York off-Broadway theaters and regional theaters. The opportunities to work on plays, too, is much less rigid today. There are groups in New York eager to have readings and staged readings of plays in development, with the means to stage a workshop production if all goes well. I don’t really mean to be a Pollyanna. I don’t minimize the difficulties facing writers, young and old, today. I have an agent, I get my plays read, and I know just those two facts can often seem overwhelming to the young writer. You may ask, “How do I get an agent? How do I get my plays read?” What I will say to you is “Stop worrying about that. Write your plays, find a group to do them. The rest will follow, slowly and painfully sometimes, but surely it will follow.” You ask, “How will I find a group?” Start your own, if necessary. “How do I do that?” Endless questions; but out of questions come answers, sometimes in the most unexpected ways. Above all, keep writing. Do not ever become a one-play-playwright, taking it from office to office, theater to theater, class to class. I wrote a one-act play in 1952 that was not produced until thirty years later—and quite handsomely, I might add. So let me say it again: Through winter nights, hot summer days, wind and rain—keep writing.*

Herbert Berghof I am curious to know how many new American plays Herbert Berghof directed at the Playwrights Foundation on Bank Street. The purpose of the Foundation was clearly stated from its beginning. It was “To further the work of new American playwrights, providing them with a creative free-working atmosphere and a responsible theater program.” The Foundation’s program makes a permanent artistic home available to promising new writers who need the experience of seeing their work performed and to writers who are confined by conditions inherent in a commercial theater. New plays by American playwrights and dramatic adaptations of works from the mainstream of American authors who previously have distinguished themselves in other literary forms are developed and presented in the Foundation’s theater. Thoreau’s statement, “Through want of enterprise and faith, men are where they are. Buying and selling and spending their lives like serfs,” is included in every program given out at the Foundation. The first season at the Foundation was in 1964 and it has continued to the present. The production budgets are sparse, but you would never know that by the look of the production or by the unpaid talent that participates. Herbert, with the steadfast help of Marlene Mancini, always seemed to get the actors he wanted for a particular play whether it was Fritz Weaver, Robert *Essay written in 1989

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Duvall, Sandy Dennis, Celeste Holm, Wesley Addy, Paul Roebling, Olga Bellin, E. G. Marshall, Uta Hagen, or . . . well, you name them. Herbert was never intimidated by the physical limitations of his theater. Time after time, I have seen him (with the help of his talented light and scenic designers) take what would seem an impossible limitation of stage space and make the space serve the play. For example, there was a play of Vincent Canby’s, The Old Flag, which everyone said was too difficult to produce. I suggested to Vincent that he send it to Herbert. Herbert didn’t find it difficult at all and gave it a wonderful production. The first time I witnessed the kind of miracle he was capable of performing was when he directed my play, Tomorrow, with Robert Duvall and Olga Bellin. One climactic scene called for a six-year-old child in a cotton field. Now there wasn’t really ever a child of six or a cotton field on the stage at Bank Street, but Herbert, through his staging, found a way to make you believe there was. Later, Herbert did a wonderful production of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth with many scenes and a huge cast. The best-equipped theater would have thought twice before attempting the kind of production that was called for in this script. Nevertheless, in that limited space he truly created the world of Edith Wharton. Year after year, production after production, he brought his enthusiasm and his love of theater to the Foundation on Bank Street. And isn’t it remarkable that this man, whose first language was not English, fought so long and consistently for the dignity and appreciation of American playwrights? I worked closely with Herbert for a number of years at the Playwrights Foundation. He directed four of my plays there and produced a number of others. He gave me a theater home and rekindled my faith in theater. How did he accomplish all that he did? Besides the responsibilities of the Foundation, he taught classes in acting and playwriting year in and year out, summer and winter, spring and fall. He directed and acted on Broadway (and off ) as well as acting in films and television. I had known about Herbert’s work as an actor and teacher for many years; however, his production of Waiting for Godot made me aware of his great talents as a director. It was a wonderful production; it was imaginative, irreverent, the best production of Beckett that I have ever seen. The American theater has been greatly enriched by his teaching of actors; he trained many of our finest. He was an enthusiast, not only about theater, but also about all the arts. We talked often, usually by phone, and he was always discovering some essay or poem or a play he felt had for too long been neglected. I have been out of New York City for a number of months. Yesterday, I took a walk down Bank Street, a walk I had taken many times while hurrying

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to a class I was teaching at the HB School or to a rehearsal at the Foundation. I came to the buildings that house the school and the theater. They were outwardly unchanged. Students were entering the building to attend their classes as Herbert would want them to do. I stood for a moment watching and then I went on, not ready yet to go back into the school or the theater. I will go back, of course, because it is the heritage Herbert has left to us, a heritage we must cherish and defend. I thought then of this quote from Pablo Neruda, which Herbert also included in one of the playbills given out at the theater: Though human values are endangered, we can keep a theater alive which without distortion is simple, critical, but not inhuman, which moves forward like a river, bounded only by the banks of its own making.

Let me tell you, finally, Herbert was a wonderful, loyal, supportive friend. I loved and admired him and was indebted to him like so many others, in many ways and for a great, great many things.*

The Orphans’ Home Cycle Lecture Before talking about The Orphans’ Home Cycle, perhaps it might interest you to know how I think it all started. It is usually difficult, at least for me, to be certain of just when an idea for a play or a film begins in my conscious mind. However, with the cycle I have reconstructed a history of its beginning that I believe is accurate, at least as accurate as anything can be that takes place so many years ago. I grew up in a large family. For five years I was an only child and grandchild and the only nephew and great-nephew to a large assortment of aunts and great-aunts and cousins. Early on, I was infatuated by stories of my father’s childhood. His father died when he was twelve, and his mother had to find ways to take care of him and his sister Lily Dale. For a time, she owned a boarding house in Wharton. My father had some pet chickens of which he was very fond. Once when his mother had no money to feed her boarders, she, without asking my father, killed the chickens. When he found this out he became ill. He told me this story many times when I was a boy, without any apparent bitterness.

*Presented at the memorial service of Herbert Berghof on December 2, 1990 at the Helen Hayes Theatre, New York

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That story made a great impression on me, and many years later, in 1958 when I was living with my wife and children in Nyack, New York, a Hollywood film producer asked me to think of an idea for a film. I thought of the story of my father and the chickens. I had to write it hurriedly, and I have no draft of it now, but I am sure it was not very well done. In any case, they politely turned it down and I filed the draft away among my papers. Then in 1960, David Susskind asked me to write a television play for the DuPont Show of the Month. The story of my father and the chickens came to me again, and I took it out of my files and began to rework it. Daniel Petrie was to direct the show for DuPont and when I had finished my work on it (it was for a ninety minute program), I asked him to come to my house and read it. He did, and he liked it. In fact, he was most enthusiastic, so we both assumed David would be. We were wrong. He did not like it at all. Fortunately, he had a producer, Audrey Gellen, for whom he had great respect and she did like it. In fact, she was most enthusiastic, so David deferred to her judgment and scheduled it for a Spring production. He and Audrey cast it superbly. The actors included Julie Harris, Mildred Dunnock, Jo Van Fleet, E. G. Marshall, Fritz Weaver, and Henderson Forsyth. When produced on television, the play, Roots in a Parched Ground, became The Night of the Storm. I had originally named it A Golden String, a title taken from a William Blake poem: I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

Everyone associated with the production thought this title too ambiguous, and I began to search for another. I found many, but the one I liked best (and the director and the producer concurred), was Roots in a Parched Ground from a poem by William Carlos Williams: “Love itself a flower with roots in a parched ground.” The advertising agency liked none of the titles, and because they were nervous about doing an original play that they feared the public would find depressing, we compromised on The Night of the Storm, a name none of us liked very much. Following the performance of The Night of the Storm, the renowned critic and my good friend Stark Young called me, full of praise for the play, and urged me to think of reworking it for the theater. I said I would certainly think about it. Sometime later, Harcourt Brace published the play, and Stark offered to write a preface to the script. He was ill by then and not able to finish the preface, but part of it was included with the play. Stark wrote:

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When I read Roots in a Parched Ground, I am so touched by the purity of tone, the precision of writing—of beautiful love, devotion, and sweetness, that its tragedies are scarcely horrors in themselves at all. The little boy, Horace, as the hero of the play, carries always the bitterness of pain which overshadows every moment. He is the gentlest and sweetest child I have ever encountered in a story. And at the end of the play, when Horace is left alone, there is that tiny shadow of a mother, the movement of the dying father, so perfect in all that wonderness of his shone on and filled the boy’s mind there among the shadows in the old empty house, the men and shadows of the day and his heart. We are talking about lovely things, about sweet people.

Stark died soon after, and I did nothing about expanding the play. Still, ever so often through the years, I would think of Stark’s love for the play and his belief in it, and I would consider reworking it. However, there were always other projects to be completed, and so I pushed it somewhere back in my mind. The years went by, and I moved with my family to New Boston, New Hampshire. Our house, an eighteenth-century New England farmhouse, was on a dirt road in the middle of the woods. My mother and father came from Texas to spend a year with us. Two years later, after they had returned to Texas, they were both dead, and it was my task after my mother’s death to go through letters and papers and photographs collected by them through their years together. I returned to New England during a time of fuel shortage and exorbitantly high fuel prices; my family and I kept warm by using our fireplaces and wood stoves. It was a typical New England winter, meaning lots of snow and cold. Because I have never been a fan of snow, I stayed in the house a great deal, going through letters and photographs I had brought back from Texas and thinking of my mother and father. I have no exact memory now of when I began to work on the plays, but it was sometime in the winter of that year; nor do I remember now the sequence of writing them. I do remember thinking of what Stark Young had to say about that early play about my father, and I am sure that thinking of that play, rereading it, prompted me to think of other events in my parents’ lives. Anyway, it was in the winter of 1974 when I first began to write the plays. I had no idea then I would write nine plays nor do I remember the ones I worked on first. I am sure that 1918 was the first to be completed. Convicts must have been written soon after because I saw Robert Duvall at a performance in New York of my play A Young Lady of Property, and he said to me that Fritz Weaver had remarked after seeing his performance in Tomorrow, a film we did together, that he had witnessed his King Lear. I responded to Duvall, rather arrogantly “I feel I have written your Lear in Convicts.”

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Duvall wanted to see the play immediately, and I sent it to him. He was the first to read any of the plays in the cycle. He called after reading it and said he would like to do it. Soon after, I realized that, as the plays progressed, the original Roots in a Parched Ground would not fit into the cycle as it was unfolding. I had made the mother of Horace in the first version of the play a much more sentimental woman than I now believed her to be, so there was nothing to do but completely rewrite the play. By 1976, I had finished drafts of eight of the plays and I thought at the time they should all be done together. Public television seemed to be the place to perform the plays. They were the only ones at the time with the will and the means to undertake such a formidable task. So, I sent the plays to Robert Geller, who had produced the American Short Story series. He liked them, but felt there should be one more play. After talking to him about the qualities he felt were important to the ninth play, I wrote The Widow Claire. Unfortunately, Geller was not able to find the financing for television. He then spoke to Adrian Hall at Trinity Repertory Theatre about the plays, and Adrian asked that I send them to him. To this day, I have not heard back from Adrian but I heard later from Richard Jenkins, an actor from that company who played in the film version of 1918, that Adrian had received the plays and had read them all. So, nine plays in manuscript were staring at me every day. I began to search for a way to bring them to life on the stage. I felt, in the climate of our present day Theater, it would be almost impossible to find a theater financially equipped to do all nine plays, as I hoped and still hope, they will one day be done. Consequently, I decided that the three plays Courtship, Valentine’s Day, and 1918 would be the most likely to find a receptive theater home. The problem then facing me was how to cast the roles of Horace Robedaux and Elizabeth Vaughn. I had worked in the past with most of America’s talented actresses Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, Eva Marie Saint, Julie Harris, Joanne Woodward, Betty Miller, Linka Peterson, but they were now in their forties and fifties and too old to play Elizabeth. My daughter, Hallie, had begun studying acting in California with Peggy Fuery. I went out to see her do my play A Young Lady of Property, and I remember calling my wife in New Hampshire after the performance and saying “I have found my Elizabeth.” At that time I had not heard any of the plays read, so I asked Hallie to get a group of her friends together and read 1918 for me. We had the reading in her apartment and it was moving to hear the play for the first time. Soon after this, I decided to perform the plays out of sequence to stress the fact that they were each complete to themselves.

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Herbert Berghof had done my plays with great success at his HB Playhouse on Bank Street, and I decided to approach him about a production of one of the plays. I wanted to direct them, and I sent him Courtship, Valentine’s Day, and 1918. We decided to do them out of sequence and to begin the series with Courtship, followed by 1918 and Valentine’s Day. I took an apartment in New York; Hallie came from California. We had a wonderful cast for the play: Hallie as Elizabeth, Gypsy DeYoung as Laura, Richard Cotrell as Horace, Carolyn Coates as Mrs. Vaughn, and Douglas Watson as Mr. Vaughn. I began early rehearsals with Hallie, Gypsy, and Richard. We worked for four or five weeks, and the rest of the cast joined us later. We were scheduled to open on July 4. The theater was not air conditioned, but the night was pleasant enough and the performance went well. We performed 1918 the following fall. Neither Doug Watson nor Carolyn Coates were available for this production, so I replaced them with two fine actors James Broderick and Rochelle Oliver. Devon Abner was Brother and Irma Levesque was Bessie. Philip Hobel, the producer, came down to see 1918 and approached me about doing it as a film. I was busy with Tender Mercies at the time and could not consider it. However, during the filming of Tender Mercies, I began to think of 1918 as a film and to consider doing all of the plays as films. My wife and I decided to produce 1918 ourselves. We saw the work of Ken Harrison, a young Dallas filmmaker, and we asked him to direct. After many months, we were able to get the money for the production. After it was completed and released, Lindsay Law, of PBS’s American Playhouse, saw the film at a preview and liked it. He had heard about Valentine’s Day and Courtship, and he offered to finance them through the American Playhouse. They were shot out of sequence, 1918 came first, then Valentine’s Day, and finally Courtship. They were also released in theaters out of sequence. Ultimately American Playhouse, when airing them on television, kept them in sequence under the title The Story of a Marriage. I also directed Valentine’s Day at the HB Studio again with Hallie Foote, James Broderick, and Rochelle Oliver. Granger Hines replaced Richard Cotrell as Horace, and Matthew Broderick, in his first theatrical role, played Brother. This was the cast for the three films except for Richard Cotrell, Granger Hines, and Gypsy DeYoung. For the films, I cast William Converse Roberts as Horace and Amanda Plummer as Laura. In the meantime, Peggy Fuery had read all nine of the plays and she decided to have the students at her school perform scenes from them. These students, however, were professional actors including Eric Stoltz, Lily Tomlin, Annette O’ Toole, Bruno Kirby, Angelica Huston, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Peter

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Horton. I went to see their work, and it was helpful and most illuminating for me. Later, Peggy Fuery did a full production of Cousins at her theater, Lily Dale was produced off-Broadway with Molly Ringwold, and Circle in the Square produced The Widow Claire off-Broadway with Hallie and Matthew Broderick. Additionally, the film version of Convicts with Robert Duvall is still locked up in litigation because the producing company filed for bankruptcy. Dramatist Play Service published acting editions of all the plays, Grove Press published an edition of the plays, and the various plays in the cycle have received productions in many regional theaters around the country. After the plays were finished and named—Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, The Widow Claire, Courtship, Valentine’s Day, 1918, Cousins, and The Death of Papa—I wanted an overall title for the cycle. Marianne Moore says in her poem “In Distrust of Merits,” “The world’s an orphans’ home,” and I took my title The Orphans’ Home from her poem. Now here I am in 1993, almost twenty years since I first began writing the cycle and thirty-two years since the production of the first version of Roots in a Parched Ground. As I worked on the plays, I would often reread what Stark had written about the first version of the first play, hoping he would be pleased with the older Horace, too, and how the character finally evolved. Now after all those years, I am reading the plays straight through for the first time in a long time. I see a pattern now in the whole, a pattern made clearer to me by different scholars and critics writing about the plays. I am in wonder that so clear a pattern seems to have emerged, since the plays were composed out of order and with no particular pattern in mind. The pattern, as I see it, is the search of the dispossessed, Horace, the homeless, seeking and finding a home. For me, the writer, I think the task is the old reoccurring one I always seem to set myself—to find a sense of order in disorder, a shape to chaos. I read somewhere recently that, in their later years, Matisse once said to Picasso, “In your painting you tear things apart and with me I put things together.” Of course, one could argue that Picasso tore things apart only to put them together in a new way. As I read the cycle, one thing that strikes me is how often the stories told by characters in the plays appear in other plays. For instance, in Courtship, Elizabeth Vaughn tells her sister Laura: As a girl Aunt Lucy was in love with Cousin Jim Murray, but Grandma wouldn’t let them marry because they were first cousins, but neither of them ever loved anyone else and every day at four o’clock Cousin Jim would pass

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Aunt Lucy’s house on his way home and rain or shine she would be sitting on the gallery waiting for him to pass by and they would wave to each other.

I have Mrs. Watts in The Trip to Bountiful use a variation of this story as part of her personal history. Roots in a Parched Ground begins The Orphans’ Home Cycle with the death of Horace Robedaux’s father, Paul Horace Robedaux, and the cycle ends with the death of Elizabeth Vaughn’s father, Henry Vaughn, in The Death of Papa. I imagined the details of the first death, the death of Paul Horace Robedaux. It took place at a time before I was born. I was told by my father and other relatives the circumstances of his death, and that a man, a family friend, took my father aside at the time of the death to tell him what a fine man his father was. I based the death of Henry Vaughn, Elizabeth’s father, on the death of my maternal grandfather, and I have a vivid memory of the day he died. Katherine Anne Porter has written: By the time a writer has reached the end of a story, he has lived it at least three times over—first in the series of actual events that, directly or indirectly, have combined to set up that commotion in his mind and senses that causes him to write the story; second, in memory, and third, in recreation of this chaotic stuff.

If this is true, and I think it is for me and for most of the writers I admire, these nine plays began even before Stark Young’s suggestion that I enlarge the original, even before writing the first Roots in a Parched Ground. They began, really when as a child, I asked questions of my family, about their past, for most of the plays of the cycle are set in a time before I was born. I am not sure at all when I first heard the stories that form the plots of the plays, but I heard variations of these stories endlessly while I was growing up. Told by different people, I became aware early on how a story would change, sometimes most subtly, but always change, as the narrator changed. The essential elements of the first play, the revised Roots in a Parched Ground are these. A young boy’s parents are separated at a time when such a thing rarely happened. Both the mother and father were poor. The father dies when the boy is ten, the mother marries again. Her new husband allows her daughter, Lily Dale, to live with them, but refuses to take the son, Horace, Jr., explaining that he had to go to work at twelve and that work was good for a boy. This part is factual. I imagined the circumstances surrounding the day of the father’s death, and I assumed the differences between the two families. Actually, both families had their fortunes reversed by the Civil War. It was a

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fact that my father’s paternal uncle was a Latin and Greek scholar and that his maternal grandparents put little value on education. Really, they had a fear of it, as we see in The Death of Papa when his mother worries about her grandson, Horace, Jr., reading books. The family is afraid he will become useless like his Uncle Terrence Robedaux, who will only read Greek and Latin and does not work. It is true that my father, the model for Horace Robedaux, never went beyond the sixth grade. As I mentioned previously, my father often told me the story of his mother killing his pet chickens to feed her boarders and how, when he found it out, he became ill. In the first version of Roots in a Parched Ground, done on television, this story became a central part of the plot. The story ends up, finally, as a tale Horace tells his wife Elizabeth in Valentine’s Day. He says: When I was nine I had some chickens that I raised as pets. They were the only pets I’d ever had and I loved them. They would eat out of my hand when I fed them and would follow me around the yard like dogs do their owners. Mama had a boarding house then and on the Christmas of my ninth year, she had no money to feed her boarders, so without telling me she went out back and killed my chickens for their Christmas dinner. (A pause) When I found out I became ill. I had a raging fever for a week. They despaired for my life. Mama says the illness was never diagnosed. (A pause) When I see her now she is all smiles and honey. She doesn’t know the pain and the bitterness and the unhappiness she has caused me. Sometimes when I’m around her I have to walk out of the room to keep from telling her. I am no orphan, but I think of myself as an orphan, belonging to no one but you. I intend to have everything I didn’t have before. A house of my own, some land, a yard, and in that yard I will plant growing things, fruitful things, fig trees, pecan trees, pear trees, peach trees—and I will have a garden and chickens.

And my father did have these things. He planted pecan trees and fig trees and he kept chickens, after he was married and had a house of his own, for many, many years. My father never forgave his mother for abandoning him as a child. He never voiced this to me but I sensed it from his behavior with his mother when she made rare visits from Houston to our home. As a child, I was puzzled by her past behavior, because when I knew her she seemed warm and motherly, the ideal grandmother. Another way I tried to differentiate the two families in Roots in a Parched Ground was by using contrasting music. In the Thornton house, music is constantly being played or sung; in the Robedaux house the silence of death pervades the atmosphere. I modeled the Thornton girls on my great-aunts, all of

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whom I knew, except for one that died before I was born. Albert Thornton is based on my great-uncle, and he reappears in other plays in the cycle, too. I never knew the models for the grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Thornton, but my father loved them and told me many stories about them. Most of the Robedaux’s were dead or they had moved away from the town by the time I was born, so I have had to imagine them based on my father’s stories about their lives in the town. In Convicts, the second play of the cycle, Horace has left his grandparents’ home to work with his Uncle Albert in a plantation store. The uncle goes back to town to gamble and leaves him alone to run the store. The life of the plantation in Convicts and the fact of this particular plantation being worked by convicts are imagined. What is not imagined is the fact that convicts worked on plantations. I saw them often as a boy working in cotton fields in my county. I did not imagine the fact that my father, as a boy, went to work in a plantation store, the only white child on the plantation, and lived with a black couple. He lived very happily, I might add; he was so happy that he did not want to go into Wharton for Christmas day. What I imagined, too, was the relationship between the owner of the plantation and the young Horace. What I did not imagine was Horace’s obsessive desire to earn the money for a tombstone to put on his father’s unmarked grave. He was not able to accomplish this feat until 1918. Lily Dale, the third play in the cycle, is about an imagined visit the young Horace would have made to see his mother and sister in Houston. Here, I tried to use all the past anger and rage I sensed from my father, which he never expressed verbally, when the name of his stepfather was spoken. The few times I remember their meeting, he always addressed his stepfather very formally. The idea of the play came to me after recalling what happened to my father when he earned enough money to take a six-week business course in Houston. His mother had promised to give him breakfast every morning. One morning, when he arrived for breakfast, she met him at the door visibly nervous. She said in a loud voice, “Thank you for bringing me the milk and eggs,” and she quickly shut the door. Before the door shut, he saw his stepfather back in the house and he realized his mother was giving him breakfast without his stepfather’s knowledge or approval. For some reason, he was home that day and she was in terror he would discover what she was doing. I decided not to use that situation but to invent one similar in emotional complexity, one that could happen to a younger, more vulnerable Horace. I also knew the stepfather doted on my father’s sister, Lily Dale, and gave her a great deal of affection. I wanted to include that in the play. One of the few characters I have used real names for is Lily Dale, the sister. I did that because I wanted to use the song Lily Dale in the play, a sentimental favorite from the Civil War era.

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There are two courtships in the cycle. The first is in the fourth play, The Widow Claire, and the second is in the fifth, Courtship. The Widow Claire was the last play to be written and the story is wholly imaginary. What I did not imagine, however, is the relationship my father had with a widow and her two children before he began “calling” (as they used to say) on my mother. The widow was older than he was and why their romance discontinued I have never known. I used to see her in later years walking by my father’s store, a handsome but matronly woman. If my father happened to be in the front of the store, she would usually stop and talk to him. I was often nearby, and the conversation was always most pleasant in a general kind of way. “It’s a nice day, isn’t it? Need rain, don’t we?” they would say. She had had a tragic life. Lewis Higgins tells of killing her son in the play Cousins. While watching them talk, exchanging their rather impersonal remarks, I could not imagine them ever being young and interested in each other. In The Widow Claire, one follows the story of Claire and her children and their relationship to Horace and another suitor, Val. Interspersed with the scenes at Claire’s house are scenes at the boarding house where Horace rooms with his friends: Archie Graham, Felix Barclay, Spence Howard, Ed Cordray. These men were all based on friends of my father’s; some I knew as older men, some dead before I was born. None of them ever amounted to much. They had little ambition, gambled and drank to excess, and in some ways were victims of a very difficult time of social adjustment for young, white males. My father often talked about them and how their lives ended, speaking sometimes with fondness and sometimes with sadness. My mother often told me that it was in some ways a miracle that my father had escaped the fate of his friends. My aunts often implied that it was my mother’s influence and my father’s love for her that kept him from succumbing to their vices. The stories my father told about his friends as young men were often comic. One of my favorites was about the friend who, when answering the phone, was asked by various young ladies what he was doing. He would invariably reply, “Thinking of you.” I tried to treat these four men in the play as they might have seemed to my father at that time of his life. Courtship was based on facts that I brooded over a great deal in my young life. I was told early on, I forget now by whom, that my maternal grandparents had objected strenuously to the marriage of my mother and father and that my parents had to slip around finally to see each other because my father was not allowed to come to my mother’s house. My maternal grandfather, for some unexplained reason, wanted none of his girls to get married. I know also, from my mother, that she had almost defied her father earlier and run away with another suitor (he managed the local picture show). I dramatized that in an earlier play called Flight. However, my mother lost her nerve at the last

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minute and did not leave. This suitor left town, and she began to see my father and they fell in love. In the course of Courtship, my father unexpectedly calls on her and her father agrees to let them visit for a while on their front gallery. I depict two aunts—sisters of the father—visiting the Vaughns. One of the aunts has married a much older man. When the play begins, her husband has been dead for a number of years and she is widowed with four children to rear. I also gave a name to Elizabeth’s former beaux, Syd Joplin, and we discover during the course of the play that he recently died. Elizabeth realizes that if she had married him she would be a widow wearing black like her aunt. I also invented a counter story to the one of Horace and Elizabeth’s courtship and their idealistic hopes for the future. It is a “courtship” we are only told about; one that ends in tragedy. Sybil Thomas and Leo Theil are married on this same day. The rumor is that she is pregnant; consequently, Leo is forced to marry her. During the action of the play, we hear bit by bit the unfolding of their story. First, we hear about the wedding and the speculations of why the wedding took place so suddenly. Then we hear that Sybil has gone into labor on her wedding day (labor brought on by corseting herself too tightly to disguise her pregnancy), then that her baby died. Lastly, we hear that Sybil died from hemorrhaging. I use this story, as well as stories of various unhappy marriages told throughout the play, to help audiences understand what a complex and serious thing it was in that day for a young woman to make a decision about marriage. Marriage then was so final, and women were so dependent upon their husbands. It was not an easy choice to defy your parents and marry someone of whom they did not approve. As Laura, Elizabeth’s sister, says in the play: LAURA. Everything bad that happens to a girl I begin to worry it will happen to me. All night I’ve been worrying. Part of the time I’ve been worrying that I’d end up an old maid like Aunt Sarah, and part of the time I worry that I’ll fall in love with someone like Syd and defy Papa and run off with him and then realize I made a mistake and part of the time I worry . . . (Pause) that what happened to Sybil Thomas will happen to me and . . . (pause) Could what happened to Sybil Thomas ever happen to you? I don’t mean the dying part. I know we all have to die. I mean the other part . . . having a baby before she was married. Do you think she loved Leo? Do you think he loved her? Do you think it was the only time she did? You know . . (Pause) Old common Anna Landry said in the girl’s room at school that she did it whenever she wanted to and nothing ever happened to her. And if it did she would get rid of it. How do women do that? ELIZABETH. Do what?

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Genesis of an American Playwright LAURA. Not have children if they don’t want them? ELIZABETH. I don’t know. LAURA. I guess we’ll never know. I don’t trust Anna Landry, and I don’t know who else to ask. Can you imagine the expression on Mama’s face, or Aunt Lucy’s, or Mrs. Cookenboo’s if I asked them something like that? (Pause) Anyway, even if I knew, I would be afraid to do something like that before I got married for fear God would strike me dead. (Pause) Aunt Sarah said that Sybil’s baby dying was God’s punishment of her sin. Aunt Lucy said if God punished sinners that way there would be a lot of dead babies.

At the conclusion of the play, Elizabeth and Laura think they are alone, but their mother hears them speaking and reappears. Ultimately, we are unsure whether they will marry: MRS. VAUGHN. Did you say something, Elizabeth? ELIZABETH. No Ma’am. MRS. VAUGHN. Oh, I thought you did. (She goes) ELIZABETH. I’m marrying Horace Robedaux. LAURA. If he asks you. ELIZABETH. If he asks me. LAURA. And if he doesn’t? Will you be an old maid? Or will you marry somebody else? ELIZABETH. We’ll see.

Valentine’s Day finds Elizabeth and Horace married. Here again the skeleton of the play is based on fact. My mother and father did elope, and her parents would not speak to her, until after she became pregnant. The first half of the play ends with the reconciliation of Elizabeth and her parents. Horace and Elizabeth have a room in a boarding house, and I often heard my parent’s stories about the other roomers: a spinster who worked in a millinery store, the owner of the boarding house and her son, who was a compulsive gambler and often drunk. There was also Bessie who lived in the neighborhood and visited my mother every day. She insisted on calling my mother Mary, though it was not her name. Bessie was not so much retarded, as she is sometimes played, as she was eccentric. We meet, too, Elizabeth’s brother for the first time. He is a composite of my own Uncles and of many brothers I knew and observed growing up. One of the models for this brother really went to Texas A&M for a brief period, but flunked out. His father had gone to A&M earlier, had put himself through college, and had made fine grades. Brother is in Valentine’s Day, 1918, and The Death of Papa. He is like

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so many men I have known in the South, and all over America, who had successful fathers and yet felt themselves to be utter failures. When I was growing up, I heard of a man who never left his house and was confined to his bedroom in the second floor, except when he had fits, as they were called, and he would try to run away. He was, of course, insane, but his family would never send him away. Once, he tried to kill himself; consequently, he was forbidden to eat with a fork or knife. I never met this man, but he was as real to me as if I had known him. I also heard that, as a younger man, he had been in love with one of my father’s aunts. Everyone assumed the two would marry, but a cousin came to visit from Louisville, Kentucky and she took him away from my father’s aunt, and they married instead. In the play, I named him George Tyler and he appears intermittently in the early part of the play at Horace and Elizabeth’s room in the boarding house, with an unexpected Christmas present for Horace. He appears later, too, after he has run away from his home. The Sheriff, Horace, deputies, and George’s son all go to the river where he is hiding to try to get him to give himself up. He escapes the searchers and finds his way back to Elizabeth and Horace in the rooming house. He speaks to Horace about the death of Horace’s father: GEORGE. Horace . . . HORACE. Oh, hello, Mr. George. GEORGE. Is this your wife? HORACE. Yes Sir. You know Elizabeth. She’s Mr. Henry Vaughn’s oldest daughter. GEORGE. Oh, yes. (Pointing to Bessie) Is this your girl? HORACE. No Sir. She lives down the street. She’s just a neighbor. GEORGE. Who does she belong to? ELIZABETH. The Stillmans. GEORGE. Are they new here? ELIZABETH. They’ve been here about ten years. GEORGE. Is this your house? HORACE. No Sir. This is Mrs. Pate’s house. GEORGE. Where is Mrs. Pate? I’d like to say hello to her. HORACE. She’s not home. She’s off with Mr. Bobby in Galveston. He’s taking the Keeley Cure. GEORGE. Is he drinking again? HORACE. Yes Sir. GEORGE. Isn’t that too bad. Your daddy drank, son. HORACE. Yes Sir. GEORGE. It killed him. HORACE. Yes Sir.

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Genesis of an American Playwright GEORGE. He was a close friend of mine, you know. HORACE. Yes Sir. GEORGE. I went to him. I said, “I’ve come to you as a friend. We all have troubles. Get hold of yourself for the sake of your baby son and little daughter . . . get hold of yourself.” But my talking didn’t do a bit of good. It never does, you know. I was just wasting my breath. He broke your mother’s heart. How is your mother? HORACE. She’s well. GEORGE. Your father sent for me before he died. Did I ever tell you this? HORACE. No Sir. GEORGE. He said: “George, I’m going to die. Promise me you’ll look after my children. Promise me you’ll never let them go hungry.” (Pause) I didn’t keep my promise. And I’m sorry; I didn’t keep my promise about a lot of things. (Pause) You say Mary’s dead? HORACE. Yes Sir. GEORGE. They won’t let me die. I want to die and they’ve been chasing me all through the river bottoms. They give me no peace. First they want to kill me . . . my own wife tried to poison me and then when I want to take my own life they do all in their power to stop me. I’ve had a difficult life, you know, since I betrayed Mary. I’ve had no happiness. I’ve been punished unmercifully for what I’ve done. (Pause) But I’m tired. Tired of running the river bottoms. Tired. (Pause) (Miss Ruth sings: “Lorena”) Do you know the way to my home? HORACE. Yes sir. GEORGE. Will you take me there? I’m very confused. I tried to get there twice, but I’m confused. HORACE. Yes sir.

Horace does take him to his son and the sheriff, but George gets away again and runs across the courthouse square. Finally, he takes a knife and kills himself. Throughout the play, the audience realizes that everyone, including Elizabeth’s father, brings their troubles to Horace and Elizabeth. Mr. Vaughn says after telling Horace and Elizabeth that he and his wife will buy a house for them: There’s peace in this room and contentment. That’s why I like to come here, I think. I said to Mrs. Vaughn, “They don’t have much but they’re contented. You feel that.” I hope you find contentment in your new home. I’d buy that for you, if I could, but of course, you know things like that can’t be bought.

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1918, the seventh play in the cycle, is almost totally imagined. My mother and father never had a child who died, but what I did not imagine was the flu of that year. I heard often how the terror of the Spanish influenza, as it was officially called, came into our home and into my hometown. In truth, it killed more people worldwide than World War I. No one knew where it came from or how it stopped. One day it was here taking lives, and the next day it was gone. Whenever my mother and father talked about the flu (they both had it), they would end up calling out the names, like a litany, of the young men they knew who had been killed by it. I can hear them now calling out “T. Abell, John Barclay, Marshall Elmore”—on and on the list would go. What I did not imagine, too, was the offer my grandfather made to my father; that if he wanted to join the Army, he would take care of his wife and new baby. In the play, I have the flu keep him from facing that decision; how it really happened I do not know. It was at this time, too, my father got the money to put a tombstone on his father’s unmarked grave. The real tombstone he placed there is a simple one. It has the name of his father, the date of his birth and death, and at the very bottom the inscription “Erected by his son.” In 1918, the death of the baby girl is imagined; actually the baby would have been me. I survived the flu in real life, but I delayed my birth in the play for dramatic purposes until the end of 1918. Sometime before beginning work on the plays, I had become fascinated with the music of Charles Ives. I bought all the records of his music that I could find and when I would get tired of writing, I would relax by listening to them repeatedly. Indeed, in 1918 I tried to bring off an Ivesion experiment. I wanted several times during the play to have a collection of sounds—music being played in a room where a scene was being played, simultaneous music coming from the house next door, and music playing down the street. When I was directing the play at the HB Studio, I tried very hard to achieve this effectively, as it is in so many of Ives’s scores. However, it never quite worked and I had to modify it. Again, in the film 1918, I tried this technique and it worked somewhat better, but never as I really wanted it to. In the other plays, I used music much more conventionally to help define the period of the plays and to create certain moods. In Roots in a Parched Ground, I used songs of the day to establish the life of the Thornton family. In Convicts, I use the songs “Ain’t No Cane on de Brazos,” “Rock Island Line,” and “Golden Slippers.” The first two are heard offstage and are sung by the convicts as they work. “Golden Slippers” is sung by a convict at the burial of Sol, the owner of the plantation who has forbidden any hymns to be sung at his funeral. The great folk singer Leadbelly told me many years ago that he

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sang “Rock Island Line” while he was working on a Texas prison farm. In Lily Dale, I used the song “Lily Dale” not only atmospherically, but also to advance the plot. In The Widow Claire, the song “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie” is used as part of the story. I was interested to read in Martha Graham’s recent memoirs that “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie” was one of her favorites. In Courtship, Elizabeth and Laura Vaughn are forbidden by their father to dance or to go to dances, although we learn in the course of the play that they have both learned how to dance from girlfriends. Additionally, throughout most of the play, the girls can hear dance music in the distance and imaginary dancers waltz in and out. In Valentine’s Day, Elizabeth and Horace sing to each other and the spinster boarder can be heard practicing a song, which she is about to sing at a local public event. In the last plays, Cousins and The Death of Papa, music disappears, although in Cousins an older Lily Dale is involved with composing and finding a publisher for her songs. I will say one more thing about the use of music. In the films of the plays, I try to avoid excessive scoring, preferring instead to use music from realistic sources whenever possible. I made many changes in the text of 1918 while working on it at the HB, always trying to simplify. Herbert Berghof said to me once after seeing the play in rehearsal: “This play is about expected death and unexpected death.” That meant a great deal to me, as it helped clarify the play to the actors. The expected death, of course, would be the Battlefield of France where so many men were dying and where Horace feared he might have to go and be killed. The unexpected death was the flu that came into their house suddenly without warning and took the life of their child. Here, too, I must give credit again to Katherine Anne Porter and her novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider that had earlier made the flu and its terrors so real to me. Horace and Elizabeth’s baby, Jenny, died while Horace was near death himself. Elizabeth finally tells him about the child’s death, but the flu has left his memory weakened and he is not sure what he has been told or what he has imagined. Infant morality was very common in those days; Elizabeth’s mother had lost two children. Elizabeth and Horace turn to her for comfort. The scene begins when Horace asks Elizabeth about the baby: HORACE. Elizabeth . . . (Elizabeth comes back into the room. The others continue off into the kitchen.) Elizabeth, I hate to ask you this. You’re gonna think for sure the flu has left me half crazy. But I keep thinking . . . I know it is just the fever . . . like my saying to Mr. Vaughn I wanted to live to join the army. Now you know I was out of my mind then—the baby . . . Elizabeth, I kept dreaming you told me she was

Writing for the Stage dead. (She cries.) Oh, honey, my dreams shouldn’t get you upset. They shouldn’t. It was the fever. I know I must have had a very high temperature. I dreamed all kinds of crazy things. ELIZABETH. It wasn’t a dream, Horace. She died a week ago. HORACE. Oh, my God! (He turns away from Elizabeth.) Was there a funeral? ELIZABETH. Yes. I told you at the time. Don’t you remember any of it? (He shakes his head “no”.) We couldn’t go, either of us. (She cries.) She died, and I couldn’t nurse her or see to her. Mama had to get Aunt Charity to come over and nurse her for us, until she got sick with the flu and then . . . (Pause) Your aunt came back. She was rocking her in her arms when she died. (Horace turns his head away from her.) I was half crazy. I couldn’t think. We didn’t know whether to tell you, sick as you were, but finally, I felt I had to tell you and you listened to me as if you understood it all. I had her buried in your family’s plot instead of Papa’s. I think that hurt Mama and Papa but I wanted to do what I thought you’d want and we didn’t have our own family plot. (In the distance bells are ringing. A siren sounds. Brother comes running in.) BROTHER. Armistice! Armistice! Armistice has been declared! ELIZABETH. Oh, no. BROTHER. That’s why they’re ringing the bells. (Bells continue to ring. Brother gives a whoop.) Germany has surrendered. We’ve licked the Kaiser. MRS. VAUGHN. (running in) Isn’t it wonderful? (She cries) Thank God. Thank God it’s all over. Your papa called the Newspaper, and they’ve had a wire confirming it. He’s calling the Thatchers and the Cookenboos now to tell them. They’ll be so happy. Lee and Buster are still in training camp in San Antonio. Mrs. Cookenboo said the other day she had this feeling they would never go overseas and she was right. BROTHER. I’m going uptown. There’ll be lots of excitement in town, I bet. (He goes running out.) (Mrs. Vaughn looks at Elizabeth and Horace. They’re silent and withdrawn.) MRS. VAUGHN. What’s the matter? Oh, I know. I know. I’m sorry, forgive me. ELIZABETH. Horace didn’t remember about the baby. He thought he had dreamed it. He thought . . . (Horace is crying again.) Don’t cry, honey. It’s not good for you. You’re still weak. (They both are crying now.) Mama, help us. How did you stand it when you lost your children? MRS. VAUGHN. You just stand it. You keep going.

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Genesis of an American Playwright ELIZABETH. Of course, you had other children. MRS. VAUGHN. I had only you when I lost the first little girl, but when I lost the second, I had four others then. There were times when you were growing up I despaired for each of you. ELIZABETH. We had the baby buried right next to your father’s grave. I had Mama order a tombstone like the one she has on my little sister’s grave. I thought I’d like a lamb on it like they have on theirs. (Pause. In the distance a band plays.) I slipped out there yesterday afternoon and visited her grave. I took some flowers from our yard. (She cries.) MRS. VAUGHN. She’s at peace, honey. She’s at peace. (Pause.) When we lost our second child your papa was sitting in the living room by her little coffin. Mrs. Coon Ferguson came into the room and said, “Mr. Vaughn, did you ever think the death of this child was a judgment on you for not joining the church?” And his face flushed crimson, but he just said very quietly, “No, Mrs. Ferguson, I never did.”

I worked, too, on the texts of Courtship and Valentine’s Day after the HB productions and even later. The work again was always toward clarifying and simplifying. Who can speak better about all this than Willa Cather? Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. Millet had done hundreds of sketches of peasants sowing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, “The Sower,” the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying, of sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves for one that was better and more universal. Any first-rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can’t be a cheap workman; he can’t be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. The courage to go on without compromise does not come to a writer all at once nor, for that matter, does the ability. Both are phases

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of natural development. In the beginning, the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old ideals, and his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would like to recapture.

The eighth play in the cycle, Cousins, I think is my most difficult play for non-Southerners to understand. Even for Southerners, I would think now “Times are a-changing.” Still in my day, it was this cousin and that cousin and he’s your first cousin once removed or your fourth cousin on your daddy’s side and on and on and on. In between all the cousins and talk of cousins, one, I hope, senses the hard realities of the life of my characters. In this play, Horace and his store have fallen on difficult times. Indeed, the whole county is suffering from what we would call today a recession. In those days, as I remember, it was just referred to as hard times or bad times in contrast to the good times that World War I provided. There are bad cousins and good cousins in the play. There are brutal cousins and sensitive ones; there are prosperous cousins and poor cousins. During the play, there is another opportunity for Horace to find some kind of union with his mother and sister in Houston. The attempt fails, as it does in their one last meeting in his store in Harrison. At the end of the play, he is together with his wife, to whom we sense he has become even closer. In the last play, The Death of Papa, Horace becomes the head of not only his own family, but the Vaughn family as well. Mrs. Vaughn, in despair over how to save her increasingly ineffectual and dissipated son, decides to take him away from Harrison to save him from total destruction. She turns over the management of her affairs to Horace and acknowledges her increasing debt to him. The play ends with a scene between Brother and Horace: BROTHER. I used to feel so sorry for you when you would come and call on Elizabeth . . . I’d hear Papa and Mama talking and they said you were practically an orphan and had no home. Now you have a home and I don’t. I expect someday you’ll even be living in my home while I’m wandering around the world. HORACE. SR. No, I won’t. This is my home. BROTHER. Don’t be too sure. Don’t be too sure about anything, big Horace. Not about anything in this world.

Consciously, I have only used myself in my writing twice: once in my first play Wharton Dance, which as I remember was too autobiographical for comfort and second in The Death of Papa, in which I was the age of Horace, Jr. when my grandfather died. I remember walking home from school and coming into my house and being aware that it was empty. This was very unusual for me, because never before had I come into my house without my mother

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and my two little brothers always being there. On this day, however, they were not, and so I went across the street to play with a friend. His mother soon came out, looking very solemn, and said she thought I had better go to my grandfather’s house. Our backyard faced my grandparents’, and I remember running through our frontyard into our backyard, and there in my grandparents’ backyard I could see their cook Eliza, their chauffeur, her brother, Walter, and Eliza and Walter’s sister Sara, who lived and worked next door. I slowed down and tried walking casually into the yard. I remember them talking about seeing a dove alight on the house that morning and that that surely meant someone in the house would die before the day was out. Then they noticed me, and told me I should go into the house and see my mother. I went up the back stairs and met my mother standing in the back hall. Still there was no mention of my grandfather, but she asked if I would like to see my grandmother. I said, “yes,” and she led me through the back hall into the front hall past the living room. I saw a crowd of people dressed in their Sunday best in the living room and my mother took me to my grandmother’s room and led me inside. I saw my grandmother leaning over my grandfather’s body, crying, and I realized he was the one who had died. Change, however, was an early acquaintance in my life. My grandfather, who seemed impervious to all mortal ends, died when I was nine, and the reverberations and changes from that death continued for many years. Soon after, I was to see a quiet, serene street (in front of my grandparents’ house) begin its slow but steady descent into a metaphor for all the ugly, trashy highways that scar a great deal of small-town America. And these plays, I feel, are about change; unexpected, unasked for, unwanted, but change to be faced and dealt with or else we sink into despair or hopeless longing for a life that is gone. My first memory was of stories about the past, a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived. It did not take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone and nothing could be done about it. The time of the plays is a harsh time. They begin in 1902, a time of far-reaching social and economic change in Texas. The aftermath of Reconstruction and its passions had brought about a White Man’s union to prevent blacks from voting in local and state elections. But in spite of political and social acts to hold onto the past, a way of life was over, and the practical, the pragmatic were scrambling to form a new economic order. Black men and women were alive who knew the agony of slavery, and white men and women were alive who had owned them. I remember the first time slavery had a concrete face for me. I was on a fourteen-mile hike to complete some phase of becoming a Boy Scout. I stopped in a country store

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for a bottle of soda water and on the gallery of the store was an elderly black man. As I drank my soda water, we got to talking and he asked me my name. When I told him, he said he had been, as a boy, a slave on my great-great-grandfather’s plantation. I have never forgotten the impact that made on me. Slavery up until then was merely an abstract statistic that I had heard older people talking about. “Our family had one hundred sixty slaves, one hundred twenty . . . or whatever,” but as I looked into that man’s tired, sorrowing face, I was shocked to realize that this abstraction spoken of so lightly (“We were good to them,” “We never mistreated them”) was a living, suffering human being. The tales of the past had a new reality for me after that. As I have said, all the plays are based on family stories—stories often of dislocation, sibling rivalries, elopements, family estrangements, family reconciliations, and all the minutiae that make family life at once so interesting and yet at times so burdening, causing a reaction described by Katherine Anne Porter in “Old Mortality”: Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past but the legend of the past, other people’s memory of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic-lantern show. Ah, but there is my own life to come yet, she thought, my own life now and beyond. I don’t want any promises, I won’t have false hopes, I won’t be romantic about myself. I can’t live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don’t care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself, silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.

But many of us do care, of course, and we do continue to remember. We give to our children and their children our versions of what has gone before, remembering always how unreliable a thing memory is and how our versions of what has gone before can only be what we have come to perceive to be the past and its people and stories. I am writing this in the house that I was brought to soon after I was born, the house, a peace offering, from my grandparents to my parents. The house I grew up in; the house in which I heard many of these stories of the past and of the people long dead before I was born. My real grandfather and grandmother’s house (the Henry Vaughn’s of the cycle) is still there, our backyards meeting. The pecan trees I climbed as a boy are still yielding their pecans every year.

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My grandmother, Daisy Speed Brooks (Mrs. Vaughn in the plays) sold the house soon after she left Wharton (Harrison) never to return, except to visit my parents. That was fifty years ago; but to the old-timers here, it is still the Brooks’s house. Surrounding our two houses when I was growing up were cotton fields. We took a dirt road to walk to town. The cotton fields are all gone now; the street is paved. The town that was once so alive on Saturdays, when the country people came to town to trade, is almost a ghost town now. More than half the stores are empty. Saturday is like any other day. In my house are portraits of the real Elizabeth and Horace and their parents, and here too are portraits of the actors in costumes of the period who played their parts. My daughter, Hallie, played her grandmother Hallie, who I named Elizabeth in the plays, and so it goes. As I read the plays, I constantly ask myself if this happened this way or did it happen at all, really. I have concluded that these plays are an attempt to understand what happened to a group of people in a given place in time, or the truth of what I was told had happened, or what I understand and remember as happening. It is a vanishing world, the world of these plays; no, not a vanishing world but a vanished world. Of all the characters in the plays, I am now the only one living, and yet I say to myself isn’t it all reappearing, only in a different way? The fears, the uncertainties, the mistakes, the hopes, the determination to survive, the problems as difficult to solve in their own way as those that faced Horace and Elizabeth, I see facing my own children and their friends. And here in Harrison (Wharton) I hear the old stories of men and women trying their best to find ways to live and survive in a somewhat less-than-perfect world. Their stories tell of bravery and loss, treachery and strength, and courage. The old stories, as old as time, are retold in times of this day, of this time. I think sometimes that Randall Jarrell speaks for me in his poem “Thinking of the Lost World”: “All of them are gone Except for me; and for me nothing is gone.”*

How to and How Not To: Some Lessons Learned Along the Way When I began writing plays, the Broadway playhouses were full nine months of the year. (There was little air conditioning then, so most theaters didn’t think of trying to survive the New York summer heat.) There were plays

*Lecture given at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, April 14, 1993

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by Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Elmer Rice, Sidney Kingsley, S. N. Berman, Clifford Odets, Franz Werfel, and occasional revivals of Shakespeare and Ibsen. One notable production was Alla Nazimova’s Ghosts followed by her not so effective Hedda Gabler. Eva LeGallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre had closed because of the Depression a few years earlier, and repertory productions of Chekhov, Ibsen, and other European playwrights were rarely ever attempted again. It was LeGallienne’s productions of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and A Doll’s House that I had seen earlier in California when I was at the Pasadena Playhouse studying acting that first gave me a sense of the power of theater. Up until then, like most young actors, I was interested in a play only if it had a good part for me. In these three Ibsen plays, there was nothing for a seventeen year old, and for the first time, I realized that a play existed for something more than to satisfy an actor’s ego. After all these years, the power of those Ibsen plays is still vividly with me. In New York a year or so later, I began studying acting with three Russians: Tamara Daykarhanova, Vera Soloviova, and Andrius Jilinsky, and although I was unaware of it at the time, my first lessons in playwriting began here. These teachers, all trained by Stanislavsky, taught me as an actor to respect the playwright and to search each play for its through-line, its beats, and its actions. A group of us from Daykarhanova’s studio formed an acting company called The American Actors Company. Mary Hunter Wolfe was our director, and we chose to do plays by American playwrights including Paul Green, Lynn Riggs, E. P. Conkle, and Thornton Wilder, all of whom were rarely produced by the commercial theater. The members of the company were from all parts of America, and we attempted through a series of improvisations to show one another something of the particular regions we came from. I was from Texas, and I did a number of improvisations about the life there. Agnes DeMille came down to do a production with us and saw some of my improvisations and suggested that I should try using some of the material in a play. I wrote a one-act play with the lead for myself, and the American Actors Company produced it. Robert Coleman of The New York Mirror came to see it and praised the play and my performance. Here I learned my first lesson of what not to do. I had taken a literal situation, called it Wharton Dance (Wharton being the name of my hometown), and used the real names of people. My mother, pleased with the attention of Mr. Coleman, asked for a copy of the play. I sent it to her and she eagerly shared it with her friends, some of whose children were characters in the play, and they were not pleased. Therefore, I learned early on never to use real names, to be cautious of using a real place, and never to be only a reporter in telling your story.

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That summer I went back to Texas and wrote a full-length play called Texas Town. This time I gave my town another name and carefully avoided naming any characters after anyone I knew. The plot of my play, although based on what I had seen and observed, was not so literal and was more than reporting. That Fall, the company produced the play and this time, Brooks Atkinson, the critic for The New York Times, came to see the play and praised it. The company wanted me to give up acting and devote my time to writing. This was the era of the Carolina Playmakers and other such regional groups who had a theory that everyone has at least one play to write. They believed the folksier the play, the better. I had a horror of being a regional playwright, and I was afraid I might prove all too true the Carolina Playmakers’ theory of one person, one play. I had written from instinct and had no technical skills whatsoever. Lynn Riggs was a friend of mine and so I went to him for advice. He told me to “Just trust your talent and write about what you know.” A little later I met Tennessee Williams, who was just becoming recognized. When I asked him for advice on how to write, he laughed that hysterical laugh of his and never answered the question. Later he said, “Everybody has to find out for him or herself.” He said his agent, Audrey Wood, had insisted he take a course at the New School with Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner of the Theater Guild, and it had been a waste of time. He said, “Find writers you admire and study them.” Some of the writers he was studying were Anton Chekhov, Hart Crane, and D. H. Lawrence. Fortunately, my training as an actor had given me a sense of play structure. The playwrights I admired—Strindberg, Ibsen, and Chekhov—were each vastly different from each other. What were the differences? How did they achieve them? I sensed the answer went beyond structure. It was something innately unique in each of them. When I asked Mary Hunter Wolfe, a very learned and articulate lady, about this she said each had developed his own thematic interest and style. I began to ask too many people too many things and I got back a barrage of “How To’s”—how to grab an audience and how to write a hit. The “How To’s” were endless. The “How To’s” in New York City in 1936 had little interest in Hart Crane and D. H. Lawrence. Ibsen was depressing to them and in spite of Nazimova’s success with Ghosts, Ibsen, they would say again and again, never made a dime. Chekhov could not be made commercially successful either, even with a star cast. As for Strindberg: “My God! Commercial suicide.” Among the more successful playwrights then were Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Elmer Rice, Lindsay and Crouse, Robert Sherwood, Sidney Kingsley, Rachel Crothers, and Lillian Hellman. Clifford Odets had a special niche. Known as a radical and an innovator, Odets was loyal to the Group Theatre and its way of working. Harold Clurman had this to say about Odets:

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Clifford Odets has not only an energy that is characteristically of our age, but he is of a generation that has come to look critically and participate actively in the day-to-day struggles of our cultural and social world. His most important contacts in the past five years have been with artists and craftsmen, all in search of a way of life which would permit them not merely to “exist” (That is, “to do as the Romans do”), but to give free range to their sensibility and intelligence in organizations that might bring some sort of constructive order into the chaos of our artistic and social life.

Odets was a child of the Depression, and his characters in his early plays were rooted in the Depression and its problems. This is an example of his dialogue from his play Awake and Sing. It is a scene between Bessie Berger and her son Ralph. BESSIE. So go out and change the world if you don’t like it. RALPH. I will! And why? ’Cause life’s different in my head. Gimme the earth in two hands. I’m strong. There . . . hear him? The air mail off to Boston. Day or night, he flies away, a job to do. That’s us and it’s no time to die. (The airplane sound fades off as MYRON gives alarm clock to BESSIE, which she begins to wind.) BESSIE. “Mom, what does she know? She’s old-fashioned!” But I’ll tell you a big secret: My whole life I wanted to go away too, but with children a woman stays home. A fire burned in my heart too, but now it’s too late. I’m no spring chicken. The clock goes and Bessie goes. Only my machinery can’t be fixed.

Most of the other playwrights, too, were political liberals of varying degrees. Many of them tried to use the social causes that interested them as themes for their plays, sometimes succeeding, more often not. Lillian Hellman did succeed with her plays The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine. The latter was about an anti-Nazi refugee, Kurt Muller, who has decided to leave his wife and children in America and return to Germany to fight Nazism. He gives this speech to his children at the end of the play: KURT. (shakes his head). Now let us get straight together. The four of us. Do you remember when we read Les Miserables? Do you remember that we talked about it afterward? Well. He stole bread. The world is out of shape we said, when there are hungry men. And until it gets in shape, men will steal and lie and—(Slowly) and—kill. But for whatever reason it is done, and whoever does it—you understand me—it is all bad. I want you to remember that. Whoever does it, it is bad. (Then gaily) But per-

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You can find a variation of these hopeful summing-up speeches in other plays of that time, for example, Sidney Kingsley’s Men in White, Elmer Rice’s Judgment Day, Gow and D’Usseau’s in Tomorrow the World. Here is Maxwell Anderson’s variation in The Eve of St. Mark: “Allright boys. You go and make things over your way. We old folks; we’ll stay here and milk the cows and run the bales . . . Make a new world, boys! God knows we need it!” These playwrights came from various backgrounds; they were reporters and lawyers. Ms. Hellman had been a play reader for the producer Herman Shumlin; Sherwood had worked for the Old Life magazine; Odets had been an actor. He came to the opening of my play, Texas Town, and was very complimentary. I knew his sister Florence, and I asked her “How does he do it?” “Do what,” she said? “Write plays,” I continued. “Same as you,” she said, “He just writes them.” Later she called me up and said, “He listens to a lot of music.” Many years later, Terrence McNally admitted being even more dependent upon music. Because he apparently learned dramatic structure by listening to music, he is unable even to begin writing until he has selected a score for the play. For example, he listened to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, an aria with thirty-two variations, while writing Frankie and Johnnie in the Claire de Lune. I did not see the Group Theatre’s first production of Odets’s Awake and Sing, but I saw its revival several years later. It was a New York play if there ever was one. New York was in a depression and New Yorkers were desperate. The play found a way to speak to them and for them; today, it is rarely produced. The dialogue that once seemed fresh and innovative now seems mannered and stilted. This is true of many of the famous and successful plays of that period such as Tomorrow the World, Watch on the Rhine, Idiot’s Delight, The Petrified Forest, Winterset, and The Eve of St. Mark. It seems plays can speak effectively to one time and place and a decade or two later become lifeless and purposeless. What makes a play transcend time and place and to continue to speak vitally to subsequent generations? To my mind, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman does this but his All My Sons does not. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night certainly does this but his The Great God Brown does not. There were “How To” books then, of course, such as How’s Your Second Act? by Arthur Hopkins, the producer, who had this to say:

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Plays of the future will be more concerned with character than event. This is in line with other art forms as well as with scientific research which is seeking the essence of being rather than dwelling on details of its manifestations . . . Certainly there is a greater and richer variety of expression in character revelation than in the altered application of long used situations. Someone once took the trouble to enumerate the basic situations available to the dramatist. I doubt if anyone would attempt to catalogue the number of character facets that are employable. It would be like counting fingerprints. That the inner man is a richer field than his outer manifestations is evident in much classic literature. One of Hamlet’s soliloquies unfolds a more exciting panorama than all of the frantic killings in the last scene.

The Art of Dramatic Writing, by Lagos Egri, was very popular at the time and full of formulas. Recently, I read that a teacher of screenwriting (I forget who) believes that Egri is the shoulder we are all standing on. Egri, he went on to say, created the concept of taking dramatic principles and laying them down in book form. Supposedly, this information helps the writer. I always found, on the other hand, Egri’s book lifeless and depressing. The American Actors Company performed my play, Texas Town, at the Humphrey Weidman Studio on 16th Street in New York. This was the home base of Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. Miss Humphrey was a leading modern dancer and choreographer. We became friends. I attended her classes and watched her rehearsals. She was someone for whom “How To” was no mystery. She was very secure in the technique she had developed as a dancer and choreographer and she understood well how she differed in both technique and content from the other great dancer/choreographer, Martha Graham. Both of them dismissed ballet as a decadent form. In the late 1930s, the Theater Guild produced William Saroyan’s one-act play My Heart’s in the Highlands for special matinees. It was directed by Robert Lewis and was much admired, but only had a brief run. Then came his The Time of Your Life and suddenly all of the New York theater was under Saroyan’s spell. All the young writers were asking how he wrote, and they were told that he paid no attention to plot or structure. He created a mood—how to? How to what? How do you create a mood? It was his secret; no one else seemed to know. He made the whole process seem so effortless. He had no real theater credentials. He thumbed his nose at the theater and its conventions. The rumor was he was writing a play a week without labor, sweat, or worry about construction. Apparently he wrote the first draft of The Time of Your Life in only six days. How to? Odets’s latest play was dismissed as being a failed attempt to copy Saroyan.

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The Theater Guild (Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn), had produced The Time of Your Life and at the insistence of my agent, and in spite of Tennessee Williams’s warning, I enrolled in their class at the New School. I attended one session. As producers, they had turned down Life with Father, which was one of the great commercial successes of the decade. Anyway, the question they posed to the class that day was: If you had been given the script of Life with Father would you have produced it? I was by now taking Tennessee Williams’s advice and studying writers I admired. Katherine Anne Porter was one; T. S. Eliot and the playwrights George Kelly and Anton Chekhov were others. Miss Porter had this to say about writing: I have always had a fixed notion that a writer should lead a private life and keep silent in so far as writing is concerned and let published works speak for themselves, so, in trying to tell you something of what I think and believe about certain aspects of writing, I speak strictly as an individual and not as the spokesman for one school or the enemy of another.

And this from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” I continued seeing a great deal of modern dance and studying the techniques of various choreographers. I became friends with the gifted, young dancer and choreographer Valerie Bettis. She was very interested in combining words and dance, and she asked me to collaborate with her on a ballet— How to? I had never done anything like that before, but she said we would discover a way together. She was a great proselytizer. She felt that the theater’s future was in the use of music, words, and dance, and that the realistic play was dead and best forgotten. John Martin, the dance critic for The New York Times had told me that he thought the two greatest dramatists of the day were Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, neither one of whom used a single word. That Spring, the American Actors Company produced my play Only the Heart (a title I hated but was persuaded to use) off-Broadway and it received very positive press. It had no music, no use of dancers, and it was not in a Saroyan mood, but, I think it was an honest attempt to explore deeply troubling relationships between a group of people. Luther Green, a fine producer, came to see it and said he would take it to Broadway if Pauline Lord would play the lead. Here was the beginning of a dilemma I have had to face all my life. I like many kinds and many forms of theater. Pauline Lord, I thought, and still think, was our greatest actress. Her means were realistic, and silence was often her greatest weapon. Her use of

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dialogue was instinctive and individual. She never dazzled you with her vocal techniques, nor did she employ music and choreography; but what she was able to create on stage had its own poetry. She read my play and asked to meet with me, and I was thrilled. I thought she could do anything, but she did not agree. She told me she liked the play, but that she was wrong for it and would not serve it properly. She said it with such great conviction that I found myself heart-broken, but agreeing. The American Actors Company had been together five years and although we had acquired some prestige, we had no money. The group was desperate to take my play to Broadway. They asked if I would meet with a producer from Paris. They said he had an idea about how to enhance the play (Playwrights be very wary of that word “enhance”), and that if I agreed with his ideas, he would produce it on Broadway. I agreed to a meeting. He introduced himself as the George Kaufman of Paris. The American George Kaufman was known in New York as a craftsman with the supreme talent of knowing how to make plays work for an audience. He was rich and very successful. How to? My Paris producer had no doubts that, like Kaufman, he could turn anything into a hit. That was and still is a favorite phrase in the New York theater. He has a hit. He doesn’t have a hit. His methods may have been successful in Paris but they did not work in New York. The reviewers who had praised my play downtown turned on it savagely and said it had been ruined. Valerie Bettis had gone with me to the opening night and she did nothing to spare my bruised and wounded feelings. We went to a diner on 8th Street and talked until about four in the morning, at least she did the talking. She told me once again how I and other writers were wasting our time in the realistic theater and that she was glad the play had failed. Now we could begin to create a new theater? How to? I wrote a ballet for her called Daisy Lee in which she spoke and danced. It was performed at the New York YMHA as part of its dance series, and Valerie kept it in her repertory and toured with it extensively. Through Valerie, I met that wise old man of modern dance, Louis Horst. We became friends, and we talked a lot about musical structure, dance structure, and play structure. He knew a great deal about all three. He said that powerful women like Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, and Valerie were very seductive. They wanted to change theater and make it in their own image. He urged me to experiment with form as much as I liked, but in the meantime, to realize that no one, not Graham, not Humphrey had a final answer. Howard Lindsay was coauthor of the play Life with Father. He had grown up in a theater that had had no competition from film and radio. He had worked with some of the great theater managers and producers of his day: Frohman, Belasco, William Brady, and Sam Harris. He called and asked to see

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me. I met him at his town house in the Village, and he was warm and courteous. He said he loved the theater and it concerned him that young playwrights of talent were being seduced by Hollywood. “As you know,” he said, “I have had many successes, and I would like to share with you two rules that I think are the basis of my success as a playwright. One: Never write a play about anyone you would not care to entertain in your own living room. Two: When I go out of town with a play, I never watch the actors, only the audience.” I have been in the theater now as long, if not longer, than Mr. Lindsay had been at that time. And it seems to me that a great many fine plays would never have been written if they had followed his first rule. As for the second, I can only say I prefer watching the actors. Each year, Rita Morganthau, head of the Neighborhood Playhouse, would commission a playwright to write a play that would use all the disciplines of the school: acting, music, and dance. She asked if I would like to write one. She said I could direct it, and Martha Graham, head of the dance department, would choreograph. I wrote the play, and it was accepted. The first days of rehearsal arrived, and in I walked to collaborate on a play with Miss Graham (by this time I was calling her Martha like everyone else). I was twenty-seven then, and I was not nervous at all. Today, I would be in a panic. It was a remarkable experience. She took my play, added a score by Louis Horst, and turned it inside out. She turned to me one day in rehearsals and said: “Don’t let me overdo, I sometimes have a tendency to do that.” I sat, watched, and learned nothing really, but I reaffirmed what I already knew. Here was a genius, and I felt blessed to be in the same room with her. It became finally an extraordinary evening in the theater, but to this day, I cannot tell you what she did or how she did it. However, something inside me kept saying, “There are other ways, too.” There’s Pauline Lord—what’s her secret? There’s Katherine Anne Porter—what’s her secret? And there’s T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams—what’s their secret? How to? The New York reviewers turned on Saroyan. They decided he did not know after all how to write a play with a real beginning, middle, and end. He had no second act and third act. It was all mood and to be avoided now. How to? In the meantime, the New York theater intellectuals had a new hero, JeanPaul Sartre and his play No Exit. This was the new theater; everything else was old hat. Poor Saroyan, poor Odets—passé. “Of course there had been The Glass Menagerie, but it would have been nothing without Laurette Taylor’s performance, and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons was given importance because of Kazan’s production.” Partisan Review, in issue after issue, it seemed, had a letter from Paris extolling the virtues of the New French theater and its playwrights. They were

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particularly enthusiastic about a Paris production of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was also produced, and it got splendid reviews, except for Mary McCarthy in the Partisan Review. She trashed it. Elia Kazan had directed A Streetcar Named Desire and soon after, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The American theater had again found heroes: Williams, Miller, and Kazan. It is interesting that Miller and Williams, though they have been in and out of fashion in the New York theater many times since then, have both managed to be produced continually. England has been consistently loyal to them. I married, and my wife and I went to Washington, DC with Valerie Bettis to teach and produce my plays in a small theater. I continued my experiments with dance and music in Washington for five years and finally felt I had learned all I could. It seemed to me I was essentially a storyteller and that I needed to return to a simpler form that allowed me to tell my stories without theatrical distractions. So, I went back to a more realistic style. However, is anything in the theater ever really realistic or naturalistic with all the theater conventions we depend upon? There had been many changes in the New York theater and among my friends. Louis Horst was dead, and Doris Humphrey was crippled with arthritis; she could no longer dance and seldom choreographed. Valerie Bettis was dancing and starring in a Broadway review with the great Beatrice Lillie. Martha Graham was at the height of her creative power, and she had expanded her dance company to include men. Television was beginning, and most of its production was happening in New York. The producer, Fred Coe, asked me to write plays for his Sunday series, The Philco-Goodyear Playhouse. In those days, television was live, which meant, like theater, it could not be stopped once a performance began. Each of the writers Coe hired had a different vision of the use of television. I wanted to keep it close to theater. Paddy Chayefsky wanted it to go in the direction of film. The necessities of the moment, low budgets, and small studios limiting the number and size of sets, made my vision the practical one. I did eight plays for Coe, all one-act plays really, which were later published and performed as one-acts on stage. However, as the audience grew and the budgets became larger, television gradually left New York and moved to Los Angeles. With the invention of videotape, it became possible to edit the plays; and consequently, they became increasingly imbued with film techniques. Earlier I had met Stark Young, and he had come to Washington to lecture at our theater. When my wife and I moved back to New York, we continued our friendship. He was as knowledgeable about theater and dance as Louis Horst had been. Many years earlier, Stark Young had been the theater critic for The New York Times, but left because he did not like to review a play

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immediately after seeing it. He then went to The New Republic where he was the theater critic for many years. He had many interests and many talents. He was a novelist, an essayist, and the skillful adapter of four of Chekhov’s plays. He was a gifted painter and theater director. He was knowledgeable about many kinds of theater and dance: the experiments of Meyerhold in Russia, German expressionism (he did not care much for this), the Chinese theater of Mei Lang Fang (which he adored), and the Indian dances of II day Shan Kar. Eleanora Duse was his friend, and he loved and admired Martha Graham as well as Pauline Lord. He had this to say about theater and playwrights: The Golden Day in the theater would dawn when the Dramatist himself directed his play, with actors capable of expressing entirely the meaning that he intends, and a designer whose settings and costumes bring the whole event to its final perfection. This blest occasion would exhibit the creator in the art of the theater working straight, using one medium directly, as any other artist does, as the painter does, the architect, the musician. But such a day never dawns; and the process by which a piece of theater art comes into existence is nothing so single or direct. We have first the idea or the matter that is to be expressed in this particular medium that we call the art of the theater. This medium in turn consists of a number of other mediums that compose it, such as the play, the acting, the decor. And these mediums involve other artists, the actor, the director, the designer, the musician, and depend on them. The art of the theater is the most complex of all arts.

Most theater people would not agree with his theory. The accepted wisdom, then and now, is that the playwright should never direct his own play, because he is too close to it and cannot be objective about its faults and what needs to be fixed in rehearsal. That point will be debated, I guess, forever. Edward Albee directs a great many of his plays. David Mamet does, too. In England, Harold Pinter directs his own plays, once in awhile, but often directs the plays of others. Alan Ayckbourn nearly always directs the first production of his plays. Some of my plays I want to direct, some I do not. Stark Young insisted, too, that there was no final “How To’s” in the theater. There were many varied and equally valuable approaches to the writing and producing of plays and to insist on one supreme or superior way was foolish and finally defeating. This has been most helpful to remember, as each year, it seems someone announces a final approach to writing or acting or directing. At the time, the New York commercial theater was in a panic. Productions were shrinking and theaters were closing and being sold for parking lots or office buildings or being used for television shows. Walter Kerr, in his book How Not to Write a Play claimed that the theater, the commercial theater, would continue to decline and lose audiences to film and television unless a way was

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found to write plays in the way he suggested. He argued that the theater was losing its audiences because playwrights continued to write watered-down versions of Chekhov and Ibsen and because of their contempt for their audience. He did not necessarily recommend the great moneymakers of the past as present models, but he felt there were lessons to be learned from the ability to attract and please audiences. Edward Albee had this to say in rebuttal: Walter Kerr, the drama critic of The Herald Tribune, has, among his many alarming opinions, the theory that the excellence of a new play is determined by its immediate mass appeal. To bolster this theory—a sad one if it is true—Mr. Kerr cites the Greek theater, where 18,000 people a night would crowd in to see Oedipus Rex. Let us say, Mr. Kerr neglects to mention, among many qualifiers, that the Greeks had nothing worse to do. And if we carry Mr. Kerr’s idea to its logical and dark end, then The Grand Canyon Suite is a better piece of music than Beethoven’s last quartet . . . But the contrary is true, as Mr. Kerr knows, as we all know. The final determination of the value of a work of art is the opinion of an informed and educated people over a long period of time.

Whatever the reason for the decline, the playwrights were usually the first to be blamed. Where are our Shakespeares? Our Ibsens? Our Chekhovs? Our O’Neills? Theater veterans said it was the worst crisis they had ever seen, worse than the dark days of the Great Depression or the arrival of talking pictures. No one, not even the worst pessimist could realize then just how drastic and far reaching the changes would be. Bertolt Brecht, a refugee from Nazi Germany, had tried throughout World War II to establish himself as a playwright in America. A great deal was written about Brecht’s plays, especially by his great champion Eric Bentley, but his works were rarely produced. There were great hopes for Charles Laughton’s production of Brecht’s Galileo, but it was a commercial failure. At the end of World War II Brecht returned to Germany and was given a theater of his own by the East German communist regime. His plays, using German expressionism and classic Chinese theater techniques, began to gain world attention. He called all this “Epic Theater” and playwrights all over the Western world began to study the plays and try to incorporate his techniques. Finally, New York had a successful Brecht production. It was The Threepenny Opera. Initially, the play was produced in Berlin before the war; here it was produced off-Broadway. In Europe, the East German government subsidized Brecht’s theater. He did not have to worry about the cost of productions or whether his plays made a profit. In England, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company were formed and the government provided generous subsidies. American

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actors, directors, and writers looked on with envy. How to? How to what? How do we create a National Theatre here so we will never again have to worry about profits? It will never work over here. Why? Just because it never will. Why not? Opera is subsidized. Symphonies are. Museums. Why not theater? Never mind. It will never work for theater. And so far it never has. In a tiny theater in Paris, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was produced, and it soon had productions all over the world. Of all the plays of its time, it was the most admired by thoughtful theater critics. It has had, I believe, more influence than even Brecht on younger writers. Beckett was, and is, a difficult model. When understood by the actors and the directors involved in the production, his plays can be powerful and disturbing. He has influenced a great many American playwrights, particularly Edward Albee in his later, more abstract style, and in England, obviously, Harold Pinter. Brecht was not so conspicuous an influence on American playwriting until the recent plays of Tony Kushner, who happily acknowledges his debt to him. In England, he has been much more of an influence. If the theater was dying on Broadway and off-Broadway, it was alive and thriving off-off-Broadway in the most unlikely places: basements, coffee houses, and cafés. This all began only a few years after Mr. Kerr published his despairing book. Instead of names like Theater Collective and Theater Union of the 1930s, groups called themselves the Living Theatre and the Open Theater. It was a time of social protest, of defiance, the beginning of the drug culture, not unlike the social protest of the thirties and early forties, but harsher, more violent. Four letter words never before accepted on the American stage were used with abandon. McBird, Viet Rock, America Hurrah, and The Connection were the off-off-Broadway successes of the day. The plays were often abrasive and confrontational, and they embraced and championed caricature. Certainly, Howard Lindsay would never want to entertain the characters from these plays in his living room. The early plays of Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson were produced in those cafés and coffeehouses. Sam Shepard had written forty plays by the time he was in his mid-thirties. His real ambition, he once said, was to be a rock star. His acknowledged influences were rock and folk music. Lanford Wilson was more conservative and traditional, but he was equally prolific. There were new manifestos it seemed almost everyday: this was the new theater, down with the old! We older playwrights looked on; at least this one did, with interest, but also with profound bewilderment. Out of Chicago came the plays of David Mamet, influenced by Harold Pinter, but finally evolving into a style of his own. Here was an early sign that serious theater was evolving outside of New York. The Ford Foundation and other similar institutions were determined to see that theater flourished in all our major cities, not just New York, and they

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poured in money to make it happen. Unfortunately, too often the money was spent on unwieldy and expensive buildings that cost a fortune to maintain. Funding organizations also provided grants to minority writers to break, as they said, the strangle hold of the white, male playwright. They also gave grants to poets and novelists, encouraging them to try the play form, giving them resident grants to write and work at the many regional theaters. The “How To’s” began to assert themselves these days in strange ways even when not sought after, for many young writers were coming to playwriting without having seen much theater, at least not in comparison to the hours spent watching television and film. It became a given that film was affecting today’s playwriting much more than theater was affecting screenwriting. Stark Young had been fond of a one-act play of mine called Roots in a Parched Ground and suggested I make a full-length play of it. After his death, I moved to the New Hampshire woods to work on the play. It finally became a cycle of nine plays I called The Orphans’ Home Cycle. To prepare for the writing of the cycle, I read and studied Shakespeare’s Chronicle plays, especially Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), and Sophocles’s Oedipus cycle. I also studied O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and Arnold Wesker’s Working Class trilogy. I wrote other plays at the time, too, and listened to a great deal of music, but plays need productions and there are no theaters in the New Hampshire woods. I had done an occasional film assignment to subsidize my playwriting, but I had spent little time in New York for nearly ten years. When I did decide to go back, I found a completely changed world. Half the theaters that were there when I first arrived had been torn down, and those that were left were mostly used for musicals. Broadway was not only decimated but the off-offBroadway movement that had seemed so flourishing and vital was beginning its rapid decline. Herbert Berghof had a small theater on Bank Street, and he invited me to work with him. He was an extraordinary man. Another refugee from the Nazis, he had an abounding passion for American writing and spent thirty years of his life producing and directing new American plays. We spent many hours after rehearsals discussing the American Theater and its future. I marveled at his resilience and optimism. He had survived many tragic catastrophes such as the death of his mother and father in a German concentration camp, and the fleeing of his German homeland and of the theater in which he had grown up. Yet, here he was in a small theater on Bank Street determined to do the kind of serious work he felt it was one’s duty to do. How to? How to find that kind of courage and strength? I now found younger playwrights asking me “How To” as much as I once asked Lynn Riggs and Tennessee; but now the questions included: “When you have learned how to write a play, how do you make a living in the theater?”

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The only honest answer to that question now was and is, you don’t, or hardly or rarely any more than poets make a living by their poetry. There are exceptions, of course (they don’t want to hear about Neil Simon—they already know about him), and I usually tell them about Alan Ayckbourn, as prolific as Neil Simon and the most produced playwright in the world. He has spent all his theater life running a theater-in-the-round in Scarborough, England. Here he directs and produces plays, including at least, one of his own each year. Of course, having written so many plays they vary in quality, but at his best, Aykbourn is extraordinary, both for the seriousness of purpose in his plays (mostly comedies) and for his imaginative use of the techniques of theater. He has a superb ear, and his physical imagination is boundless. To me, the “How To’s” now also included how to write a screenplay or a television play, a question I never thought of asking all those years ago. I was interested in the answers Elizabeth Bishop gave to someone who sent her a ‘How To” letter. Here is what she had to say: From what you say, I think perhaps you are actually trying too hard—or reading too much about poetry and not enough poetry. Metrics—etc. are fascinating—but they all came afterwards, obviously. And I always ask my writing classes NOT to read criticism. Read a lot of poetry—all the time—and not 20th century poetry. Read, Herbert, Pope, Tennyson, Coleridge—anything at all almost that’s any good, from the past—until you find out what you really like, by yourself. Even if you try to imitate it exactly—it will come out quite different. Then the great poets of our own century—Marianne Moore, Auden, Wallace Steven—and not just 2 or 3 poems each, in anthologies—read ALL of somebody. Then read his or her life, and letters, and so on. (And by all means read Keats’s letters.) Then see what happens. That’s really all I can say. It can’t be done, apparently, by willpower and study alone—or by being “with it”—but I really don’t know how poetry gets to be written. There is a mystery and a surprise, and after that a great deal of hard work.

And I encouraged the “How To’s” who came to me to read plays of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, Racine, Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, Brecht, Beckett, Williams, Miller, Albee, Lanford Wilson, August Wilson, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, and Romulus Linney. I tried to make clear that for a playwright the search for knowledge cannot stop there, for as Stark Young says, “The art of the theater is the most complex of all the arts for they include not only the dramatist, but the actor,

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the director, the designer, and often musicians.” The wise playwright will make it his business to learn something of all these disciplines. Recently Frank Rich in The New York Times used me as an example of our contemporary theater’s problems. He wrote: Fifty-four years ago this week a young man from Texas named Horton Foote made his playwriting debut in New York with a drama called Texas Town. Brooks Atkinson, the critic of the Times, declared it a “feat of magic.” Last week and some 50 plays later, Mr. Foote, now 79, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Young Man from Atlanta. In the intervening halfcentury, he has passed through Broadway during its Golden Age—Lillian Gish starred in his Trip to Bountiful in 1953—and won two Oscars in Hollywood (for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies). But, incredibly, Mr. Foote is now in some ways back where he started in the theater. Not only is he still writing about the same Texans but his Pulitzer-winning play, just like Texas Town, was staged on a shoestring in a tiny off-off-Broadway playhouse. To be exact, only 1,700 people saw The Young Man from Atlanta during its four weeks at a 75-seat theater in NoHo—fewer than see Show Boat in a single night. Though the play received good reviews, no producer moved it to a large home off-Broadway, let alone on, for an extended run— so financially risky has it become to mount a serious drama requiring nine actors in the commercial theater. If Mr. Foote’s plays have much to tell audiences about the psychic fissures lying just beneath the surface of middleclass American life in this century, what does it also say about America that playwrights of his stature must now fight to be heard? I served on the Pulitzer jury that chose Mr. Foote as one of the three drama finalists this year. I am overjoyed that he won. But no prize, however lustrous, should obscure the fact that even he, after a half-century of performing feats of theatrical magic, has no guarantee that his work will be staged in our cultural capital.

You would think all of these apparent difficulties would discourage young writers, but they do not, of course. They ask their “How To’s,” and they continue to write plays. They continue to believe they will find a way to get productions and find solutions to the problems they and the theater face today, just as I and my contemporaries asked our “How To’s” and refused to be defeated by the problems of the theater we first faced . . . and refuse to be defeated still.*

*Lecture presented at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in July, 1995

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Introduction to The Young Man from Atlanta Early in 1993, Jim Houghton approached me about the Signature Theatre doing a season of four of my plays. We had discussed this during its first season when the Signature was producing the plays of Romulus Linney, but I wasn’t sure then that I was ready for such scrutiny. I was out of New York for the next season when the Signature season did Lee Blessing’s plays, but I was back again for the Edward Albee plays given in the third season. I was able to see most of the plays, and I was again very impressed by the theater’s work. So when Jim approached me once again, I decided to take the plunge. And, I might add, I’m mighty glad I did. Both Romulus and Edward had elected to include plays of theirs that had been performed before in New York, as well as ones that were new to the city. I decided to do plays that had never before been seen in New York. Two of them, The Young Man from Atlanta and Laura Dennis, were given first productions. It was a busy time for this playwright, because I was encouraged to be present at all casting sessions, to go to rehearsals, and to attend as many performances as I could. I’ve never seen months go by quite so fast. Signature decided to open the season with Talking Pictures, directed by Carol Goodheart. Night Seasons followed, which I directed with a cast that included Jean Stapleton and Hallie Foote. We took a break during the Christmas season and returned in late December to cast and rehearse The Young Man from Atlanta. Pete Masterson was to direct, and soon we had the casting all in place except for the crucial role of Will Kidder. Ralph Waite was suggested; Pete knew his work as an actor and was enthusiastic about using him. Fortunately, Ralph was just as enthusiastic about doing the play; and when I listened to him at the first rehearsal, I knew we had made a very wise choice. Laura Dennis, directed by Jim Houghton, closed the season. Will Kidder, Lily Dale Kidder, and Pete Davenport, the leading characters in The Young Man from Atlanta, all appear in earlier plays of mine: Lily Dale and Pete in Roots in a Parched Ground, Lily Dale, and Cousins, and Will Kidder in Lily Dale and Cousins. We first meet Lily Dale when she is ten and follow her through different phases of her life until we see her at sixty in The Young Man from Atlanta. When we first meet Will in Lily Dale, he is in his early twenties; he’s approaching middle age in Cousins; and he’s sixty-four in The Young Man from Atlanta. Pete Davenport, Lily Dale’s stepfather, is in his early thirties when we first meet him and seventy-two in The Young Man from Atlanta. Roots in a Parched Ground, Lily Dale, and Cousins are all part of my nineplay collection called The Orphans’ Home Cycle. When I finished Cousins in the late 1970s I thought I was through with Will, Lily Dale, and Pete forever; but four years ago, I began thinking about the three of them again, cut off

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from their beginning roots, trying to make a life in ever-growing Houston. Soon after, I began working on the play. The Will Kidders of this world I’ve known all my life, North and South— optimistic, hardworking, confident that their world is the best of all possible worlds, admiring business success above all other things. It seemed for many years that Will’s private and public world would continue forever on its upward spiral. But it doesn’t, and that’s the dilemma we find him in at the beginning of the play. From the very first, I’ve had ambivalent feelings about the character of Lily Dale. In the earlier plays, even as a child, she seemed to me to be vain, selfish, and not very admirable, but when I came to her again in this play I wanted to make her more complex, to give her more humanity and vulnerability, but always to keep in mind her many faults. Fortunately, Carlin Glynn loved exploring all these many facets and did much to make Lily Dale understood by the audience. Indeed, all the actors—Devon Abner, Christina Burz, Seth Jones, James Pritchett, Frances Foster, Michael Lewis, and Beatrice Winde—in addition to Carlin Glynn and Ralph Waite—did much to give the play a compelling life. The eponymous “young man from Atlanta” never appears. A number of characters in the play have to decide whether the story he has told is the truth or not. Lily Dale wants to believe it. Will does not. It was always interesting to me how different members of the audience came to quite differing conclusions about his truthfulness. At a benefit for the theater just before rehearsals began, a letter from Edward Albee (May 1995) was read to me. It said: Dear Horton: Welcome to the club! You will most probably have a frightening experience with the Signature Theatre Company this coming season. You will discover that you are working with eager, dedicated, talented, resourceful, gentle, and thoughtful people whose main concern will be making you happy. This will be frightening. Even more, they will succeed in making you happy. This will be even more frightening. Don’t fret about it; just go with it. Have a wonderful season. Regards, Edward Albee

He was a true prophet. It was a wonderful season, and the cast did much to make me happy. I’ll always be grateful.* *Essay published as Introduction to The Young Man From Atlanta (New York: Dutton, 1995)

Chapter Four

Writing for the Screen Good screenplays, like good plays or good novels, do not come by the gross, or by the dozen. Money can’t buy them or cajole them. They are the result of talent and hard work. “The McDermott Lecture”

The Little Box There is an extraordinary feeling you get when you sit in the control room, look up at the clock, and see the hands getting nearer and nearer to the time when your teleplay begins. There are three minutes left, and then two, and then silence, silence like no other in the world, and then the music and the impersonally assured voice of the announcer. Suddenly you realize that nothing can stop the ticking of the clock, that for good or bad you have had your inning for ten days, or a week, or however long you have rehearsed the show. Now, the production is out of your hands, and out of the director’s and the producer’s hands, and it’s going out into many little boxes, the good Lord only knows how many, into hundreds of homes, bars, hotels, and clubs. Of course, you want to take it back and work on it some more, see it rehearsed some more, but there’s no time. If you’re going to keep working in television, one of the first things you have to find is a way to live with the phrase, “There’s not enough time.” Because the truth is, there isn’t. You learn to do what you can with the time you have. Once in a while you are astonished with the results and sometimes depressed. However, you discover soon enough that this is a fact of television life that you cannot change and that probably will not change for a very long 155

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time. In the theater there is time, in motion pictures there is time, in television, there isn’t. A lack of time is an inescapable fact for everyone from the casting director to the producer. Fred Coe once said to me that to do good work in television you first have to learn to make peace with the little box. Certainly, the assets as well as the limitations of television define for the individual writer the television technique he or she must develop. This is a new and exciting form for the writer to work with, to enrich and enliven according to his or her own unique talents. Some hope to find a “pure” television technique. I wonder if this is possible. It seems to me that television is a hybrid by nature. It borrows a little from here and a little from there, from motion pictures, radio, and the theater. Of course, all this does not really matter because it is the content after all (and I use content in its broadest possible sense), that makes any technique worthwhile. There are two reasons why I am presently at peace with the little box. First, as a playwright I often envied the novelist who also worked with the forms of the novella and the short story. As a writer for the theater, I often felt that I had to waste a good deal of material that interested me simply because the material did not warrant a fuller treatment for the stage. Now, in the hour-long television play, the writer has the opportunity to use just such material and in a medium that presents this material with great honesty and emotional power. Secondly, television allows the writer a physical freedom that the theater at present does not or cannot. Walter Kerr was said to have once remarked: “It is a rare dramatist nowadays who follows his actions where his action leads him. He spends most of his time contriving, curtailing, and even distorting his action in order to draw it all into that single immovable set.” There is another temptation in television. When I first began to write for the medium I found myself wanting to go every place, into set after set, for the sheer joy of moving around. I soon found that such freedom is meaningless unless you have a real need to change locale. Whether using one set or ten sets, there has to be a need in terms of your characters and your story or else the use of numerous locales simply clutters and confuses. When there is a need, however, how wonderful to be able to go directly to the place most effective for your action. I wrote five one-hour plays last season. I have only done six one-hour plays in all, so I came to my work this year fresh. Because of this, I found that it was not difficult for me to find things I really wanted to write. However, eventually, I am going to need time, time to think and meditate and experiment. So far, this is not economically possible for the television writer. I think, sooner or later, the industry will have to make it so.* *Article written for The New York Times in 1952

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On First Dramatizing Faulkner When I first began to dramatize Faulkner almost twenty years ago, the South was still a remote, exotic region to many people in America. Although there had been critical evaluations of Faulkner’s novels and stories, beginning with Cowley’s Portable Faulkner, I still felt that it was material that relatively few had discovered. I personally had not read a single critical evaluation or interpretation of his work. Nor were there many people I knew who had read him carefully enough to discuss with me the problems of dramatizing his stories. Rather, my introduction to William Faulkner was through the pages of the Partisan Review. It was right after World War II, and I began to read in the review about productions of As I Lay Dying that were done in the French theater. The accounts seemed vital and interesting. I went out then and tried to get copies of his work, but was unsuccessful. Even the secondhand bookstores had few or no copies. About that time, a dancer and choreographer named Valerie Bettis was looking for material for a ballet. I had finally somehow found and read a copy of As I Lay Dying and I brought it to Miss Bettis, telling her that I thought it would be quite a remarkable thing for her to stage. She read it, liked it, and decided to do a ballet for her company based on the novel. I had met Malcolm Cowley who I knew was a friend of Faulkner’s. So, I wrote to him for Miss Bettis and he graciously consented to contact Faulkner who gave his permission for her to do the ballet. The ballet was a great success for Miss Bettis and her company, and she performed it for many, many years. I was not a member of Miss Bettis’s company, but I was very close to her and I attended many rehearsals and saw the whole work evolve. I soon realized the enormous theatrical potential in his work. I then began to read other novels and stories by Faulkner. I read The Sound and the Fury, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. I soon became an avid reader of his and considered myself, in some measure, a student of his work. I continued with my own writing and, through the Philco Television Playhouse, became associated with a producer and director who was born in Mississippi named Fred Coe. He had begun a program called Playwrights ’56 and called me one day to ask if I had read The Sound and the Fury. I said I had, and he asked if I would like to dramatize it. I asked about the proposed length for the dramatization, and he said we would have an hour on the air, which really meant, after commercials and station announcements, about fortyeight minutes. When I reread the novel, I wasn’t sure that all the time in the world could successfully preserve what I felt were the unique qualities of the work, so I declined the assignment.

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Fred Coe then became associated with Playhouse 90. This was still back in the dark ages of television when its technical facilities were very limited. Videotape had been invented, but it hadn’t been used extensively, and not much was known about it. Fred Coe called and asked if I knew Faulkner’s Old Man. I said I did, and he said that he wanted me to think about dramatizing it for television. I had never dramatized anyone else’s work then, and I was very wary of getting involved, but because of my admiration for Faulkner, I decided to reread it. I liked it, but the story takes place on the Mississippi River during the time of a flood, and the action of the novel centers around the struggle of two people to survive this terrible ordeal. I couldn’t conceive how a story of such physical scope could be done on television with its then limited technical facilities. Still, I was very drawn to the work. I was very taken by the tall convict, the plump convict, and the woman they were sent out to rescue, and I began to find myself thinking a great deal about them. That’s always a sure sign for me that the material might interest me as a dramatist, because I’m usually involved first through my feeling for or about certain characters in a work. However, my rational mind kept asking how in the world anyone could get this on what was then called “live” television, which meant that it was shot as it went on the air and not edited in any way. The cameras never stopped, the action was continuous and took place in a studio with sets simulating the outdoors. I thought: How is it going to be possible to do a Mississippi flood on a CBS soundstage in Hollywood, California? I was living in Nyack, New York, at that time, on the banks of the Hudson River, and I found myself walking down along the Hudson and thinking over the problem. Finally, my instinct told me that this was a technical problem; let the technical people handle it. If Fred Coe hasn’t brought it up and John Frankenheimer, who was to direct it, hasn’t brought it up, don’t worry about it. Write it like you have the Mississippi River and the flood and let them solve all the technical details. So, that’s how I began to dramatize my first Faulkner story. I read it, reread it, and I immersed myself as best as I could into his particular world. It wasn’t a world I was a stranger to, having been born on the Texas Gulf Coast in a town that lay between two rivers that flooded constantly. My hometown had many people who had either recently come from Mississippi or whose family had come from Mississippi. One of my favorite stories at home was how Miss Callie Watts, a schoolteacher, got her brother out of the Mississippi cotton fields to come to my little town in Texas and become a preacher in the Baptist church. The story went that he prayed as he walked behind the plow in the fields, and he asked God what to do and God told him to go to Texas and preach.

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Anyway, the task for me, as I began to read and reread Old Man, was how to bring all the chaotic, disparate elements of this turbulent flood journey into some semblance of dramatic order. For example, in all the early scenes between the plump convict and the tall convict, the relationship between the two is quite clear and quite dramatic, but once the plump convict leaves the tall convict and the woman joins him, I wasn’t quite sure how to make the relationships effective dramatically. I knew instinctively that the literal physical area of the CBS soundstage we were going to use, although vast compared to the soundstages of the earlier days of television, could not comfortably hold more than six or seven sets. And because this novel was quite an odyssey—many places and many towns along the river are touched—I had to begin to make a decision about which places I would focus on in telling the story. Now for me, drama is in its best sense a form of concentration. Often I have found, whether it is a small off-Broadway theater or television show or whatever, that limitations are a great asset. Conversely I have found that one of the greatest hindrances to the theater, television shows, or motion pictures is overindulgence, having too much to choose from and too much to work with. Although I approached the reassigning or combining of certain elements in the story from a purely economical and cost-efficient point of view, it helped clarify for me this work as a play, as a television play. No matter what decisions I made for the setting, however, I knew that the characters would almost constantly be surrounded by water, by the Old Man. But I went along working on my dramatization as if, indeed, we had every technical convenience, including the Mississippi itself, at our disposal. Old Man is a vast canvas. The river, the central metaphor of the story, has an infinite sense about it. The flood gives the tall convict his chance to escape from the pen, but he doesn’t want this as the plump convict does. He would rather surrender so that he can turn over to someone else the responsibility of the woman and the child and go back to the penitentiary and fulfill his duty to society. He attempts to surrender several times during the story, but something always frustrates his doing so. Each of these attempts, and his being denied for various reasons the grace of surrender, seemed at first interesting to dramatize, but finally, I had to choose those scenes that seemed to me most essential to the progression of the story. The scenes I felt were most important involved the woman and the tall convict’s stay with the Cajun in his cabin. It was here that I felt the tall convict was really tempted to give up his mission. He even forgets for a time the obsessive thrust of the river that was carrying him farther and farther from the place where he could satisfy his desire to obey the authorities and return the woman. He was happy at the Cajun’s shack, working and fulfilling himself as a free man. Indeed, if the flood hadn’t followed him there he might have

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abandoned his journey altogether; but again, the river takes over. His place of refuge is dynamited. He is forced again to go to the river and find his way back to Parchman. And of course, the woman was also happy at the Cajun’s cabin, cooking the tall convict’s meals and taking care of her baby. But then, she had been content during most of the trip. I never tired of thinking about the woman. The woman’s passive acceptance of everything that happened was always a delight to me. She always found something in the journey to enjoy in spite of the cold and hunger, a painful childbirth, an infestation of snakes, and gunfire. Part of Old Man is told as straight narrative and part is narrated by the tall convict to the plump convict when they are reunited in the prison. I decided early on not to use any personal narration, but to head directly into the river and stay there until the journey was over. Faulkner describes the meeting of the tall convict and the woman in the tree this way: So he lay on his face, now not only feeling but hearing the strong quiet rustling of the current on the underside of the planks, for a while longer. Then he raised his head and this time touched his palm gingerly to his face and looked at the flood again. Then, he sat up onto his heels and leaning over the gunwale, he pinched his nostrils between thumb and finger, and expelled a gout of blood and was in the act of wiping his fingers on his thigh when a voice slightly above his line of sight said quietly, “It’s taken you a while,” and he who up to this moment had neither reason nor time to raise his eyes higher than the brow, looked up and saw sitting in a tree and looking at him a woman.

This passage is preceded by two pages of material describing what happens to the tall convict when the flood overturns his boat and he loses the plump convict. The tall convict is thrown out of the rowboat and struck across the nose by the boat. He manages to climb back in and, seized by the malignant force of the rampaging river, is unable to control the boat at all. After the woman gets into the boat with him, he lets go of the grapevine she had thrown to him to hold the boat in place. The river again takes them over, and they have no control whatsoever of the boat. Now all this is so wonderfully visual; but I knew that no matter how large the tanks holding the water might be, there were only so many visual effects we could count on. I wanted to establish a specific character for the woman. I made her a talker and gave her a detailed history to try to involve the audience with her condition of pregnancy and her personal necessity in getting to land as quickly as possible. I changed the meeting so that it happened in a much more physically controlled way.

Writing for the Screen (The TALL CONVICT takes the paddle. He puts it into the water and tries to manage the boat. The boat passes under a tree. The PLUMP CONVICT grabs the limb of the tree. He clears the boat as it spins forward and then overthrows the TALL CONVICT into the water.) Dissolve to: The bayou. The rowboat is floating along with the TALL CONVICT holding onto it with one hand, and to the paddle with the other. He throws the paddle into the boat, pulls himself up with both hands, and falls down in the bottom of the boat with exhaustion. He stays there a beat, then sits up, gets the paddle, and begins to move the boat down the bayou. The rowboat strikes a tree and he is thrown back to the bottom of the boat, and the paddle flies out of his hand, out of the boat, and out of sight. The rowboat is stuck to the tree snag, and he lies on the bottom of the boat in disgust and fatigue. A voice calls out to him. YOUNG WOMAN. It’s taken you a time. (He looks up slowly and sees a YOUNG WOMAN, very pregnant, sitting in the tree, looking down at him. She has on a sunbonnet, a calico wrapper, an army private’s tunic, no stockings, a pair of man’s unlaced brogans. He stares at her in utter disbelief that of all women in the world he might be sent to rescue, it would be this kind, in this condition.) YOUNG WOMAN. Could you, maybe, get the boat a little closer? I’ve taken a right sharp strain getting up here. TALL CONVICT. Yes, ma’am. (He discovers the paddle is gone and begins to look, frantically, for it over the side of the boat.) YOUNG WOMAN. What’s the matter? TALL CONVICT. I lost my paddle. YOUNG WOMAN. No, you didn’t. It landed right up here beside me in the tree. You can get it. Here, catch a hold of this grapevine. (She throws a piece of grapevine that twines around the tree out to him. He takes hold of it, holds the end of the vine, and wraps the rowboat around the end of the jam, picks up the paddle, wraps the rowboat beneath the limb, holds it while she descends carefully into the boat.) TALL CONVICT. Do you know where the cotton house would be? YOUNG WOMAN. Cotton house? TALL CONVICT. Yes, ma’am. They told me to pick you up down in the bayou and then to go west and pick up a fellow on top of a cotton house. YOUNG WOMAN. I don’t know. It’s a right smart of cotton houses around here, with folks on them, too, I reckon. (She looks up at him.) You look like a convict. TALL CONVICT. Yeah. I feel like I already done been hung.

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Genesis of an American Playwright (He releases his hold on the grapevine and the rowboat moves out into the water. He paddles away. The bayou is lined with treetops.) YOUNG WOMAN. A lot of water isn’t it? (He doesn’t answer, but paddles on.) I don’t think you’d have ever seen me in that tree, if I hadn’t called to you. Flood took everything, our house, barn, chicken coop, mule, cow. Would a got me if I hadn’t gotten up in that tree in time. My Daddy is a cotton farmer on the Peter Douglas place. I’m usually out in the field working with him this time of day, but I haven’t been able to do much work lately, and then, of course, it’s rained so much nobody has been doing too much work. And we were all sitting around the house yesterday, or the day before, or whenever it was, because in all this confusion I’ve gotten all turned around and lost all sense of time. And my Mama and my Daddy and my baby brother said they were going to get the wagon and go into town, because they were sick of sitting in the house and listening to that old rain. TALL CONVICT. Excuse me. YOUNG WOMAN. Yes, sir. TALL CONVICT. You wouldn’t have an idea of where we are now, would you? YOUNG WOMAN. (Looking around ) No, sir. I sure don’t. If I had a guess, I would guess Carolton is back that way somewhere. TALL CONVICT. What is? YOUNG WOMAN. Carolton. That’s the nearest town to where our farm is. You ever been there? TALL CONVICT. No, ma’am. YOUNG WOMAN. Of course, you wouldn’t call it much of a town, but we go there most every Satidy. My Daddy and my Mama and me. Until lately, and I haven’t traveled too much lately. Yonder come some telephone poles. Does that mean anything to you? TALL CONVICT. No ma’am. To tell you the truth, I’m lost. YOUNG WOMAN. My goodness, I hope you’re not too lost. (She looks down at her stomach.) I cain’t stay out here forever. I’ll have to get to land sometime. I wasn’t due yet, but maybe climbin’ that tree quick yesterday, and having to sit there all night. . . TALL CONVICT. Just hold on. YOUNG WOMAN. I’m doing the best I can, but we got to get some place quick. TALL CONVICT. Yes, ma’am. YOUNG WOMAN. I just cain’t get over how quick it all happened. I was lying down on a pallet resting when a man come runnin’ up and says, “Get out, the water is comin’ ever which way.” And my stars, it was . . .

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(The TALL CONVICT is hit over the head by a limb from a tree. He is knocked unconscious, and slumps forward in the boat. The YOUNG WOMAN is terrified for a moment. She looks at him, not knowing what to do. Finally, she shakes him frantically.) YOUNG WOMAN. Mr. Convict. Mr. Convict. Wake up. Please, wake up. (She sees he won’t revive for a while, so she takes the paddle, looks around for a moment, and then begins to row.)

And somewhere along the way, I decided to name the baby and personalize him a little. I first made us aware of her search for a name in this scene: (They row on a few yards in silence. The YOUNG WOMAN looks over at the TALL CONVICT, and she seems nervous about attempting conversation again, but she tries.) YOUNG WOMAN. Would you think we’d finally come to something? Carolton, or Yazoo City, or— TALL CONVICT. (Interrupting) Do you know where Parchman is? YOUNG WOMAN. Yes, sir. It’s about two miles from Carolton. It’s no town. It’s just a landing. Oh, they got a little general store there, but mighty little else. TALL CONVICT. That’s where I started from when I went out to find you. YOUNG WOMAN. I’m hungry. I ain’t eatin’ in I don’t know when. When was the last time you ate? TALL CONVICT. Early this morning. (The YOUNG WOMAN has a little twinge of pain. He notices it.) Just keep holding on. YOUNG WOMAN. Yes, sir. I’m trying. (She looks up at him. She looks bewildered and frightened.) TALL CONVICT. Now, we’ll see you get somewhere in time. Don’t worry. YOUNG WOMAN. Yes, sir. I been trying to recall the names I had picked out to call the baby, but they’ve all gone out of my head. I knew a girl back home, they never did get around to naming. They just called her “Baby” from the time she was born till now. (She bites her lip.) I can’t see two feet in front of me. Can you? TALL CONVICT. Nope. YOUNG WOMAN. We might have gone past a million cotton houses, for all we know. A million cotton houses and Yazoo City and Carolton and Parchman and Vicksburg and the whole state of Mississippi. (He continues rowing. If he is listening to her chatter, he makes no sign. She takes up a rusty tin can. She starts to fill the can with water that has seeped into the boat.) I better start taking some of the water out of this old boat. TALL CONVICT. Yeah. YOUNG WOMAN. Help keep my mind off troubles.

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Genesis of an American Playwright TALL CONVICT. Yeah. (He rows on. She empties the can and starts to take more water out of the boat.)

And then after the baby is born: Dissolve to: The Indian Mound. It is early morning six days later. The YOUNG WOMAN is asleep in the rowboat, holding the baby in her arms. The TALL CONVICT is asleep on the ground. One end of a piece of grapevine is tied around his waist; the other end is tied to the rowboat. The man wakes up, unties the grapevine from around his waist. His convict uniform is so mud-stained that it is by now unrecognizable. The YOUNG WOMAN wakes up and gets out of the rowboat. The man walks over to the fire that is burning on the mound. There is a can at the edge of the fire. YOUNG WOMAN. The baby is sleeping well in the boat. TALL CONVICT. Haven’t you decided on a name for him yet? YOUNG WOMAN. No, sir. Some of the names started coming back to me last night. Rosita Marie was one for a girl. TALL CONVICT. Well, you don’t have to worry about a girl’s name now. YOUNG WOMAN. No, sir. And for a boy one of the names I had thought of was Gifford. And one was Gerard. And one was Patterson. Which do you favor? TALL CONVICT. Let me think about it. (He points toward the can near the fire.) There’s a rabbit little stew left here, if you would care for some. YOUNG WOMAN. Thank you. TALL CONVICT. I don’t know what we’d a-done without them matches of yours. Those empty shells stuck together make the driest match box I ever saw. (The YOUNG WOMAN goes over and eats some of the stew from the can.) YOUNG WOMAN. There are a lot of snakes on this old mound. Time was when I’d a-died if I’d even thought of a snake, but now I don’t do any more than kick it aside. I dreamt last night I was back at the farm. There was a whole lot of people come there to hear about my trip. Their eyes were just popping out of their heads, listening to the things I had to tell. TALL CONVICT. I had a dream last night, too. I dreamt about John Henry. YOUNG WOMAN. Who’s John Henry? TALL CONVICT. He’s the mule they give me to plow with back at the State Farm. . . . it was cold, and I was trying to pull the covers up over me, but my mule wouldn’t let me. He kep’ pullin’ them covers down and trying to get into the bed with me, and when I tried to get out of bed, he wouldn’t let me. He held my belt by his teeth and he kept jerking and bumping me back into bed. And I woke up and I was in two feet of water and that boat there was bumping and shoving me back into the water.

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YOUNG WOMAN. My, that was some dream. (A pause.) I bet you’re tired to death of sleeping in that old mud. TALL CONVICT. No, ma’am. I got no complaints. It’s solid underneath. It don’t move. YOUNG WOMAN. How long you reckon we’ve been here? TALL CONVICT. Six days. YOUNG WOMAN. Six days. The Lord created the world in six days. (A pause.) I’m feeling rested now. I’m ready to leave whenever you say so. TALL CONVICT. How about the baby? YOUNG WOMAN. He’s ready, too. Aren’t you, baby? TALL CONVICT. Well, then I reckon we’ll start out.

And then at the end of the play when they are about to be separated for the last time: Dissolve to: The Mississippi. A motorboat with TALL CONVICT, YOUNG WOMAN, baby and PILOT comes down the river. The rowboat is being towed behind. The TALL CONVICT has the newspaper-wrapped package in his lap. He watches the shore attentively as they move along. YOUNG WOMAN. My, isn’t this a nice pleasant way to travel? The river sure looks different than it did the last time we come this way, don’t it? TALL CONVICT. It does. YOUNG WOMAN. How are you gonna know it when we get there? TALL CONVICT. I’ll know. YOUNG WOMAN. I expect you will. You always did say not to worry, that you’d get us back. There were times I did worry, though. Times I didn’t, of course. Well, I’m glad you know where we are, because I don’t know where in the world I am. If you stopped this boat now and told me to git out and find my way home, I couldn’t do it. Not if my life depended on it. (The TALL CONVICT is looking out at the banks as they pass.) And you think we’ve been gone two months? TALL CONVICT. Every bit of it. YOUNG WOMAN. Baton Rouge. New Orleans. MOTORBOAT PILOT. (Calling out to them.) Back yonder aways we passed Vicksburg. YOUNG WOMAN. You don’t mean it? Vicksburg. (She looks down at the baby asleep in her arms.) Gerard, we passed Vicksburg a while back. You better take it all in while you can, because we’re liable never to pass it again. MOTORBOAT PILOT. You husband and wife? YOUNG WOMAN. No, sir. MOTORBOAT PILOT. Brother and sister? YOUNG WOMAN. Just friends. MOTORBOAT PILOT. I see . . .

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Genesis of an American Playwright YOUNG WOMAN. (She looks over at the TALL CONVICT.) You’re sure you like the name Gerard? TALL CONVICT. I do. YOUNG WOMAN. Won’t Mama and Daddy be surprised to see me come walking up the road with Gerard in my arms. I hope my Daddy has his cotton planted. TALL CONVICT. I think they’re still plowing. I doubt if they’ll get it planted for a week or so. YOUNG WOMAN. Which part of the trip have you enjoyed the most? TALL CONVICT. Well I don’t know . . . YOUNG WOMAN. I enjoyed it all once Gerard was here, and we left the flood behind. I’ve gotten real fond of the boat. Two months ago you could hardly get me inside a boat, and now I don’t feel right comfortable on land. TALL CONVICT. Captain, I reckon this will do. MOTORBOAT PILOT. Here? TALL CONVICT. Yeah. MOTORBOAT PILOT. This don’t look like anything to me. TALL CONVICT. I reckon this is it. (The MOTORBOAT PILOT cuts the engine off.) MOTORBOAT PILOT. You better let me take you on until we come to something. That was what I promised. TALL CONVICT. I reckon this will do. MOTORBOAT PILOT. All right, You’re the boss. (The TALL CONVICT gets out of the boat. He puts the package on the ground, unties the skiff, and ties the painter to a tree. He helps the YOUNG WOMAN and the baby out of the boat. He picks up the newspaper package and walks on down the levee out of sight.) MOTORBOAT PILOT. Well, I guess that’s all he wants of me.

What I couldn’t get and didn’t try for was a certain savagery in the story that could only come if one could visually deal with the elements Faulkner did in the story: the flood, the snakes, the burning of the tree to make a paddle, the vastness of the flooded river. Upon reading my first draft, I felt I had found an interesting relationship between the tall convict and the woman in the tree which in no way violated Faulkner’s more austere relationship between the two. I also felt I had used well certain essential comedic elements inherent in the two characters. Fred called from California after reading the script to say that they were pleased. They made a few suggestions for changes and told me they had scheduled the work and could I be in California for the rehearsals in a few weeks. I met with John Frankenheimer, who has an extraordinary technical mind that likes being challenged by all sorts of technical feats, and he seemed more delighted

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than disheartened that we had to spend so much of our time on water. He explained that CBS was building two huge tanks in the studio and that he was still determined not to resort to videotape or to shoot scenes out of sequence but to shoot straight on from beginning to end as in a live television show. He met with all the heads of the departments and got them equally excited about these technical challenges, and I felt a great sense of relief. We were able to cast the play wonderfully. Geraldine Page was to play the young woman and Sterling Hayden, the tall convict. We had little over three weeks to rehearse and shoot it, but the actors and crew were used to working fast and everybody put their full effort into it. I knew that I had gifted actors and a fine director. The rehearsals went very well as long as the actors were running along the ground cloth and the studio markings. But the first day with the actual set—with the water—there was chaos. I understand, although I never verified this, that the weight of the water, which had been pumped into the two enormous tanks, cracked the foundation of the CBS building, not severely but enough to cause serious concern. Frankenheimer soon realized that it would be impossible to shoot the play live, and he quickly decided to turn from his original concept and to shoot the scenes out of sequence. I believe this was the first television show, for good or bad, that was successfully taped out of sequence; and because the show had quite an impact at the time it was done, it did much to end the era of live television. Now I had assumed, when first working on Old Man, that the story was very dependent on the visual for its effectiveness. However, I had a rather humbling experience about two years ago. Peggy Feury asked my permission to do a production of Old Man in her small studio theater in Los Angeles. I was rather skeptical that anything would come of the project, but I gave my consent. It was a wonderful production. She did a variation of the classic Chinese theater use of the stage manager prop man. In her production, he was the plump convict and any number of minor characters, setting scenes for us and describing the stages of the river. The tall convict and the woman were in a rubber boat on a bare stage and through their skill and imagination, it soon became the rowboat of Faulkner’s story. It was another kind of journey, of course, but a very satisfying one. About six months later, I again got a call from CBS, and this time the producer was Herbert Brodkin. He asked me to read a short story of Faulkner’s called Tomorrow, which was from the collection Knight’s Gambit, and I agreed to dramatize it. Since then, I’ve been asked to read three works that were suggested for television dramatization— Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, and The Unvanquished—and one, The Wild Palms, which was optioned for motion pictures. For different reasons, none of the productions ever materialized, and I’ve just been asked (and had agreed) to do a dramatization of Barn Burning for the American Short Story Series.

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As I worked on the dramatization of Barn Burning, I realized how much had changed since Old Man—how many critics in how many magazines and books have written about Faulkner now? He is taught in colleges and universities, and many films have been made of his stories. The problem now in thinking of his material is how to shut out all these opinions and critical evaluations, how to see the characters freshly, how to read the stories as if for the first time, and how to dramatize them as if they had never been dramatized. Gore Vidal, who much earlier dramatized Barn Burning for television, wrote: There are certain works peculiarly difficult to adapt and one is not always conscious at first of what is dramatically viable . . . certain themes, certain seemingly impossible works do not transfer easily from the stage to the camera; for instance, when I adapted A Farewell to Arms, I was reasonably pleased with the script. Hemingway is the scenarist of the novel. His scenes are direct and taut, so playable does he seem that for the first time as an adapter, I used actual dialogue from the novel. I was particularly confident that the first love scene in the hotel bedroom would play beautifully. Well, it did not. Hemingway, in his dialogue, so theatrical on the page does not fit easily into the mouths of actors. It is prose dialogue, not stage dialogue and though, the eye cannot always distinguish the difference, the ear does mercilessly, and I have yet to see a faithful adaptation of Hemingway either on television or on the screen which was as good as the original. On the other hand, William Faulkner, considered obscure by the impatient was much easier to adapt.

Before his production of A Requiem for a Nun, Albert Camus wrote: I like and admire Faulkner. I believe I understand him rather well even though he did not write for the stage. He is, in my opinion, the only truly tragic dramatist of our time. He gives us an ancient but always contemporary theme that is perhaps the only tragedy in the world. The blind man stumbling along between his destiny and his responsibilities. A simple dialogue must be found acceptable to people who are simple but who have access to grandeur despite their coats and ties. Only Faulkner has known how to find an intensity of tone, of situation intolerable to the point of making heroes deliver themselves by means of a violent, superhuman act.

People often ask my advice about dramatizing Faulkner. I think the first essential is to establish the moral and aesthetic climate of the producers. Be sure their desire to do Faulkner comes from a real desire to understand the man, his world, and his work, and to try, without being literal, to find the theatrical equivalent for this fictional world.

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I think Hollywood has so often failed with him because they insisted on improving him—for whatever reasons: to make him more palatable, more popular, or more commercial. I think it would be well for any dramatist to give up this approach. He can be dramatized: he can’t be improved.*

The McDermott Lecture In the forty-some years I have been writing, I have spent only about ten of them writing screenplays. There was a time, not too long ago, when if asked whether I preferred writing for theater or films I would have positively said theater. However, in the last eight years I have become passionately involved in filmmaking. And so, if asked the same question today, I would say that I would hate to give up either. What seems to me most interesting about life is the unexpected. You can begin on a determined path, think that you have found a way of life forever, and then, through unforeseen and unexpected circumstances, find everything rearranged without your consent. New adjustments are then called for. For instance, when I was a young boy I woke up one day and knew I wanted to be an actor. Now I was from a large, well-ordered family of cotton farmers, merchants, lawyers, and bankers, but there were no actors. And so when I announced that an actor was what I wanted to be, I don’t wonder that there was skepticism on my parent’s part—a polite skepticism filled with “Well, you’ll grow out of that” or “Wait until you’ve matured and then we’ll discuss it.” Fortunately, a young teacher who had recently graduated from college came to Wharton to teach Speech. I soon told her of my ambitions, and she wasn’t skeptical at all, but encouraging. And so by the time I turned sixteen, I had been in six plays in school and in the local Little Theater and I thought that surely I was ready for Broadway. After two years in Pasadena, I got a job in a summer stock company in the East and when it was over, I had enough money for a ticket to New York and a month’s rent. If I was ready for Broadway, Broadway wasn’t ready for me, and in between infrequent acting jobs, I survived by working in movie houses and running elevators. Rosamond Pinchot, the star of Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle, had seen my work and asked if I would join her at Daykarhanova’s School for the Stage where she was studying acting. I agreed to go, and there I met a group of actors about to start an off-Broadway theater over a garage on West 69th Street to be called the American Actors Company. They invited me to join them. In the meantime, I had made my *Previously published in Faulkner, Modernism, and Film: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, University Press of Mississippi, 1978

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Broadway debut in plays of Paul Vincent Carroll and Josephine Nigli at the One-Act Repertory Company. However, we only lasted three nights, so I began work full-time with the American Actors Company. At the American Actors Company we were working on plays by American playwrights—E. P. Conkle, Paul Green, Lynn Riggs, Thornton Wilder, and Arnold Sundgaard. A young Tennessee Williams wandered down with a play called You Touched Me, and Agnes DeMille, who had just begun her Broadway career, came to do a theater piece involving dances and sketches called American Legend. The members of the company were from all over America and to help each other understand different regions of the country, we began to do a series of improvisations. Agnes DeMille took me aside and asked if I had ever thought of writing. I said I hadn’t, and she said I should try. I asked her what I should write about and she said about Texas, just as I had done in my improvisations. With that advice, I decided to write a one-act play called Wharton Dance. The company liked it and decided to produce it with me playing the lead. By chance, Robert Coleman, a critic for The New York Mirror, came down to see it. He liked it and reviewed it very favorably. I was delighted, of course, and so was the company. I took off for Wharton for the summer and wrote a three-act play called Texas Town. I came back to New York and they decided to produce that play, too, along with DeMille’s American Legend. And on opening night of Texas Town, Brooks Atkinson, then the dean of American critics, gave the play, the production, and the actors a very favorable review except for the young man (me) playing the lead. I was devastated, of course. I took no pleasure in being praised as a writer and was more determined than ever to be acclaimed as an actor. I vowed never to write again. Fortunately, that summer the American Actors Company took over a theater in Connecticut and we did nine plays. I played leads in most of them, was well received, and felt quite fulfilled as an actor. Somehow, when the summer was over, I began to think not about acting, but about writing. I had never been to college, had never known any writers, except the playwrights who once or twice attended rehearsals of their plays I was in. Fortunately, the director of our company, Mary Hunter, was a very wise, learned lady and she counseled me when I turned to her for advice. I had some knowledge of play structure through my work as an actor, and since early childhood, I had been an omnivorous and eclectic reader. I knew that the stories and plays I admired had a sense of place and that the writers wrote about what they knew. That is what I began to do, to write about Wharton (Harrison) and its environs. From the time I had my first full-length play produced, I was known as a promising playwright. I grew to loathe this phrase, and it followed me for the

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next three years even to my Broadway debut as a playwright—“Mr. Foote, one of our most promising playwrights . . .” I knew if I wanted to experiment and to grow I had better leave New York and go someplace where I was not so well known. I needed the freedom to make mistakes and even to fail, if necessary, without upsetting many people because I was “a promising playwright.” By then, I was married and my wife and I left New York City for Washington, DC where I taught acting and playwriting at the King-Smith School. Valerie Bettis, the great dancer and choreographer from Dallas, and Vincent J. Donehue, who was later to become a well-known Broadway director, also worked at the school. Together we started a theater company producing plays I wrote, along with plays by Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, and Jean-Paul Sartre. After five years in DC, I decided to go back to New York. The Chase had been optioned to be done on Broadway. Upon my return, I found that in the years I had been away, the New York theater had begun a drastic change. For example, Clifford Odets had his first Broadway play done for five thousand dollars; my first play cost fifteen thousand dollars. By the time I returned to New York, plays were costing forty to sixty thousand dollars and producers were being very wary about what they chose to produce. They could no longer afford to back their own plays and had to look for investors to help carry the financial burden. The old familiar producers, including Guthrie McClintic, Arthur Hopkins, Max Gordon, Herman Shumlin, and Kermit Bloomgarden, were all dead, retired, or inactive; and Elia Kazan, the director every playwright of the 40s and 50s hoped would direct his plays, was soon to leave directing and start writing novels. Over on 6th Avenue at NBC, a new phenomenon called “television” was beginning to flourish. Fred Coe, a young man from Mississippi, was beginning to do original drama at NBC’s Television Playhouse. I was invited to write plays for them and for two years enjoyed a very happy association. During the same period, I had three plays done on Broadway: The Chase, The Trip to Bountiful, and The Traveling Lady. Good or bad, I was no longer called a promising young playwright, but a playwright. I was summoned to Hollywood to do a film and I went. I was paid fifteen thousand dollars plus expenses, which seemed a magnificent sum to me. I got one thousand dollars for writing the TV version of The Trip to Bountiful. I saved ten thousand of it and took my family back to Wharton where I bought a lot for five thousand dollars and used the rest to live on in the house in which I had been born. There, I wrote the full-length play The Habitation of Dragons and several short plays that were sold to television. I was asked to write the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird. I accepted, won an Oscar, and became “a successful screenwriter.” I was lured into working on the only project I was

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ever ashamed of in my life. Disheartened and disappointed I afterward decided not to do any more screenplays except my own. Original screenplays in Hollywood then were anathema. Producers only wanted what they considered to be pre-sold projects, which were best selling novels or successful Broadway plays. I had other concerns; I had children to help through those terrifying (to me) sixties and seventies, and I enjoyed being a parent and a husband. My wife and I found a wonderful old house in New Hampshire, and we decided to live there and raise our family. I lived in the woods on a dirt road, and I had plenty of time to write. When my phone rang, it was an offer for me to adapt a book for the screen. I undertook three projects (never produced) to put bread on the table. In the silence of those woods, I began work on my nineplay cycle, The Orphans’ Home Cycle, and wrote three full-length plays: Pilgrims, Night Seasons, and In a Coffin in Egypt. In due time, they were all sent out by my agent to Broadway and off-Broadway theaters and were all rejected. In a corner of New York City, not as quiet as my New Hampshire woods but certainly quiet for New York, is a small theater called the HB Playwrights Foundation. Herbert Berghof ran the theater and directed most of the plays. He was a Viennese-born Max Reinhardt actor with a passion for American plays. I expect he has produced as many new American plays as any theater producer in America. At the time, he had recently read Tomorrow, an adaptation of a Faulkner short story I had made for Playhouse 90, and he wanted to stage it in his theater with Robert Duvall. His productions, because of his agreement with Actors’ Equity, could only have ten performances. Nevertheless, his staging of Tomorrow was a landmark for anyone who saw it. David Mamet, who was an acting student at the Neighborhood Playhouse at the time, recently told me that it was one of the most thrilling evenings he has ever had in the theater. Robert DeNiro, when I met him, told me that he had also seen the production and that he was very moved by it. Out of this production grew the film Tomorrow, and again, unknown to me, the direction of my life changed. First, the production in Herbert’s theater gave me a theater home for the first time in many years. Secondly, although I wasn’t a producer of the film Tomorrow, I was asked to go with the company on location to Mississippi, and to be on the set at all times (unheard of for a writer in Hollywood). I was also invited into the editing room. What an exciting new world this was for me. All around New York and Chicago were young men and women, not sitting around bemoaning the death of the Broadway theater, but busy writing and producing their plays in all kinds of unorthodox spaces—coffeehouses, saloons, storefronts, living rooms, converted garages—any place where they were permitted to perform. And they were doing interesting and exciting

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work. For example, Herbert Berghof ’s theater is simply a long, narrow room. The stage is the cement floor of the building, and the ninety-nine seats for the audience set on risers at one end of the room. Herbert worked in this space for many years, and did remarkable work there. He attracted first-rate actors. Uta Hagen, Fritz Weaver, Lindsay Crouse, E. G. Marshall, Anne Jackson, Eli Wallach, Celeste Holm, and Robert Duvall are a few of the many I have seen perform there. No one is paid; not actors, directors, or playwrights, and critics are not allowed. After Tomorrow, Herbert did two more productions of my plays there: A Young Lady of Property with Lindsay Crouse and Night Seasons. I asked if I might direct some of The Orphans’ Home Cycle. He read them and agreed. So, in the Spring of 1978, I began rehearsals for Courtship. The fifth in the cycle opened on July 5, 1978. New York City was in the midst of a heat wave, and the theater was not air-conditioned. How the actors and the audience survived the heat during some of those performances I will never know, but survive they did, and Herbert asked me to continue working on the plays. The next two I directed there were 1918 and Valentine’s Day. I was enjoying myself immensely working again in the theater, but I needed to earn some money to enable me to continue working on the plays. My agent, Lucy Kroll, suggested I write a screenplay. I thought she meant an adaptation of a novel, and I explained I was so consumed with my own work that I didn’t want to adapt anyone else’s. She explained that she meant for me to write an original screenplay and when I had an idea of something I wanted to write, she would arrange a meeting with a producer so that I could tell him the idea. She was sure she could get me an advance. Now in Hollywood, I believe this is called pitching an idea, and grown men spend their lives going from producer to producer doing this in order to get the money to write their screenplays. I had always refused to do it, but the financial pressures were very great and so I agreed to try. I met with a producer at Twentieth Century Fox, and I was so embarrassed I wanted the earth to swallow me up. I mumbled a few sentences and, to my surprise, he made some kind of sense out of my mumblings. He called my agent to come to the West Coast the next week to draw up a contract for my services. The morning my agent arrived in Beverly Hills, she read in Hollywood Reporter that the producer had been fired by Twentieth Century Fox. I felt this was an omen of some kind; and because by this time I had become deeply involved in writing the screenplay, I decided to pull in my belt and continue working on it without an advance from anyone. The screenplay was Tender Mercies and when it was finished, I showed it to Robert Duvall and he agreed to do it. My first experience as a writer-producer of film came with Tender Mercies. Bob and I hoped to produce the film ourselves and we began looking for financial backing. The independent film was not as prevalent then as it is

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today; and besides, we had no knowledge of how to proceed in that way so we began a more conventional search—contacting major studios, cable networks, and others. This led nowhere. During this period, I was directing 1918 at the Berghof Studio and Bob was working on his gypsy film Angelo, My Love, which he was financing himself. Philip Hobel, a documentary filmmaker, came to see 1918 and wanted to discuss making it as a film. We met and I explained that I was too involved just then with finding a producer for Tender Mercies to think of another film. He asked to read Tender Mercies, liked it, and offered to help produce it. He had an office and a secretary, all of which makes producing easier. He also had experience in raising money and seemed quite optimistic about getting it done quickly. Well, it wasn’t done quickly, but rather slowly, almost laboriously. Not only could we not find the money, but we couldn’t find anyone to direct it. Arthur Penn, Robert Mulligan, Dan Petrie, and Delbert Mann all turned it down. And studio after studio said no. I was devastated, but Philip Hobel was not. If he was, he didn’t let me know it. He kept assuring me that we would get it produced. Then one day John Cohn at EMI called and said that he had read it and was interested in producing it. He told me later that he had been given a stack of screenplays to take home to read and in going through them he saw mine. Having known and liked my work, he read it and decided to do it. It was as simple as that. Working out contracts was not so simple, however. It took months. Finding a director was also difficult. EMI, Duvall, and Hobel asked me to go and see a film called Breaker Morant directed by the Australian Bruce Beresford. They wanted my permission to send him the screenplay. I liked his film a great deal, but I thought sending a script to someone so rooted in Australian culture was a sheer waste of everyone’s time. Fortunately, they didn’t listen to me. I sent the screenplay to Beresford, he cabled almost immediately that he wanted to meet with the author, and if we could get along, he would do the film. He flew to America, we met, we did get along, and that week we flew to Dallas so I could show him Texas, or as much of North Texas as you could see in three days. To my joy, he liked what he saw—the land, the people, the climate even, and he kept saying over and over in that Australian accent of his, “It’s just like Australia.” We went back to New York to work out contracts and schedules, and to begin our casting. Bruce and I got along in every way, and we became a real team. We had an instinctive trust for one another. I was determined that the film be made in Texas, and Philip Hobel, for any number of pragmatic reasons, was equally determined to go to Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, or Arkansas. But I dug in my heels and said no. Bruce and Duvall both sup-

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ported me, and so we came to Dallas and began casting and assembling a crew. That was indeed a fortunate day for me because Dallas has as fine a group of film technicians as can be found anywhere. I owe them a great deal. I learned too, that producers need nerves of steel. For all the time we were hiring actors and crew members and looking confident and talking about a starting date, we knew that the contract with EMI had not been completed and that any moment it could all fall apart. I learned from Hobel, however, that you keep going, doing what needs to be done so that if the contract is worked out, the film will be ready to start. It’s a war of nerves all right and a side of producing I don’t care for particularly, but I’ve learned to live with it. Tender Mercies was a great learning time for me. I learned about budgets and the day-by-day problems in making a film. I was on the set everyday with Bruce, and we had a very close relationship all during the filming. In my ignorance, I thought that once a film was edited we could all go home and wait for the opening. I learned differently about that, too. For a film financed by a studio, the period after it is edited is a whole new ballgame. The agents, the studio heads, the press agents, the distributors, and the theater owners are all full of advice—“I don’t like it; it’s too long, too slow, how can we sell it”—it goes on and on. Philip Hobel is a real professional. He was able to listen to everyone, to those who liked the film and those who didn’t, and to keep pressing for an opening date. He came dangerously close to not getting one. Universal, who was to distribute the film for EMI, decided it would not open the film in America, but to fulfill its contract with HBO, they would open it only in Europe. What changed their minds I don’t know, and I doubt if Philip does, but they did change and announced suddenly they were to open in New York. They were totally unprepared for its critical reception. And never once did they express sorrow for their lack of faith. In fact, one of the more candid of the tribe said to me, “We know how to sell The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas but how do you market Tender Mercies?” It was also Universal Studios, incidentally, that had equally little faith in To Kill a Mockingbird. This time they owned the film, and if Robert Mulligan hadn’t demanded in his contract that he have say on the final cut, the studioheads would have totally reedited and likely ruined the film. It was while in Texas during Tender Mercies that I fell in love with the process of moviemaking. I loved being on the set everyday and going to watch the dailies at night. However, I didn’t want to spend another two or three years getting a project financed. My wife and I had a long talk about how to proceed. We’d been so impressed with Texas crews and Dallas as a film center that we began to wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to do a film outside the studio system. In our innocence and our ignorance, we felt it could be done very easily. At about this time, Jerry Calaway, the lead cameraman for Tender Mercies,

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said he’d like us to see the work of a filmmaker he knew in Dallas. A few days later in a room at the Brookshire Hotel in Waxahachie, Texas, we met Ken Harrison and saw three of his short theatrical films. We liked what we saw very much, particularly Hannah and the Dog Ghost, and so we told him our plans. We wanted to make a film in Dallas, using Texas crews, a Texas director, and Texas financing. And so, as casually as that, my wife and I began to try to produce a film without studio help. I would be here all night if I tried to explain all the twists and turns that that road took. The film was 1918; and believe me when I say we were total novices. We had never raised money before or been faced with the myriad of problems in starting a project like this. Anyway, part of the journey led us to Ross Milloy of Guadalupe Entertainment in Austin, Texas, who had been introduced to us by a relative of my wifes, Ralph Meyers. Ross subsequently told us to get in touch with Lewis Allen and Peter Newman in New York. Newman and Allen read the screenplay and liked it, but they wanted to produce it first as a play at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. I never thought I would say no to Lewis Allen on anything, much less a request of his to produce a play of mine, but I did say no, explaining I had already done it as a play and I wanted now to make the film. Eventually, Ross, Lewis, and Peter arranged most of the financing for us and joined us as producers. Ken Harrison had agreed to direct the film, and while the money was being raised, we found our locations in Waxahachie and hoped to start filming in early Fall. There were a number of postponements, and we began to feel panicky. We wondered if all the obstacles could be overcome in time to meet our proposed schedule. We had rented space in New York for rehearsals and during the first day of rehearsals, I had a phone call from Peter Newman asking that I meet with him and Lewis in their office. I went there immediately after rehearsal, and they were very sober-faced indeed. They asked if I would be willing to postpone the film until Spring and they gave very concrete reasons why it seemed necessary to do so. I trusted them both and accepted their decision to postpone. I then had the unhappy task of returning to the actors and technicians to explain what had happened. Spring, of course, seemed a very long time away, and I don’t know if the actors believed that the film would ever be made. My wife and I went to Waxahachie where we had leased a house to live in while making the film. We decided we would stay on in Waxahachie during the intervening months to keep things in place before starting up again in the Spring. It turned out the postponement was a blessing. The winter of 1983–1984 was one of the most severe on record for Texas, icy cold weather (the temperatures approaching zero on many days) and snow that stayed on the ground

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for weeks. Because 1918, like all my films, was done on location and not in a studio, we would have been wiped out on the lean budget we had to maintain. Spring did arrive. We assembled the actors and crew and found and staffed a production office, but it wasn’t until two days before the official start date for shooting that we knew for sure the financing was in place. Now, I’ve gone into such explicit personal detail in all this because I think it is important for anyone interested in producing low-budget films to know some of the difficulties one can face. On Valentine’s Day, The Trip to Bountiful, and Courtship all had similar moments of preproduction crisis. There are also more predictable production crises, such as personal problems, actors’ egos, the weather, keeping on schedule, and any number of others. For instance, during the early shooting of Courtship a malfunctioning generator caused a flicker in the print of one day’s shooting, which DuArt Film Lab phoned us about immediately. Fortunately, only the outside night scenes would have been affected so we were able to switch the schedule to interior shooting until the problem was located. We had to redo a whole day’s shooting but we had very comprehensive insurance that covered our loss and were most grateful for that. Postproduction problems are also more predictable because the editing of a film is under less-pressured circumstances. When it comes to marketing and distribution of the film, the filmmaker feels totally helpless. Decisions are made that he can be privy to but certainly not allowed the final word, such as what cities to open in, what theater is best, what kind of ads to use, the list goes on and on. Although some producers follow their films from city to city, at least in the early months, few have the time or can afford to do so. Sam Grogg, a remarkably bright and innovative producer, thinks the best solution is to start one’s own distribution company which he has done. I wish him well because I know that too many interesting films get lost under the present system of independent distribution. However, in spite of all the hazards and risks, I think now is a very good time for independent filmmakers. There are an increasing number of independent distributors looking for products. Video and CD companies are making handsome advances to help complete film budgets. It is true that if a film is received well, one can get a better video deal probably after it has been released, but independent filmmakers can’t always afford that luxury. It wasn’t possible for 1918, On Valentine’s Day, and Courtship, but for The Trip to Bountiful our distributor, Island Pictures, insisted that we wait until after its release. Many independent filmmakers have a courageous and powerful ally in Lindsay Law, executive producer of PBS’s American Playhouse. Since the inception of the Playhouse, he has made possible many interesting films such as The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, El Norte, A Flash of Green, Heartland, Smooth Talk, and Testament. He and the Playhouse were almost completely responsible for

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the financing of On Valentine’s Day and Courtship. I doubt whether either of these films would have been made in the foreseeable future without his help. American Playhouse will present all three films, Courtship, On Valentine’s Day, and 1918, as a five-part miniseries on PBS during the Spring of 1987 under the title Story of a Marriage. As independent producers, my wife and I have also been the recipients of incredible generosity from a great many people. The people in the towns where we’ve worked have found us locations at affordable prices; helped furnish props, set pieces, and costumes; and always made us feel welcome. The actors, technicians, and office staff all labor long hours, sometimes under very difficult conditions, cheerfully and willingly. Each film has been a learning experience for me. In 1918 and On Valentine’s Day, I learned a great deal about the actual making of a film—the lighting, the camera work, the sound, and, finally, the editing. Ken Harrison, who directed both films, has a great knowledge of all these, and he was always very generous in sharing that knowledge; many times, I’m sure, wishing he could get on with his work and not have to answer my questions. Comparisons have been made between independent film producing and producing plays off-Broadway. There are many similarities: Both are able to attract interesting actors, often stars; both avoid big Broadway houses; both have limited budgets for production and advertising; both treasure their independence and are realistic about the profits to be made; and both operate with low overhead. In the old studio writer contracts is the phrase “Writer for Hire,” which studio heads interpret to mean that you are hired to write for them and that at any time if they’re not pleased with your performance, they can fire you and leave you empty-handed. This practice began early on when pictures were silent and writers were hired only to think of story outlines and dialogue captions. Writers, not respecting what they were doing, didn’t worry about owning the work, and so the copyright was taken out in the studio’s name. Whoever owns the copyright controls the material, and to this day, studios own the copyright on all screenplays. I own the copyright of my plays. A novelist owns the copyright of his novels and a poet of his poems, but not the screenwriter, at least not in the United States. In the heyday of Hollywood, each studio had its writers’ building and writers were placed under contract much like actors and directors. They were assigned to work on specific projects, and sometimes as many as five writers were assigned to the same project. William Faulkner, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter all worked under these conditions and survived, but many gifted writers did not. The steady employment, the expensive living, and the easy money became narcotics for them, and they became addicted to the system and its demands.

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When I first began lecturing at colleges, I was surprised by the number of young writers I met that had no ambition to be novelists or poets or playwrights, but instead wanted only to write screenplays. It was not so when I began writing. Then, screenwriting was considered the province of hacks, of writers who had failed at writing novels, poems, or plays. However unfair this was, it was the general assumption, at least among theater people. And so to find at a university that often the brightest and the most talented writers unashamedly announced their intent to be screenwriters was something of a shock. If the ending of the writers’ stables at the studios was the end of an era, this interest in writing for the screen was certainly the beginning of a new era. Yet, bad pictures written and produced each year far outweigh, I fear, the good ones. Why hasn’t this intense interest in films produced more good writing? Jim Jarmusch remarked recently that young screenwriters never read. Vincent Canby voiced the same complaint recently about younger film directors—that they are not sufficiently interested in other art forms. We have with us a new phenomenon, a generation raised on television. Often, too, I find in contemporary films a plastic quality that seems to have no source or roots in life or living—the point of reference being other films or television. Good screenplays, like good plays or good novels, do not come by the gross, or by the dozen. Money can’t produce them or cajole them. They are the result of talent and hard work. When I became an actor, I soon learned that the theater was no frivolous place and to survive I had to work at my craft constantly. When I became a writer, the same discipline seemed necessary—work, work, work—finish a play, start another. For forty-five years, I’ve written almost every day of my life. I haven’t literally taken a pen in my hand and written words on a sheet of paper, although in the earlier years I tried to do just that because I thought if I didn’t lock myself in a room and literally write I was undisciplined and lazy. So it was a great relief to me to read somewhere that Hawthorne walked and thought for days before writing any of his stories and that he had them all worked out in his head before doing the actual writing. And so I accepted that it was all right to spend time thinking about what I was going to write. This period of thought has become a very precious time for me and makes the actual writing period much briefer. I have learned to trust the writing of my first drafts straight on and not edit what comes to me to put down. Then comes the labor, the reading and the rereading, and the revisions—the constant intent to clarify and simplify. I love to write. I truly love to write. This writer’s life has been a great gift and privilege to me. I didn’t ask for it or expect it, and I am constantly amazed that it has been given to me to do. I am amazed and grateful. And I do take it seriously. If I am not writing, I am thinking about writing, my own or some-

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one else’s. I read poetry a great deal and have been nourished and inspired by all poets, particularly our American poets: Pound, Eliot, Williams, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Penn Warren, to name a few. But it would be a sorry world to me without Yeats and Philip Larkin and Edwin Muir, too. Moreover, I have been nourished by the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, Reynolds Price, William Faulkner, Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy. To Samuel Beckett and the younger playwrights such as David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and Harold Pinter, I owe a great debt for their determination and courage to remake our theater into a place of dignity and of human value. There are films and screenplays too numerous to mention that nourished and inspired me. Several people have remarked that certain films of mine, particularly Courtship, On Valentine’s Day, and 1918, reminded them of the films of the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro¯ Ozu. The truth is that I had never seen an Ozu film until recently when a friend sent me a cassette of his wonderful Tokyo Story. I now own other cassettes of his movies, Late Spring, Autumn Afternoon, Equinox Flower, and Floating Weeds, and although his work has not influenced a frame of mine, I am delighted when people think so. Finally, I also owe a great debt to dancers and choreographers, to painters, to musicians—in fact, to all the Arts. Stark Young, in an introduction to my play, The Traveling Lady, wrote: “We may not invite comparison of immortality exactly, but we may at least be reminded of Aristotle’s remark that ‘Homer’ deserving to be praised for many things is most to be praised because he knows what part to take himself.” And W. B. Yeats wrote: “How very unlike Ireland this whole place is. I only felt at home once—when I came to a steep lane with a stream in the middle. The rest—one noticed with a foreign eye, picking out the strange and not, as in one’s own country, the familiar things for interest—the fault, by the way of all poetry about countries, not the writer’s own.” Of course, I warm to that because I try to write about my own true country. I can’t say, of course, that this is right or profitable for all writers, but it has been for me, for I feel, insofar as I have followed that long-ago advice of Agnes DeMille to write about what I knew, in the deepest, truest sense that I was able, I have felt most fulfilled as a writer. And my work as a producer has been to try to serve and protect that writer.*

Writing For Film We all know there was a time when films were silent, no sound, no talking. I thought that was how movies were meant to be. Some people still feel *Lecture delivered in Dallas, Texas on November 20, 1986

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that way. My good friend, the great actress Lillian Gish will still express that she continues to have doubts about the transition, although she has made her peace with the talkies. She asserts that the silent pictures created a universal language that everyone understood all over the world. You did not need to know Russian or Japanese or English to understand the films of Chaplin or Griffith. But the talkies, when they came along, reinstated, as it were, the Tower of Babel. Suddenly to understand American films, for instance, you needed to know English, to understand French films, French. I remember well the first talking picture that I saw. I am not sure whether it was all-talking, for in those early days, they were part-talking or part-singing before there were the all-talking. Anyway, I rode with my parents sixty miles to Houston to see Al Jolson in The Singing Fool. I remember that my father cried all the way through it and said afterwards that there ought to be a law against making people cry like that. It was not long after that that the talkies arrived in my hometown of Wharton at the Queen Theatre, and forever after the silent films disappeared from my experience. In those days, I wasn’t very interested in writing films, silent or talking. I was interested in the actors because that was the goal I had set for myself, to become an actor. However, it didn’t turn out that way, and through a series of circumstances, I wound up in New York City writing plays. The writing of plays led to the writing of early television plays and that in turn led me to writing films. For my second assignment in Hollywood, Warner Brothers hired me to adapt a short novel by Erskine Caldwell. I’d had four plays done on Broadway by then, had ten plays produced on television, and had already done one film, working closely with a director-producer. But this was the first time I was entirely on my own writing a film at a studio. I arrived on the Warner lot and punched the required time clock as I would on my arrival and departure each day, and I was led to a two-story building with a number of offices. Most of the offices were empty, except for the one assigned to me and the one occupied by Marion Hargrove, who was working on Maverick, a TV series. The first day, I remember my secretary telling me how it used to be when the offices were all filled with writers. She pointed out where Christopher Isherwood worked, and Faulkner, and she said that she hoped the offices would be full again one day with writers working on screenplays for theatrical distribution. They never were. I worked for six weeks and saw no one the whole time except my secretary and Marion Hargrove. I had no idea who was to be the producer, the actors, or the director of the scripts I had written. My secretary, who was my information on all studio politics, inferred that the film might never have any of these, and she began to list the films written here on this lot that had never been produced at all. I finished my draft and went home.

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I met other “Hollywood writers,” as we called them back East. They would tell me stories of the horrors of the old studio system: how as many as five writers would be assigned to one project and how a producer would have complete control over a writer’s work. There are many such stories about the terrible things that happened to Hollywood writers. I heard soon after that my script had been given to a producer, who had brought in another writer, and then another producer and another writer. A year passed and one day my phone rang. It was yet another producer at Warners, who said he had been assigned the film now and, after going over all the scripts, had decided mine was the best. He said that he had, based on mine, a final version, which he would like to send to me and that he would like to put me back on salary to do some final polishing. I thanked him and said I would be most happy to read this version, which I did; but after reading it, I found it had nothing to do with my original script. How he felt it did, I will never know. So I thanked him politely for thinking of me and said I had not the time, and I thought, “Well that will be the end of my Hollywood career.” It was certainly the end of a way of working, for it was the end of the old studio way. No longer are writers hired en masse, put into offices, and assigned projects to write. That is not to say that producers no longer interfere with writers or directors in Hollywood, because they do, but it is done on a more one-to-one basis, as it were. A year later, Alan Pakula called and asked me to read a novel he had recently purchased called To Kill a Mockingbird. Robert Mulligan was to direct the film. I had worked with Robert before in television and had known Alan for a number of years. Alan told me that Harper Lee did not want to dramatize the novel and that I was the first choice of writers to do it. I read it, liked it, and agreed to the task. This experience changed my notion of the writer and his relation to films forever, or rather, it made me understand the possibilities of creative work for the writer of films. The director and producer treated this writer with as much respect and dignity as was ever given to a writer in the theater. Since To Kill a Mockingbird, most of the theatrical films that I have done have been adaptations of my stage plays or the short stories or novels of other writers. I have written directly for the screen only once and that was Tender Mercies. Adapting my own plays presents certain problems, certainly, but adapting the work of other writers is in some ways for me the most difficult and painful process imaginable. I do anything I can to avoid it. You see, when a writer is dealing with his own work he inhabits a familiar world and can move around with some confidence and freedom. When he tries to get inside the world of another writer, he is under constant tension not to violate that per-

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son’s vision. I remember after agreeing to dramatize To Kill a Mockingbird feeling very depressed. I read it over and over searching for a way to begin my share of the work. Then I happened to read a review by R. P. Blackmur called “Scout in the Wilderness,” which compared the book in a very imaginative and profound way to Huckleberry Finn, a great favorite of mine. Suddenly I began to feel at home in the material. Then Alan Pakula asked me to consider changing the time span in the screenplay to one year rather than the threeyear time span of the novel. Somehow, this restriction that he placed on the work became very helpful, making me rethink the original structure in a creative way. To be successful adapting, one must like the original work. I do not always have to understand it, but I have to like it and be willing to try to understand it and go through the painful process of entering someone else’s creative world. Every time, I find that the entrance into that world is different. I have dramatized three works of Faulkner, including Barn Burning (for the American Short Story Series), and Old Man and Tomorrow (for Playhouse 90). I have also adapted Flannery O’Connor’s The Displaced Person for the American Short Story Series, and Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp, which has not yet been produced. Each of these works required a different approach for me to be able to enter the writer’s world. In The Displaced Person, the characters intrigued me most and proved wonderfully comic companions in my stay in the O’Connor country. What often eluded me here were the mystic, visionary aspects of the story, qualities that almost defy dramatization. With Barn Burning, I knew the people in the story like the back of my hand. I had seen their prototypes in my father’s store and the streets of my town when I was a boy. I was able to flesh out some minor characters and invent additional scenes that I felt were necessary in the screenplay, and all went well until I reached the end of the story. Those of you who know the story will remember that Snopes is a barn burner and that his son, Colonel Sartoris Snopes, informs his last victim, Major DeSpain, of what is to happen, and then runs away. All that is vivid and immediate and it was for me usable as the dramatist. Then Faulkner, in the last two paragraphs, compresses time in a way a dramatist never can, so that the whole experience became inner and subjective. The first of the two paragraphs starts, “At midnight he sat on the crest of a hill.” The second paragraph continues, “He knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the whippoorwills.” In those two paragraphs, between midnight and near dawn, the boy is alone with his thoughts, his guilt, his continuing inner defense of his father, his emotions, and finally his wordless decision to go on alone. I worked and worked on these last two paragraphs. What

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I finally came up with was acceptable, in my opinion, but in no way did it match the original ending. In making screenplays of my own stage plays, the task was easier. The danger, however, is in the freedom of being able to move around, indoors and outdoors, without the financial or technical limitations of the stage. One can almost get drunk with this new freedom and end up with a travelogue, losing all sense of the dramatic purpose behind the play. In working on 1918, I was benefited by a remark made by Herbert Berghof who had produced the play in his theater in New York City. He said this play is about imagined death and real death. And it was by this phase that I measured everything that I chose to use in the screenplay. 1918 is a part of a cycle of nine plays I have written, many already produced on the stage, and there are plans to film them. 1918 is the seventh in this series of plays. The sixth is On Valentine’s Day, which is to be released early in March. The play Valentine’s Day takes place in a living room. There is one set, the bedroom of a young husband and wife. Various people come to their home, and we hear stories of various activities in the town. When I was writing the screenplay, the challenge was to use the great variety of scenes that a film can afford without overwhelming the thrust of the story, which is the growth of the young couple. Maintaining the proper balance between the outer world and the world in the house needed constant watching, even through the editing process. The Trip to Bountiful was a very special problem. It was written thirty-five years ago and first produced on television with Lillian Gish, and then later on Broadway, again with Lillian Gish. The first production on television was done in the days of live television, which meant that it was performed live and unedited. Budgets were small then, and to have four sets was a luxury, so the writers had to be very selective in their choice of sets. Through the years I’d had many offers to make a film of The Trip to Bountiful, but they wanted to change the location from Texas to New England, to modernize the story, or to cast it with actors I didn’t like. Then one day Peter Masterson, who was spending the summer working at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, called. He said he was talking to Redford about doing a feature film and Redford’s advice was to “direct something you really like.” Peter had seen The Trip to Bountiful in an off-Broadway revival many years before and was very moved by it. I was in Dallas editing 1918 when he called and asked permission to do the film. Because this session is about adapting work to the screen, I will only dwell briefly on Tender Mercies. In the late sixties and early seventies, I had spent a great deal of time working on my cycle of nine plays, The Orphans’ Home Cycle. I had financed

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this writing period myself, and I needed to earn some money. My agent suggested that I write a film. She said that if I would outline an idea, she would arrange for me to meet with someone from a studio and would try to get that studio to finance the writing of the film. I have never felt comfortable talking about work before it is written, but I decided to try it one time. I met with a studio representative to tell him the idea, and he was responsive. He asked my agent to fly out to the coast to arrange a contract. She did; the day she arrived the studio fired him. I took this as an omen of some kind, so instead of seeking another executive to tell my story to, I decided to write it first. When it was finished I read it to Robert Duvall and he agreed to appear in it. I thought we would have studios knocking at our doors for an immediate production, but we did not. There was rejection after rejection after rejection, “change this, and change that.” This is when one has to be steadfast and say, always politely, “No thank you, this is how we want to do it.” At the end of a very long year, everything changed. One day a producer called and said his company wanted to do it. And they did. Now I wish to discuss, at some length, how I approached adapting Faulkner’s Tomorrow, first for television, then for the stage, and finally for the screen. Tomorrow takes place in Mississippi early in the twentieth century. Jackson Fentry, who has spent most of his life on a cotton farm, leaves one Fall to work in a sawmill. He lives alone in the sawmill, and one winter day a pregnant woman, ill and tired, comes to the sawmill. He takes her in, and she lives there until her baby is born. He falls in love with her. Although she has a husband, she agrees to marry him just after her baby is born. She dies soon after; but before she dies, she gets him to promise to raise the baby as his own. He raises the boy, and the child becomes his life. One day, the woman’s brother appears and takes the baby. Fentry is heartbroken and leaves the area for a number of years. When he returns, he hears of a troublesome and vicious young man in the neighborhood and surmises that it is the boy he had been given to raise. He goes to town to look at him. They meet, and the grown boy does not recognize him. Later, the boy is killed, and Fentry is chosen to serve on the jury trying the man who killed him. Fentry refuses to acquit the man who killed the boy, and the jury is hung. Faulkner’s story, although relatively short, is not told in this straightforward manner. When Herbert Brodkin sent me the short story, I hadn’t remembered reading it before, although I had read most of the other stories in the collection Knight’s Gambit. My chief concern was whether there would be enough material for a ninety-minute television play. As is the way with television, and particularly television at that time, they were most anxious to have a quick decision from me. My first inclination was to say that I really did not

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feel I could undertake it. However, I found myself all afternoon postponing this decision and thinking more and more about certain elements of the story. I remember being very intrigued by the character of Fentry and the way that Faulkner undertook to tell his story. It is told from three points of view, four really, if you count Gavin Stevens who is mostly a listener but at times will express a point of view and some facts. Each narrator is important to the story because each one has knowledge of certain events that the others cannot possibly know. In addition, there is an erratic time sequence. I explained something about the nature of adaptation in an interview I gave after I dramatized a Flannery O’Connor story. The interviewer asked if there was anything about the day-to-day working when I am attempting an adaptation that is different from when I am working on an original script. The answer is yes. When I am working on something of my own it is like going into an unchartered world, and part of the secret is to find the structure. When restructuring a story in dramatic form, I am involved in the process of construction, but there are so many things that I assimilate differently. When working on something of my own, I call upon a lot of unconscious things that I have been storing up and thinking about. While adapting someone else’s work a great deal more is conscious, and I have to approach consciously what must have been an unconscious process for the original writer. However, there are times when I am able to make a story my own. For instance, when I was dramatizing Faulkner’s story Tomorrow, the character of the woman became alive to me even though Faulkner gave only a few paragraphs to her. He told enough about her so that my imagination began to work, and she became somebody I knew. The paragraphs that first made me really want to enter the world of Jackson Fentry read as follows: Then one afternoon in February—there had been a mild spell and I reckon I was restless—I rode out there. The first thing I seen was her, and it was the first time I had ever done that—a woman, young, and maybe when she was in her normal health she might have been pretty, too; I don’t know. Because she wasn’t just thin, she was gaunted. She was sick, more than just starvedlooking, even if she was still on her feet, and it wasn’t just because she was going to have that baby in a considerable less than another month. And I says, “Who is that?” and he looked at me and he says, “That’s my wife,” and I says, “Since when? You never had no wife last fall. And that child ain’t a month off.” And he says, “Do you want us to leave;” and I says, “What do I want you to leave for?” I’m going to tell you this from what I know now, what I found out after them two brothers showed up here three years later with their court paper, not from what he ever told me, because he never told

Writing for the Screen nobody nothing . . . I don’t know where he found her. I don’t know if he found her somewhere or if she just walked into the mill one day or one night and he looked up and seen her, and it was like the fellow says—nobody knows where or when love or lightning either is going to strike, except that it ain’t going to strike there twice, because it don’t have to . . . And I don’t believe she was hunting for the husband that had deserted her—likely he cut and run soon as she told him about the baby—and I don’t believe she was scared or ashamed to go back home just because her brothers and father tried to keep her from marrying the husband, in the first place. I believe it was just some more of that same kind of black-complected and not extraintelligent and pretty darn ruthless blood pride that them brothers themselves was waving around here for about a hour that day. Anyway, there she was, and I reckon she knowed her time was going to be short, and him saying to her, “Let’s get married,” and her saying, “I can’t marry you. I’ve already got a husband.” And her time come and she was down then, on that shuck mattress, and him feeding her with a spoon, likely, and I reckon she knowed she wouldn’t get up from it, and he got the midwife, and the baby was born, and likely her and the midwife both knowed by then she would never get up from that mattress and maybe they even convinced him at last, or maybe she knowed it wouldn’t make no difference nohow and said yes, and he taken the mule pap let him keep at the mill and rid seven miles to Preacher Whitfield’s and brung Whitfield back about daylight, and Whitfield married them and she died, and him and Whitfield buried her. And that night he come to the house and told pap he was quitting, and left the mule, and I went out to the mill a few days later and he was gone.

I dramatized their meeting this way: (ISHAM goes out the door. FENTRY has finished the little food he prepared for himself. He scrapes the dish outside the door and then starts outside to wash the dishes, when he hears a noise. It is the low moan of someone in pain. He stands listening for a moment; the sound comes again. He steps outside the door and calls.) FENTRY. Isham. Isham. (There is no answer to his call. The sound comes again and he walks toward it. He goes over to a stack of lumber inside an open shed. Lying against the logs is a young woman, black-haired, poorly dressed, thin, gaunt, almost emaciated, her clothes are patched and worn giving no protection at all against the cold. If she were not so ill and starved-looking, she might be pretty. Even so, there is pride and dignity in her face. He goes

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Genesis of an American Playwright over to her and gently rolls her over on her back. It is then that we see she is pregnant. He sees how cold she is, how thin her arms and legs are and he takes his coat off and puts it over her. It is difficult to tell at first whether she is alive or dead, and he stands a moment looking at the careworn, hurt face. He feels her pulse and knows then that she is living. He watches her for a moment longer and then, shaking her gently, he tries to rouse her.) FENTRY. Lady. Lady. (He gets no response. He goes to the well, gets a dipper of water, comes back with the water, and pats her face gently with it. She opens her eyes slowly.) SARAH. Where am I? FENTRY. You’re at Ben Quick’s sawmill over at Frenchman’s Bend. (He looks down at the thin, emaciated face.) I’m Jackson Fentry. I’m the watchman out here in the winter time when the mill is shut down. I heard you when I came outside of the boiler room. You sounded to me like you was in pain. Are you in pain? (The woman shakes her head weakly, “No.” She shivers and he puts his coat more securely around her.) FENTRY. How long have you been here? SARAH. I don’t know. I remember walking down the road back yonder. I don’t remember passing the sawmill. I knowed I was feeling dizzy, and I said to myself, I hope I ain’t going to faint, but I guess I did. Though when I did, and how I got here, I don’t exactly remember. (She rests her head back on the logs.) What day is it? FENTRY. Christmas Eve. SARAH. Is it morning or the afternoon? FENTRY. It’s the late morning. SARAH. Then I haven’t been here too long. It was early in the morning on Christmas Eve when I started this way. (She tries to get up.) FENTRY. Let me help you. SARAH. Thank you. I think I’d better be getting on now. (He helps her up, but she is still very weak and has to lean against the pile of logs and against Fentry.) I’m sorry, I guess I will have to rest a while longer. I haven’t quite gotten my strength back. FENTRY. Let me help you in here so you can rest by the fire. It’s so raw and cold out here. SARAH. Thank you. It has been a cold winter, hasn’t it? FENTRY. Yes’m. SARAH. There was ice this morning early when I left the house. I seen it in the ditches as I passed. FENTRY. Yes’m.

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SARAH. I said to myself, Jack Frost has been here. FENTRY. He sure had. (She is grasping for breath and holds onto him. They pause for a moment.) SARAH. How far we got to go? FENTRY. Just in this door here. Can you make it? SARAH. Yes, sir. I can make that. (They start on again slowly. They reach the doorway. She rests again by the doorway for a moment.) Thank you. You say it’s warm in here? FENTRY. Oh, yes, ma’am. (He helps her inside the door and to the chair. She sits slowly down and rests her head against the back as if this little exertion was made at great cost.) You set here, missus. SARAH. Thank you. (She looks around) It is nice and warm in here. I love a good fire in the stove. FENTRY. I could get it warmer. I was letting it die out because I was about to leave for my Papa’s farm for Christmas. (He goes to the stove and starts to feed it wood.)

Now I know a lot about cotton fields; I know nothing about sawmills. In any case, I began somehow, in the most obsessive, vivid kind of way, to want to discover for myself as a writer what went on between Jackson Fentry and his black-complected woman. It is interesting that both actresses who have played Sarah, Kim Stanley and Olga Bellin, are blonde, but they did understand the fierce pride of the woman, “black-complected pride” Faulkner calls it. I called this woman Sarah, although Faulkner never names her, and I had her married to a man named Eubanks. And so, that night I sat down and began to dramatize what I felt was the story of Jackson Fentry and Sarah Eubanks. I worked on it that night and finished it early the next morning. From that time until this, I have never changed it. It seemed moving to me, but I realized that what I had written was monstrously out of proportion to the rest of the story. I wanted to retain this, and I wanted to see it used, so I began to construct the rest of the play around the story of these two people. In looking back over the original copy of the story that I worked with, I find that I have marked these paragraphs. The first one reads: And the story itself was old and unoriginal enough: The county girl of seventeen, her imagination fired by the swagger and the prowess and the daring and the glib tongue; the father who tried to reason with her and got exactly as far as parents usually do in such cases; then the interdiction, the forbidden door, the inevitable elopement at midnight, and at four o’clock the next morning Bookwright waked Will Varner, the justice

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Now surely if one had imagination, a whole play could be done on the basis of that one paragraph. It is curious that I have marked it because in every attempt that I have made to dramatize Tomorrow, I have always in some measure tried to use effectively the element of the story that has to do with Buck Thorpe as a grown man. However, in all candor, I don’t think I’ve ever found a way to integrate it into any version. The next paragraphs marked are these: “I went close enough,” Pruitt said. “I would get close enough to the field to hear him cussing at the nigger for not moving fast enough and to watch the nigger trying to keep up with him, and to think what a good thing it was Jackson hadn’t got two niggers to work the place while he was gone, because if that old man—and he was close to sixty then—had had to spend one full day sitting in a chair in the shade with nothing in his hands to chop or hoe with, he would have died before sundown.” So Jackson left. He walked. They didn’t have but one mule. They ain’t never had but one mule. “He come home that first Christmas,” Mrs. Pruitt said. “That’s right,” Pruitt said. “He walked them thirty miles home and spent Christmas Day and walked them other thirty miles back to the sawmill.” “Whose sawmill?” Uncle Gavin said. “Quick’s,” Pruitt said. “Old Man Ben Quick’s.” It was the second Christmas he never come home. Then, about the beginning of March, about when the river bottom at Frenchman’s Bend would be starting to dry out where you could skid logs through it and you would have thought he would be settled down good to his third year of sawmilling, he come home to stay. He didn’t walk this time. He come in a hired buggy. Because he had the goat and the baby.

And then later Pruitt says: “In the next summer, him and the boy disappeared.” “Disappeared?” Uncle Gavin said, “That’s right. They were just gone one morning. I didn’t know when. And one day I couldn’t stand it no longer, I went up there and the house was empty, and I went on to the field where the old man was plow-

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ing, and at first I thought the spreader between his plow handles had broke and he had tied a sapling across the handles, until he seen me and snatched the sapling off, and it was that shotgun, and I reckon what he said to me was about what he said to you this morning when you stopped there. Next year he had the nigger helping him again. Then, about five years later, Jackson come back I don’t know when. He was just there one morning. And the nigger was gone again, and him and his pa worked the place like they used to. And one day I couldn’t stand it no longer, I went up there and I stood at the fence where he was plowing, until after a while the land he was breaking brought him up to the fence, and still he hadn’t never looked at me, he plowed right by me, not ten feet away, still without looking at me, and he turned and come back, and I said, ‘Did he die, Jackson?’ and then he looked at me. ‘The boy,’ I said. And he said, ‘What boy?’ “They invited us to stay for dinner. Uncle Gavin thanked him. ‘We brought a snack with us,’ he said. ‘And it’s thirty miles to Varner’s store, and twenty-two from there to Jefferson. And our roads ain’t quite used to automobiles yet.”

I am not really sure now why I marked those paragraphs when first attempting to dramatize Tomorrow, but I am very moved now when I read this description of the father. I think that I wanted to try to retain in the character the wonderful sense that Faulkner can give us of a man and his need to work, his total absorption into whatever he has been given to do, and his ability to live in solitude under the most primitive and unlikely conditions. The man can also express pride, loyalty, integrity, and many very admirable virtues, and that Faulkner always finds a way to give us these qualities in a very unsentimental way. I think I was successful in retaining these qualities in the television and stage versions. In the latter paragraph, I suspect I was interested in the relationship of the neighbors to the story—how they had to know what was going on and what means they had to find out what was going on. I have always been haunted by the question that Pruitt asked Fentry after he had returned and the boy had been taken from him: “That boy?” he asks. And Fentry answers: “What boy?” One of the obvious problems in dramatizing this story is the matter of time. In Old Man, although the story was also told out of sequence, time was very clearly defined from the beginning of the flood to the end of the flood. In Tomorrow, time is approached in various ways and not in sequence, and covers a period of roughly twenty years or more. This span presents enormous technical difficulties. For example, it makes great demands on the actor to play convincingly a character who ages twenty years. At first, this time scheme was a great worry to me, but then I decided that this was not really my

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problem and that what I had to address was dramatizing, as best I could, the story Faulkner had given me; I had to let the director and the producer take care of solving the casting problems for my play. I decided therefore to begin with the search of the lawyer, Gavin Stevens. Why had a Mississippi dirt farmer named Jackson Fentry hung his jury? Instead of three characters telling the story of Fentry to Stevens, I decided to confine it to the Pruitts. It was apparent that, given the character of Fentry, Stevens would never go directly to him, and I felt that my structure would be served best by one point of view or narrator. And so, these choices—the choice of where to begin the story, of dramatizing very fully the relationship of Sarah Eubanks and Jackson Fentry, of the Pruitts as narrator, and of trying to accommodate in some way Faulkner’s time structure—all dictated the form that finally began to evolve into the first adapted version of Tomorrow. In this version, one thing always worried me. The more completely I dramatized the relationship between Fentry and Sarah, the less room it left for the dramatizing of other elements of the story. I finished the first version of the story very quickly, in four or five days. Brodkin read it and immediately called to say that he liked it and wanted to do it. I had six weeks to think about any further changes or improvements I wanted to make. Most of my thinking, as I remember, was spent wondering what happened to Fentry from the time the boy he adopted had been taken away from him until the time he returned to the cotton farm; and I made a very logical sequence of events for myself, but I was unable to use any of it in the play. Other problems that I felt I was never able to solve satisfactorily in any version was how to use the return of the grown Buck Thorpe, how to dramatize Fentry’s story about him properly and how to dramatize what happened when Fentry decided to see for himself the evolution of Buck Thorpe. In all versions, television, theater, and screen, we attempted this meeting of Fentry and Buck. I think it was most effective in the theater. There was something immediate and quite wonderful about the meeting of the two in the scene that occurred in the play version. In the screen version, the scene was shot but eventually cut. I understand this was very difficult for Bob Duvall, because he felt so strongly that in some ways it was his best work, and the producer and director told me that they did indeed agree that it was. After I finished my work on the television play, I had a meeting with Robert Mulligan, who was to direct it. He liked what I had done, but he felt that it lacked “theatrical excitement,” which is a comment that I have heard often in my life. His first suggestion on how to give it theatrical excitement was to start somehow with the trial and try to build the story from there. I had thought earlier of starting the play with the trial, but, given the ninety minutes (or seventy minutes really) allotted for playing time, it had seemed

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uneconomical. Anyway, I tried again for four or five days, but felt it was no improvement, so we agreed to return to what I had already written. I started the play on the front porch of the Pruitts’ farmhouse. Ed Pruitt and his mother are there, and they see Thornton Douglas’s car come up the road. (I had to change Gavin Stevens to Thornton Douglas for legal reasons.) MRS. PRUITT. Whose car is that coming up the road? PRUITT. I think it’s Lawyer Douglas’s son’s car. MRS. PRUITT. What’s he doing around here this time of morning. (The car stops.) PRUITT. Looks to me like he’s coming to see us. MRS. PRUITT. What’s he want with us? PRUITT. He probably is going to ask us some questions about Jackson Fentry. MRS. PRUITT. Don’t you tell him nothing, Pruitt. PRUITT. Yes’m. (THORNTON DOUGLAS, thirty, and his nephew, CHARLES, fourteen, come up to the porch.) THORNTON. Howdy. PRUITT. Howdy, Thornton. THORNTON. How are you, Mrs. Pruitt? MRS. PRUITT. Pretty well. THORNTON. You’re looking very well. MRS. PRUITT. Thank you, I can’t complain. THORNTON. This is my nephew, Charles. He’s my partner, aren’t you, boy? CHARLES. Yes, sir. THORNTON. He likes to ride out in the country with me. MRS. PRUITT. Hello, son. THORNTON. I don’t know if you folks know it or not, but I’m a lawyer now. PRUITT. Yes, sir. We heard.

Then, Douglas begins to tell them why he’s here. In this speech, he uses a great deal of the material Faulkner wrote for him when making his jury summation. And the Pruitts change their mind and decide to tell him what he wants to know about Jackson Fentry, beginning their story on the night Fentry tells them that he is going away to work in a sawmill and asks them to look in on his father while he’s gone. And I followed the action directly until the end of the story, using Pruitt as a voice-over narrator to make certain scene transitions and give us the important facts. This version was produced on Playhouse 90, March 7, 1960, and repeated again July 18, 1961. Some years later, Herbert Berghof called me about doing

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the play in his small off-Broadway theater on Bank Street in New York. He said his production would be based on the idea of compressed time. I didn’t quite understand what he meant then (I talked to him about it again a few days ago and I’m still not sure I understand), but I have great respect for his directorial talents and I agreed to let him do it. He wanted to use my play basically as it was done on television with the exceptions of using Thornton Douglas rather than Pruitt as the narrator and starting the play with Douglas’s speech to the jury, or part of it, and having him address the audience as if it were the jury. He was casting Robert Duvall in the role of Fentry and Olga Bellin as Sarah. I was living in New Hampshire then and only came to a run-through in the last week. I was very impressed with the work of the directors and the actors. Paul Roebling and Gilbert Pearlman saw this production. A few weeks later, they called to ask me about doing it as a film and if I would care to do the screenplay. They wanted to use Robert Duvall and Olga Bellin in the two parts. In our first discussions, Paul and Gilbert said that the presence of Sarah Eubanks, which was so felt in the first part of the story as I dramatized it, should somehow be kept in the second part. So, I took that as a kind of task for myself. Then, of course, there is always the enormous visual and physical freedom with the camera, which was not allowed me in theater or television. They wanted to do it on location in Mississippi and wanted to make it as authentic as possible. They said they would do everything they could to maintain that authenticity. The screenplay we went into rehearsal with had a great deal of material in the second half of the film that tried to keep the memory of Sarah alive, but most of it was cut in the rehearsals before the filming began. There were additions: we started the film in the courthouse and the trial; we used the jury, had Douglas address the jury, witnessed Fentry hang the jury, and from there went out into the country with Douglas as he began his search for why Fentry had done this. We took Fentry and Sarah outside the cabin as much as possible, dramatizing the moment when he shows Sarah where he hopes to build her house. We added a scene between Sarah and Fentry when it is raining and she speculates about walking on water; another after Sarah dies, with Fentry’s trip home with the baby and a goat; and many new scenes between Fentry and the boy. The film has its own rhythm, its own life. Joseph Anthony, the director, has a wonderful sense of detail, the kind of detail that makes the life on screen believable. These details were valuable and interesting, but they took a great deal of time. The first cut of the film was extremely long; Roebling, Pearlman, and Anthony worked many hours with Reva Schlesinger, the editor. All the

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Pruitt scenes were cut; most of Papa Fentry’s scenes were cut. What were retained were the scenes between Fentry and Sarah. There were substitutions: the boy playing Jackson Longstreet was not a trained actor and was very shy. Duvall spent many hours with him on and off the set winning his confidence. When it came to the actual shooting of the scenes, however, he would become stiff and self-conscious when he had to say the dialogue. So, Duvall—and he is a master at this—simply improvised the scenes with him using whatever the boy said spontaneously. Each time I finish dramatizing another’s work, I think that the next time I will know more and it will get easier. I hope each time I know more, but it never gets easier. Each work presents its own problems. There is only one rule of which I am sure: Do something you really admire.*

Willa Cather It might interest you to know how I first became acquainted with the writings of Willa Cather. I was a sophomore in high school. I have very little memory of anything I learned in school, but I do remember that about that time I became an avid reader. There was no library in the town of Wharton, but my parents allowed me to join the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild, both in those days were more dignified in their choice of books, book dividends, and marketing than today. I am sure they had their popular potboilers even in those days; Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel was one that I remember. It was through the Book of the Month Club that I first learned about the world of Willa Cather. I do not remember the order of her books that came my way, but they included Death Comes to the Archbishop, Shadow on the Rocks, Obscure Destinies, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Many years later when I began my own career as a writer, Willa Cather, her novels and her stories, became for me a kind of tuning fork that I often returned to as a guide. I felt then and still feel that they were the best in American writing and storytelling. How I finally came to read My Mortal Enemy many years later, I do not remember. However, I do remember that I was devastated by it when I read it, and I have never failed to be moved by this dark tale after many, many readings. Whenever I come upon a fellow enthusiast, I always ask: “Have you read My Mortal Enemy.” If they have not, I send them scurrying to find a copy. I do remember how I came to read A Lost Lady. An actress, I cannot recall who, approached me about dramatizing the book. At the time, I did not know *Published in Film and Literature: A Comparative Approach to Adaptation, Texas Tech University Press, 1988

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a clause was in Miss Cather’s will forbidding all dramatizations for either stage or film. Subsequently, other actresses as diverse as Uta Hagen, Sandy Dennis, and Geraldine Page approached me about doing an adaptation. Still not knowing about the stricture, I approached Playhouse 90 about such a project, but they turned me down for some forgotten reason. Many years later, my daughter Daisy fell in love with the writings of Willa Cather. She was fortunate in having Sharon O’Brian as one of her professors at Dickinson College, and so her interest was encouraged. Later when Daisy became interested in writing, she wanted to dramatize Oh! Pioneers. We talked about the ban imposed by Miss Cather on dramatizing her work, but because we knew the ban would legally expire for Oh! Pioneers in a few months (with the end of her copyright), I concluded that Daisy should quickly begin the dramatization. If Daisy could manage a film script with dignity, always trying to honor and respect the integrity of Miss Cather’s work, I felt she should move ahead with the project. So secondhand as it were, I was a witness to some of the problems with adapting a Willa Cather novel. Daisy is here today and has brought her screenplay with her. I think it speaks for itself. I am sure of this; in all ways, it sought to honor Miss Cather and her novel. I have had some experience in dramatizing novels and short stories: William Faulkner’s Barn Burning, Tomorrow, and Old Man; Flannery O’Connor’s The Displaced Person; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; and more recently John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I did them all reluctantly, not that I did not admire them but because it is such an awesome responsibility transferring someone else’s work to another medium. It is a difficult journey, at best, for obvious technical reasons, but also because it is painful to enter completely others’ worlds, to get inside their skin as it were. Equally painful is the moment when the adapter has to decide it is time to claim the world he has so painfully entered as his own and make decisions for its new life as a screen or stage play. How can anyone be faithful to a work he or she admires, even reveres, without allowing that devotion to keep one from making the changes necessary to give it life in a new form? The original cannot continually intimidate or the adapter will surely bring about a stillbirth. For me to have any chance of successfully dramatizing the work of another writer, I have to choose material that I respect, that I sympathize with, and that deals with people and a world that I understand. Whenever I have done that with Faulkner, O’Connor, or Lee, I have felt a real satisfaction in the work, and when I have not, I have felt lost and confused. After I decide to adapt a work, I read it repeatedly, making notes. The essential story, of course, is given to the reader; the characters have been named and defined. The adapter’s creativity has to work within a given frame-

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work but not in a straitjacket that reduces him to uninspired literalness. I try to absorb the author’s world and to find a creative way to enter it. That can take place in many unexpected ways. With To Kill a Mockingbird I was very influenced in my dramatization by a review of R. P. Blackmur called “Scout in the Wilderness,” in which he compared (very favorably) To Kill a Mockingbird to Huckleberry Finn and the character of Scout to Huck. His review strengthened my own feelings that the audience should discover the evil and hypocrisy in this small, Southern, pastoral town along with and through the eyes of the children. I was also helped by Alan Pakula’s suggestion that I restructure the events of the novel, which ran over several years, to fit into a single year. The two approaches, one subjective and one objective, helped me to find both a style and structure for the screenplay. Since being asked to talk to you about dramatizing A Lost Lady, I have thought as long and hard about the problems that seem to me involved as if I had been commissioned to undertake such a venture. I wish I could tell you I had all the answers. However, I do not. First of all one would have to wrestle in his own way with Willa Cather’s wish, which I believe is still legally enforceable in the case of A Lost Lady. Her wish was that her work would never again be adapted to film after a poorly made silent movie version of A Lost Lady caused such terror and horror in her heart. Now I have not seen the silent version in its entirety, but I recently saw half of the film (which is all I could take) starring Barbara Stanwick as the Lady. I am still in shock. No wonder Miss Cather was so vehement in her resisting further dramatizations. I have wondered, knowing how much Miss Cather enjoyed the theater, why she never attempted a play, as Henry James did, or considered dramatizing her own works. However, that is idle speculation and it has nothing to do with the question at hand: Is it possible to dramatize A Lost Lady for stage or screen? Before addressing the subject directly I would like to relate to you what Octavio Paz had to say about the work of a favorite poet of mine, Elizabeth Bishop. “Elizabeth Bishop is the master of silence,” Paz once remarked. I think his words also apply to Miss Cather. She is able to communicate not only the evident things, but also the unsaid things, the things we don’t say and the things we are unable to say. The job of the poet is to show that silence. I think this line from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Robinson Caruso” also applies to Miss Cather: “Homemade, Homemade but aren’t we all.” Bishop’s poem caused one critic, I forget who, to suggest that everything in Bishop is homemade, centered in her own perception. There is an absolute authenticity about every word spoken at every time, and there is a sense perhaps that this is too modest, perhaps not the insight one needs or wants, but this is what I have and what I can make.

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Miss Cather, quoting from a letter by Sarah Ann Jewett, says: “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years and at last sets itself just down rightly on paper. Whether little or great, it belongs to literature.” Now I would like to read to you something written by Miss Cather herself, a statement about writing that I am sure all you Willa Cather scholars know. But I think it will help explain my point of view about approaching her work. By the way, those paragraphs are ones that I read often, particularly when I feel discouraged about solving a problem in my own writing. She writes: Whatever is felt upon the page, without being specifically named there— that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself. Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—that all one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

A Lost Lady has many easily discernible elements. The story has a potential narrator, Niel, and a great deal of the story is told from his point of view, either as a passive witness or an active part of the action. The first scene of the story, which brings Niel and his friends to the Forrester farm, is laid out much like a dramatist would depict the scene. We are introduced to Niel, our potential narrator, and we are given bits of his special relationship with Mrs. Forrester, a relationship we see develop as the story continues. Before the entrance of Niel and his friends, however, we are given a brief sketch of the Forresters and told how they have come to be in their present home. We are given all the important information of the story, the information that Niel as narrator could give us in a film adaptation. In the first scene (I will refer to them as scenes rather than chapters), we see the awe the boys have of Mrs. Forrester and the Forrester land—a kind of Eden, really. The boys, particularly Niel, bring a sense of innocence and appreciation to this Eden. Then, again like a skillful dramatist, Miss Cather introduces Niel’s opposite, Ivy Peters. Through a series of actions, we witness him wound and blind a female woodpecker, and we recognize him as corrupt, evil (capable of all kinds of mischief ), and arrogant toward the Forresters and their land. The contrast between the two, Niel and nineteen-year old Ivy, is further demonstrated when Niel breaks his arm and the two boys are taken into the Forrester home. We see their vastly different reactions to the house and to the Forresters.

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I could go on tracing Miss Cather’s method, always it seems a dramatist’s method, of introducing pivotal characters and events in the first part of the book that sharply contrast the Forrester fortunes. How skillfully we are told early on, through dialogue, of the difference in the business ethics of Forrester and Ivy Peters. How like a dramatist she begins Act II with a scene between Niel and Ivy who discuss the history of the Forresters in the two years Niel has been away at college. Again how skillfully she shows us through the eyes of Niel how Marian Forrester has changed and how, at one moment, she reacts with the terror of the wounded female woodpecker. I could go on and on pointing out scenes from the novel that she has already dramatized for our use. Yes, in one sense she has made the job of the dramatist very easy. So then, what is the difficulty? The real problem is how to keep the plot from turning into melodrama or banality. By what magic does she take material, which in any other hands would be predictable, sift it through her own special sensibilities and give this material an almost mythic quality? I think what I am really saying is that the major difficulty in adapting Cather is really the same difficulty one faces in adapting any truly gifted writer. The plot and the scenes are usually easy to dramatize but it is the style of the writer, which gives life and breath to the whole that is the most difficult part to capture. In dramatizing both Faulkner and O’Connor, that is the challenge, and it is certainly the challenge in dramatizing Willa Cather. How subtly she finds a way to contrast the present with the past. For instance, Forrester’s tale about how he came upon the land he wanted to build his house on one day is very moving. And Marian’s story of how her husband rescued her is particularly striking because of where Cather has placed it in the novel. She has the gift of the unexpected. Another problem for the dramatist, at least this one, is how to find a viable form for that particular Cather gift of beginning a story at one place and ending it where you never expected. For example in this story, Eden seems to be possessed by its rightful owners, and yet the story ends with the Forresters gone and Eden now owned by Ivy Peters. Cather’s gift for the unexpected is also illustrated through her characterizations. One of Cather’s characters, Marian Forrester, is not an admirable woman because of her vanity, her weaknesses, and her unfaithfulness to her husband. She is willing to make the kind of compromise we wish she would not, and yet in the end, we are moved by her and glad for her when she finds another Captain Forrester to appreciate her and to take care of her. In the novel, Niel makes this judgement of her: This was the very end of the road making West, the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even

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Miss Cather lets Niel speak for her about Mrs. Forrester. Cather always has a definite point of view about the right and wrong of human actions, and the dramatist must always be in sympathy with this fact. Katherine Anne Porter says of Willa Cather: Mr. Maxwell Geisnar wrote a book about her and some others, called The Last of the Provincials. Not having read it I do not know his argument; but he has a case: she is a provincial; and I hope not the last. She was a good artist, and all true art is provincial in the most realistic sense: of the very time and place of its making, out of human beings who are so particularly limited by their situation, whose faces and names are real and whose lives begin each one at an individual unique center. Indeed, Willa Cather was a provincial as Hawthorne or Flaubert or Turgenev, as little concerned with aesthetics and as much with morals as Tolstoy, as obstinately reserved as Melville. In fact, she always reminds me of very good literary company, of the particularly admirable masters who formed her youthful tastes, her thinking and feeling.

Willa Cather’s world is so carefully created, emerging from her memory of other times and her need to shape that world and the events of that time and place into a meaningful whole. Her world is not an easy one to enter. The final effect of A Lost Lady is a kind of peace, a kind of final acceptance of the inscrutable mysteries of human life. The effect is a kind of benediction, a forgiveness of all men, and an acceptance of the Ivy Peters of this world, even though Miss Cather despises such people. Above all there is a sense of balance in her novel, a sense of what to tell and when to tell it, of what to include and what to leave out. There is a most delicate balance, a feeling that tipping too much in one direction or the other would be fatal. A dramatist must carefully examine these elements of Cather’s writing if he is to have any chance of doing justice to her work and her world. In one-hundred-fifty pages, Willa Cather has not only given us the story of A Lost Lady, but of a lost world. By what cost to herself does she know what

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to do and what to leave unsaid? Somehow, I believe, the dramatist must understand that cost. Remember she says, “Art should simplify.” That indeed is very nearly the whole of the artistic process, finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole so that all one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s conscience as much as if it were in type on the page. It all works so well and so effortlessly on the printed page. The challenge to the dramatist is to discover how to achieve this same effect in the screenplay form.*

*Lecture delivered at Red Cloud, Nebraska for the Willa Cather Association on May 1, 1993

Chapter Five

Thoughts on the American Theater In all of this there is hope; because in spite of all the obstacles and there are many, new writers, new directors and new actors, using all kinds of forms are emerging. Theater, all kinds of theater, is finding its way and I am sure will continue to make its way all over America. “The Vanishing World and Renewals”

New York Theater (1930–1940) So much of theater is ephemeral. Last night’s performance will never be seen in all of its particulars again. It may be relived in memory; but even then, it will certainly be changed by memory. There was a performance, perhaps the greatest that I have ever seen, in which Pauline Lord played Zenobia in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. I saw it in New York City in the thirties, when I was a young man. In all the years since, I have thought about it at least once a week, trying in some way to recapture what I saw that night. Although the exact details of the performance escape me now, the emotions I felt and the exaltation at having seen great acting remains with me. Stark Young eloquently wrote of this same performance in his book Immortal Shadows: Miss Pauline Lord cleans the whole thing up and tops everything, the story, the play, the scene, the acting. There are things here that Mrs. Wharton, for all her ability and confidence in approach, could not even have imagined . . . [Pauline Lord’s] performance has a miraculous humility, a subtle variety and gradation and shy power that are indescribable. At her own cost and some decisive selection among the things that are her own and

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Genesis of an American Playwright the things that are not, she knows what is right for her and finds the strength within herself to sustain and project it. When she does so, there is no other player who can bring into it such tragic elements, such bite, or so sharp a stain of life. Here is an art, which could derive from no tradition and on which no tradition could be built. It is a form so entirely related to the particular artist’s own meaning and interpretation that, divorced from her, it would only be a mannerism or decadence in straight style. It has an immediacy that prevents its even remaining in the memory as technical moments or outlines; a trick of the voice, of pause, a gesture now and then, we recall; the rest has moved so far inward that it is largely our own response that stings and moves us still. Of this art of Pauline Lord you know that its small voice haunts your ears and its weakness overpowers you, as you go back to it in your thoughts, thoughts tender and somewhat awed by that of which you seem to have heard only the echo.

A great deal of what I am going to talk to you about in these three lectures is based on loss, the grace of accepting loss, and the changes necessitated by loss. When I think of loss and the grace of accepting loss, I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s lovely poem “One Art”: The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

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Even losing you [the joking voice, a gesture I love] I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like [Write it!] like disaster.

In one of the Cantos, Ezra Pound says, “Things have ends and beginnings.” Moreover, T. S. Eliot writes, “In my end is my beginning.” When I left my home at seventeen to study acting I had no idea what that meant. Up until that time I had only acted in high school plays in which I learned my lines and the director moved me arbitrarily about the stage, then sat out front to be sure I could be heard. My parents would not let me study acting in New York, so they enrolled me in the Pasadena Playhouse School of Theater. A semi-professional theater, the Playhouse was an outgrowth of the little theater movement that was prevalent in America in the 1920s. George Kelly has satirized this movement in his play The Torchbearers. The school included classes in fencing, eurythmics, makeup, scene design, history of costume, French, diction [phonetics], and history of theater. Two hours were spent every day rehearsing plays directed by one of the mainstage directors. The founder, Gilmor Brown, met with us once a week and gave inspirational talks assuring us that hard work and real desire for achievement would surely make a life in the theater possible. Always interspersing his optimistic assessments of our future was his recalling of a lost time, a time of the actors Booth, Forrest, Southern, and Marlowe, the “glory days” of great acting. These recollections left us feeling somehow diminished, as if such a loss could never be recovered and real acting had vanished forever from the earth. This was the first time that I was introduced to the idea of loss in the theater, which I would later hear in endless variation. Gilmor Brown received his training from the stock companies that flourished when he was a young man. “Learning by doing” was his motto and the creed of his school. This kind of training was available all over America at the time. The trouble was that there was no one to tell us how best to work. We were put in classic plays that few of us understood, and the director would bark out orders: “Move here, Speak faster, Can’t hear you, Stand up straight, Don’t tense up,” and many others. Sometimes the director would demand instant results: “Cry here, Laugh here, Shout here.” It was confusing to say the least, but most of us hung on. When I was eighteen years old, my grandmother took me to see Eva LeGallienne in Hedda Gabler. I had never seen anything quite like it before, and I asked my grandmother if we could see the other two Ibsen plays in her

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repertoire, The Master Builder and A Doll’s House. These were the first Ibsen plays and the first company of New York actors I had ever seen. I fell in love with Ibsen and Miss LeGallienne, and after reading her book, At 33, I fell in love with the idea of repertory theater. I wanted to get to New York and become a member of her company as quickly as I could. However, when I told my ambitions to a fellow student, he said that, with my Southern accent, they wouldn’t let me sweep out the theater lobby. He had been to New York and had visited LeGallienne’s theater on 14th Street. He assured me that even the people who answered the telephones at the box office had perfect diction. Now in those days, “perfect diction” meant a modified British accent, so I decided to go to a private speech coach. She insisted I write out phonetically all the speeches from the plays I was doing. Her phonetics instruction did have some kind of effect on my speech; for when I went home that summer, I spoke so differently that my younger brother began charging his friends twenty-five cents for the privilege of hearing me talk. That Fall I went to New York to look for work as an actor. I had little experience: two years at the Pasadena Playhouse and a summer at the Rice Playhouse. However, there was and is one constant understanding among theater people: Never dwell on the obstacles. And so I began to learn lessons about a part of the theater the Pasadena Playhouse had not prepared me for: how to survive in an economically depressed city where the phenomenon of talking pictures, having decimated both vaudeville and winter stock companies, was now beginning to make inroads on Broadway itself. There were losses, losses everywhere. The first thing I did when I got to New York was to make a pilgrimage to LeGallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre on 14th Street. When I got there, I found it occupied by a left-wing theater group called “Theater Union.” The Theater Union, I was soon to learn, claimed to be part of “the new theater movement.” How often have I heard through the years: “This is the new theater”? This also is a truism about theater; suddenly there appears from nowhere a new concept, a new approach to acting, to directing, and to producing. It all meant little to me at the time. I wanted to be part of the “old theater,” the theater of Belasco, Frohman, Sam Harris, Winthrop Ames, and Arthur Hopkins. I wanted to be an acclaimed actor-manager, have a New York season, and then tour the country; or I wanted to be idealistic like Miss LeGallienne and be part of a repertory company. It seemed to my young mind that the “old theater” was invincible. In those days, the theater district ran from 38th Street as far up as 59th Street. In this district, there were lovely theaters in abundance: the Empire, the Playhouse, the Cort, the Maxine Elliott, the Music Box, the Morosco, the Belasco, the Hudson, the Henry Miller, the Booth, the Shubert, the Martin

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Beck, the National, the Forrest, the Ambassador, the Bijou, the Little Theater, the Forty-Sixth Street Theater, the Golden. The list went on and on. Every season they were all filled with productions, not all of them successes, but few New York theaters in those days remained dark for very long. Each Fall, the producers such as Sam Harris, Arthur Hopkins, Guthrie McClintic, Jed Harris, John Golden, Crosby Gaige, Max Gordon, Gilbert Miller, Brock Pemberton, and the Theater Guild announced their new productions and usually fulfilled their promises. These days, the second balcony of a theater is rarely filled, but when I first came to New York, they were often filled. The tickets for the second balcony were fifty-five cents, and we soon learned we could look down into the orchestra for empty seats during the first part of the show, and then during intermission we would move down to the orchestra and take the vacant seat. I saw a great many plays starting from the second balcony, usually ending up in the orchestra. I saw Judith Anderson and Helen Menken in The Old Maid; Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour; John Gielgud, Lillian Gish, and Judith Anderson in Hamlet; and Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, High Tor, and The Star Wagon with Burgess Meredith, Lillian Gish, and Russell Collins. I saw plays by John Van Druten, Philip Barry, Elmer Rice, Sidney Howard, and George Kelly. I saw Tobacco Road with Henry Hull, Candida and The Three Sisters with Katharine Cornell, Clifford Odets’s Paradise Lost and Awake and Sing, Tallulah Bankhead in The Little Foxes, and Ethel Barrymore in The Corn is Green. I also saw Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, in a lovely production by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, with Barry Fitzgerald and Sara Allgood, and a brilliant performance by Nazimova in Ibsen’s Ghosts. The New York theater had its stars then. There were the Lunts, Katharine Cornell, Ina Claire, Lenore Ulric, Pauline Lord, Helen Hayes, Ruth Gordon, Walter Huston, Henry Hull, Earl Lattimore, Francine Larrimore, Burgess Meredith, Franchot Tone, Raymond Massey, Laurette Taylor, Walter Hampden, Ethel Barrymore, Sydney Greenstreet, Luther and Stella Adler, Jane Cowl, Lily Cahill, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, Judith Anderson, and Florence Reed. The stars often acted in plays tailored to their particular talents. Stark Young sums up this kind of theater in a review of the play Harriet, starring Helen Hayes: This play, regarded as history, is mere nursery rubbish, but it is agreeable enough. Mr. Rhys Williams as the husband gives an almost charming performance. It needs only to be a bit less dull and more wittily absent-minded. Miss Jane Seymour as the dried virgin old-maid sister is excellent. Mr. William Woodson as the suitor for the various sisters’ hands is a promising newcomer. Within the limits of the role as it is written, Miss Hayes acts with

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Genesis of an American Playwright finish and skill; there is a security about her work in this play that comes from true study and experience. There is also a good balance of emotion and common sense in all she does. Opinions vary as to Miss Hayes’ acting. To my mind she is a sturdy, highly honorable player, capable only of a sensible style and without any great imaginative scope or boldness. At times a part of her solution of stage problems is a certain element of archness which a more intense lover of art would elevate into seductive style or else eliminate. La Rochefoucauld said that “the greatest miracle love can accomplish is to conquer coquetry.”

Sometimes, not often, these stars were in interesting plays. The Lunts did The Seagull (translated by Stark Young) and Katharine Cornell did Romeo and Juliet, Shaw’s Candida and The Doctor’s Dilemma, and Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. All of this impressed me at the time; but as I look back now I realize that the plays were mostly superficial comedies or melodramas with a firm eye on the box office. Then I saw Laurette Taylor in a revival of Outward Bound. Suddenly, I began to realize that talent was abundant but genius and originality were quite rare. It was during this time that the playwrights Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, and S. N. Behrman formed the Playwrights Company, which was to produce their plays exactly as they wanted them, or at least as they thought they wanted them. The other popular writers: Moss Hart, George Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Howard Lindsay, Russell Crouse, and Rachel Crothers mostly formed permanent attachments to producers who cared little about what the playwright wanted from the production. Also at this time, a great influx of German theater artists, fleeing from the Nazis, began to arrive in New York: Albert Basserman, Elisabeth Bergner, Max Reinhardt, Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Bertolt Brecht, Erwin and Maria Piscator, and Elonora Mendelssohn. The New York theater of this era was genteel, a kind of gentleman’s club, sure of itself and what its public wanted. America was in the midst of a Depression, but you would never have known it from the plays. If playwrights attempted any social commentary, it was on the most superficial level. One exception to this happened down at the 14th Street Theater where Clifford Odets’s one-act play Waiting for Lefty was being produced. It was about a strike; and at the end of the play, the actors called on the audience to strike. The audience responded by yelling back, “Strike!” Broadway pretended it did not hear that call at all. It kept right on pouring tea in its drawing rooms. One day in New York City I met Rosamond Pinchot, whom I had known in California. She was well known for her appearance in Max Reinhardt’s The

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Miracle. She told me she was now studying at Tamara Daykarhanova’s School for the Stage. She needed a scene partner and said if I would like to join her in the class she would arrange a scholarship. I had no idea who Tamara Daykarhanova was, but I wanted to keep busy at the craft of acting, so I decided to accept the scholarship. This decision changed my world, changed my perception of theater, and was one of the forces that began to alter American acting styles and theater concepts permanently. Tamara Daykarhanova had studied with Constantine Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater. She had fled Russia with her husband and joined Balieff ’s Chauve Souries, which had come from Paris to New York and then disbanded. Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, also students of Stanislavsky and former members of the Moscow Art Theater, had already arrived in New York and had established a school and a theater. Boleslavsky’s book, Acting: The First Six Lessons, soon became required reading for all young aspiring actors. It was as influential as Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares. Boleslavsky soon left New York to direct films. Maria Ouspenskaya closed the theater but kept the school open and invited Daykarhanova to join her. When Ouspenskaya moved west to act and teach, Daykarhanova became head of the school, and invited Vera Soloviova and Andrius Jilinsky to teach. Soloviova and Jilinsky, husband and wife, had also been members of the Moscow Art Theater and had left Russia for political reasons. Like Daykarhanova, they went to Paris first where they joined a company headed by Michael Chekhov, Anton’s nephew. Eventually the company brought a tour to New York. After the New York season, Chekhov disbanded the company and the Jilinskys decided to stay in America and join Daykarhanova’s school. In many ways these five Russians: Boleslavsky, Ouspenskaya, Daykarhanova, Soloviova, and Jilinsky were to influence American acting, directing, producing, and the perception of all of these for years to come. Daykarhanova’s studio was a strange world to me. She and the Jilinkys were strict taskmasters. They felt that American actors, particularly those trained at the Pasadena Playhouse or the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, had been badly trained. I was told that I had to go through a process of relearning. I was not aware of it then, but at the same time, former American students of Boleslavsky—Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Harold Clurman— had begun teaching classes of their own using similar techniques. Jilinsky had this to say about theater and teaching acting: I believe that the theater must speak to human hearts: in this way, we will awaken and console, strengthen and help others to live. The human heart, a very old-fashioned article physically and spiritually, will always be

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Genesis of an American Playwright new and modern because its wealth is infinite. That is why I write here about the “living” theater. In the accepted triangle of the theater—playwright, director and actor—it seems to me that the ideal of collaboration forms an equilateral triangle. If there is no playwright in, for, and from this theater, there is no theater. If there is no actor especially “created” and trained to fulfill the tasks of this theater, there is no theater. And if there is no director who understands how to produce the plays of these playwrights with these actors, there is no theater. Let me start with the actor. The actor and his training has been my life’s work. The kind of actor who fascinates me is the one whose acting I feel— not understand, but feel. He must be “alive;” the passions he plays on the stage must be living feelings. When I hear dead intonations in the theater, produced by a dull marionette whose whole technique is in his voice, I know that the actor is trying only to deceive his audience. He is creatively castrated, with nothing but his body and without any knowledge of how to master his body. That is why I seek talented actors. It is not enough for them to be gifted. And not only is talent important, but the quality of talent. I mean by this the ability to be truthful on the stage. An actor must be able to play and project true feelings and true passions. Such an actor will always touch the heart of an audience and not its calculating mind, for his weapon is truth. And what happens between the actor and the audience—these moments of contact and relationship—are what we call “living” theater. This is the theater we want, because these precious moments of communion awaken the thoughts of an audience through its heart, through the sharing of “alive” feelings. They awaken what is eternal and undying, everything that makes man an organic part of the cosmos.

Our teachers said that the American theater was moribund and decadent and that most of the acting and writing was old fashioned and cliché-ridden. They said that the Stanislavskian precepts, practiced at the Art Theater, were the ideal and the basis for the theater of the future. Rosamond and I were deeply impressed and thought we had at last found the way to true theatrical art. We believed that when we learned this way of working, our search would be over and a new world of theater would be miraculously established. Meanwhile, in Russia, former students and associates of Stanislavsky had rejected Stanislavsky and his system as too naturalistic and had joined Meyerhold in forming “a new theater” in Moscow. During my time of study with the Russians, I saw Pauline Lord perform for the first time. I was afraid to tell anyone at Daykarhanova’s about my admiration of Pauline Lord’s acting because she was, after all, a commercial actress, a Broadway star. I was greatly relieved when one of the Russians said

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that when Stanislavsky was performing in America he had seen only two actresses who knew instinctively everything he had discovered for himself about acting: Pauline Lord and Laurette Taylor. About this time, to help relieve unemployment among actors, playwrights, designers, and other theater workers, the government began the Federal Theater Project. Hallie Flannigan headed it. Among its most famous productions were The Living Newspaper and the Orson Welles and John Houseman collaborations. These productions were rooted in German expressionist theater. The Russians and their disciples were impressed by the theatricality of these productions, but they were critical of the acting. Despite the presence of the Russians and the Germans in the theaters offBroadway, Broadway seemed to change very little. The Theater Guild, the Shuberts, the Gilbert Millers, and the Max Gordons continued to produce their plays written by their in-house playwrights and with their in-house stars in the old, accepted ways. A talented director named Mary Hunter, with the urging of Daykarhanova and the Jilinskys, decided not to wait for Broadway to change, but to start an ensemble acting company that would do plays by American playwrights that Broadway rejected as uncommercial. She started the American Actors Company. The company lasted six years and disbanded when World War II took many of its actors. The company did plays of Paul Green, Lynn Riggs, Ramon Naya, Josephine Nigli, E. P. Conkle, Thornton Wilder, and Arnold Sundgaard, including a musical review, American Legend, directed and choreographed by Agnes DeMille. I was a member of the American Actors Company; and it was, as a member of this group, that I abandoned acting for writing and had my first plays produced. There was another kind of theater making its way in New York at this time. It was the theater of the dancers Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Hanya Holm. It flourished with amazing vigor and resilience in the thirties. Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman had their theater on 16th Street where they gave regular performances of their works. Martha Graham had no permanent theater building, but each season she found a way to give her concerts for at least one performance. All these dancers had their passionate followers and disciples. The Group Theatre, the greatest influence in the thirties, Depressionborn, took a commercial Broadway theater and tried to attract a public with no stars and with plays that attempted to deal with the social issues of the times. Stark Young wrote about it when the Group undertook Paul Green’s The House of Connelly: In this first production by the Group Theatre we have a play that the dramatist could not quite write and that, written or not, the players could

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Genesis of an American Playwright not quite act—not by a long sight, to be quite honest, could they act it. The choice, nevertheless, is a good one. The House of Connelly provides a sincere vehicle, full of well-defined acting parts; it has less mere facility, a more profound source, more richness in texture and scope in emotion, than most plays that could have been available. This honesty and serious intention in the choice of a play was prophetic of the general character of the whole event. There was not an instance of stage cheating for effect, or of hollowness; there was no forcing, no individual grabbing of the scene; you felt the play free of tampering or intrusion. The promise that lies in such an attitude is obvious; the very genuine welcome given on the part of the daily newspaper reviews to the Group’s first venture rested basically on that. This brings us to a problem very pressing and delicate when a play with Southern characters is to be produced: the extent to which the actors shall attempt the Southern accent. In the first place there is no one Southern accent any more than there is one British accent, but scores, depending on the section, the social class, the individual person speaking, and so forth. In the second place few actors not Southern can catch the right effect. It was to some extent a good decision, then, that led the Group players away from this attempt in their speech (though Mr. Tone in his first scene, however he may have reverted afterward, caught the right placement in the throat, the right voice and rhythm, very well indeed, without travesty and to the furtherance of his effect). Clearly the general intention of the directors was to present the play on its universal side, the story as it might happen anywhere; and this, in so far as concerns the main themes and straight movements of the scenes, was also a wise decision. It is also true that where the acting can really search out the depths of the emotions and character portrayed by a dramatist, mere surface qualities are easily dispensed with and forgotten. The old problem of the relation between exact surface and inner content is obviously involved. And meanwhile it is clear that it might be easier to be cosmic than to be local, in the same sense that prophecy may come more readily than baking bread, and that those who cannot be Southern can at least be universal.

The Group actors came mostly from urban backgrounds and had no real experience of life outside New York or other eastern cities. Plays of city life were easiest for them to produce. However, they were passionately devoted to an ideal of theater that was uncompromising and, at its best, served the craft well. Harold Clurman, one of its founders, said many years later: The Group was not just a company of actors. It had a philosophy of acting, a philosophy of life. It was developed out of our body. We made teachers.

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We made directors. We made designers. We made actors. We made playwrights. We made things, created things, we didn’t just produce—we made it out of ourselves. We weren’t an enterprise, an institution—we were a creative body. We lived together, not out of some ideal, but out of common sense. We were practical people because we made a theater out of nothing. We talked ideal and then made it practical. We changed world theater. Today, people don’t have the spiritual or moral know-how, besides the talent and technical training to do it. Plays must address the needs of the people and mean it. To do this you must have a technique. A theater must create instruments that can convey its idea on stage, not just talented acting or talking about ideas, but theater instruments that convey the idea of the theater. That’s why you have a technique. That’s why you train. All you have in life is to make the effort. Today, we are losing our dignity. We’re becoming a country of no-accounts. We are addicts about ideas, eating, music, theater, TV, sex—all levels of life!

There was no off- or off-off-Broadway theater at the time, no regional theater, as we know it today. The nearest thing to our present off-Broadway theater was the concerts of the modern dancers, who rarely could afford the rent of a commercial theater. They performed at the YMCA on 92nd Street and in small spaces and theaters in all the back alleys and streets of the city. Everyone that is, except for Martha Graham. Perhaps she could afford only one night’s rental of a Broadway theater, but at great personal sacrifice, even deprivation (designing and often sewing the dancers’ costumes herself ), and her dancers often had to rehearse at night after working all day at other jobs to keep them alive. She did somehow manage at least one performance a year in a Broadway house. When Stark Young first saw Martha Graham dance he told a friend that when she dances she looks as if she is giving birth to a cube. However, after seeing her perform several times, he finally began to understand what she was about. He wrote: Since I am not a critic of the art of dancing, perhaps the best thing I can do is to set down two cardinal points with regard to this dancer’s art and the general theater art in our midst. The first is that Miss Martha Graham in my opinion is the most important lesson for our theater that we now have. She has come more and more to exemplify some of our stage’s chief needs and to illustrate fine possibilities where it may have deficiencies and gaps. Her work can be studied for its search after stage gesture in the largest sense, some discovered and final movement. And it can be imitated in the perpetual revision and recomposing that she does in her search for the right

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Genesis of an American Playwright emphases, and the right pressure to be given them, as if she were feeling for the bones of the work’s body, within the flowing articulation of the whole. The point here is not that everything we see Miss Graham do is beautiful or perfect; the point is the scraping back to the design, the lyric, and almost harsh resolution to be honest toward it. This projection and this firm statement of the emphases are what the ordinary acting to be found in our theater needs in order to discipline its shiftless inconsequence. We can make another note on Martha Graham’s dancing. Certain reiterations are highly manifest: the return of a form, a tone, or a rhythm. This seems to me a very wise tendency. The lack of reiteration is one of the things that send so much modern art off into nothing. There is not only the hypnotic effect of repetition and the satisfaction, as close as our heartbeats, of recurrence; there is the fact that a thing must return on itself as a part of its life process. The dance especially, involved as it is so immediately with life, is gone as soon as it is finished, just as life is gone as soon as it ceases, and so the dance tends to repeat the passion of its vitality. Underlying all that is alive is the compulsion toward return.

Who would have imagined then that Martha Graham would some day be recognized along with Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, and Hindemeth as one of the great creative geniuses of our century? Yet, even with fame and worldwide recognition, her financial struggles continued. At her death, in her ninetysixth year, she was still searching for money and grants to finance her concerts. The theater of the thirties and forties was a strange mix, with the German expressionist experiments of the Federal Theater, the dance theater of Graham and Humphrey, the Russians and their ever-increasing disciples, and the Group Theatre. These influences are still active in many ways even in the theater of today. My own lasting influences were the Russians and the theater of Graham and Humphrey. After ten years of living in New York, the popular commercial theater seemed the same as the theater I had seen when I first arrived there. The Voice of the Turtle, starring Margaret Sullavan and Elliott Nugent, was treating the war and the times in a trivial and sentimental way just as Broadway had treated the Depression. Bertolt Brecht was writing and revising his plays in California but he could find no interested producers in New York. With this in mind, I decided to leave New York to start a theater of my own and try out some of my ideas. In 1945, my wife and I left the city to start a theater production company in Washington, DC. What then was the theater of the thirties and early forties? Looking back now with the perspective given by the distance of years, it was a way of life, a place where one could expect, with talent and perseverance, to make a living.

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Actors, directors, and writers took pride in their profession. They felt debased if they had to leave it to go work in films. There were standards—too often based on commercial success—but standards. They had opinions—what was good acting, what was bad acting, what was good writing, who were the good producers. No two people agreed on the good and the bad, but no matter, opinions were formed, and because of the continuity of productions, one could test his opinion year after year on the actors, the playwrights, the directors, and the producers. What does hindsight tell us of that time, our time, perhaps all time? Could it be that the artist, the truly original creator, is always ahead of his or her time? There was then, as now, two worlds really, the world of Martha Graham and the world of the Shuberts. Most artists end up in the world of the Shuberts, or at least they want to. Some try to go back and forth. Few, very few have the will, the desire, the courage or the talent to go the way of the Grahams. Still, when I look back at the popular theater of the thirties and the forties, the theater of Cornell and Helen Hayes, Helen Menken and Jane Cowl, Henry Hull and Walter Huston, for all its faults it was a world, a way of life, complacent perhaps, insular certainly, but it was a world, a way of life, and it has vanished. It has disappeared like silent pictures, Chautauqua, the Gibson girl, and tent shows.

The Changing of the Guard I returned to New York in 1949. Many changes were taking place in the theater. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were now considered America’s leading playwrights, after their productions of The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Death of a Salesman (1949). Not only were Williams and Miller commercially successful, but also most critics gave them the kind of serious attention that Odets, Saroyan, and O’Neill had received earlier. In 1950, the Theater Guild produced William Inge’s play, Come Back, Little Sheba with Shirley Booth and Sidney Blackmur playing the leads. Inge joined Williams and Miller in both critical and financial successes. Elia Kazan became the leading director, not only because of his staging of Williams’s, Inge’s and Miller’s plays, but also because of his production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. In many ways, the commercial theater of the 1950s became the domain of Williams, Miller, Inge, and Kazan. These men were serious about theater and their responsibilities toward it. Many of the producers who had been prominent when I first came to New York were either dead or retired by the time I returned. The last of the leading actors who continued to work every season now only included Helen

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Hayes, Katharine Cornell, Judith Anderson, and the Lunts. Jane Cowl was dead, Ina Claire was in semi-retirement, and Walter Huston and Ethel Barrymore were acting in Hollywood. Their kind of theater was gone forever. Yet, most of the New York theater buildings were still intact. A few were rented to radio shows that required a live audience, but there were still enough to accommodate new productions each season. The Theater Guild and the Playwrights Company were still producing, and the new producers were Kermit Bloomgarden and Herman Shumlin. By the mid-40s, off-Broadway and even off-off-Broadway had been established as alternatives to the rising production costs of Broadway. There had been interesting productions of Sartre’s No Exit and The Respectful Prostitute. The latter had begun off-Broadway and then was moved to Broadway. However, the goal for most playwrights, directors, and actors continued to be to make it into a Broadway production. This stayed pretty much the same, even with the success of playwrights like Miller, Williams, and Inge. The process began with a producer who took the play, cast it with as many big name actors as possible, then took it “on the road” to Boston, Philadelphia, New Haven, or Baltimore for an out of town tour of at least four weeks. According to the local critical response, the play was worked on, often recast, and sometimes a new director was hired. Nearly always, the playwright spent hours rewriting under the pressure of the impending New York opening. Rising production costs also caused producers to begin looking for venues outside of New York. Margo Jones had begun her theater in Dallas which was dedicated to finding new playwrights. Nina Vance began the Alley Theater in Houston and the Arena Theater opened in Washington, DC. Even the thriving world of modern dance could not escape the impact of the rising production costs. By the mid-40s modern dance, as it had been known in the 1920s and 30s, had vanished. Doris Humphrey, crippled by arthritis, could no longer dance. Her partner, Charles Weidman, was semi-retired. Hanya Holm had left concert work to choreograph musicals. Only Martha Graham remained active. Of course, there were younger dancers of talent and power, including Valerie Bettis, Pearl Primus, Jane Dudley, and Sophie Maslow; but the rigors of establishing companies on shoestrings, as Graham, Humphrey, and Holm had done, seemed almost impossible both on Broadway and off. In the midst of all these financial struggles, the acting studios that had been established in the 1930s continued to flourish. Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and Robert Lewis were teaching by this time, and students of theirs began to open studios of their own. Part of the success of these schools was due to the ending of the war and the establishment of the GI Bill. Returning soldiers had money to pay for whatever they wished to study, and many of them chose to study theater in day and night classes. The American Theater

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Wing began a program designed particularly for returning veterans. There were acting and singing classes, acting classes for singers, dance classes, design classes, and classes for playwrights. Herbert Berghof opened his HB Studio. He was soon joined by Uta Hagen, one of the new leading actresses. She would later become his wife. The most influential of all the studios was The Actors Studio, created by Cheryl Crawford, Robert Lewis, and Elia Kazan, in the hope of forming an acting company. They invited a number of the most talented young actors and actresses in New York to join them. Robert Lewis and Elia Kazan both taught classes. Kazan optioned a play by Bessie Breuer and cast it with Studio actors including Julie Harris and Steven Hill. Lewis and Kazan took the play to the summer theaters and to New York in the Fall. It was not a critical success. Robert Lewis and Kazan disagreed about the future direction of the studio, and Lewis left. Kazan became active with theater and film work and thereafter had little time for teaching, so he decided to ask Lee Strasberg to take over the training of the actors. Lee Strasberg became The Actors Studio. From then on until his death, he was responsible for the direction it was to take. Almost all the talented actors of consequence found their way there, and Strasberg and his techniques had a profound and lasting influence on acting performances, not only in New York, but all over the world. Strasberg’s work at the Studio was both lauded and derided. Myths grew up about the work done there and the rituals of that work. I was invited to observe their work at the Studio, and I attended classes throughout the late 1950s. Strasberg had a great vision. He inspired the actors, the writers, and the directors who came under his influence to see theater as a way of life, not as a commercial commodity. He had a vigorous and inquiring mind. He knew a great deal about the productions of the theater of the past and the present. I am aware of his faults and the faults attributed to him by his detractors. I am aware, too, that in his later days he felt the need to succeed in all the conventional ways, but when he was in his prime, he was, I believe, one of the great theater minds of all time. In 1956, Strasberg said: Sometimes a lot of you people take tasks onto yourselves unnecessarily. You begin to defend The Actors Studio or Lee Strasberg or the “Method.” All you have to say is, “Look at the work and see what other work is as good.” There is no need to defend the work as if it were bad. Everybody is talking about the Studio because, without any propaganda on our part, the work that has been done has received a certain amount of acclaim—but not from us. We sit here in high judgment and criticize ourselves, and we are sympathetic, but we are not easy.

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Genesis of an American Playwright Nobody is forcing anybody to work according to Lee Strasberg or The Actors Studio or Elia Kazan or anything else. Nobody’s forcing anybody. There are a lot of teachers available. The members come here from all kinds of teachers—good and bad. So we need not be pushed into a kind of selfdefense. If somebody is interested, that is one thing. But if somebody sees the work and then argues that it’s accomplished by the wrong methods, what is the point of arguing? Let them explain why good work is gotten by the wrong way of doing things. If other people want to work differently, there is no reason why they shouldn’t. Good work is accomplished in many ways. We are partially paying the price for something that takes place very rarely in the arts and that has never before taken place in the theater. Never before has a method of actors’ work become almost a burning issue. The other arts have been—cubism and the other modern arts. Music has aroused its public to heights of frenzy. Actors have been fought about. Duse and Bernhardt, Kean and Junius Booth, Kean and Kemble, those are classic struggles. But never before has a method or theory of acting become an issue. People in general are discussing the work of the Actors Studio. “Is it too realistic?” “How about Shakespeare?” Till now only sports or movies have elicited this kind of interest. This is the first time that the technical problems of the actor have received public cognizance. Obviously, we pay the price. You can hardly expect the general run of people either really to be interested or really to know what they’re concerned about. The result is argument on the level of generality. However, the fact that the Studio has dramatized the problems of acting for the general public is important because awareness that the actor is a technician and craftsman is a prelude to the appreciation of acting. Part of the reason why the remuneration of the actor today is good but appreciation is very low is that the public really regards the actor as no craftsman but still a sort of romantic figure. To the extent that this general concern serves to correct that impression, the contribution of the Actors Studio is significant.

The Actors Studio hoped to create one day a permanent acting company. There were several attempts and some interesting productions, notably The Three Sisters with Kim Stanley and Geraldine Page, but nothing of permanence was achieved. What was achieved was the training of a wonderful group of actors: Julie Harris, Kim Stanley, Rip Torn, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton, James Dean, Eva Marie Saint, Lee Grant, Ellen Burstyn, Sandy Dennis, Anne Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Steve McQueen, Ben Gazzara, Steven Hill, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Karl Malden, Mildred Dun-

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nock, Marlon Brando, Patricia Neal, Jo Van Fleet, and Eli Wallach among others. Later they established a directors’ unit and a playwrights’ unit in which most of the young, promising playwrights and directors participated. Since Strasberg’s death, the Studio has continued and young actors are still being given a place to work at their craft. The directors’ and the playwrights’ units go on, but their vitality and influence has greatly lessened. Strasberg was the driving force. Harold Clurman had this to say about the Actors Studio and the Method: Are you in favor of grammar? Yes or no? God darn it! Can you conceive of people engaging in such a dispute? Do you suppose anyone could become fanatic about the subjunctive case? In theater circles something almost as absurd as this appears to be going on. The bone of contention is the famous Method—the grammar of acting. There have been great writers who never studied grammar—though they usually possess it—but no one on that account proclaims grammar a fake and instruction in the subject futile. A mastery of grammar does not guarantee either a fine style or valuable literary content. Once in command of it, the writer is unconscious of method. It is never an end in itself. The same is true of the Stanislavsky Method.

Dramatic television in New York began almost simultaneously with the start of the Actors Studio. They nourished each other. The actors from the studio needed work to survive. Most of them were beginning or unknown actors, and they worked for very little money. Television budgets in those early days were small and could not support established actors or stars. They filled a need for one another. Television needed actors and the Studio actors needed the work to sustain them while they continued their work with Strasberg. Most television in those days was “live,” which meant it was very similar to theater. Videotape had not been invented yet, and so a performance could not be stopped or edited. Once started, it had to continue to the end as was done on the stage. Fred Coe, who had directed and produced plays in little theaters in the South, worked early in television as a director, and later as a producer. At first, he produced Broadway plays of a semi-serious nature on television, but later he decided to produce original scripts that might more easily fit his austere budgets. He became the producer of the Philco Television Playhouse, and because his budgets (which I believe were sixty thousand dollars for each show) couldn’t pay for big-name actors or the escalating royalties on established plays, he decided to search for new writers to feature. I began working with Coe in his second year. I did nine one-hour plays for Philco Television and

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two half-hour plays for a summer program. He paid me a thousand dollars for each of the plays, and the network asked to retain “all rights in perpetuity,” which was an old Hollywood trick. However, my agent, Lucy Kroll, insisted that I was to retain my own dramatic copyright and all future rights or I wouldn’t give them my plays. They agreed to her terms. In a way, we writers were inventing television, or at least our version of it. Paddy Chayefsky, J. P. Miller, Robert Alan Arthur, Gore Vidal, Tad Mosel, David Shaw, and I were some of the writers used by Coe. Chayefsky wanted to go more in the direction of film. I was known as the one trying to keep it nearer to theater. In truth, I had no passionate feelings about the direction of its development. My real interest continued to be in the theater, and so for television, I simply used ideas I’d had for one-act plays. In those days, the theater had little use or interest in the one-act play, so writing one seemed almost a futile exercise. Fred Coe, however, agreed with me that they were ideal for the limitations of live television. Anyway, that is what I did. I later published them as one-act plays, and they are still being produced in theaters all over America. As the television writers, actors, and directors became better known and the number of television sets in America increased, the program budgets became larger. Chayefsky proved to be the true prophet, and the new producers turned more toward cinematic structure. By the late 50s, the industry itself began to leave New York for California. What live television gave New York, while it lasted, were new playwrights, actors, directors, and producers. Some of the new Broadway plays were first produced by Fred Coe on the Philco Television Playhouse: Chayefsky’s In the Middle of the Night, Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker, Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet, and my The Trip to Bountiful. Arthur Penn and Vincent J. Donehue, who first came into prominence working for Coe, later directed a number of successful Broadway productions. Fred Coe and David Susskind went on to produce plays, and the actors and actresses from New York television became the new stars of the theater. Most of them, such as Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Rod Steiger had also worked at the Actors Studio. Just as Stark Young chronicled the theater of the 1920s and 1930s, Harold Clurman became the most respected critic of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. A director and producer of some talent, his great gift was as a critic. Lies Like Truth, a collection of his reviews and essays, is a compelling review of the American theater of that time, with brief accounts of the French, German, and English theater as well. In 1949, Clurman wrote about the young American playwrights:

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Several friends and admirers of Tennessee Williams, (they happen also to be earning impressive profits from A Streetcar Named Desire), sent him a set of the press notices on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman the morning after that successful play opened. Was this intended as a warning to Williams that he had better do some fast thinking if he wants to remain No. 1 playwright of the younger generation? I heard the other day of a playwright’s wife who developed a migraine headache on her husband’s behalf when she was given a report of Miller’s triumph. Some of the market competitiveness of Broadway must have always existed in the theater. Yet it is hard to believe that the rivalry among contemporary artists ever possessed so specifically commercial a character as it does now in the American theater. I say “commercial,” but that is perhaps a species of highbrow slander. The race between Gimbel’s and Macy’s, I am sure, does not produce the same psychological tension in the managements of those emporia as is suffered by our playwrights. Perhaps one reason for this is that Macy’s and Gimbel’s are surer of the worth of their wares. When Heywood Broun in 1935 wrote that Odets would eventually surpass O’Neill, I thought the prediction a genial expression of faith in a new playwright. When I read a year later that Irwin Shaw, who had just written Bury the Dead, was “better than Odets,” and a year after, when Shaw had written Siege, that he was “finished,” (he was then twenty-four), I began to recognize a pattern. Saroyan a few years later was hailed as “the playwright of the forties,” and Odets was accused in 1940 of imitating Saroyan. After Streetcar, Williams, about whom no decision had been reached on the evidence of The Glass Menagerie, became the great contender for honors which, apart from box-office statements, are rather difficult to define. Today Miller has become the white hope. Our white hopes darken with the years. Their annihilation is implicit in their glorification.

Williams’s Summer and Smoke, after failing on Broadway, was later given a remarkable production off-Broadway at the Circle in the Square. José Quintero directed the production; and Geraldine Page gave a memorable performance in the lead role. It was also in this same off-Broadway theater that O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which had failed on Broadway, was successfully revived under the direction of José Quintero. These two productions did much to get audiences and critics to take off-Broadway seriously. During the 1920s and 1930s, the commercial producers often gathered around the playwrights, directors, and actors, and they became a kind of family. The producers guaranteed productions and employment year after year.

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However, the new producers of the 40s and 50s, because of escalating costs, were in no position to guarantee any kind of continuity. Playwrights, directors, and actors survived from play to play. As television moved west, actors and directors began to follow, and a real talent drain began. Off-Broadway, David Ross produced all of Chekhov’s major plays, mostly using Stark Young’s translations. In addition, Joseph Papp established his Shakespeare Festival Theater Off-Broadway, and he has continued year after year doing plays rarely produced in the commercial theater. These productions helped strengthen interest in off-Broadway as a viable alternative. While off-Broadway was coming to life, the old era of New York theater was slowing dying. The Maxine Elliott Theater on 39th Street was the first one that I remember being torn down. At the time, no one complained too much; after all, it was below 42nd Street, so there were still plenty of theaters available in more fashionable parts of the city. If we had known what was to happen to so many of our lovely theaters in the coming years, I wonder if we would have been so complacent. Not only were the buildings disappearing; but a whole generation of actors began disappearing as well. Laurette Taylor died and Pauline Lord followed. When Miss Lord died, she had not been seen in New York for several years. Two years before her death, she had toured America in The Glass Menagerie. I saw her perform in the play twice. She was unforgettable. These two were the greatest, and the last of their kind. Eva LeGallienne, Cheryl Crawford, and Margaret Webster made one last attempt at repertory theater. It failed very quickly. Costs were prohibitive, and the public was woefully uninterested. How to master losing is a lesson theater people seem to have to learn over and over. One of the most difficult problems for the theater of that time was the black list. No one knew who supplied the list of Communist Party members and communist sympathizers to the McCarthy committee, but names were given, and the committee called the people listed to Washington for questioning. Some gave the committee more names of fellow workers and acquaintances known or suspected of being communists. Others refused to do so. Many innocent people were wrongly accused and were not able to find work in the theater nor on television, and certainly not in films. It was a terrifying and divisive time. Friends turned against friends. When it was all over, Kazan and Arthur Miller, who had such a fruitful relationship as director and writer, could no longer work together. The Theater Guild had a considerable reputation for doing the plays of O’Neill, Shaw, and S. N. Berman. By this time, however, these writers were all dead, and the Guild began to look for younger playwrights. They produced my play, The Trip to Bountiful, with the assistance of Fred Coe.

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Harold Clurman turned out to be a prophet. Williams and Miller saw their latter plays so savaged by the critics that producing their new works in the Broadway Theater became almost impossible. William Inge lasted the longest in the 1950s. After productions of Come Back, Little Sheba and Picnic, he had two more successes with Bus Stop and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Then, Robert Brustein wrote a devastating critical article about Inge’s plays and before long, the critical attitude towards his work became openly hostile. Many years later Brustein began a similar, if more subtle attack on August Wilson. However, Wilson, tougher than Inge, ignored the attack and continued writing his plays. Most recently, Brustein has taken on Frank Rich, the theater critic for The New York Times. In part, Brustein writes: Even before the disappearance of competing New York newspapers, The New York Times played an important role in the success or failure of Broadway plays. For the past twenty-five years, however, the Times has played virtually the only role. And for eleven of those twenty-five years, this respected organ of the press has not only been adjudicating Broadway hits and flops, but strongly influencing the aesthetic direction, the artistic personnel, the style, and the content of American theater—not only in New York but (now that resident theaters are trying out so many New Yorkbound plays) throughout much of the country. These eleven years have marked the reign of Frank Rich. And although it is not fair to hold one man accountable for the dwindling number and the diminishing quality of plays and productions, there is almost universal agreement that a casual link exists between Rich’s dramatic opinions and the crisis in the American theater. Rich has defended himself against such charges by saying, with considerable disingenuousness, that producers, not critics, are responsible for closing plays. But his leverage has grown so potent that it is being noticed even by the mass media. A whole section of 60 Minutes was devoted last year to Rich’s reputation as the “Butcher of Broadway.” (Only a handful of his victims were sufficiently unintimidated to speak for the record, though scores more were willing to testify off camera.)

Brustein goes on to attack Rich’s taste and the main thrust of that attack is that Rich has been unfriendly to the concept of the auteur director; the “deconstructionists” as they have been called. In the 1960s, Edward Albee became the theater’s “white hope.” He was highly praised by the critics, awarded all the prizes, and then attacked by the critics. Until recently, it was impossible for him to get a play of his done in the New York commercial theater.

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Howard Lindsay remained active as a playwright, director, and actor in the 1950s. He had a real concern that the economic conditions were making producing new playwrights increasingly difficult in New York. So he founded and nurtured an organization called “The New Dramatists,” which was devoted to helping the beginning playwright. It still exists today, and it has been helpful to playwrights in many ways, although not in the way Howard Lindsay would want it to be. What Lindsay really wanted was to recreate the system and the world in which he had flourished, a world where most playwrights were content to function as mere craftsman, trying to find ways to please an audience. I met with him once early in my career as a writer. He called and asked me to come to his house in Greenwich Village. He said he was concerned for the theater that he loved so much and which had been so good to him; and he feared, because it was increasingly difficult for playwrights to make a living in the theater that they would all, in time, get discouraged and leave for Hollywood. He said for that reason he often called young writers who he felt had talent and would tell them the formula that had stood him in such good stead all these years. He said there were only two rules a writer should observe: One was never write a play about anyone you would not care to entertain in your own living room, and two was when trying a play out of town, never watch the actors; always watch the audience to see when they get restless or bored. He had had great commercial successes; Life with Father and State of the Union among them, but they were not the kind of plays that interested me, nor did I think they would interest most of the playwrights I knew. As the 1960s began, the off-off-Broadway theater was beginning to develop talented writers, directors, and actors, and together these artists began to insist that a new way be found. Eileen Blumenthal wrote about this movement in her book Directors in Perspective: Joseph Chaikin, Exploring from the Boundaries of Theatre: The notion of an alternative American theater was not new, of course. There had been the Washington Square Players, Provincetown Players, and Neighborhood Playhouse, all founded in 1915 (and all closed before 1930), then the Civic Repertory Theatre, Group Theatre, and Federal Theater Project in the late twenties and thirties. But their momentum toward a noncommercial and, in some cases, socially activist theater had not outlived them. And while several of these earlier companies had been artistically innovative, the only one to have a lasting effect on the mainstream was the Group Theatre, which had reinforced, even cemented, naturalism as the mode of serious American drama. Indeed, it was partly the legacy of the Group Theatre that many of the new artists were opposing in their discontent with the strangle hold of nat-

Thoughts on the American Theater uralism. Apart from musical comedy or old classics, realism was the only acceptable form in commercial theater. The few off-Broadway productions of Brecht, Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet in the fifties offered glimpses of a greater range of expression but did little to expand the field in general. The antiestablishment bent turned, too, against the theater industry. The commercial stage was a business, and production costs had reached the point where artistic innovation was an unaffordable risk. Moreover, the rich producers and investors who largely financed Broadway seemed to be part of the ruling class rather than kindred spirits resisting it. Off-Broadway, a handful of small houses that began to thrive in the fifties, mostly in and around Greenwich Village, was less conservative politically and artistically; but still, it was more a scaled-down copy of the commercial system than a regular forum for alternative work. The desire to disentangle art from moneymaking also spawned a movement toward antiprofessionalism. Amateurism, moreover, suited the superdemocratic, communal ethos of the time, because it made everyone equal. And since Method-schooled actors were not necessarily more qualified than beginners to handle non-naturalistic plays, there was some justification for challenging professional theater instruction. Happenings and other performance art forms designed for untrained actors grew from and supported this trend. These various explorations gradually began to have an outlet. In 1958, Joe Cino opened a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, the Caffe Cino, which presented theatrical productions, poetry readings, and art exhibitions. A handful of similar establishments opened over the next few years presenting small-budget productions, mostly of original plays exploring new forms. The most important of these was the LaMama Experimental Theater Club, launched in 1961 by Ellen Stewart. Individual productions and ongoing groups also began to find homes in local churches, including the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square and St. Marks in the Bowery. Perhaps the major force in early off-off-Broadway was the Living Theatre, which established itself on 14th Street in 1959. Formed in 1946 by Judith Malina and her husband, Julian Beck, to work on poetic drama, the company already had a reputation for innovation. It had presented Noh dramas, medieval miracle plays, and works by Paul Goodman, Alfred Jarry, Jean Cocteau, William Carlos Williams, August Strindberg, and Jean Racine. Intensely political (professed anarchists), the directors of the Living Theatre set out in the late fifties to integrate their social conviction with their art. Their repertory focused on works like Jack Gelber’s The Connection, Brecht’s Man Is Man, and Kenneth Brown’s The Brig. The company began

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Genesis of an American Playwright to take public stands on social issues, including U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, and to engage in civil disobedience. Brashly anti-establishment, the Living Theatre was important in opening ground for theater outside bourgeois respectability and “high culture” and in drawing public attention to the alternative New York stage. I wonder what the Max Gordon’s, the Sam Harris’s and the Howard Lindsay’s would have made of all that? It all had its day and then with the success of the musicals Hair and Godspell it began to become part of the mainstream; and though LaMama continues, most of the other theaters have disbanded.

Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and John Guare emerged out of all this, and of course, they continue to write. Each writer in his time has been discovered and lionized, although not as extravagantly as in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Shepard has consistently refused to have his plays done on Broadway, nor will he join the Dramatists Guild. Lanford Wilson, for many years, has produced his plays first at the Circle Repertory Company, of which he was a founding member. So in part, their survival would seem to be a result of their refusal to become as dependent upon the kind of commercial theater of which Miller, Williams, and Inge were a part. The English playwrights seemed to have suffered, in some measure, the same fate as our American writers. At twenty-seven, John Osborne wrote Look Back in Anger and with it, he began a revolution in English theater. Look Back in Anger was followed by Luther, A Patriot for Me, and The Entertainer. A whole new generation of English playwrights emerged including Arnold Wesker. Thirty years later, Wesker wrote an article published in the London Times in which he says: If I were a director of a theater and a new John Osborne play were given me, I would judge it my responsibility to offer that play to the public regardless of my personal view. Similarly with any other writer of proven track record. There reaches a point where the writer becomes a kind of property of the public.

Clurman said: “Our white hopes darken with the years. Their annihilation is implicit in their glorification.” In England, as well as in America, it seems a Wesker has to make a public appeal for an Osborne play now to get a production. I left New York again in the mid-60s and went with my family to New Hampshire. The theater I had known was fast disappearing and the present “new” theater that was emerging off-off-Broadway, well, I was interested in it, but felt no part of it. It was an attempt by a younger generation to redefine

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theater, as I have come to believe every generation must. I had been through this process in my work with dancers, but I had finally come to agree with Treplev in Chekhov’s The Seagull: “It’s a matter not of old forms and not of new forms, but that a man writes, not thinking at all of what form to choose, writes because it comes pouring out of his soul.” Looking back now, I am sorry I did not see some of the experiments taking place in the 60s, particularly those of Beck and Chaikin. Eileen Blumenthal writes of Chaikin’s work with actors and playwrights: Each of the playwrights has handled the collaborative process differently: Some have participated actively in the group or observed sessions; others have just communicated with Chaikin about scenes or speeches that might be useful, in some cases contributing new or preexisting texts before workshops began. But all, one way or another, have faced the problem that van Itallie, one of the playwrights described as “two primary creators trying to squeeze into the same space,” a situation that, he said, was “mighty uncomfortable” at times. Susan Yankowitz, another one of the playwrights for example, found her involvement on Terminal, one of the plays, as much a frustration as a challenge [saying]: “If Joe or the actor who was to perform a speech wasn’t satisfied with it, the speech had to be rewritten. I could argue or defend my work, but ultimately artistic control was not in my hands . . . I found it difficult to write without having a sense of the whole; and yet the discovery of the whole was the process which occasioned the writing.” The playwrights’ problems have been complicated by their tenuous position in the groups. In the early Open Theater especially, actors often resented having free workshop exploration hemmed in by writers. To some extent, Chaikin feels, this tension was inherent in the ensemble’s methods. But the writers’ position in the Open Theater remained, in Yankowitz’s words, “ambiguous and insecure”—in an awkward middle ground where one was “neither an integral part of the group nor an independent outsider providing a finished script.” The playwrights, she says, were “made to feel that they’re only allowed to go this far and not that far, and that it’s an intrusion if they step out of place.” While Chaikin originally intended the Winter Project to have writers as full, active members, in fact none ever became a long-term or central participant. Ultimately, the only way that Chaikin has avoided playwright-ensemble tensions has been by eliminating either the playwright or the ensemble. He has gone the first of these routes more and more often, either accidentally (when writers did not work out) or intentionally.

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Although I know these collaborative efforts were attempts to explore the uses of theater in the deepest sense, I wonder how effective all this was or is for the writer. Sam Shepard was one of the playwrights around the Open Theater, and he has continued to grow as a writer, but he is the only one. In some ways, this kind of process is like some film writing, where committees develop scripts. Many years ago Stark Young wrote about the playwright: The Golden Day in the theater would dawn when the dramatist himself directed his play, with actors capable of expressing entirely the meaning that he intends, and a designer whose settings and costumes bring the whole event to its final perfection. This blest occasion would exhibit the creator in the art of the theater working straight, using one medium directly, as any other artist does, as the painter does, the architect, the musician. But such a day never dawns; and the process by which a piece of theater art comes into existence is nothing so single or direct. We have first the idea or the matter that is to be expressed in this particular medium that we call the art of the theater. This medium in turn consists of a number of other mediums that compose it, such as the play, the acting, the decor. And these mediums involve other artists, the actor, the director, the designer, the musician, and depend on them. The art of the theater is the most complex of all arts.

Blumenthal adds to this discussion: The charge of the sixties, which helped to launch Chaikin’s work, is largely spent now in theater as in the rest of American society. And most of the individual cast that made up the stage vanguard then has backed either into obscurity or into the mainstream which looks very different as a result. Indeed, much American theater carries some stamp of that period of revolution. Artists’ refusal to accept the tyranny of the commercial box office has been answered by a diversified nonprofit base that apparently has survived even recession economics.

Anyway, when I returned to New York in the later 1970s, the Beck’s Living Theater and Chaikin’s Open Theater were finished. I saw Chaikin perform in Uncle Vanya, and I was not impressed by either his acting or the production. I am sorry I missed seeing his earlier work. The theater I came back to in New York was floundering. Outside the city, however, there were reports of great vitality. I had come back to New York to work with Herbert Berghof in his theater on Bank Street. It was a unique

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theater, one devoted to providing a place for writers, actors, and directors to take risks and grow as artists. It continued until his death. Remember what Ezra Pound said: “Things have ends and beginnings.”

The Vanishing World and Renewals In 1981, Herbert Berghof spoke before the Austrian Academy of Arts in Graz. He said: The young American actors, who often remind me of Cézanne’s “Green Apples” with a similar, luminous promise of ripening, are soon disappointed, become restless or bewildered. They are an easy prey for exploitation. When they succeed, particularly in films or television, they may be discarded as “over-exposed,” abandoned like old cars in deserted parking lots. Similarly, young playwrights stand on suspiciously shaky ground. Those who carry an unfulfilled promise are impatient. Torn between “art theater” and a commercial payoff, they work superficially, racing for brilliance, cleverness, and quick success at the cost of their potential. Only reorientation and an understanding of the causes of the theater’s crisis can save their talent for the nation. Some of them retain the indomitable spirit of the American pioneer which does not allow them to forget the Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. They must be helped. What I am trying to share with you may simply be a reminder of something you have forgotten. If anything is new, I hope you will give it consideration. While I am grateful for what I’ve earned in the commercial world of theater, film, and television, I am most proud of having used these earnings to liberate myself from its stranglehold. In 1945, the HB Studio was begun with this goal in mind. We wanted a place to escape from all the dictatorship of money and power, to regain some of our self-determination. It is a place where actor, directors, writers, and designers are evaluated only for the nature of their philosophy and the expression of their needs. It is an educational program for the seasoned, distinguished members of our profession who repeatedly voice a desire for it, as well as being a practice ground for the young. It is not a “showcase!” No one is on display to be bought or sold, hired or fired, or “reviewed.” The work is our offering. The work of the Playwrights Foundation is equally an offering to an audience of friends and colleagues—without advertisement or sale of tickets. No one is paid with money. We do not have the ability to relieve the need for “employment,” a need of which we are acutely aware. Its fulfillment remains the responsibility of producers. A waste of creative talent made us develop our shelter—to preserve talent and allow it to develop. We wait for the time

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Genesis of an American Playwright when an understanding management will offer compensation, not just with money, but with the dignity those artists deserve who long to serve their people honestly. Until then, we will have to be self-supporting or, like Saint Clair and Saint Francis, to take a vow of poverty. Who knows, perhaps this will change the ill wind that blows through the theater’s crisis.

Indeed, it was an alternative for me, an alternative world and a refuge. I worked with Herbert and his theater off and on for six years. He directed my plays Tomorrow (with Robert Duvall), Night Seasons, and The Old Friends. He produced A Young Lady of Property and codirected with me A Coffin in Egypt with Sandy Dennis. He later directed my one-act plays Blind Date, The Prisoner’s Song, and The One-Armed Man. At the HB Studio, I directed three plays from my Orphans’ Home Cycle: Courtship, Valentine’s Day, and 1918. I also taught a class in acting there for two semesters, a class in which actors worked on scenes from my plays. The New York commercial theater was a dismal scene. Productions of straight plays on Broadway had continued to decline at an alarming rate. Many of the lovely theaters were being torn down. These included the Empire, the Hudson, the Forrest, the Playhouse (where my plays The Traveling Lady and The Chase had been produced, as well as Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie), the Maxine Elliott, the Morosco, the Bijou, and the Helen Hayes. In addition, the daily papers had been reduced to only three. Conversely, off-Broadway companies, like Playwrights Horizon and the Manhattan Theater Club, began to flourish, introducing interesting new playwrights in limited runs. The regional theater also continued to prosper. It was in one of these theaters, The Alley Theatre in Houston, that I saw two productions: Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, directed by Edward Albee, and Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, directed by Robert Wilson. The Beckett play, a long one-act, depends upon the virtue of its extraordinary use of language and the strict attention paid to the language by the actor and the director, including their discovering the subtext beneath the language. When We Dead Awaken is a late Ibsen play, rarely produced because of its scenic difficulties. It concerns the struggle of the artist to come to terms with his mortality and the meaning of his life and his art. I saw the two productions less than a month apart. I had never seen either play staged before. I found Krapp’s Last Tape remarkable in its use of language, the idea behind the play, and the execution in theatrical terms of that idea. The play contains a coherence in style and content that is rare in all art, but particularly in the theater. Both Albee and his actor served the play remarkably well. Mr. Wilson, however, used the Ibsen play as a departure.

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Besides directing the play, he designed the sets and the lighting. (He was formerly an architect.) Music was used extensively throughout, and the actors were directed in not only a non-realistic style, but made to sound as if they were voices of robots you hear in certain elevators these days announcing the floors, robots whose vocal tones were out of control, wavering up and down because of mechanical failure. The sets and the staged movements of the actors were effective and sometimes visually stirring, although often in a sentimental way, while the verbal life of the actors and their use of Ibsen’s text was harsh and grating. There were stunning moments visually (never verbally, the verbal choices were only annoying), but I knew little and cared less about the play at the end. It all seemed to me like very sophisticated Radio City Music Hall material, and just as empty. I was reminded that, many years before, I had heard Harry Holtzman, a protégé of the painter Mondrian, say of Fred Astaire that he was the greatest of all dancers because his was pure dance with no other meaning intended. Mr. Wilson’s admirers defend his concepts as pure theater. There are many other directors besides Robert Wilson, particularly in the regional non-profit theater, who are taking plays, new and old, and transforming them or deconstructing them in the parlance of today as Mr. Wilson did with Ibsen. This struggle between the different forms of performance chosen by theater artists has been going on forever, since Meyerhold and Stanislavsky in Russia, Gordon Craig in England (“Ban the actors, use only puppets!”), the German expressionists, Brecht’s epic theater, Peter Brook’s experiments with nonverbal language, and, of course, Ibsen and Strindberg. And surely we know by now that a chosen form, no matter how experimental or traditional, does not make an interesting or provocative play or playwright. Chekhov is a rarity. Brecht is a rarity. Beckett is a rarity. All three of them use different forms. Does the form make their greatness? I don’t think so. The form is only there to serve their particular talent and needs. And who would want to be without their plays? We may like one better than another, relate to one more passionately than another, find one more useful in our own writing and directing and acting than another, but each in his own way has surely enriched our world. The English playwright Arnold Wesker recently observed one of the most depressing aspects of contemporary British theater: For the first time since 1956 there is a whole generation of talented young British directors who affect little or no attachment to the production of new work. Emerging RSC stars such as Phyllida Lloyd declare themselves only interested in the classics . . . The National’s Deborah Warner is well

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Genesis of an American Playwright known for her dismissal of contemporary plays and her hostility to the idea of a living writer in the rehearsal room. The phenomenon may be new for Britain, but it is old hat on mainland Europe and Scandinavia. This new generation of directors have, like Jonathan Miller, joined the ranks of a fiercesome breed of European directors who could be called The Necrophiliacs—those who prefer to practice strange acts on the dead without fear of protest. Living writers, vibrant with intellectual energies of their own, answer back with matching, often more vivid theatrical imaginations. Most troublesome! The director’s vain usurpation of the theater’s means of production in those countries has resulted in a death of playwrights. Small wonder. The novelist Margaret Drabble once said to me: “No, I don’t ever want to write plays. Put in a stage direction for a certain kind of yellow hat to be worn, one that’s absolutely representative of the character’s personality, and you can be sure they’ll get the wrong bloody color if they bother to get a hat at all because the actress is allergic to things on her head or something! Give me prose every time where the reader reads exactly what I’ve written, whether I’m making mistakes or not . . . at least they’re my mistakes.” Blight, however, seems to have overtaken at least the French branch of the Necrophiliac family. At a festival in Parma four years ago, where I was giving a reading, I heard a lecture by the departing head of the Comédie Française. “We have lost our way,” he said. “The productions of the major French directors are all beginning to look like each other.” That is what happens when, to change to less salacious imagery, the tail wags the dog. Accepted procedure decrees that we will not see on stage what the creative writer wants to write, but what the interpretative director considers is the fulfillment of his or her taste. This is a double-edged exercise. If the director’s taste is exquisite and generous: fine. The danger is that most directors are concerned to offer a public not what they consider the public should experience but the kind of plays that will give them an opportunity to shine.

Mel Gussow of The New York Times quotes from a conversation he had with Brian Freil, Ireland’s foremost contemporary playwright: In his career Friel has deliberately moved from theater to theater, from director to director, taking the widest advantage of Ireland’s relatively small pool of theatrical talent. If he worked with the same people each time, he said he “would acquire a dependence, a comfort, a house style.” He adds: “You could absorb the style of a director. It’s necessary to maintain your freedom, your individuality.”

Thoughts on the American Theater

233

Despite his feelings about Tyrone Guthrie and several directors with whom he has worked, he has grave doubts about the directorial profession. “I want a director to call rehearsals, to make sure the actors are there on time and to get them to speak their lines clearly and distinctly,” he says. “I’ve no interest whatever in his concept or interpretation. I think it’s almost a bogus career. When did these people appear on the scene? One hundred years ago?” And he added, “I think we can dispose of them very easily again.” By his measure a director should be “obedient” to the play. If not, all you need is an “efficient stage manager.” He makes his revisions before a play goes into rehearsal. “As far as I’m concerned, there is a final and complete orchestra score. All I want is musicians to play it. I’m not going to rewrite the second movement for the sake of the oboe player.” Then he admitted: “I sound very dogmatic and grossly self-assured about this, but I don’t feel that way at all. For the actor, the score is there and there are musical notations all around. We call them stage directions.” To safeguard his work, he attends all rehearsals of a new play. But once the play has opened, he leaves it, and it is with the greatest reluctance that he will look at a second production.

The early plays of O’Casey: The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plow and the Stars are being revived today. New audiences are discovering them and being moved by them. In the sixties, Kenneth Tynan, the English critic, said that the plays of O’Casey were dated, sentimental, and second rate in comparison to the plays of Samuel Beckett. O’Casey, always a fighter, said Tynan didn’t know what he was talking about and that the plays of Beckett were nihilistic, morbid, and decadent. Beckett, too smart to get into the battle, said he admired and honored O’Casey. O’Casey left the Abbey Theatre when they rejected a play of his not written in his earlier realistic style. He never returned to the style of the earlier plays. He left Ireland and lived the rest of his life in England. I remember reading once that Eva LeGallienne said that she would not trade her age for youth because it meant that she would never have seen Eleanora Duse act or Isadore Duncan or Anna Pavlova dance. I thought at the time that this was a strange remark. I understand it somewhat better today, because I would not trade seeing Pauline Lord act or Martha Graham dance for anything. But Miss LeGallienne didn’t think much of Martha Graham. She thought her dancing was ugly in comparison to Pavlova or Duncan. This is where I differ from her as much as I honor the greatness of the writers, directors, and actors of the past. I think the here and now is great with promise. The Pauline Lords have come and gone and the Kim Stanleys and the

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Genesis of an American Playwright

Geraldine Pages of my generation have come and gone. Arthur Miller is out of fashion in New York, but he is loved and respected in the London Theater. Tennessee Williams, who could not get plays done in New York in the last years of his life, is being revived successfully now every season. Talent, sometimes genius even, will assert itself and continue to assert itself no matter what the physical conditions and limitations are of the theater in America and the world at present. Talent, real talent, will take those limitations and somehow turn them into virtues. In all of this, there is hope; because in spite of all the obstacles, and there are many, new writers, new directors, new actors using all kinds of forms are emerging. Theater, all kinds of theater, is finding its way and I am sure will continue to make its way all over America.*

*Lecture presented at the University of Montevallo, Montevallo, Alabama, March 1992

Appendix

Cast lists and production details for stage plays, teleplays, and films are listed in chronological order.

Stage Plays Wharton Dance (1940) Texas Town (1941) Out of My House (1942) Only the Heart (1942) Celebration (1950) The Chase (1952) The Trip to Bountiful (1953) The Midnight Caller (1953) The Traveling Lady (1954) Tomorrow (1968) Courtship (1978) 1918 (1979) Valentine’s Day (1980) Arrival and Departure (1980) The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees (1982) Blind Date (1982) The Road to the Graveyard (1982) The Roads to Home (1982) The Old Friends (1982) The One-Armed Man (1985) The Prisoner’s Song (1985) The Widow Claire (1986) Lily Dale (1986) The Land of the Astronauts (1988) The Habitation of Dragons (1988) Dividing the Estate (1989) Night Seasons (1993) Talking Pictures (1994) The Young Man from Atlanta (1995) Laura Dennis (1995) The Death of Papa (1997) The Day Emily Married (1997)

235

236

Appendix A Coffin in Egypt (1998) Vernon Early (1998) The Last of the Thorntons (2000) The Carpetbagger’s Children (2001) The Rocking Chair (2001) Getting Frankie Married-and Afterwards (2002) The Actor (2003)

Teleplays Ludie Brooks (1951) The Old Beginning (1952) The Trip to Bountiful (1953) A Young Lady of Property (1953) The Oil Well (1953) The Rocking Chair (1953) Expectant Relations (1953) The Death of the Old Man (1953) The Tears of My Sister (1953) John Turner Davis (1953) The Midnight Caller (1953) The Dancers (1954) The Shadow of Willie Greer (1954) Flight (1956) Drug Store, Sunday Noon (1956) A Member of the Family (1957) The Travelers (1957) The Traveling Lady (1957) Old Man (1958) The Shape of the River (1960) Tomorrow (1961) The Night of the Storm (1961) The Gambling Heart (1964) Barn Burning (1980) Displaced Persons (1980) Keeping On (1983) Alone (1997)

Screenplays Storm Fear (1956) To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) Baby, the Rain Must Fall (1965)

Appendix

237

Tomorrow (1973) Tender Mercies (1983) 1918 (1985) The Trip to Bountiful (1985) On Valentine’s Day (1986) Courtship (1986) Convicts (1990) Of Mice and Men (1991) Lily Dale (1996)

Stage Play Cast Lists Texas Town This full-length play was first produced at the American Actors Company in 1941. It was directed by Mary Hunter.

Cast Maner Hannah Doc Digger Carrie Judge Ray Case Uncle Emma Lyde Fannie Belle Tim Mamie Tom Fred Mrs. Case Mrs. Nelson Brother Andrews Tucker Case Boy

William Hare Randall Steplight Roland Wood Dwight Marfield Loraine Stuart Frederick Campbell Horton Foote Ronald Sherman Gertrude Corey Bettina Prescott Patricia Coates Russell Hoyt Jane Phin Rose Donald Boeche Casey Walters Beulah Well Phyllia Carver John Hampshire Wendell Corey Amos Laing

Out of My House This series of one-act plays was first produced by the American Actors Company at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York in 1942. It was directed by Mary Hunter.

238

Appendix

Cast Night after Night Minnie Bartell Syd Bartell Jack Weems Tell Miller Clara Hog Jaw Ellen Belle Grey Tom Sloane Sonny Mavis Babe Mavis Louie Celebration Red Mavis Babe Mavis Sonny Mavis Ellen Belle Grey Tom Sloane The Girls Idella Miss Nora Anthony Miss Sue Anthony Lillie Belle Aunt Lizzie Cousin Loula Behold a Cry Mrs. Weems John Bassett Ford Weems Jack Weems

Jane Rose Donald Boeche William Hare Burrell Smith Patricia Coates Clarence Red Loraine Stuart Tom Brooks Foote George Breen Phyllis Carver Ronald Sherman Nancy Milroy Phyllis Carver George Breen Loraine Stuart Tom Brooks Foote Virginia Girvin Mary Hunter Gertrude Corey Elinor Grant Jane Rose Beulah Weil Jeanne Tufts Thomas Hughes Casey Walters William Hare

Only the Heart This full-length play was first produced by American Actors Company at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York in 1942. It was directed by Mary Hunter.

Cast India Hamilton Julia Borden Mamie Borden Albert Price Mr. Borden

Mildred Dunnock Eleanor Anton June Walker Will Hare Maurice Wells

Appendix

239

Celebration This one-act play was first produced by Fred Stewart at the Maxine Elliot Theatre in 1950. It was directed by Joseph Anthony.

Cast Sally Gracie Tom Sonny Red Babe

Ellen Belle James Karen Warren Stevens Hilda Vaughn Perry Wilson

The Chase This full-length play was first presented on Broadway at the Playhouse Theatre in New York City on April 15, 1952. It was produced by José Ferrer.

Cast Sheriff Hawes Rip Tarl Ruby Hawes Edwin Stewart Mr. Douglas Anna Reeves Mrs. Reeves Knub McDermont Bubber Reeves Hawks Damon

John Hodiak Richard Poston Lin McCarthy Kim Hunter Sam Byrd G. Albert Smith Kim Stanley Nan McFarland Lonny Chapman Murray Hamilton Ted Varyan

The Trip to Bountiful This full-length play was first produced by Fred Coe at the Henry Miller Theatre in 1953. It was directed by Vincent J. Donehue.

Cast Mrs. Carrie Watts Ludie Watts Thelma Jessie Mae Watts Second Houston ticket man Traveler Harrison ticket man Houston ticket man

Lillian Gish Gene Lyons Eva Marie Saint Jo Van Fleet David Clive Helen Cordes Frederic Downs Will Hare

240

Appendix Traveler Traveler Sheriff

Neil Laurence Salem Ludwig Frank Overton

The Midnight Caller This one-act play was first produced at the Neighbor Playhouse in 1953.

Cast Alma Jean Jordan Cutie Spencer Miss Rowena Douglas Ralph Johnson Helen Crews Harvey Weems

Mary James Rebecca Darke Mary Perry Justin Reid Patricia Frye Robert Morris

The Traveling Lady This full-length play was first produced by the Playwrights Producing Company and Roger Stevens at the Playhouse, New York, on October 27, 1954. It was directed by Vincent J. Donehue.

Cast Mrs. Mavis Slim Murray Judge Robedeux Georgette Thomas Margaret Rose Clara Breedlove Sitter Mavis Mrs. Tillman Henry Thomas Sheriff

Mary Perry Jack Lord Calvin Thomas Kim Stanley Brook Seawell Helen Carew Katherine Squire Kathleen Comegys Lonny Chapman Tony Sexton

John Turner Davis This full-length play was originally produced by the Sheridan Square Playhouse in 1956 in New York City.

Cast John Turner Davis Paul, an iceman Hazel White Inez Thurman White

Richard Snyder Richard Ward Mary James Nora Dunfee Justin Reid

Appendix Miss Fanny Dee Sheriff

241

Rebecca Drake Sid Lee

Tomorrow This full-length play was originally presented on stage at the HB Playwrights Foundation, New York, April–May, 1968. The director was Herbert Berghof.

Cast Thornton Douglas

Papa Fentry Mrs. Pruitt Jackson Gentry Isham Quick Sarah Eubanks Walter The Preacher Les Thorpe Dave Thorpe Jackson and Longstreet Buck Thorpe Maybell Bookwright

Edward Anthony Kenneth Gridges Romulus Linney Oliver Berg Brooks Rogers Leigh Burch Naomi Riordan Robert Duvall Michael Holmes Richard Frey Richard McConnell Olga Bellin Marlene Mancini Richard Frey Andre Sedriks Oliver Berg Brooks Rogers Edward Anthony Thomas McCready Richard Frey Andre Sedriks Franc Geraci, Richard McConnell Susan Kornzweig, Carol Pearce

Courtship This full-length play, part of The Orphans’ Home Cycle, was first presented by the HB Playwrights Foundation on July 5, 1978. It was directed by Horton Foote and choreographed by Valerie Bettis.

Cast Elizabeth Laura Mr. Vaughn Mrs. Vaughn

Hallie Foote Gypsi DeYoung Douglass Watson Carol Coates

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Appendix Aunt Lucy Aunt Sarah Horace Stanley Dancers

Jean Francie Shirley Bodtke Richard Cottrell Timothy Farmer Susan Epstein Deborah MacHale Valerie Ritter Thomas Laskaris Ricardo Velez Raymond Wolf

1918 This full length play, part of The Orphans’ Home Cycle, was first produced by the HB Playwrights Foundation in 1979. It was directed by Horton Foote.

Cast Horace Robedeux Elizabeth Robedeux Mrs. Vaughn Mr. Vaughn Brother Bessie

Richard Cotrell Hallie Foote Rochelle Oliver James Broderick Devon Abner Irma Levesque

A Coffin in Egypt This full-length play was originally produced by the HB Playwrights Theatre in January 1980 in New York City.

Cast Myrtle Jessie

Sandy Dennis Bonita Griffin

Valentine’s Day This full length play, part of The Orphans’ Home Cycle, was first produced at the HB Playwrights Foundation, New York City, in 1980.

Cast Horace Robedaux Elizabeth Robedaux Mr. Vaughn Mrs. Vaughn Brother Bessie

Granger Hines Hallie Foote James Broderick Rochelle Oliver Matthew Broderick Irma Levesque

Appendix

243

Arrival and Departure This one-act play was first produced by the HB Playwrights Foundation as a “curtain raiser” for The Road to the Graveyard on October 15, 1980. It was directed by Horton Foote.

Cast PART ONE India Sonny Ben Roberta Reenie Lyd Beatrice Woman’s Voice Mr. Hall PART TWO India Lyd Mr. Hall Lillie Sonny

Carol Sirugo Carl Dunn Jason Bross Samantha Atkins Barnetta Carter Rachel Arp Bonita Griffin Carol Morley Richard Fulvio Patricia Lindley Carol Morley James Carruthers Julie Follansbee Tony Noll

The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees This one-act play was first produced at the Loft Studio in Los Angeles in 1981. It was directed by William Traylor.

Cast Mrs. Campbell Stanley Birtie Dee Brother Younger Brother

Peggy Feury Albert Horton Foote Cinda Jackson Davin Weininger Joey Sagal

Blind Date This play was originally produced at the Loft Studio in Los Angeles, in 1981. It was directed by Peggy Feury.

Cast Robert Sarah Nancy Dolores Felix

Blake Marion Pattie Lee Pierce Ann Sweeney Corey Parker

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Appendix

The Roads to Home This full-length play was first presented by the Manhattan Punch Line Theatre, Inc., in association with Indian Falls Productions at the Manhattan Punch Line Theatre in New York City on March 25, 1982. It was directed by Calvin Skaggs.

Cast Mabel Votaugh Vonnie Hayhurst Annie Gayle Long Mr. Long Jack Votaugh Eddie Hayhurst Dave Dushon Cecil Henry Greene Hamilton

Carol Fox Rochelle Oliver Hallie Foote Greg Zittel Jess Osuna Jon Berry Ron Marr James Paradise Tony Noll

The Old Friends This full-length play was first produced at the HB Playwrights Foundation on July 27, 1982. It was directed by Herbert Berghof.

Cast Albert Julia Mamie Gertrude Howard Sibyl Hattie Tom Anton

Robert Bernard Carol Goodheart Patricia O’Grady Ruth Ford Leo Burmester Amy Wright Barnetta Carter Albert Horton Foote Don Sileo

The One Armed Man This one-act play was first presented by the HB Playwrights Foundation in New York City on July 9, 1985 as one of three plays collectively called Harrison, Texas. It was directed by Herbert Berghoff.

Cast C. W. Rowe Pinkey McHenry

Leo Burmester William Hickey Mike Leighton

Appendix

245

The Road to the Graveyard This one-act play was produced by the Ensemble Studio Theater in 1985 in New York City.

Cast India Hall Lillie Hall Tom Hall Sonny Lyda

Roberta Maxwell Margaret Thomson Emmett O’Sullivan Moore Frank Girardeau Carolyn Coates

The Prisoner’s Song This one-act play was first presented by the HB Playwrights Foundation in New York City on July 9, 1985, as one of three plays collectively called Harrison, Texas. It was directed by Herbert Berghof.

Cast Mae Murray John Murray Luther Wright Bonny Estill

Edith Meeks Wallace Johnson Richard Mawe Sara Rush Patricia O’Grady

The Widow Claire This full-length play, part of The Orphans’ Home Cycle, was first produced at the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York, 1986. It was directed by Michael LindsayHogg.

Cast Horace Robedeux Widow Claire Spence Ed Corday Felix Archie Molly Buddy Val Roger

Matthew Broderick Hallie Foote Spartan McClure William Youmans Victor Slezak Anthony Weaver Sarah Michelle Gellar John Damon Patrick James Clark Dan Butler

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Appendix

Lily Dale This full-length play, part of The Orphans’ Home Cycle, was first produced at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in New York in November 1986.

Cast Lily Dale Pete Davenport Corella

Molly Ringwald Don Bloomfield Julie Heberlein

The Land of the Astronauts This full-length play was first presented by Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City in May, 1988. It was directed by Curt Dempster.

Cast Loula Lorena Buster Kathleen Bertie Dee Mrs. Taylor Mr. Taylor Son Mabel Sue Mr. Henry Lila Bernice Sitter Drunk Carl V. O. Conklin Kelly

Lois Smith Deborah Hedwall Patrick Hurley Lynn Goodwin Ameila Penland Mary Davenport Emmett O’Sullivan-Moore Bill Cwikowski Kia Graves Evan Thompson Pat McLemore Julie McKee Don Baldaramos Tom Sizemore John Fiedler Joseph McKenna James Murtaugh

The Habitation of Dragons This full-length play premiered at Pittsburgh Public Theatre on September 20, 1988. It was directed by Horton Foote.

Cast George Tolliver Lonny Miss Helen Leonard Tolliver Mr. Charlie

Horton Foote, Jr. Peter Francis James Eugenia Rawis Marco St. John Emmett O’Sullivan-Moore

Appendix Leonard Tolliver Margaret Tolliver Leonard Tolliver, Jr. Horace Tolliver Wally Smith Billy Dalton Virgil Tolliver Lester Whyte Bernice Dayton Sheriff Evelyn Sparks Mr. Smith Harry Brightman Edward Janeck

247

Isa Thomas Hallie Foote Mac Fleischmann Stephen Robert Hanna Matt Mulhern Harley Venton Concard McLaren Ben Tatar Ann Kittredge David Butler Denise du Maurier William Thunhurst Douglas Rees Zachary Mott

Dividing the Estate This full-length play premiered at the McCarter Theatre, New Jersey, on March 28, 1989. It was directed by Jamie Brown.

Cast Doug Emily Irene Son Gordon Lewis Sissie Stella Lucille Mary Jo Lucy Bob Cathleen Mildred

Thomas Martell Brimm Julie Corby Debora Jeanne Culpin Edmund Davys Jay Doyle Ginger Finney Jane Hoffman Annette Hunt Kimberly King Mary Martello Jerry Mayer Théa Perkins Beatrice Winde

Talking Pictures This full-length play premiered at the Asolo Center for Performing Arts in 1990. It was produced by the Asolo Theatre Company and directed by John Ulmer.

Cast Katie Bell Jackon Vesta Jackson Myra Tolliver

Meghan Cary Jamie Martin Kathryn Grant

248

Appendix Mr. Jackson Willis Mrs. Jackson Estaquio Pete Anderson Gladys Ashenback Gerard Anderson

Donald Christopher Michael James Laird Barbara Bates Smith Jack Boslet Rafael Petlock Carol Hanpeter Eric Tavares Jack Conley

Night Seasons This full-length play premiered at the American Stage Company in Teaneck, New Jersey on February 26, 1993. It was directed by Horton Foote.

Cast Lawrence Mr. Chestnut Mercer Rose Laura Lee Skeeter Thurman Mr. Barsoty Mr. Weems Dolly Josie Weems Delian Doris

Devon Abner Lewis Arlt George Bamford Jo Ann Cunningham Hallie Foote Frank Girardeau Michael Hadge Howard Hensel James Pritchett Barbara Sims Jean Stapleton Karen Trott Beatrice Winde

The Young Man from Atlanta A full-lenth play first presented by the Signature Theatre Company in New York City. It opened on January 27, 1995 and was directed by Peter Masterson.

Cast Will Kidder Tom Jackson Miss Lacey Ted Cleveland Jr. Lily Dale Kidder Pete Davenport Clara Carson Etta Doris

Ralph Waite Devon Abner Christina Burz Seth Jones Carlin Glynn James Pritchett Frances Foster Michael Lewis Beatrice Winde

Appendix

249

Laura Dennis This full-length play was first presented at Signature Theatre Company in New York City on March 10, 1995. It was directed by James Houghton.

Cast Pud Murphy Laura Dennis Annie Laurie Davis Mrs. Murphy Fay Griswold Andrew Griswold Harvey Griswold Lena Abernathy Velma Dennis Seymour Mann Ethel Dennis Stewart Wilson Edward Dennis

Victoria Fischer Missy Yager Stacey Moseley Pamela Lewis Barbara Caren Sims Horton Foote, Jr. Peter Sarsgaard Becky Ann Baker Hallie Foote Andrew Finney Janet Ward Eric Williams Michael Hadge

The Death of Papa This full-length play was first produced by the Playmakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on February 8, 1997. It was directed by Michael Wilson.

Cast Horace Robedeux, Jr. Elizabeth Robedeux Brother Vaughn Mary Vaughn Horace Robedeux, Sr. Corella Davenport Ida Harris Eliza Gertrude Inez Kirby Will Borden Walter

Nicholas Shaw Hallie Foote Matthew Broderick Ellen Burstyn Ray Virta Polly Holliday Dede Corvinus “Joan J.” Mathis Nikki Coleman-Andrews Julie Fishell Ray Dooley Kevin M. Butler

The Day Emily Married This full-length play was originally presented at the Silver Springs Stage, Silver Springs, Maryland, in May, 1997. It was directed by Jack Sbarbori.

Cast Sadie

Eugenia Sorgnit

250

Appendix Lyd Davis “Belle” Emily Richard Murray Addie Lee Davie Lucy Fay Alma Nash Maud Barker

Gay Hill Stephanie Mumford Bob Justis Sunday Wynkoop Rob Peters Elizabeth Lawrence Patty Richmond Marilyn Osterman

Vernon Early This full-length play was first presented at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery, Alabama, in May of 1998. It was directed by Charles Towers.

Cast Mildred Early Vernon Early Velma Miss Ethel Erma Lou Ann Douglas Jackie Gertrude Mayfield Harry Reavis Reavis Grant Elreese Sheriff

Jill Tanner Philip Pleasants Sonja Lanzener Mary Fogarty Elizabeth Omilami Lanier Walker Blaine Wise Danno Allgrove Cameron Doucette Yvette Jones-Smedley Fiona Macleod Barry Boys Rennie Monica Bell Virgil Wilson Jeff Obafemi Carr Reese Phillip Purser

The Last of the Thorntons This full-length play was first performed at the Signature Theatre in New York on November 21, 2000. It was directed by James Houghton.

Cast Lewis Reavis Harry Vaughn, Jr. Alberta Thornton Ora Sue Douglas Jackson Annie Gayle Long Pearl Dayton

Mason Adams Timothy Altmeyer Hallie Foote Mary Catherine Garrison Michael Hadge Jen Jones Alice McLane

Appendix Fannie Mae Gossett Ruby Blair Clarabelle Jones

251

Estelle Parsons Anne Pitoniak Cherene Snow

A Coffin in Egypt This one-act play was originally presented at the Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, New York, in June of 1998. It was directed by Leonard Foglia.

Cast Myrtle Bledsoe Jessie Lydell

Glynis Johns Mindy H. Washington

The Carpetbagger’s Children This full-length play was first presented by the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas in 2001. It was directed by Michael Wilson.

Cast Sissie Cornelia Grace Ann

Hallie Foote Roberta Maxwell Jean Stapleton

The Rocking Chair This one-act play was first presented at the Quotidian Theatre Company in Washington DC in October, 2001. It was directed by Jack Sbarbori.

Cast Loula Ewing Helen Dove Horace Dove Doctor White Ewing Edna Mae Hooten Lucy Jay Bolton Mary Jo Ainsley Agnes Samuel

Gay Hill Erika Imhoof Andy Greenleaf Rob Peters Lori Murray Sampson Morgan Aronson Dana Ballard Brook Soden James Archie

Getting Frankie Married—and Afterwards This full-length play was first produced by the South Coast Repertory Theatre in 2002. It was directed by Martin Benson and produced by Jean and Tim Weiss.

Cast Constance Laverne

Annie La Russa Jennifer Parsons

252

Appendix Mae Frankie Georgia Dale S. P. Mrs. Willis Isabel Helen Vaught Bill Simmons Carlton Gleason

Barbara Roberts Juliana Donald Linda Gehringer Hal Landon Jr. Nan Martin Kristen Lowman Sarah Rafferty Jason Guess Randy Oglesby

The Actor This one-act play’s national premiere was at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, 2003. It was directed by Craig Slaight.

Cast Horace Robedeux, Jr. Louise Susan Kate Cecil Marie Archie Dorothy Prather Elizabeth Robedeux Jim Robedeux Horace Robedeux, Sr.

Zach Kenny Nina Negusse Julie Mattison Cameron Chernoff Julia Bellows Ian Wolff Natalie Kotin Natalie Solomon Adam Brooks Jonah Meadows

Teleplays Ludie Brooks This teleplay was first produced by Pamela Ilott on Lamp Unto My Feet, CBS, February 4, 1951. It was directed by Herbert Kenwith.

The Travelers This teleplay was first produced by Fred Coe on Studio One, CBS, April 22, 1953. It was directed by Delbert Mann.

The Trip to Bountiful This teleplay was first produced by Fred Coe at the Goodyear Television Playhouse on March 1, 1953. It was directed by Vincent J. Donehue, and the cast included Lillian Gish, Jo Van Fleet, and Eva Marie Saint.

Appendix

253

A Young Lady of Property This teleplay was originally produced by the Philco Television Playhouse on April 5, 1953. It was directed by Vincent J. Donehue and produced by Fred Coe. It starred Kim Stanley, and Joanne Woodward.

The Oil Well This teleplay was first produced by Fred Coe on Goodyear Television Playhouse, NBC, May 17, 1953. It was directed by Vincent J. Donehue. The cast included Dorothy Gish and E. G. Marshall.

The Rocking Chair This teleplay was first produced by NBC on May 24, 1953. The cast included Mildred Natwick and Ian Keith.

Expectant Relations This teleplay was first produced by the Goodyear Television Playhouse on June 21, 1953. It was directed by Vincent J. Donehue and produced by Fred Coe.

The Death of the Old Man This teleplay was first produced on First Person Playhouse, NBC, July 17, 1953. It was directed by Arthur Penn and produced by Fred Coe. The cast included Mildred Natwic and William Hanson.

The Tears of My Sister This full-length play was originally produced by Fred Coe on the Gulf Playhouse in New York City on August 14, 1953. It was directed by Arthur Penn. The cast included Kim Stanley, Edgar Stehi, Catherine Doucet, Lenka Petersen, Katherine Squire, and Frank Overton.

John Turner Davis This teleplay was originally produced by Fred Coe on the Philco Television Playhouse, NBC, on November 15, 1953. It was directed by Arthur Penn.

The Old Beginning This teleplay was first produced on Goodyear Television Playhouse, NBC, November 23, 1953. It was directed by Vincent J. Donehue.

254

Appendix

The Midnight Caller This teleplay was first produced by Fred Coe on the Philco Television Playhouse, NBC, December 13, 1953. It was directed by Vincent J. Donehue.

The Dancers This teleplay was first produced by the Philco Television Playhouse on March 7, 1954. It was directed by Vincent J. Donehue and produced by Fred Coe. The cast included Joanne Woodward and James Broderick.

The Shadow of Willie Greer This teleplay was first produced by Fred Coe on Philco Television Playhouse, NBC, May 30, 1954. It was directed by Vincent Donehue. The cast included Dorothy Gish, Pat Hingle, and Wright King.

Flight This teleplay was first produced by Fred Coe on Playwrights 56, NBC, on February 28, 1956. It was directed by Vincent J. Donehue and starred Kim Stanley.

Drug Store, Sunday Noon This teleplay is an adaptation of a Robert Hutchinson short story and was first produced on the Omnibus series, ABC, on December 16, 1956. It was directed by Andrew McCullough and starred Helen Hayes.

A Member of the Family This teleplay was originally produced on Studio One, CBS, March 25, 1957.

The Traveling Lady This teleplay was first produced by Herbert Brodkin on Studio One, CBS, April 22, 1957. It was directed by Robert Mulligan. The cast included Kim Stanley, Steven Hill, Robert Loggia, Wendy Hiller, and Mildred Dunnock.

The Shape of the River This teleplay was originally produced by Fred Coe on Playhouse 90, CBS, May 2, 1960. The cast included Franchot Tone and Lief Erickson.

Appendix

255

Old Man This teleplay, an adaptation of a William Faulkner story, was first produced by Fred Coe on Playhouse 90, CBS, November 20, 1960. It was directed by John Frankenheimer. The cast included Geraldine Page and Sterling Hayden.

The Night of the Storm This teleplay (also titled Roots in a Parched Ground) was first produced by David Susskind on the Du Pont Show of the Month, March 21, 1961. It was directed by Daniel Petrie. The cast included Julie Harris, E. G. Marshall, Mildred Dunnock, Mark Connelly, Fritz Weaver, and Jo Van Fleet.

Tomorrow This teleplay was originally presented on television’s Playhouse 90, CBS, on March 7, 1960, and then repeated on July 18, 1961. It was directed by Robert Mulligan and produced by Herbert Brodkin. The cast included Richard Boone and Kim Stanley.

The Gambling Heart This teleplay was first produced by David Susskind and Daniel Melnick on the Du Pont Show of the Week, NBC, February 23, 1964. It was directed by Paul Bogart. The cast included Tom Bosley and Estelle Parsons.

Barn Burning This teleplay was an adaptation of a William Faulkner story and was first produced by the American Short Story series on PBS, March 17, 1980. It was directed by Peter Werner. The cast included Tommy Lee Jones and Diane Kagan.

Displaced Person This teleplay is an adaptation of a Flannery O’Connor short story and was first produced for the American Short Story series, PBS, on April 14, 1980. It was directed by Glenn Jordan. The cast included Irene Worth and John Houseman.

Keeping On This teleplay was first directed and produced by Barbara Koople for the PBS American Playhouse in 1983.

256

Appendix

Habitation of Dragons This teleplay was first produced by Amblin-Steven Spielberg Productions, TNT, 1992. It was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. The cast included Brad Davis, Jean Stapleton, Frederic Forrest, Pat Hingle, Hallie Foote, and Horton Foote, Jr.

Alone This teleplay was first produced by Showtime Television in 1997. It was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and starred Hallie Foote, Frederick Forrest, Hume Cronyn, James Earl Jones, and Piper Laurie.

Screenplays To Kill a Mockingbird This adaptation of the Harper Lee novel was first produced by Alan J. Pakula in 1961. It was directed by Robert Mulligan.

Cast Atticus Finch Scout Finch Jem Finch Gill Harris Sheriff Tate Miss Maudie Mrs. Dubose Tom Robinson Calpurina Judge Taylor Mayella Ewell Bob Ewell Boo Radley Walter Cunningham Walter, Jr.

Gregory Peck Mary Bedham Phillip Alford John Megna Frank Overton Rosemary Murphy Ruth White Brock Peters Estelle Evans Paul Fix Collin Wilcox James Anderson Robert Duvall Graham Denton Steve Condit

Baby, the Rain Must Fall This screenplay, an adaptation of The Traveling Lady by Horton Foote, was first produced by Alan J. Pakula at Columbia Pictures in 1965. It was directed by Robert Mulligan.

Cast Henry Thomas Georgette Thomas

Steve McQueen Lee Remick

Appendix Slim Judge Ewing Mrs. Ewing Miss Clara Mr. Tillman Mrs. Tillman Catherine Margaret Rose Mrs. T. V. Smith Counterman Miss Kate

257

Don Murray Paul Fix Josephine Hutchinson Ruth White Charles Watts Carol Veazie Estelle Hemsley Kimberly Block Zamah Cunningham George Dunn Georgia Simmons

Storm Fear Based on the novel by Clinton Seeley, this screenplay was first directed and produced by Cornel Wilde at Theodora Productions in 1966.

Cast Charlie Elizabeth Fred Edna David Hank Benjie Doctor

Cornel Wilde Jean Wallace Dan Duryea Lee Grant David Stollery Dennis Weaver Steven Hill Keith Britton

Tomorrow This adaptation of a William Faulkner story was first produced by Paul Roebling and Gilbert Pearlman at Filmgroup in 1972. It was directed by Joseph Anthony.

Cast Jackson Fentry Sarah Eubanks Mrs. Hulie Isham Russell Lawyer Papa Fentry H. T. Bookwright Preacher Whitehead Boy

Robert Duvall Olga Bellin Sudie Bond Richard McConnell Peter Masterson William Hawley Jeff Williams James Franks Johnny Mask

258

Appendix

Tender Mercies This screenplay was first produced produced by Antron Media-EMI in 1982 and was the American entry in the Cannes Film Festival in 1983. It was directed by Bruce Beresford.

Cast Mac Sledge Rosa Lee Dixie Sue Anne Harry Sonny Lewis Menefee Robert Dennis Henry Jake Reverend Hotchkiss Walter LaRue Reporter

Robert Duvall Tess Harper Betty Buckley Ellen Barkin Wilford Brimley Allan Hubbard Michael Crabtree Lenny Von Dohlen James Aaron Rick Murray Norman Bennett Harlan Jordan Andrew Scott Hollon Paul Gleason

1918 This screenplay was first produced by Lewis Allen, Peter Newman, and Lillian Foote with Guadalupe Entertainment and Cinecom in 1985. It was directed by Ken Harrison.

Cast Brother Horace Robedeux Elizabeth Robedeux Mrs. Vaughn Mr. Vaughn Bessie Sam Mr. Thatcher Jessie Stanley Bill Mrs. Gregory Mrs. Cunningham Ruth Amos Gladys Maud

Matthew Broderick William Converse-Roberts Hallie Foote Rochelle Oliver Michael Higgins Jeannie McCarthy Bill McGhee L. T. Felty Horton Foote, Jr. Tom Murrel Phillip Smith Norma Allen Margaret Spaulding Carol Goodheart Buffy Carol

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The Trip to Bountiful This screenplay was first produced by Sterling Van Wagenen at Island Pictures in 1985. It was directed by Peter Masterson.

Cast Mrs. Watts Ludie Watts Jessie Mae Sheriff Thelma Roy Bus Ticket Man Rosella Train Ticket Agent Billy Davis Young Carrie Watts Young Ludie Watts Blonde on Bus Stationmaster Gerard

Geraldine Page John Heard Carlin Glynn Richard Bradford Rebecca DeMornay Kevin Cooney Norman Bennett Mary Kay Mars Kirk Sisco David Tanner Frances Peterson Dean de Wulf Alison Marich Gil Glasgow

Courtship This film was first produced by Lillian V. Foote and Marcus Viscidi at Indian Falls in 1986. It was directed by Howard Cummings.

Cast Elizabeth Vaughn Laura Vaughn Mrs. Vaughn Mr. Vaughn Horace Robedeux Brother Vaughn

Hallie Foote Amanda Plummer Rochelle Oliver Michael Higgins William Converse-Roberts Matthew Broderick

Valentine’s Day This film was first produced by Lillian V. Foote and Calvin Skaggs in 1986. It was directed by Ken Harrison.

Cast Brother Vaughn Horace Robedeux Elizabeth Robedeux Mr. Vaughn

Matthew Broderick William Converse-Roberts Hallie Foote Michael Higgins

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Appendix Bobby Pate Bessie George Tyler Aunt Charity Mrs. Vaughn Miss Ruth Steve Tyler Sheriff Old Black Man Dr. Goodhue Young Black Man Baptist Preacher Sam Ned

Richard Jenkins Jeanne McCarthy Steven Hill Irma Hall Rochelle Oliver Carol Goodheart Horton Foote, Jr. Tim Green Oskar Kelly Peyton Park Artist Thornton Jack Gould Bill McGhee Ed Holmes

Convicts This screenplay was first produced by Jonatha Krane and Sterling van Wagenen at MCEG-Sterling in 1990. It was directed by Peter Masterson.

Cast Soll Gautier Horace Robedeux Ben Johnson Jackson Martha Johnson Asa Billy Leroy

Robert Duvall Lukas Haas James Earl Jones Mel Winkler Starletta DuPois Carlin Glynn Gary Swanson Calvin Levels Walter Breux, Jr. John “Spud” McConnell

Of Mice and Men This screenplay adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel was first produced by MGM in 1992. It was directed by Gary Sinise.

Cast Lennie George Candy Curley Curley’s Wife Slim

John Malkovich Gary Sinise Ray Walston Casey Siemaszko Sherilyn Fenn John Terry

Appendix Carlson Whitt Crook Boss Jack Tom Mike

261

Richard Riehle Alexis Arquette Joe Morton Nobel Willingham Joe D’Angerio David Steen Tuck Milligan

Lily Dale This screenplay was first produced by Showtime Television in 1996. It was directed by Peter Masterson.

Cast Lily Dale Pete Davenport Corella Horace Robedeux Mrs. Coons Will Kidder Card Player Drummer Singers Uncle Albert Mrs. Westheimer Mr. Westheimer Voice of Old Horace

Mary Stuart Masterson Sam Shepard Stockard Channing Tim Guinee Jean Stapleton John Slattery Sean Hennington Chamblee Ferguson Jonathan Bren Brent Anderson Mark Walters Angee Hughes John Hussey Horton Foote

Bibliography of Published and Produced Works (1939–2003)

The following list contains only produced or published plays, teleplays, screenplays, and books by Horton Foote. For a more complete list of works by Foote, see Gerald C. Wood, Horton Foote and the Theater of Intimacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

The Actor. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2002. Alone. Original teleplay for Showtime Television, 1997. Arrival and Departure. “Curtain raiser” for HB Playwrights Foundation production of The Road to the Graveyard, 1980. Baby, the Rain Must Fall. Film adaptation of The Traveling Lady produced by Columbia Pictures, 1965. Barn Burning. Adaptation of William Faulkner story for American Short Story series on PBS, March 17, 1980. Beginnings: A Memoir. New York: Scribner Press, 2001. Blind Date. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1986. Originally produced with The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees at the Loft Studio, Los Angeles, in 1982. First New York production at HB Playwrights Foundation, New York, in 1985; produced by the Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York, 1986. The Chase. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1952. First produced and directed by José Ferrer at the Playhouse Theatre, New York, 1952. The Chase [a novel]. New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc., 1956. The Carpetbagger’s Children. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2002. Premiered at the Alley Theatre, Houston, Texas, and then at Hartford Stage, Hartford, Connecticut, in 2001. Later produced by the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and by the Lincoln Theatre Center, New York, 2002. The Carpetbagger’s Children and The Actor. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2003. A Coffin in Egypt. Originally produced in 1980 at HB Playwrights Foundation, New York, as In a Coffin in Egypt. Produced under current title at Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, New York, 1998. Convicts. Film version of play produced by MCEG-Sterling, 1990. Courtship. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1984.

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Bibliography

Cousins. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1989. Cousins and The Death of Papa: Two Plays from The Orphans’ Home Cycle. Introduction by Samuel G. Freedman. New York: Grove Press, 1989. Daisy Lee. Dance-play choreographed and danced by Valerie Bettis in New York, 1944. The Dancers. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1956. The Day Emily Married. First produced at Silver Spring Stage, Silver Spring, Maryland, 1997. The Dearest of Friends. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1982. The Death of Papa. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1989. The Death of the Old Man. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1956. Displaced Person. Adaptation of Flannery O’Connor story for American Short Story series for PBS, April 14, 1980. Dividing the Estate. First produced at McCarter Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey, March 28, 1989. Drug Store, Sunday Noon. Adaptation of Robert Hutchinson story for Omnibus, ABC, December 16, 1956. Emily. Kansas City Review, XV (Summer 1949), 263–66. Expectant Relations. Teleplay aired on NBC’s Philco Television Playhouse, June 21, 1953. Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood. New York: Scribner Press, 1999. Flight. Television Plays for Writers. Edited by Abraham Burack. Boston: The Writer, 1957. Four Plays from The Orphans’ Home Cycle. Introduction by Horton Foote. New York: Grove Press, 1988 [Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, The Widow Claire]. The Gambling Heart. First aired on DuPont Show of the Week, NBC, February 23, 1964. Getting Frankie Married—and Afterwards. First produced by South Coast Repertory Company, Los Angeles, California, 2002. Gone with the Wind. Musical adaptation of novel by Margaret Mitchell performed at Drury Lane Theatre, London, 1972-73. Goodbye to Richmond. Performed at the Neighborhood Playhouse, New York, 1944. The Habitation of Dragons. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1993. Teleplay Harrison, Texas: Eight Television Plays. Preface by Horton Foote. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956 [A Young Lady of Property, John Turner Davis, The Tears of My Sister, The Death of the Old Man, Expectant Relations, The Midnight Caller, The Dancers, The Trip to Bountiful]. Play was first produced at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre, September 20, 1988. Teleplay aired on TNT in 1992. Homecoming. First produced in Washington, DC in 1945. Horton Foote: Collected Plays. Introduction by Robert Ellermann. Lyme, N. H.: Smith and Kraus, 1993 [The Trip to Bountiful, The Chase, The Traveling Lady, The Roads to Home]. Horton Foote: Four New Plays. Introduction by Jerry Tallmer. Newbury, VT: Smith and Kraus, 1993 [The Habitation of Dragons, Night Seasons, Dividing the Estate, Talking Pictures].

Bibliography

265

Horton Foote: “Getting Frankie Married—and Afterwards” and Other Plays. Introduction by James Houghton, Lyme, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 1998 [The Day Emily Married, Tomorrow, A Coffin in Egypt, Laura Dennis, Vernon Early, Getting Frankie Married—and Afterwards]. Horton Foote: Three Plays. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1962 [Old Man, Tomorrow, Roots in a Parched Ground]. Horton Foote’s The Shape of the River: The Lost Teleplay about Mark Twain. History and analysis by David Dawidziak. New York: Applause Books, 2003. Horton Foote’s Three Trips to Bountiful. Edited by Barbara Moore and David G. Yellin. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1993. John Turner Davis. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1956. Keeping On. Teleplay aired on American Playhouse, PBS, 1983. The Land of the Astronauts. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1989. First produced by Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York, 1988. The Last of the Thorntons. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000; New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2001. First produced by Signature Theatre Company, New York, 2000. Laura Dennis. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1996. Lily Dale. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1987. The Lonely. Play with dance choreographed by Martha Graham at Neighborhood Playhouse, 1944. Ludie Brooks. Teleplay aired on Lamp Unto My Feet, CBS, February 4, 1951. The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1989. A Member of the Family. Teleplay aired on Studio One, CBS, March 25, 1957. The Midnight Caller. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1959. Miss Lou. Produced at Neighborhood Playhouse, 1944. The Night of the Storm. Teleplay aired on DuPont Show of the Month, NBC, March 21, 1961. Also called Roots in a Parched Ground. Night Seasons. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1996. First produced at HB Playwrights Foundation, 1977. Produced by American Stage Company, Teaneck, New Jersey, 1993 and by Signature Theatre Company, 1994. A Nightingale. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1982. First produced as part of The Roads to Home by HB Playwrights Foundation, March 25, 1982. 1918. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1987. Of Mice and Men. Film adaptation of John Steinbeck novel produced by MGM, 1992. The Oil Well. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1956. The Old Beginning. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1956. The Old Friends. First produced at HB Playwrights Foundation, 1982. Old Man. Adaptation of William Faulkner story produced on Playhouse 90, CBS, November 20, 1958. Revised version aired on Hallmark Playhouse, Februrary 9, 1997. Old Man and Tomorrow. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1963. The One-Armed Man. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1998. Published in the collection The Tears of My Sister, The Prisoner’s Song, The One-Armed Man, and The Land of the Astronauts.

266

Bibliography

Only the Heart. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1944. On Valentine’s Day. Film version of Valentine’s Day produced by Lillian V. Foote and Calvin Skaggs, 1986. The Orphans’ Home Cycle. New York: Grove Press, 1989. Out of My House. Four one-act plays Night after Night, Celebration, The Girls, Behold a Cry produced by the American Actors Company, at the Provincetown Playhouse, New York, 1942. The Prisoner’s Song. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1986. The Road to the Graveyard. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1988. The Roads to Home. Teleplay aired on U.S. Steel Hour, ABC, April 26, 1955. The Roads to Home. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1982. Trilogy of one-act plays, A Nightingale, The Dearest of Friends, and Spring Dance. The Rocking Chair. Teleplay aired on The Doctor series, NBC, May 24, 1953. Roots in a Parched Ground. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1962. Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, The Widow Claire: The First Four Plays of The Orphans’ Home Cycle. Introduction by Horton Foote. New York: Grove Press, 1988. Roundabout. Ballet with Jerome Robbins, produced in Broadway musical Two for the Show, 1953. Selected One-Act Plays of Horton Foote. Edited by Gerald C. Wood. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989 [The Old Beginning, A Young Lady of Property, The Oil Well, The Death of the Old Man, The Tears of My Sister, John Turner Davis, The Midnight Caller, The Dancers, The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees, The Roads to Home (A Nightingale, The Dearest of Friends, and Spring Dance), Blind Date, The Prisoner’s Song, The One-Armed Man, The Road to the Graveyard, The Land of the Astronauts]. The Shadow of Willie Greer. Teleplay aired on The Philco Television Playhouse, NBC, May 30, 1954. The Shape of the River. Teleplay aired on Playhouse 90, CBS, May 2, 1960. Spring Dance. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1982. First produced as part of The Roads to Home by HB Playwrights Foundation, 1982. Storm Fear. Adaptation of Clinton Seeley novel produced for Theodora Productions, United Artists, 1956. The Story of a Marriage. Five part television series based on films Courtship, On Valentine’s Day, and 1918, aired on American Playhouse, PBS, April 1987. Talking Pictures. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1996. Tender Mercies. Original screenplay produced by Antron Media-EMI, 1982. The Tears of My Sister. Teleplay aired on First Person Playhouse, NBC, August 14, 1953. The Tears of My Sister, Prisoner’s Song, The One-Armed Man, and The Land of the Astronauts. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1993. Three Screenplays: To Kill a Mockingbird, Tender Mercies, and The Trip to Bountiful. Foreward by Horton Foote. New York: Grove Press, 1989. To Kill a Mockingbird [screenplay]. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1964. Film adaptation of Harper Lee novel produced by Universal Pictures, 1963.

Bibliography

267

Tomorrow. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1963. Teleplay based on William Faulkner story aired on Playhouse 90, CBS, March 7, 1960. Stage version of teleplay produced by HB Playwrights Foundation, 1968. Film version of stage play produced by Film-Group, 1972. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Edited by David G. Yellin and Marie Connors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. The Travelers. Teleplay first aired on Goodyear Theatre, NBC, April 27, 1952. Later telecast on Philco Television Playhouse, March 7, 1954. The Traveling Lady. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1955. The Trip to Bountiful. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1954. First aired on Goodyear Television Playhouse, NBC, March 1, 1953. The 50th anniversary production by Hartford Stage and Alley Theatre, 2003, was directed by Michael Wilson and starring Dee Maskee, Hallie Foote, and Devon Abner. Valentine’s Day. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1987. Vernon Early. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1998. The Widow Claire. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1987. A Young Lady of Property. Teleplay aired on The Philco Television Playhouse, NBC, April 5, 1953. A Young Lady of Property [six short plays]. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1983 [A Young Lady of Property, The Dancers, The Oil Well, The Old Beginning, The Death of the Old Man, and John Turner Davis]. The Young Man from Atlanta. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1995; New York: Dutton Press, 1995. First produced by Signature Theatre Company, New York, January 27–February 26, 1995. Later produced at the Alley Theatre, 1996, the Goodman Theatre, 1997, and restaged for Broadway at Longacre Theatre, New York, March 1997.

Works Cited

Introduction Marian Burkhart’s quotations in this chapter can be found in “Horton Foote’s Many Roads Home: An American Playwright and His Characters” published in Commonweal, February 26, 1988. Jim Lehrer’s “America’s greatest playwright” quotation can be found in Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, and The Widow Claire: The First Four Plays of the Orphans’ Home Cycle by Horton Foote (New York: Grove Press, 1988). The quotations by Gerald C. Wood can be found in his introduction to Selected One-Act Plays of Horton Foote (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1988). Laurin Porter’s quotation can be found in Orphans’ Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). Robert Ellerman’s conclusion can be found in the introduction to Horton Foote: Collected Plays, vol. II by Horton Foote (New Hampshire: Smith and Kraus, 1996). Reynolds Price’s quotations in this chapter can be found in his introduction to Courtship, Valentine’s Day, 1918: Three Plays from the Orphans’ Home Cycle by Horton Foote (New York: Grove Press, 1987). Rebecca Briley’s quotation can be found in her article “Southern Accents,” published in Horton Foote: A Casebook, edited by Gerald C. Wood (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). Horton Foote’s quotation is from a personal interview with Marion Castleberry conducted on May 10, 2002. The play excerpt can be found in the acting edition of The Actor by Horton Foote (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2003). The quotation by William Humphrey can be found in The Ordways (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964).

Chapter 1 Randall Jarrell’s poem “Thinking of the Lost World” can be found in The Complete Poems by Randall Jarrell (New York: Noonday Press, 1996). The quotation from Andrius Jilinsky can be found in The Joy of Acting: A Primer for Actors, American University Studies, series XXVI, Theater Arts, vol. 4, by Andrius Jilinsky (New York: Peter Land Publishing, 1990). Mary Hunter’s quotation can be found in her introduction to Horton Foote’s play Only the Heart (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1944). Bruce Atkinson’s review of Texas Town was published in The New York Times.

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Works Cited

Chapter 2 Katherine Anne Porter’s poem “Old Mortality” and the excerpt from her story “Noon Wine” can be found in her book The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1975). The William Butler Yeats poem can be found in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1965). Robert Frost’s poem “Directive” can be found in The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, edited by Edward C. Lathem (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1965). The Pat and Keith Carter quotations were taken from The Blue Man by Keith Carter and Anne Wilkes Tucker (Houston: Rice University Press, 1990). The first quotation in “The Artist as Mythmaker” was taken from Gerald C. Wood’s introduction to Selected One-Act Plays of Horton Foote, edited by Gerald C. Wood (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989). Lillian Gish’s quotation comes from a personal correspondence. Dictionary definitions in this chapter were taken from Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster Inc., 1986). Both quotations by Neal Gabler were taken from his book An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown Books, 1990). All quotations in this chapter by Katherine Anne Porter can be found in The Collected Essays of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Delacorte Press, 1970). Marianne Moore’s poem “Nevertheless” can be found in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1967). Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” can be found in The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, edited by Edward C. Lathem (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1965). Elizabeth Bishop’s quotation can be found in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984). Willa Cather’s quotation can be found in Willa Cather on Writing by Willa Cather (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).

Chapter 3 Ezra Pound’s poem “Mr. Nixon” can be found in Selected Poems by Ezra Pound (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988). Katherine Porter’s first quotation comes from a personal correspondence. Pablo Neruda’s quotation is used on a playbill from Herbert Berghof ’s Playwrights Foundation. All Stark Young’s quotations in this chapter can be found in his book Immortal Shadows: A Book of Dramatic Criticism (Buckinghamshire: Octagon Books, 1973). William Blake’s poem “I Gave You the End of a Golden String” can be found in The Complete Poems and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdmau, Harold Bloom, and William Golding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Stark Young’s preface remarks can be found in the revised acting edition of the script Roots in a Parched Ground (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1998). Katherine Anne Porter’s poem “Old Mortality” can be found in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1965). Willa Cather’s quotation on writing can be found in Willa Cather on Writing by Willa Cather (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). Katherine Anne Porter’s comments on Willa Cather and her quotations in this chapter were all

Works Cited

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taken from The Collected Essays of Katherine Anne Porter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990). Randall Jarrell’s poem “Thinking of the Lost World” can be found in The Complete Poems by Randall Jarrell (New York: Noonday Press, 1996). Harold Clurman’s quotation about Clifford Odets can be found in the The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the ’30s by Harold Clurman and Stella Adler (Cambridge, Mass.: DeCapo Press, 1983). The quotation from Arthur Hopkins was taken from his book How’s Your Second Act? (New York: Philip Goodman Company, 1918). The quotation from Edward Albee’s letter can be found in Conversations with Edward Albee, edited by Philip C. Kolin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988). The letter from Elizabeth Bishop can be found in Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It by Brett C. Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Frank Rich’s comments on Horton Foote were excerpted from The New York Times.

Chapter 4 The quotation by Gore Vidal can be found in his book A Thirsty Evil (Freeport: Books for Library Press, 1976). The Albert Camus quotation on Faulkner can be found in Albert Camus: Lyrical and Critical Essays, edited by Philip Thody (New York: Random House, 1970). Stark Young’s quotation comes from the Introduction in the acting edition of The Traveling Lady by Horton Foote (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1998). William Faulkner’s short story “Tomorrow” can be found in the collection Knight’s Gambit, edited by Joseph Blotner (New York: Random House, 1949). Willa Cather’s quotation can be found in Willa Cather on Writing by Willa Cather (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). Willa Cather’s characterization of the fictitious Marian Forrester comes from her novel, A Lost Lady. Katherine Anne Porter’s quotation was taken from The Collected Essays of Katherine Anne Porter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990).

Chapter 5 All Stark Young’s quotations and reviews in this chapter can be found in his book Immortal Shadows: A Book of Dramatic Criticism (Buckinghamshire: Octagon Books, 1973), but the quotation about Pauline Lord’s performance in Ethan Frome first appeared in his review of the play published in the New Republic magazine. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” can be found in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984). The quotation from Andrius Jilinsky can be found in The Joy of Acting: A Primer for Actors, American University Studies, series XXVI, Theater Arts, vol. 4, by Andrius Jilinsky (New York: Peter Land Publishing, 1990). Harold Clurman’s quotation about the Group Theater can be found in his book The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the ’30s by Harold Clurman and Stella Adler (Cambridge, Mass.: DeCapo Press, 1983). The Strasberg quotation can be found in his book Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio: Tape Recorded Sessions, edited by Robert H. Hethmon (New York: Theatre Communications group, 1991). Harold Clurman’s quotations about the Method and the young playwrights can be found in his book Lies Like Truth: Theatre

272

Works Cited

Reviews and Essays (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1958). Robert Brustein’s quotation is excerpted from a once ongoing debate with Frank Rich printed in The New York Times. Eileen Blumenthal’s quotations in this chapter on Joseph Chaikin can be found in her book Joseph Chaikin (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1991). All Wesker quotations are from articles he wrote in the London Times. Herbert Berghof ’s quotation spoken before the Austrian Academy of Arts was taken from the author’s personal copy of the talk. Mel Gussow’s quotation is from a personal conversation.

Index

Abbey Theatre, see theaters Abner, Devon, 119, 153 Academy Award, 1, 10, 12, 151, 171 Actors’ Equity, 44, 172 Actors Studio, 218, 219, 220 Actors Theatre, see theaters Addy, Wesley, 114 Adler, Luther, 207 Adler, Stella, 207, 209, 216 Albee, Edward, 102, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152, 153, 223, 230 Zoo Story, 102 Alcott, Chauncey, 20 Alger, Horatio, 80 Alice in Wonderland, 36 Allen, Lewis, 176 Alley Theatre, see theaters Allgood, Sara, 207 Altman, Robert, 13 America Hurrah, 148 American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1 American Academy of Dramatic Arts, 209 American Actors Company, 3, 6, 7, 45, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 68, 93, 94, 103, 137, 141, 142, 143, 169, 170, 211 American Conservatory Theatre, see theaters American Legend, 46, 51, 52, 53, 170, 211 American National Theatre and Academy, 103 American Short Story Series, 118, 167, 183 American Theater Wing, 106, 216–17 Ames, Winthrop, 39, 206 Amos n’ Andy, 28 Anderson, Judith, 40, 55, 207, 216 Anderson, Maxwell, 38, 137, 138, 140, 207, 208 The Eve of St. Mark, 140 High Tor, 43, 207 The Star Wagon, 43, 207 Winterset, 43, 45, 140, 207 Anderson, Sherwood, 85

Angelo, My Love, 174 Anouilh, Jean, 57 Anthony, Joseph, 38, 55, 194 Arena Theater, see theaters Aristotle, 109, 180 Art Theater, see theaters Dude Arthur Players, 89, 107 Arthur, Mickey, 89 Arthur, Robert Alan, 220 Astaire, Fred, 231 Atkinson, Brooks, 51, 52, 53, 93, 138, 151, 170 Auden, W. H., 150 Austrian Academy of Arts, 229 Ayckbourn, Alan, 146, 150 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 140 Goldberg Variations, 140 Badham, Mary, 10 Balieff, Nikita, 41, 209 Chauve Souries, 41, 209 Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, The, 177 Bankhead, Tallulah, 207 Barkin, Ellen, 12 Barry, Philip, 29, 207 The Animal Kingdom, 29 Barrymore, Ethel, 207, 216 Barrymore, John, 35 Barthelmess, Richard, 28 Bashee, Em Jo, 104 Basserman, Albert, 208 Baylor University, 15 BBC, 85 Beck, Julian, 225, 227 Beck’s Living Theatre, 228 Beckett, Samuel, 86, 108, 114, 148, 150, 225, 230, 231, 233 Krapp’s Last Tape, 230 Waiting for Godot, 114, 148 Beethoven, 147 Behrman, S. N., 137, 138, 208, 222

273

274 Bel Geddes, Norman, 44 Belasco, David, 39, 143, 206 Belasco, see theaters Bellin, Olga, 12, 114, 194 Ben Greet Players, 90 Bentley, Eric, 147 Beresford, Bruce, 74, 174 Berger, Bessie, 139 Berghof, Herbert, 12, 113–15, 119, 130, 149, 172, 173, 184, 193, 217, 228, 229, 230 HB Playwrights Foundation, 12, 104, 113, 114, 115, 119, 129, 132, 172, 174, 217, 229, 230 Bergner, Elisabeth, 208 Bernhardt, Sarah, 218 Bernstein, Leonard, 99 Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, The, 175 Bettis, Valerie, 6, 7, 8, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 111, 142, 143, 145, 157, 171, 216 Bijou, see theaters Biltmore Theater, see theaters Bishop, Elizabeth, 87, 91, 95, 150, 180, 197, 204 “The Moose”, 91 “One Art”, 204 “Robinson Caruso”, 197 Blackmur, R. P., 183, 197 Blackmur, Sidney, 215 Blake, William, 116 Bloomer Girl, 98 Bloomgarden, Kermit, 171, 216 Blossom Time, 99 Blumenthal, Eileen, 224, 227, 228 Directors in Perspective: Joseph Chaikin, Exploring from the Boundaries of Theatre, 224 Boleslavsky, Richard, 42, 209 Acting: The First Six Lessons, 209 Bonnie and Clyde, 75 Booth, Edwin, 35, 205, 206 Booth, Junius, 218 Booth, Shirley, 215 Borden, Lizzie, 54 Brady, William, 39, 143 Brando, Marlon, 219 Breaker Morant, 174 Brecht, Bertolt, 108, 147, 148, 150, 208, 214, 225, 231

Index Galileo, 147 Man Is Man, 225 The Threepenny Opera, 147 Briley, Rebecca, 10 Brimley, Wilford, 12 Brinnin, John, 54 “The Desperate Heart”, 53–54 Broadway, 7, 8, 9, 13, 36, 38, 40, 44, 45, 52, 55, 56, 57, 59, 79, 97, 98, 99, 102, 104, 105, 108, 111, 112, 114, 136, 142, 143, 145, 148, 149, 151, 169, 170, 171, 172, 181, 206, 208, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, 219, 220, 221, 223, 225, 226, 230 Broderick, James, 119 Broderick, Matthew, 119, 120 Brodkin, Herbert, 167, 185, 192 Brothers Karamazov, The, 34 Brothers Shubert, 52 Broun, Heywood, 221 Brown, Gilmor, 34, 205 Brown, John, 41 Brown, Kenneth, 225 The Brig, 225 Browning, Robert, 35 “Last Duchess”, 35 Brustein, Robert, 223 Buckley, Betty, 12 Burkhart, Marian, 5 Burstyn, Ellen, 218 Burz, Christina, 153 Caffe Cino, 225 Cage, John, 54, 87 Cahill, Lily, 207 Calaway, Jerry, 175 Caldwell, Erskine, 181 Campbell, Joseph, 82, 83 Camus, Albert, 57, 168 Canby, Vincent, 114, 179 The Old Flag, 114 Candide, 24 Caney Creek, 19, 21, 62 Capote, Truman, 183 The Grass Harp, 183 Capra, Frank, 81 Dodsworth, 81 It Happened One Night, 81 Meet John Doe, 81

Index Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 81 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 81 You Can’t Take It With You, 81 Carolina Playmakers, 138 Carroll, Paul Vincent, 45, 104, 170 The Coggerers, 45, 104 Carter, Keith, 75, 76, 78 Cather, Willa, 24, 85, 90, 94, 106, 132, 195–201 A Lost Lady, 195, 197, 198, 200 Death Comes to the Archbishop, 195 My Mortal Enemy, 195 Obscure Destinies, 195 Oh! Pioneers, 196 Sapphira and the Slave Girl, 195 Shadow on the Rocks, 195 CBS, 158, 159, 167 Hallmark Hall of Fame, 13 Cézanne, 229 Chaikin, Joseph, 227, 228 Terminal, 227 Chaplin, Charlie, 181 Chautauqua, 215 Chayefsky, Paddy, 9, 145, 220 In the Middle of the Night, 220 Chekhov, Michael, 41, 42 Chekhov, Anton, 4, 36, 42, 58, 137, 138, 142, 146, 147, 150, 171, 208, 209, 222, 227, 231 The Seagull, 41, 43, 208, 227 The Three Sisters, 207, 208, 218 Cherokee County, 76 Cherokee Nights, 43 Choate, Edward, 52 Cino, Joe, 225 Circle in the Square, 120, 221 Circle Repertory Company, 36, 107, 226 Civic Repertory Theatre, see theaters Claire, Ina, 207, 216 Clinton, President Bill, 1 Clurman, Harold, 138, 209, 212, 219, 220, 223, 226 Lies Like Truth, 220 Coates, Carolyn, 119 Cobb, Lee J., 34 Cocteau, Jean, 225 Coe, Fred, 8, 72, 103, 110, 145, 156, 157, 158, 171, 219, 220, 222 Cohn, John, 174

275

Coleman, Robert, 7, 46, 170, 137 Collins, Russell, 43, 207 Colorado Boulevard, 33 Colorado River, 48, 62 Columbo, Russ, 28 Come of Age, 43 Comédie Française, 232 Concert Varieties, 99 Congreve, William, 108 Conkle, E. P., 46, 68, 70, 137, 170, 211 Connection, The, 148, 225 Corn is Green, The, 207 Cornell, Katharine, 207, 208, 215, 216 Cort Theater, see theaters Cotrell, Richard, 119 Coward, Noël, 90 Private Lives, 90 Cowl, Jane, 207, 215, 216 Cowley, Malcolm, 85, 157 Portable Faulkner, 157 Craig, Gordon, 231 Crane, Hart, 138 Crawford, Cheryl, 217, 222 Critics Circle Award, 107 Crosby, Bing, 28 Crothers, Rachel, 138, 208 Crouse, Lindsay, 173 Crouse, Russel, 138, 208 Cunningham, Merce, 54, 87 D’Usseau, Amaud, 140 Dance Observer, 7 Dark of the Moon, 98 Davenport, Peter, 152 Daykarhanova, Tamara, 6, 42, 43, 44, 45, 93, 209, 210, 211 Daykarhanova’s School for the Stage, 93, 137, 169, 209 Dean, James, 218 deconstructionists, 223 DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, 3 DeLiagre, Alfred, 39 DeMille, Agnes, 6, 7, 45, 46, 51, 53, 58, 68, 93, 94, 97, 99, 110, 137, 170, 180, 211 DeNiro, Robert 172 Dennis, Sandy, 114, 196, 218, 230 Dennis Shawn Group, 87

276

Index

Depression, the, 2, 22, 29, 30, 33, 36, 51, 64, 81, 90, 107, 137, 139, 147, 208, 211, 214 DeYoung, Gypsy, 119 Dial, John, 76 Dickens, Charles, 34, 90 David Copperfield, 24 The Cricket on the Hearth, 41 Dickinson College, 196 Dickinson, Emily, 56 Dobie, J. Frank, 68, 82 Donehue, Vincent, 8, 58, 171, 220 Douglas, Thornton, 193, 194 Dowling, Eddie, 56 Drabble, Margaret, 232 Drag, 28 Dramatist Play Service, 120 Dramatists Guild, 226 DuArt Film Lab, 177 Dubinsky Brothers, 89 Dudley, Jane, 216 Duncan, Isadore, 233 Dunham, Katherine, 45, 88, 99 Tropical Revue, 99 Dunnock, Mildred, 46, 56, 116, 218 DuPont Show of the Month, 116 Duse, Eleanora, 43, 146, 218, 233 Duvall, Robert, 6, 10, 12, 72, 103, 113–14, 117, 118, 120, 172, 173, 174, 185, 192, 194, 195, 230 Easy Aces, 45 Egri, Lagos, 141 The Art of Dramatic Writing, 141 El Norte, 177 Eliot, T. S., 80, 87, 142, 144, 180, 205 Four Quartets, 142 Prufrock, 87 The Waste Land, 80, 87 Ellermann, Robert, 5 EMI, 174, 175 Emmett, Robert, 104 Emmy Award, 1, 13 Empire, see theaters Ensemble Studio Theatre, see theaters Ensemble Studio Theatre One-Act Marathon, 104 Epic Theater, see theaters Eubanks, Sarah, 189, 192, 194

Evans, Walker, 78 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 78 Experimental Theatre, see theaters Ezra Pound, 87, 103, 105, 108, 144, 205, 229 Fang, Mei Lang, 146 Farrell, James T., 45 Faulkner, William, 4, 10, 11, 12, 56, 68, 71, 87, 145, 157, 158, 160, 167, 168, 172, 178, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 189, 191, 192, 193, 196, 199 Absalom, Absalom!, 167 A Requiem for a Nun, 168 As I Lay Dying, 145, 157 Barn Burning, 11, 167, 168, 183, 196 Go Down, Moses, 157 The Hamlet, 157 Knight’s Gambit, 167, 185 Light in August, 167 Old Man, 10, 13, 158, 159, 160, 167, 168, 183, 191, 196 The Sound and the Fury, 157 The Unvanquished, 167 The Wild Palms, 167 Federal Theater Project, 211, 224 Federal Theater, see theaters Ferber, Edna, 82, 208 Feury, Peggy, 118, 119, 120, 167 Fitzgerald, Barry, 207 Flannigan, Hallie, 211 Flash of Green, A, 177 Flats, the, 18 Flaubert, Gustave, 85, 200 Madame Bovary, 85 Flavin, Martin, 34 Foote, Hallie, 118, 119, 120, 136, 152 Foote, Horton—books Beginnings, 2, 3 Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood, 2, 3 Foote, Horton—plays and films The Actor, 2, 14 Alone, 1, 13 Baby, the Rain Must Fall, 10 Blind Date, 11, 230 The Carpetbagger’s Children, 2, 14 The Chase, 1, 9, 10, 58, 74, 101, 102, 171, 230

Index A Coffin in Egypt, 230 Courtship, 11, 12, 13, 118, 119, 120, 124, 125, 132, 173, 177, 178, 180, 230 Cousins, 11, 120, 124, 130, 133, 152 Convicts, 11, 13, 85, 117, 120, 123, 129 The Dancers, 9 Daisy Lee, 7, 56, 111, 143 The Death of Papa, 11, 120, 121, 122, 126, 130, 133 The Death of the Old Man, 9 Dividing the Estate, 1 Drugstore, 9 Expectant Relations, 9 Flight, 9, 124 The Gambling Heart, 9 Getting Frankie Married-and Afterwards, 2 A Golden String, 116 Goodbye to Richmond, 8 The Habitation of Dragons, 1, 12, 13, 171 Homecoming, 8 Hurry Sundown, 10 In a Coffin in Egypt, 11, 12, 172 In My Beginning, 57 John Turner Davis, 9 The Last of the Thorntons, 2, 14 Laura Dennis, 1, 13, 152 Lily Dale, 11, 36, 73, 120, 123, 130, 152 The Lonely, 8, 54 The Man Who Climbed the Pecan Trees, 11 A Member of the Family, 9 The Midnight Caller, 9, 103 The Night of the Storm, 9, 116 Night Seasons, 1, 11, 12, 13, 152, 172, 173, 230 1918, 13, 75, 117, 118, 119, 120, 126, 129, 130, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 180, 184, 230 The Oil Well, 8–9 The Old Beginning, 8 The Old Friends, 11, 12, 230 Only the Heart, 55 On Valentine’s Day, 73, 75, 177, 178, 180, 184 The One-Armed Man, 11, 230 The Orphans’ Home Cycle, 1, 11, 12, 49, 69, 72, 112, 115, 120, 121, 149, 152, 172, 173, 184, 230 Out of My House, 7, 52, 102 People in the Show, 8

277

Pilgrims, 11, 172 The Prisoner’s Song, 11, 230 The Return, 8 The Road to the Graveyard, 1 The Roads to Home, 1, 9, 11 Roots in a Parched Ground, 11, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 129, 149, 152 The Shadow of Willie Greer, 9 The Stalking Moon, 10 The Story of a Marriage, 13, 119, 178 Sunday Noon, 9 Talking Pictures, 1, 13, 28 The Tax Assessor, 15 The Tears of My Sister, 9 Tender Mercies, 1, 12, 47, 72, 74, 119, 151, 173, 174, 175, 182, 184 Texas Town, 7, 51, 52, 53, 68, 93, 138, 141, 151, 170 Themes and Variations, 8 To Kill a Mockingbird, 1, 10, 73, 151, 171, 175, 182, 183, 196, Tomorrow, 1, 10, 12, 66, 84, 114, 117, 167, 172, 173, 183, 185, 186, 190, 191, 192, 196, 230 The Travelers, 8 The Traveling Lady, 1, 9, 109, 171, 180, 230 The Trip to Bountiful, 1, 2, 8, 9, 12, 72, 74, 79, 95, 121, 151, 171, 177, 184, 220, 222 Valentine’s Day, 11, 12, 13, 118, 119, 120, 122, 126, 130, 132, 173, 184, 230 Vernon Early, 1 Wharton Dance, 1, 6, 7, 46, 68, 102, 133, 137, 170 The Widow Claire, 11, 13, 15, 118, 120, 124, 130 A Young Lady of Property, 8, 12, 28, 117, 118, 173, 230 The Young Man from Atlanta, 1, 13, 28, 151, 152 Foote, Lillian, 8, 12, 13, 57, 58 Ford Foundation, 148 Ford Maddox Ford, 108 Ford, John, 109 Forrest, see theaters Forsht, John, 35, 37, 39 Forsyth, Henderson, 116 The Forsythe Saga, 24

278

Index

Foster, Frances, 153 14th Street Theater, see theaters 46th Street Theater, see theaters Fox Pictures studio, 39 Frankenheimer, John, 158, 166, 167 Freedman’s Town, 63 Freil, Brian, 232 Frohman, Charles, 39, 143, 206 Frome, Ethan, 40, 55, 203 Frost, Robert, 75, 88 “Directive”, 75 “The Road Not Taken”, 88 Gabler, Neal, 80, 81 An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, 80 Gahagan, Helen, 38 Gaige, Crosby, 39, 207 Galsworthy, John, 90, 106 Gazzara, Ben, 218 Geisnar, Maxwell, 200 The Last of the Provincials, 200 Gelber, Jack, 225 Gellen, Audrey, 116 Geller, Robert, 118 Genet, Jean, 225 Gershwin, George, 99 Gielgud, John, 207 Giraudoux, Jean, 104 Gish, Dorothy, 207 Gish, Lillian, 43, 72, 79, 95, 151, 181, 184, 207 Glynn, Carlin, 13, 153 Godspell, 226 Golden, John, 39, 207 Goodheart, Carol, 152 Goodman Theatre, see theaters Goodman, Paul, 225 Gordon, Max, 39, 171, 207, 211, 226 Gordon, Ruth, 40, 207 Gow, James, 140 Graham, Martha, 6, 7, 8, 53, 54, 56, 58, 87, 94, 103, 111, 130, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 233 Every Soul Is a Circus, 56 Letter to the World, 56 Grand Canyon Suite, The, 147 Grandfather Brooks, 24, 25, 30, 32, 35, 47, 49

Grant, Lee, 218 Green, Luther, 55, 142 Green, Paul, 7, 38, 46, 68, 70, 137, 170, 211 The House of Connelly, 211–12 No ’Count Boy, 38, 44, 46 Greenstreet, Sydney, 207 Greenwich Village, 57, 224, 225 Griffith, D. W., 181 Grogg, Samuel, 177 Group Theater, see theaters Guadalupe Entertainment, 176 Guare, John, 226 Gussow, Mel, 232 Guthrie Theatre, see theaters Guthrie, Tyrone, 233 Habimah Theater, see theaters Hagen, Uta, 114, 173, 196, 217 Hair, 226 Hall, Adrian, 118 Hall, James, 31 Hamilton, Edith, 46 Hampden, Walter, 34, 207 Harding, Ann, 29 Hargrove, Marion, 181 Harper, Tess, 12 Harriet, 207 Harris, Jed, 207 Harris, Julie, 116, 118, 217, 218, 220 Harris, Samuel, 39, 143, 206, 207, 226 Harrison, Ken, 119, 176, 178 Hannah and the Dog Ghost, 176 Harrison, Texas, 5, 9, 72, 74, 100–102, 133, 136, 170 Hart, Moss, 208 Hart, Richard, 98 Hartford Stage, see theaters Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 179, 200 Hayes, Helen, 207, 208, 215–16 Helen Hayes Theatre, see theaters HBO Television, 85, 175 Heartland, 177 Heine, Heinrich, 54 Helburn, Theresa, 138, 142 Hellman, Lillian, 10, 40, 74, 138, 139, 140, 207 The Children’s Hour, 40, 207 The Little Foxes, 139, 207 Watch on the Rhine, 139, 140

Index Hemingway, Ernest, 168 A Farewell to Arm, 168 Herald Tribune, The, 147 Hill, Steven, 217, 218 Hines, Granger, 119 Hinze’s Barbeque Restaurant, 65 Hobel, Philip, 119, 174, 175 Holiday, Billie, 84 Hollywood, 10, 12, 13, 28, 31, 34, 41, 42, 54, 55, 80, 81, 86, 87, 116, 144, 151, 158, 171, 172, 173, 178, 181, 182, 216, 220, 224 Hollywood Reporter, 173 Holm, Hanya, 54, 211, 216 Holm, Celeste, 114, 173 Holtzman, Harry, 54, 231 Home Place Inn, 65 Homer, 180 Hopkins, Arthur, 39, 40, 140, 171, 206, 207 How’s Your Second Act?, 140 Horovitz, Israel, 104 Horst, Louis, 7, 54, 56, 94, 102, 143, 145 Horton Foote American Playwrights Festival, The, 15 Horton, Governor Albert Clinton, 15, 21, 92 Horton, Louisiana Texas Patience, 22, 24, 49 Houghton, James, 13, 152 Houseman, John, 211 Howard, Leslie, 29 Howard, Sidney, 34, 207, 208 Alien Corn, 34 Hubbard, Allan, 12 Hudson Theater, see theaters Hull, Henry, 207, 215 Humphrey, Doris, 7, 51, 53, 58, 141, 142, 143, 145, 211, 214, 216 Humphrey, William, 15 The Ordways, 15 Humphrey Weidman Studio Theater, see theaters Hunter, Mary, 6, 45, 46, 51, 54, 55, 57, 69, 170, 211 Huston, Angelica, 119 Huston, Walter, 43, 81, 207, 215 Ibsen, Henrik, 6, 36, 58, 93, 137, 138, 147, 150, 171, 205, 206, 207, 230, 231

279

A Doll’s House, 93, 137, 206 Ghosts, 137, 138, 207 Hedda Gabler, 6, 36, 93, 137, 205 The Master Builder, 36, 93, 137, 206 When We Dead Awaken, 230 Idiot’s Delight, 140 Inge, William, 107, 215, 216, 223, 226 Bus Stop, 223 Come Back, Little Sheba, 215, 223 The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, 223 Picnic, 223 Interplay, 99 Ionesco, Eugène, 57, 225 Irving, Henry, 35 Isherwood, Christopher, 178, 181 Ives, Charles, 87, 93, 112, 129 Jackson, Anne, 173, 218 Jalna Stories, The, 24 Jarmusch, Jim, 179 Jarrell, Randall, 31, 86, 136, 180 “The Lost World”, 86 “Thinking of the Lost World”, 32, 86, 136 Jarry, Alfred, 225 Jenkins, George, 98 Jenkins, Richard, 118 Jewett, Sarah Ann, 198 Jilinsky, Andrius, 6, 41–44, 107, 137, 209, 211 Jolson, Al, 27, 181 Jones, Margo, 216 Jones, Seth, 153 Jory, Victor, 34 Joyce, James, 69, 80, 86 Ulysses, 80 Judson Memorial Church, 225 Kaufman, George, 55, 143, 208 Kaye, Nora, 111 Kazan, Elia, 144, 145, 171, 215, 217, 218, 222 Keats, John, 150 Kean, Edmund, 218 Kelly, George, 34, 142, 205, 207 The Torchbearers, 34, 205 Kemble, John Philip, 218 Kerr, Walter, 105, 146, 147, 156 How Not to Write a Play, 146

280 Kincheloe, William, 61 Kingsley, Sidney, 137, 138, 140 Men in White, 140 King-Smith School, 8, 58, 171 Kirby, Bruno, 119 Kozlenko, William, 104 Kreymbourg, Alfred, 104 Kroll, Lucy, 173, 220 Kronenberger, Louis, 98 Kushner, Tony, 148 La Rochefoucauld, François, 208 LaMama Experimental Theater Club, 225, 226 Langner, Lawrence, 138, 142 Larkin, Philip, 180 Larrimore, Francine, 207 Lattimore, Earl, 207 Laughton, Charles, 147 Law, Lindsay, 119 Lawrence, D. H., 138 Leadbelly, 84, 129 Lee, Harper, 1, 10, 73, 182, 196 Lee, Lila, 28 LeGallienne, Eva, 6, 35, 36, 37, 93, 137, 205, 206, 222, 233 At 33, 36, 206 Lenya, Lotte, 44, 45, 208 Levesque, Irma, 119 Lewis, Michael, 153 Lewis, Robert, 141, 216, 217 Lewis, Sinclair, 85 Lillie, Beatrice, 145 Lincoln Center, 2 Linden, Eric, 52 Lindsay, Howard, 57, 143, 144, 138, 148, 208, 224, 226 Life with Father, 54, 142, 143, 224 Linney, Romulus, 150, 152 Literary Guild, 24, 90, 195 Little Jack Little, 28 Little Theater, see theaters Litz, Katherine, 53 Living Newspaper, The, 211 Living Theater, see theaters Lloyd, Phyllida, 231 Loft Theatre, see theaters London Theater, see theaters

Index London Times, 226 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 58 Lord, Pauline, 40, 42, 55, 142, 146, 203, 204, 207, 210, 211, 222, 233 Louise, Anita, 52 Louisiana State University, 3 Lowell, Henry, 19 Lunts, the, 207, 208, 216 Lyceum, see theaters MacDougal Street, 38, 102 Majestic Theatre, see theaters Malden, Karl, 218 Malina, Judith, 225 Mamet, David, 104, 112, 146, 148, 150, 172, 180 Mancini, Marlene, 113 Manhattan Punch Line Theatre, see theaters Manhattan Theater Club, 230 Mann, Delbert, 174 Marlowe, Christopher, 105, 205 Marshal, E. G., 114, 116, 173 Martha’s Vineyard, 37, 38, 44 Martin Beck Theater, see theaters Mary of Scotland, 38 Maslow, Sophie, 216 Massey, Raymond, 40, 207 Masterson, Peter, 13, 74, 95, 152 Maverick Theater, see theaters Maxine Elliott Theater, see theaters McBird, 148 McCarthy, Mary, 145 McClintic, Guthrie, 39, 171, 207 McCullers, Carson, 67–68 McNally, Terrence, 140 Frankie and Johnnie in the Claire deLune, 140 McQueen, Steve, 218 Meisner, Sanford, 56, 103, 111, 216 Melville, Herman, 200 Mendelssohn, Elonora, 208 Menken, Helen, 207, 215 Meredith, Burgess, 43, 45, 207 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 56 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 146, 210, 231 Meyers, Ralph, 176 Michener, James, 82 Milhaud, Darius, 57

Index Miller, Arthur, 107, 140, 144, 145, 150, 215, 216, 221, 222, 223, 226, 234 All My Sons, 140, 144 Death of a Salesman, 140, 145, 215, 221 Miller, Betty, 118 Miller, Gilbert, 207, 211 Miller, Henry, 206 Miller, J. P., 220 Miller, Jonathan, 232 Milloy, Ross, 176 Miss Minerva and William Greenhill, 24 Moissi, Alexander, 35 Molière, 34, 35, 150 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 34 Molnar, Ferenc, 36 Liliom, 36, 37 The Swan, 36 Mondrian, Poet, 54, 231 Monotowese Playhouse, see theaters Moore, Jim, 76 A History of Dialville, 76 Moore, Marianne, 11, 86, 87, 120, 144, 150, 180, 218 “In Distrust of Merits”, 11, 120 “Nevertheless”, 86 Morganthau, Rita, 144 Morosco Theater, see theaters Moscow Art Theater, see theaters Mosel, Tad, 9, 220 Muir, Edwin, 180 Muller, Kurt, 139 Mulligan, Robert, 10, 73, 174, 175, 182, 192 Music Box Theater, see theaters Nash, N. Richard, 9, 220 The Rainmaker, 220 National Medal of Arts, 1, 2 National Theater, see theaters, Natural Bridge of Virginia, 20 Naya, Ramon, 211 Nazi Germany, 147 Nazis, 149, 208 Nazism, 139 Nazimova, Alla, 137, 138, 207 NBC, 8, 45, 171 Philco-Goodyear Playhouse, 8 Television Playhouse, 8, 171

281

Neal, Patricia, 219 Neighborhood Playhouse, see theaters Neruda, Pablo, 115 “The New Dramatists”, 224 New Republic, The, 146 New York (City), 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 17, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 65, 67, 68, 78, 84, 86, 88, 93, 94, 102, 105, 107, 113, 114, 117, 119, 136, 137, 138, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 181, 184, 194, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 215, 217, 219, 220, 222, 223, 224, 226, 228, 234 New York Mirror, The, 7, 46, 102, 104, 137, 138, 142, 145, 151, 170, 223, 232 New York theater, 52, 70, 141, 143, 145, 203–15, 222, 230 New York Times, The, 52, 93, 151, 156, 223, 232 New York World’s Fair, 46 Newman, Paul, 218, 220 Newman, Peter, 176 Nigli, Josephina, 45, 104, 170, 211 The Red Velvet Goat, 45, 104 Nugent, Elliott, 214 O’Brian, Sharon, 196 O’Casey, Sean, 150, 207, 233 Juno and the Paycock, 207, 233 The Plow and the Stars, 233 The Shadow of a Gunman, 233 O’Connor, Flannery, 4, 5, 11, 67, 71, 80, 87, 180, 183, 186, 196, 199 The Displaced Person, 11, 183, 196 O’Daniels, W. Lee (Pappy), 51 O’Neill, Eugene, 43, 102, 108, 140, 147, 149, 215, 221, 222 Ah Wilderness, 43 The Emperor Jones, 108 The Great God Brown, 140 The Iceman Cometh, 108, 221 Long Day’s Journey into Night, 108, 140 Moon for the Misbegotten, 108 Mourning Becomes Electra, 149 O’Toole, Annette, 119

282 Odets, Clifford, 51, 102, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 171, 207, 208, 215, 221 Awake and Sing, 139, 140, 207 Paradise Lost, 207 Waiting for Lefty, 102, 208 Odets, Florence, 51, 140 Oedipus, 80, 149 Oedipal myth, 80 Oklahoma, 97 Old Life, 140 Old Maid, The, 40, 207 Old Wives Tale, The, 24 Oliver, Rochelle, 119 On the Town, 99 One-Act Marathon, 104 One-Act Play Magazine, 104 One-Act Repertory Company, 170 One-Act Repertory Theater, see theaters Open Theater, see theaters Osborne, John, 226 The Entertainer, 226 Look Back in Anger, 226 Luther, A Patriot for Me, 226 Ouspenskaya, Maria, 41, 42, 45, 209 Ozu, Yasujiro¯, 180 Autumn Afternoon, 180 Equinox Flower, 180 Floating Weeds, 180 Late Spring, 180 Tokyo Story, 180 Page, Geraldine, 6, 12, 73, 95, 118, 167, 196, 218, 220, 221, 234 Pakula, Alan, 73, 182, 183, 197 Palace Theater, see theaters Papp, Joseph, 222 Park Avenue, 54 Partisan Review, 57, 144, 145 Pasadena Playhouse, 6, 14, 30, 34, 37, 38, 41, 68, 90, 93, 107, 137, 172, 183, 193, 196, 205, 206, 209, 230 Pavlova, Anna, 233 Paz, Octavio, 197 PBS, 11, 177, 178 PBS’s American Playhouse, 119, 177, 178 Pearlman, Gilbert, 12, 194 Peck, Gregory, 6, 10

Index Pemberton, Brock, 39, 207 Penn, Arthur, 174, 220 Percy, Walker, 71, 180 Peter Pan, 36 Peterson, Linka, 118 Petrie, Daniel, 116, 174 Petrified Forest, The, 140 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 119 Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, 103, 110, 145, 157, 219, 220 Pinchot, Rosamond, 41, 42, 44, 93, 169, 208, 210 Pinter, Harold, 146, 148, 180 Piscator, Erwin and Maria, 208 Pittsburgh Public Theater, see theaters Playwrights ’56, 157 Playwrights Company, 208, 216 Playwrights Horizon, 230 Plummer, Amanda, 119 Plymouth Theater, see theaters Porter, Katherine Anne, 5, 8, 58, 68, 69, 71, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84, 86, 94, 95, 108, 121, 130, 135, 142, 178, 180, 200 “Noon Wine”, 69, 77, 78, 82 “Old Mortality”, 82, 83, 135 “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”, 82 Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 8, 58, 130 Porter, Laurin, 5 Orphans’ Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote, 5 Pound, Ezra, 80, 180 Cantos, 80, 87, 205 “Mr. Nixon”, 103, 105 Price, Reynolds, 6, 11, 71, 87, 180 Primus, Pearl, 7, 54, 111, 216 Pritchett, James, 153 Production Incorporated, 8 Provincetown Players, 224 Provincetown Playhouse, see theaters, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 1, 13, 107, 151 Queen Theatre, see theaters Quintero, José, 221 Racine, Jean, 150, 225 Radio City Music Hall, 231 Railroads on Parade, 46 Ray, Johnny, 72

Index Reconstruction, 134 Redford, Robert, 184 Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, 184 Reed, Florence, 90, 207 Reinhardt, Max, 41, 44, 169, 172, 208 The Miracle, 41, 169, 208 Rice Players, 37 Rice Playhouse, 206 Rice, Elmer, 137, 138, 140, 207, 208 Judgment Day, 140 Rich, Frank, 151, 223 Richmond Road, 18, 65 Riggs, Lynn, 34, 43, 45, 46, 68, 70, 137, 138, 149, 170, 211 Green Grow the Lilacs, 45, 97 Road Side, 34 Sumpin’ Like Wings, 46 Ringwold, Molly, 120 Robbins, Jerome, 53, 99, 100, 111 Roberts, William Converse, 119 Robinson Crusoe, 24 Roebling, Paul, 12, 114, 194 Roman comedy, 34, 35 Romeo and Juliet, 208 Roosevelt, President Theodore, 29 Roseberry, Willie, 20 Ross, David, 222 Rover Boys, 24 Royal National Theatre, see theaters, Royal Shakespeare Company, 147 Saint, Eva Marie, 118, 218 Salvini, Tommaso, 43 Samuel Beckett Theatre, see theaters San Quentin, 50 Sand, Carl, 53 Santa Fe Railroad, 65 Saroyan, William, 141, 142, 144, 215, 221 My Heart’s in the Highlands, 141 The Time of Your Life, 141–42 Sartre, Jean Paul, 57, 58, 144, 171, 216 No Exit, 144, 216 The Respectful Prostitute, 216 Schlesinger, Reva, 194 School for the Stage, 6, 41 Scott, Janet, 37 Screen Laurel Award from the Writers Guild of America, 1

283

Second Studio, 41, 42 Segall, Bernardo, 7, 54, 56, 58, 59 Serlin, Oscar, 39, 54 Seven Oaks, 20 Sewanee Writers’ Conference, 151 Seymour, Jane, 207 Shakespeare, William, 34, 36, 58, 73, 90, 105, 137, 147, 149, 150, 218 Hamlet, 35, 207 Henry IV, 149 Shakespeare Festival Theater, 222 Shakespeare’s Globe, 73 Shakuntula, 34 Shanghai Gesture, The, 90 Shaw, David, 220 Shaw, George Bernard, 35, 208, 222 Candida, 42, 43, 207, 208 The Doctor’s Dilemma, 208 Pygmalion, 35 Shaw, Irwin, 221 Bury the Dead, 221 Siege, 221 Shearer, Sibyl, 53, 54 Shepard, Samuel, 81, 82, 104, 148, 150, 180, 226, 228 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 108 Sherwood, Robert, 137, 138, 140, 208 Show Boat, 151 Shubert Theater, see theaters Shubert family, 39, 211, 215 Shumlin, Herman, 39, 140, 171, 216 Signature Theatre, see theaters Simon, Neil, 150 Singing Fool, The, 27, 181 60 Minutes, 223 Smith, Bessie, 88 Smith, Kate, 28 Smooth Talk, 177 Soloviova, Vera, 6, 41, 42, 43, 107, 137, 209 songs “After the Ball”, 20 “Ain’t No Cane on de Brazos”, 129 “Beautiful Texas”, 51 “Golden Slippers”, 129 “Goodnight Mr. Elephant”, 20 “Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven”, 20 “I Am Lonely”, 100

284

Index

songs (continued ) “Lily Dale”, 130 “Lorena”, 128 “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon”, 20 “Rock Island Line”, 129, 130 “Sonny Boy”, 27 “Strange Fruit”, 84 “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie”, 130 “Weary River”, 28 Sophocles, 149, 150 Oedipus Rex, 147 South Coast Repertory Theatre, see theaters Speigel, Samuel, 74 Spencer, Elizabeth, 67 St. Denis, Ruth, 87 St. Marks in the Bowery, 225 Stanislavsky, Constantine, 6, 41, 42, 43, 137, 209, 210, 211, 231 An Actor Prepares, 209 Stanislavsky Method, 43, 217, 219, 225 Stanley, Kim, 6, 72, 110, 118, 189, 218, 220, 233 Stanwick, Barbara, 197 Stapleton, Jean, 152 Stapleton, Maureen, 218 State of the Union, 224 State Theater, see theaters Steiger, Rod, 220 Stein, Gertrude, 58, 87 Steinbeck, John, 196 Of Mice and Men, 196 Stevens, Wallace, 150 Stewart, Ellen, 225 Stoltz, Eric, 119 Strait, George, 47 Strasberg, Paula, 51 Strasberg, Lee, 45, 51, 209, 217, 218, 219 Stratford-upon-Avon, 34 Strindberg, August, 105, 138, 150, 225 Student Prince, The, 99 Sullavan, Margaret, 214 Sundgaard, Arnold, 170, 211 Susskind, David, 116, 220 Swing Your Lady, 44 Swiss Family Robinson, The, 24 Synge, John Millington, 34, 38, 69, 150 The Playboy of the Western World, 34, 38

Tamiris, 54 Tate, Alan, 71 Taylor, Laurette, 42, 144, 207, 208, 211, 222 Taylor, Peter, 67, 68, 71, 180 Temple University, 79 Testament, 177 Texas A&M University, 126 Thackery, William, 90 Tharpe, Twyla, 111 The Actors Studio, 217, 218 Theater Collective, 148 Theater Guild, 37, 39, 45, 107, 138, 141, 142, 207, 211, 215, 216, 222 Theater Union, 107, 148, 206 theaters Abbey Theatre, 207, 233 Actors Theatre, 12 Alley Theatre, 2, 12, 216, 230 Ambassador, 207 American Conservatory Theatre, 2 ANTA Experimental Theatre, 103 Arena Theater, 216 Art Theater, 41, 210 Belasco, 39 Bijou, 207, 230 Biltmore Theater, 6, 35 Civic Repertory Theatre, 137, 206, 224 Cort, 206 Empire, 39, 40, 206, 230 Ensemble Studio, 12, 104 Epic, 147 Federal Theater, 214 Forrest, 205, 207, 230 46th Street Theater, 207 14th Street Theater, 208 Goodman Theatre, 13 Group Theatre, 42, 45, 55, 107, 138, 140, 211, 214, 224 Guthrie Theatre, 2 Habimah Theater, 34 Hartford Stage, 2 Helen Hayes Theater, 115, 230 Hudson Theater, 45, 104, 206, 230 Humphrey Weidman Studio Theater, 7, 52, 141 Little Theater, 27, 39, 47, 107, 169, 207 Living Theatre, 148, 225, 226

Index Loft Theatre, 12 London Theatre, 234 Lyceum, 39 Main Stage, 33, 34 Majestic Theatre, 28 Manhattan Punch Line Theatre, 12, 104 Martin Beck Theater, 206 Maverick Theater, 45, 181 Maxine Elliott Theater, 40, 206, 222, 230 Montowese Playhouse, 52 Morosco, 206, 230 Moscow Art Theater, 41, 43, 209 Music Box, 206 National Theatre, 147, 148, 207, 231 Neighborhood Playhouse, 53, 55, 56, 57, 94, 102, 103, 111, 144, 172, 224 One-Act Repertory Theater, 45, 104 Open Theater, 148, 227, 228 Padua Playhouse, 34 Palace Theater, 90 Pittsburgh Public Theater, 79 Play Box, 34 Plymouth Theater, 40 Provincetown Playhouse, 38, 55, 102 Queen Theatre, 27, 181 Recital Hall Theater, 33, 34, 37 Royal National Theatre, 2 Samuel Beckett Theatre, 73 Shubert Theater, 52, 98, 206 Signature Theatre, 2, 13, 152 South Coast Repertory Theatre, 2 State Theater, 41 Trinity Repertory Theatre, 118 Theatre Guild, 138, 141, 142 Theatre Hall of Fame, 1 Therie, Jacques, 55 Times Square, 52 Tobacco Road, 98, 207 Tolstoy, Leo, 200 Tom Sawyer, 19, 24 Tom Swift and the Motor Boys, 24 Tomlin, Lily, 119 Tomorrow the World, 140 Tone, Franchot, 45, 207 Torn, Rip, 218 Tower of Babel, 80, 181 towns Art, 78

Bessmay, 78 Burr, 77 Call, 78 Circle Back, 78 Climax, 78 Columbus, 4 Corinth, 84 Cost, 78 Dialville, 76 Dime Box, 78 Ding Dong, 78 East Columbia, 21, 67, 77, 92 Egypt, 4, 77 Elysian Fields, 78 Ennis, 75 Fairy, 78 Galveston, 21, 26, 75, 78, 127 Glen Flora, 77 Grit, 78 Hoard, 78 Hungerford, 77, 100 Iago, 77 Industry, 78 Kendleton, 100 Lane City, 77 Looneyville, 76, 78 Matagorda, 21, 22, 62 Missouri City, 100 Mount Calm, 78 Noonday, 78 Omen, 78 Palmer, 75 Peach Point, 21 Pluck, 78 Poetry, 78 Preston, 77 Richmond, 4 Rosebud, 78 Stafford, 100 Sublime, 78 Sugarland, 100 Sweet Home, 78 Uncertain, 78 Venus, 75 Waxahachie, 12, 75, 176 West Columbia, 77, 92 Townsend, Blanche, 35, 37, 38 Treasure Island, 24

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286 Trinity Repertory Theatre, see theaters Trojan Women, The, 45 Tudor, Anthony, 53, 58 Turgenev, Ivan, 200 Twain, Mark, 71, 90, 106 Huckleberry Finn, 24, 183, 197 Twentieth Century Fox, 173 Tynan, Kenneth, 233 Ulric, Lenore, 207 Universal Studios, 74, 175 University of Texas, 50, 92 Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 42 Vallee, Rudy, 28 Van Druten, John, 207 Van Fleet, Jo, 116, 219 Vance, Nina, 216 Vassiliev, Sergei, 41 Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel, 195 Vidal, Gore, 9, 168, 220 Visit to a Small Planet, 220 Viet Rock, 148 Voice of the Turtle, The, 214 Waite, Ralph, 13, 152, 153 Walker, June, 40, 45, 56 Wallach, Eli, 173, 219 Warner Brothers, 44, 181 Warner, Deborah, 231 Warren, Robert Penn, 71, 180 Washington, DC, 8, 55, 58, 94, 145, 171, 176, 214, 216, 222 Washington Square Players, 224 Watson, Douglas, 119, 194 Weaver, Fritz, 113, 116, 117, 173 Webster, Margaret, 222 Weidman, Charles, 51, 141, 211, 216 Weil, Beulah, 51 Weill, Kurt, 44, 45, 208 Welles, Orson, 211 Welty, Eudora, 68, 71, 87, 180 Werfel, Franz, 44, 137 The Eternal Road, 44, 45 Wesker, Arnold, 149, 226, 231 Working Class, 149 West 55th Street, 39 West 59th Street, 41

Index West 69th Street, 46, 169 West Texas, 24, 31, 74 Westley, Helen, 45 Wharton, 1, 3, 4, 5, 13, 14, 17, 21, 29, 41, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 61, 62, 64, 67, 77, 82, 83, 88, 90, 92, 94, 100, 115, 123, 136, 170, 181, 195 Wharton County, 77 Wharton Opera House, 20 Wharton, Edith, 114, 203 The House of Mirth, 114 White Man’s Union, 101 Wilde, Oscar, 34, 37 The Importance of Being Earnest, 37 Salome, 34, 44 The Skin of Our Teeth, 215 Wilder, Thornton, 7, 46, 68, 137, 170, 211, 215 William Inge Lifetime Achievement Award, 1 Williams, Rhys, 207 Williams, Tennessee, 4, 6, 56, 71, 102, 107, 138, 142, 145, 149, 150, 170, 171, 178, 180, 215, 216, 221, 223, 226, 230, 234 “The Gentleman Caller”, 56 The Glass Menagerie, 55, 56, 144, 215, 221, 222, 230 A Streetcar Named Desire, 145, 215, 221 Summer and Smoke, 221 You Touched Me, 56, 170 Williams, William Carlos, 116, 144, 225 “Love itself a flower with roots in a parched ground”, 116 Wilson, August, 150, 223 Wilson, Lanford, 104, 148, 150, 180, 226 Wilson, Robert, 73, 230, 231 Winde, Beatrice, 153 Winesburg, Ohio, 85 Winter Project, 227 Wolfe, Mary Hunter, 137, 138 Wood, Audrey, 138 Wood, Gerald, 5, 79 Woodson, William, 207 Woodward, Joanne, 118, 218, 220 Woolf, Virginia, 90

Index World War I, 41, 129, 133 World War II, 47, 54, 99, 147, 157, 211 Wright, Richard, 88 Writer’s Guild Award, 10 Yale, 70 Yankee soldiers, 84 Yankowitz, Susan, 227 Yeats, W. B., 69, 75, 108, 109, 150, 180

287

YMCA 92nd Street, 213 Pasadena, 32, 33 YMHA—New York, 143 Young, Stark, 71, 109, 116, 117, 121, 145, 146, 149, 150, 180, 203, 207, 208, 211, 213, 220, 222, 228 Immortal Shadows, 203 Zemach, Benjamin, 44