A Playwright’s Life in 8 Moves

If you grow up in Beaver, Utah,
you have no experience
with art museums,
Broadway plays,
or classical music.
In fact, you don’t even know anyone
who became an artist,
a writer,
or a musician.
You do, however, know
a couple of thousand people
whose stories you understand
in exquisite detail.
These are the stories
that hang in your mind
and walk with you through your life,
your very different life.

If you grow up in Beaver, Utah,
you don’t decide to become a writer,
you simply know that’s what you will be,
later on,
once you know how.
As a child,
you are not a voracious reader
nor a prolific writer.
You do not perform backyard shows
or put on plays in your garage.
You are, instead, an avid listener.
From your childhood rocking chair,
you pretend you’re busy
with childhood things,
while all the time,
you’re listening to the grown-ups
talk to each other.
The comfort, the ease, the quiet,
the give
and the take.
A childhood of rocking,
a lifetime of stories.

If you grow up in Beaver, Utah,
you attend college 60 miles away
at the College of Southern Utah.
Just better that way,
better for you.
And besides, you have heard about
the charismatic new drama teacher there,
Fred Adams, who becomes
the founder of Utah Shakespeare Festival,
where you are an actor
for the first three seasons,
performing a half dozen major roles,
more than should be allowed
of anyone so young.
And yet, a wonderful education
for one who believes
she will be a writer.

If you grow up in Beaver, Utah,
you graduate fromUtah State University,
just like your father
and your mother.
You major in English,
because  it’s marketable.
You study dramatic literature,
and you even write a  play
that Professor Morgan
thinks is good, damn good.
While you’re at it,
you get an M.A. in English,
instead of a teaching certificate
because you can teach in a college
with that degree.
But now you must do something somewhere.
New York sounds the best
when you say it out loud.
And so you swallow
ten gallons of fear
and move there.

If you grow up in Beaver, Utah,
and you are now  in New York City,
you must pretend
you know where you’re going,
and where you are
when you get there.
You live in a single room,
at a women’s residence,
Roberts House.
You get a job in a publishing company,
Funk and Wagnalls,
where you make so little money,
you must pay your rent by the week,
because you cannot amass enough
to pay by the month.

You  pretend
to be writing or auditioning;
in fact, you do neither.
Instead, you go to the theatre.
Standing room is 75 cents
for sold-out shows
–how many times did you see Barbra Streisand?–
and all other plays are free
if you attend only the second half.
On weekends, you walk in the Village,
because there are  trees there,
and you miss them.

On weekdays you are frightened
by women in furs
with make-up and painted nails,
by a store called Lord and Taylor.
and by a black woman,
your age,
an elevator operator
in your building.
You do not speak to anyone
who scares you.
For the first three days each week,
you can afford  a coffee
at Chock Full o’ Nuts
and maybe a lunch
at the automat
that dispenses food
as if you were a lab rat.

And yet the feeling,
in that city,
the glorious feeling ,
of being alone,
entirely anonymous,
in a street crowded
with bumping people.
Then you meet a beautiful Greek man
between the lions at the public library.
You exchange phone numbers
and a week later his wife
threatens to sue you
for alienation of affection.

If you grow up in Beaver, Utah,
and spend a year in New York City,
the next thing you do
is marry your old college friend,
and move to Davis, California,
where he is working on an MA in theatre,
and you teach English
at Sacramento City College.
Sounds lovely,
but hang on to your chair,
the 60s are blowing through.

The Summer of Love
is also  a summer of fear and loathing.
Friends are drafted,
including your husband.
And a guy you know
shoots off his finger
to avoid Viet Nam,
only to be imprisoned
for willfully destroying Army property.

Black people seething,
young people raging,
colleges closing,
cities collapsing.
And your heroes are all shot,
time after time, over and over.
From close up and far away,
in slow motion, and double speed.
The center cannot hold.
Then you fall in love with a woman.
The center does not hold.

You begin to write.
It is a refuge,
a place of quiet and calm
where the world settles down
and differences dissolve.
It’s also an answer
to your own recurring question,
“What the hell am I doing?”
And so what’s next?
A most improbable city.

In spite of ample evidence
that your marriage is over,
you move with your husband
to the Motor City,
he to do graduate work in theatre,
you to teach English,
both of you at
Wayne State University,
Detroit, Michigan,
a city of blood and blight
bludgeoned by riots
a year before.
A city that scares hell out of you
until you figure out how to survive,
stay alive,
even thrive–
you just fake it.

Fake it till you  make it,
or take it,
or break it,
just fake it.
Fake “I ain’t scared a you.”
Fake “I got a knife in my coat.”
Fake “You touch me, I kick you into nex’ week.”
And fake also “You sing the blues to me, man,
and I sing the blues to you.”
Top of your game,
peak of your powers,
teaching at Wayne,
maybe because, just maybe,
it matters.

Calling yourself a writer there,
claiming the title,
you study playwriting with E.M. Broner,
rent a space on Grand Circus Park,
create and perform your own work
with an actor-singer Mary Roberts.
Together you’re given the title
of Detroit’s most avant-garde.
On your own,
you write plays with a poetic edge:
Geneveve,
Down by the River,
and A Way Out of No Way.
You get a few readings
and small productions.

In your last year there,
you live rent-free in a mansion,
acting as its gardener and caretaker,
while you finish your PhD in theatre,
and pursue an intense job search,
promising if you fail,
to become either
a barber or
a mail carrier.

And then after 8 years in the city,
a city you now love
you land a job:
University of Notre Dame/Saint Mary’s College
Cooperative Department of Speech and Drama.

More than you could have hoped for,
an actual job,
promising to put
your mother’s Depression fears to rest,
a job that could last a lifetime.
But where are you?
Capital of Catholicism,
which Mormons called
“The great and abominable religion,”
and their children believed
that Catholics dipped babies in gold
to make angels for their churches.

You find, in fact, that you like these people.
The students are smart, disciplined, and eager,
the faculty, accepting and generous,
the nuns, great friends.
But the administration
is uncomfortable with you.
You‘re not what they want
their students to become.
single, divorced, and gay,
not their idea of a role model.

You are brave there, though,
taking chances,
directing good plays well.
You bring playwrights
like Marsha Norman and David Hare
to see your productions of their work
and speak to students.
Three of your plays are produced Off-Broadway,
Stray Dogs wins a major prize, publication,
and production at Arena Stage in DC,
Your work is  also produced
in Detroit, Los Angeles, Albany, and Hartford.

You are given residencies
at two artists’ colonies,
and a couple of development labs,
Shenandoah Playwrights Retreat
especially important in repeated visits.

Although you are granted tenure,
the administration begins to fear
you might stay forever.
And you fear the same thing.
That’s when Norman Lear calls.
His daughter has seen a reading
of Thursday’s Child with Kathy Bates
at Playwrights Horizons in New York.
You could make a sitcom writer!
And so after 12 years,
you pack your bag,
wave good-bye,
and move again.

In LA the weather smiles like a child,
and one must check the calendar
to know the season,
because weather is the same every day.
The people seem delighted
with themselves and you.
They even call you brilliant.
But Hollywood terrorizes
people from Beaver, Utah,
feeding, as it does,
on insecurity
and you know nothing about
what you’re supposed to be doing.
You understand little about television,
never watched it much.
You dislike sitcoms,
deplore the laugh tracks,
and disparage the life lesson
at the end of each episode.
You spend the better part of a year
in comedy development
at Columbia Pictures Television,
pitching projects
(not your own)
to the networks,
all the while terrorized,
frozen with fear.
You are an imposter,
and they are certain to find you out.

In June, they do.
You are fired,
or more politely,
you’re let go.
And where do you go?
Into an orbit of paralytic terror.
Overtaken by your parents’
Depression nightmares,
you become that woman
in a cardboard box,
jobless, nameless, homeless,
shitting in the street,
like an unclaimed dog.
You are sure you’ll never work again,
never write another word.
But then you win a big prize
for your play White Money,
which comes with production
at Salt Lake Acting Company.
You are saved!
You are a playwright.
And you know fuck all about that!
Your terror settles.
You land a playwriting residency at Ohio State,
a half dozen productions in LA,
and a strong relationship
with ASK Theatre Workshop,
which develops, produces and commissions
your work.

You also teach courses at UCLA
and serve as sabbatical replacement at UNLV.
You belong in the theatre
and to the theatre.

That welcome realization accompanies
the illness and death of your parents,
your mother of complications from Alzheimer’s,
and your father from prostate cancer.
You shuttle back and forth,
between Beaver and LA,
feeling you should do more
for such devoted  parents,
but fearing,
as you did as a child,
that you might be swallowed
by your mother,
just as she was swallowed
by her children,
her husband,
the 50s,
and small-town Utah.
She always struggled
to assert her intelligence,
while frustrated by the Church,
tormented by the Depression,
then twisted by the War.
No wonder she clung!

Your father, by contrast,
suffers quietly and gracefully.
He was always sure of where he was
and what he was doing there.
Beaver was his home,
his people among the original white settlers.
Standing firmly,
hands in his pockets,
eyeing the horizon,
he always spoke the truth.
Never the sharpest tool in the drawer,
he made up for it
with the grace of his temperament.

Within a month of your parents’ death,
you landed the job
they would have wanted for you:
Director, Graduate Playwriting Program,
University of Nevada Las Vegas.
And so after 5 years in La-La Land,
you pack up,
wave good-bye
and move again.

This is the land of “I will be rich tomorrow,”
all dreams accompanied
by the incessant rattle
of dropping coins,
wailing sirens,
and clanging bells,
announcing another winner.
All the while,
an urgent song in the background:
crying “Come on, Mama.
Mama, come on.”

This is a city oblivious to nature,
paved over and reconstituted
from fragments and figments
of other places, other times.
Nothing is real.

At the University,
you are part of a serious theatre department
with graduate programs
and professional ambitions.
Yet down the road 3 blocks
the biggest tits and ass extravaganza
on any stage anywhere.
Irony haunts your time there.

Your colleague is Davey Marlin-Jones,
one of the great theatre men.
Your students are smart and motivated.

All writers in the program
see several productions of their work,
many of them directed
by outside professionals.

The students  write well,
and you do too:
Two-Headed,
Last Lists of My Mad Mother,
The Lost Vegas Series,
Cheat,
and Playwriting; Brief and Brilliant.
Your work is produced in L.A., San Francisco,
Minneapolis, Chicago,
Roanoke and Salt Lake City.

You are also picked up by Dramatic Publishing.
Why then, after six years
in the best job you ever had,
would you leave?
Simple answer:
if you grew up in Beaver, Utah,
and you lived in New York,
northern California,
Detroit,
South Bend,
Los Angeles,
and Las Vegas,
you might go back home to Utah
if you get the chance.
And you get the chance.

Back home,
where the air is familiar,
the mountains reassuring.
Where the wind off the west desert
reminds you to listen
to the sound of your people–
slow, comforting, sure.
Your history in theirs,
their stories in yours.

Resident Playwright,
Salt Lake Acting Company,
your home theatre
in your home state.
A theatre you believe in,
a  theatre that believes in you.
You are a staff member
with a voice in all decisions,
no guarantee of production,
just a guarantee of a theatre community.
For a playwright,
life as it should be
and seldom is.

You write well
with development help
from an expert staff:
Dust Eaters,
WAIT!,
Billion Dollar Baby,
Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie,
She Was My Brother,
and The Harvey Girls
plus shorter pieces for
2 anthology productions.
SLAC also produces
3 other earlier plays
and is connected to
three major grants you receive.

In addition, you work is produced in
New York, DC, LA,
Detroit,  Cleveland,
Louisville, Tucson,
and Edinburgh, Scotland.
You receive five commissions
and significant development help
from Playwrights’ Center.

Your time at SLAC,
a rich and gratifying experience
that ends after 10 years
with a failing economy
and a change in leadership
when you and most of the staff
are tipped out
of the basket.

Happily, you work at other theatres
in the city,
Plan-B and Pygmalion,
both excellent companies,
committed to new work by local writers.
You continue to write
and write well:
Christmas with Misfits,
P.G. Anon,
Mockingbird,
Winter.
and Mother, Mother, the Many Mothers of Maude.
with productions of your work
in Chicago, DC, Berkeley, Kansas City, Milwaukee,
Morristown, NJ, Montclair, NJ,
London and Istanbul.

You are commissioned by Kennedy Center
to adapt a novel for young audiences.
Mockingbird wins two national prizes
and dozens of productions.
Winter, produced by SLAC,
receives a rolling world premiere
through NNPN.

A life-long member of the Dramatists Guild,
you serve as Regional Representative.
You are also honored  with membership in
the College of Fellows of the American Theatre
and the National Theatre Conference.

You are the lucky one.
to have spent your life in the theatre,
some experiences wildly wonderful,
others disappointing,
yet always the belief
in the possibility of greatness,
importance, meaning.
At the end of it,
you are grateful
for a life well lived
and work well loved.