Category Archives: Dramaturgy

The Man Behind “Death of a Salesman”, Arthur Miller

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American Playwright Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller, The Playwright

Arthur Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City, to his  Jewish parents, Isidore and Augusta Miller. Arthur lived a comfortable middle class life until age fourteen when the Great Depression struck and his family’s business failed. In high school,Arthur was more actively involved in football and other sports than in his studies. After several rejected applications, Miller was finally admitted to the University of Michigan in 1934, where he studied journalism, economics and history.  It was also in college that Miller discovered his love for play writing and in his junior year, he won $250 in a college play writing contest. Miller graduated from college in 1938 with a   degree in English. In 1940 Miller married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery.

 During World War II, Miller worked on ships in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and wrote plays for the Columbia Broadcasting System. In 1944, he received his first theatrical break when his play The Man Who Had All the Luck was staged on Broadway. Unfortunately it was not well received. At age 30, Miller  decided to give play writing one last try and diligently spent the next two years writing the play All My Sons, that was co-produced by stage and film director Elia Kazan, who helped him focus and polish the work. All My Sons enjoyed a profitable run of 328 performances and won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award and inspired Miller to carry on with his play writing. But it was with Death of a Salesman that Miller’s reputation as an outstanding play wright was solidified. With Death of a Salesman, Miller became famous. However despite his remarkable success, he  continued to focus his writing on the struggles of the common person—social, economic, political, and personal. In the 1940s and 1950s, the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States created a mood of fear and suspicion. In particular, political, social, and business leaders were increasingly concerned that  communism threatened the American “way of life.” 

Herbert Block, who signed his work “Herblock”, coined the term “McCarthyism” in this cartoon in The Washington Post

In 1950 Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), whose mission it was to uncover forces that would subvert this American way of life, started focusing on the intellectual and artisticcommunity in order to find potential communist influences. HUAC targeted both Miller and director Kazan. Citing artistic freedom as his rationale, he refused to cooperate with HUAC that he believed was censoring the critical voice of the American people. Miller was found guilty of contempt of Congress but this was later repealed on account that he had not been informed adequately of the risks involved in incurring contempt. Miller’s  response to the anti-Communist fear and hysteria was The Crucible, where he merged the terror tactics of McCarthyism with the Salem witch hunts of the 17th century.  The Crucible which premiered on Broadway in 1953, became Miller’s most frequently produced play, staged every week somewhere in the world for the past 40 years. It was dramatized on television and in 1996, he adapted the script to a screenplay and the movie was released with his son-in-law, academy award winning  actor, Daniel Day Lewis starring as John Proctor.

“I wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman’s way of mind. I wished to speak of the salesman most precisely as I felt about him, to give no part of that feeling away for the sake of any effect or any dramatic necessity.”

~Arthur Miller

 In 1956, Miller divorced his first wife Mary, and soon after married actress Marilyn Monroe. However this marriage was short-lived and Miller and Monroe divorced in 1961, a year before Monroe’s death due to drug overdose. Soon after his divorce, Miller met Inge Morath, a  Vienna-born photographer and they were married in February 1962. Miller and Morath spent 40 years together till her death in 2002. In the mid-60s, Miller focused on political activism, becoming the President of PEN, an international writer’s organizing of poets, playwrights, editors, essayists, and novelists. In 1968 he resumed play writing with The Price, a work about the two brothers who cannot overcome their anger with each other. The play enjoyed moderate success. In the 1970s, Miller wrote three plays: The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), TheAmerican Clock (1976), and The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977).

The productions of all three works were harshly criticized. During the 1980s,  Arthur Miller’s works experienced a worldwide revival. In 1983, Miller and his wife traveled to Beijing, China to see a production of Death of a Salesman.  Miller never quite enjoyed the success he had in the 40s and the 50s and his last few plays had very short runs on the stage. In his eighties, Miller kept writing social dramas, still driven by the desire to represent the wants, struggles, and frustration of common people. The characters in his plays act out human concerns that are universal. Miller called on his characters to take responsibility for their actions and act on the world that they live in; he rejected self-pity in his characters, no matter how dire their circumstance.

Arthur Miller passed away at the age of 89 on February 10, 2005, surrounded by his family. When he was  dying, he asked to be driven back from New York to New England, where he had written most of his plays. To mourn his death, lights were dimmed on Broadway. Source for this article: www.oldglobe.org

Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s production of Death of a Salesman will run April 26-May 12, 2013. To purchase tickets call (501) 378-0405 or visit www.therep.org

Article written by Werner Trieschmann

Treasure Island: More Than Just a “Boy’s Book”

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Robert Louis Stevenson

Although conceived with a juvenile audience in mind, Treasure Island was not truly a “boys’ book.”

Serious adult readers admired the work, including Stevenson’s friend, early modernist author and literary theorist Henry James, who declared that “Treasure Island will surely become—it must already have become and will remain—a classic.”

Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone was reported to have stayed up all night to finish it, prompting Stevenson, who was no fan of the politician, to comment that he “would do better to attend to the imperial affairs of England.”

Stevenson did not, of course, write the first book about pirates and buried treasure. His historical and fictional influences were numerous.

“I care not a jot.”

A major source of information (and disinformation) on the so-called “Golden Age of Piracy,” Captain Charles Johnson’s “General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates” appeared in 1724.

Stevenson acknowledged his literary debts to Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” for Silver’s parrot; Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” for the skeleton; Frederick Marryat’s “Masterman Ready” for the stockade; Charles Kingsley’s “At Last” for the ‘Dead Man’s Chest’; and Washington Irving’s “Tales of a Traveller” for the scenes of Billy Bones at the Admiral Benbow.

Regarding his borrowing from these “useful writers,” the author declared: “I care not a jot.” In Treasure Island, Stevenson was consciously creating something new from familiar material, and he transcended his sources and shattered stereotypes.

Discovering Gee’s Bend: A Place Within a Play

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Gee’s Bend, Alabama is located in Wilcox County and is surrounded on three sides by a dramatic U-turn in the Alabama River. The approximately 700 residents are almost all descendants of the slaves of the original Gee’s Bend plantation.

Boykin, also known as Gee’s Bend, is an African American majority community and census-designated place in a large bend of the Alabama River in Wilcox County, Alabama.

This geographic isolation and unusual stability of community created a unique enclave for the women’s art community: quilting. The history of Gee’s Bend is the story of a tiny place altered by large social changes occurring over the years.

Before the Civil War, Gee’s Bend was primarily a working cotton plantation, first controlled by slave owner Joseph Gee and then his nephews, who sold it to Mark Pettway. After the Civil War, the emancipated slaves took the last name of Pettway, and worked the same land as tenant farmers. In the 1930s the acreage was sold to the federal government, which in turn developed a program to enable them to purchase the land that they already cultivated.

Pettway plantation, April 1937. Photo by Arthur Rothstein.

The type of quilt making found in Gee’s Bend is of the African-American style. This style is considered unique among others found elsewhere in the United States. The most obvious reason for this is the overt African influence. The use of symbols, asymmetry, bright colors, and vertical piecing are techniques that hark back to African textile creations of years ago. Many of the symbols found in these quilts have also been traced back to religious symbols native to a multitude of African tribes. So although these quilts signify their personal pasts and hopes for a future, these women still respect the culture from which they originated.

Mary Lee Bendolph, one of the quilters who inspired the play Gee’s Bend. Photo credit internationalfolkart.org.

These quilts were not originally created as pieces of art—whether for wall hangings or theatrical inspiration. In fact, the quilts were made out of necessity. The very culture that these women were raised in taught them that everything had a use.

So when the nights became cold each winter, the women would scrounge what small scraps of fabric they could find and fashion a blanket to put on the beds of their children and themselves. The inspiration for this approach to construction came from the equally as innovative approach to housing insulation—using layers of paper found in newspapers or magazines.

These wonderful pieces of art were simply thought of as creative methods of keeping a family warm until 1966. It was then that these women realized that the magic and beauty of the quilts came more from what went into them rather than what came out.

Flying Geese variation, ca. 1935 by Annie E. Pettway.

It was a common practice in these small communities of quilt makers to “air out” their quilts every spring. For members of the community, this became a time to study other’s methods or designs so that they may have inspiration the next winter. However, in 1966, another set of eyes caught a glimpse of these soon to be masterpieces.

Gee’s Bend Quilt, April 2012, Gee’s Bend. Photo credit: “The Future of Gee’s Bend,” Deep South Magazine.

Father Francis Walter saw something more than function in these quilts. He saw a passion and a history unique to these people. Walter, a Civil Rights worker, proposed the idea of marketing and selling these quilts to stores in larger cities in the hopes that these women would soon become self-sufficient economically doing what they loved. Working in conjunction with many volunteers, he was able to get the quilts into the Smithsonian Institution. This exposed the work of these women to the world, but also inspired stores such as Sears, Bloomingdales, and Saks Fifth Ave. to sign contracts with them to manufacture and sell their designs.

In 2002, Houston’s noted Museum of Fine Arts held an exhibition of quilts created by over 30 residents of Alabama’s small community of Gee’s Bend. The exhibit, praised by The New York Times and others, brought world-wide attention to the otherwise hidden creative endeavors of the quilters of Gee’s Bend.

“The best of these designs, unusually minimalist and spare, are so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it’s hard to know how to begin to account for them. The results, not incidentally, turn out to be some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” - The New York Times

Art collector William Arnett, working on a history of African-American folk art in 1998, made the discovery when he came across a photograph of Annie Mae Young’s work-clothes quilt draped over a woodpile. He was so impressed by its originality, he set out to find it. Research lead Arnett and his son Matt to Young in Gee’s Bend and then they showed up at her door late one evening.

Young had burned some quilts the week before (smoke from burning cotton drives off mosquitoes), and at first she thought the quilt in the photograph had been among them. But the next day, she found it and offered it to Arnett for free. Arnett, however, insisted on writing her a check for a few thousand dollars for that quilt and several others. Soon the word spread through Gee’s Bend that there was a white man in town paying money for raggedy old quilts.

Work-Clothes Quilt ca. 2002 by Mary Lee Bendolph.

Arnett shared his discovery with Peter Marzio of the Museum of Fine Arts. The attention to the exhibition revived what had been a dying art in Gee’s Bend. In 2006, the Smithsonian magazine reported that some of the quilters, who had given in to age and arthritis, were back quilting again. And many of their children and grandchildren, some of whom had moved away from Gee’s Bend, had taken up quilting themselves.

Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective, Gee’s Bend. Photo credit: “The Future of Gee’s Bend,” Deep South Magazine.

With the help of Arnett and the Tinwood Alliance (a nonprofit organization that he and his four sons formed in 2002), fifty local women founded the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective in 2003 to market their quilts, some of which had sold for more than $20,000.

The play Gee’s Bend was commissioned by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s Southern Writers Project, where it received a staged reading in 2006 and premiered in January 2007. Even though the story is loosely based on the life of Mary Lee Bendolph, the play focuses on the community of Gee’s Bend as well. Like most artists, the women of Gee’s Bend looked to their surroundings to inspire their designs and were influenced by those around them.

Watch as Director Gilbert McCauley discusses discovering Gee’s Bend and the impact it has in telling this story. Woman on Pettway Plantation, Gees Bend, 1937. Photo by Arthur Rothstein.

“The story of Gee’s Bend is tied to Gee’s Bend only; it’s a special place filled with special people who may appear mundane on the surface, but beneath they are as textured as the very quilts they make,” says Rep Dramaturg Adewunmi Oke. “The costumes, the set and the props will reflect not only the people, but also the place of Gee’s Bend both literally and metaphorically.”

Watch as Dramaturg Adewunmi Oke discusses the lessons audiences will take away from this true story. Monica Parks as mother Alice, Nambi E. Kelley as Sadie and Shannon Lamb as sister Nella in Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s production of Gee’s Bend.

Gee’s Bend opens on The Rep stage January 25 and runs through February 10, 2013, supported and sponsored by The Design Group, Philander Smith College, Arora, Delta Airlines and the Little Rock Convention and Visitor’s Bureau.

The Rep’s production of Gee’s Bend is made possible in part by a grant from the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame Foundation, a component fund of the Arkansas Community Fund.

Gee’s Bend Weaves Stories Behind Quilts

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Monica Parks as Alice, Shannon Lamb as Nella and Nambi E. Kelley as Sadie in Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s production of Gee’s Bend. Photography by Cindy Momchilov, Camera Work. © Copyright 2013 Arkansas Repertory Theatre. All rights reserved.

Gee’s Bend, written by Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder, follows Sadie Pettway and her family, sister Nella and mother Alice, as they turn to quilting to provide comfort and creative expression to their lives. What begins as a labor of love soon turns into a spiritual and artistic awakening.

Pieced together from discarded clothes and seasoned with laughter and tears, the women sew a patchwork of inventive abstract designs in rich, blazing colors. Stitch by stitch, the stories of these strong women are revealed as their experiences unravel and inspire them to create what the New York Times called “miraculous works of modern art.”

Gee’s Bend opens in 1939, with the beginning of the era of African-American land ownership. The story then advances to 1965, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement and the historic visit to Gee’s Bend by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The production concludes in 2002, on the eve of the unveiling of “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

“Gee’s Bend has received a great response from audiences across the country. Regardless of age, race or geography, people are able to connect with these women on some level,” Wilder has said about the play. “People are always telling me stories about their experience with an old family quilt, or about the women in their family. There is something universal about the story.”

The quilts that have become iconic art were created as thrifty necessities, pieced together from old clothing and material scraps to provide warmth. According to the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective website, “The town’s women developed a distinctive, bold and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African-American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art. The women of Gee’s Bend passed their skills and aesthetic down through at least six generations to the present.”

Those same quilts became a much-needed source of income for the women of Gee’s Bend in the 1960s, when an Episcopal priest helped the women sell their quilts to high-end stores like Bloomingdale’s. In 2002, a national exhibition tour was organized, and in 2007 the legacy of the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend was complete with the debut of Wilder’s play.

Gee’s Bend was commissioned by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s Southern Writers Project, where it received a staged reading in 2006 and premiered in January 2007. A graduate of the dramatic writing program at New York University, Wilder received the American Theatre Critics Association’s 2008 Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award for an emerging playwright.

When Wilder interviewed the women of Gee’s Bend, she asked many questions about the women’s personal lives, and which stories she should reveal. Quilter Mary Lee Bendolph reportedly said to her, “Just write it honest.” Wilder promised to do so, saying, “I just hope my love for these women and these stories can be seen in the work.”

Even though the story is loosely based on the life of Bendolph, the play focuses on the community of Gee’s Bend as well. Like most artists, the women of Gee’s Bend looked to their surroundings to inspire their designs and were influenced by those around them.

“Gee’s Bend is the place that allows the play to happen,” says Director Gilbert McCauley. “And our set will be evocative of that…Gee’s Bend was isolated by a river. So this is a story of a woman who has to make a crossing from the known into the unknown, and the only things she has are the pieces of her life, which she turns into quilts.”

“The story of Gee’s Bend is tied to Gee’s Bend only; it’s a special place filled with special people who may appear mundane on the surface, but beneath they are as textured as the very quilts they make,” says Dramaturg Adewunmi Oke. “The costumes, the set and the props will reflect not only the people, but also the place of Gee’s Bend both literally and metaphorically.”

The true story of the women of Gee’s Bend has already touched millions who viewed their stunning work through a national exhibition tour and features on National Public Radio, in Newsweek and Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine. “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” have been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others

But McCauley says this is not a play about quilts, but about people, a fact Wilder was careful to point out in her production notes. “While the quilts are the metaphor, the women are the focus,” says McCauley. “The women of Gee’s Bend wrote their stories through their quilts—their blood, sweat, and tears—these quilts hold the fabric of their lives.”

Gee’s Bend opens January 25 and runs through February 10, 2013, supported and sponsored by The Design Group, Philander Smith College, Arora, Delta Airlines and the Little Rock Convention and Visitor’s Bureau.

The Rep’s production of Gee’s Bend is made possible in part by a grant from the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame Foundation, a component fund of the Arkansas Community Fund.

Five reasons you should see the Rep’s new production of “Henry V”

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5. Avery Clark. With “Henry V” you have a chance to see a handsome production of one of Shakespeare’s top shelf history plays, which comes on the heels of the Rep’s terrific production of “Hamlet” in 2010. Rep audiences are lucky enough to witness Avery Clark in the title role in both plays.  Clark is one of those rare actors who is in command in every moment he’s on stage. There are two scenes in “Henry V” where Clark’s powers seem especially present. The first is at the beginning when young king Henry is on his throne and is given the mocking gift of a trunk of tennis balls by the Dauphine of France. Clark is so still and calm in this scene that you take notice when he lifts a hand to direct the attendants in his court.  Then, near the end, as Henry is wooing non-English speaking Katherine (played by Nikki Coble) to be his queen, Clark displays his uncanny comic timing. The scene just floats off the stage and the audience responds with sustained laughter.

4. The cast of “The 39 Steps” is reunited.  Joining Clark on stage in “Henry V” is the rest of the Rep’s cast from the hilarious production of “The 39 Steps” – Coble is the would-be queen who first ducks Henry’s kiss, Jason Guy pulling double duty as Chorus and Montjoy and Collins as the discipline-loving Welch soldier Fluellen.  This quartet that was so strong in “The 39 Steps” is no less so in “Henry V.” Don’t know if there is another play in the Rep’s future that would have roles for all four but one can hope.

3. Local actors shine.  Director Bob Hupp has put together a strong cast for this “Henry V”  and it includes a number of local faces who happen to be very busy during the course of the production. Michael Bartholmey plays three roles (Grey/Messenger/York),  Andrew Curzon, a freshman at Parkview Arts and Science High School plays Boy, Sheila Glasscock is Mistress Quckly and Alice, Bill Jones takes on three roles (French Ambassador/Erpingham/Bourbon) and Ed Lowry plays Bardolph and Gloucester. There is not a weak link among these actors in supporting roles.

2. A different Shakespeare.  The more one is exposed to Shakespeare, the more one can appreciate how the great dramatist was an entertainer as much as poet and profound thinker.  “Henry V” is at once a carefully balanced underdog tale (Henry’s ragtag forces are constantly being noted as sick as well as outnumbered by the massive French army before they triumph), a meditation on honor and the high cost of battle along with precise moments of levity (in nobody’s hands but Shakespeare’s would a scene as simple as Katherine’s instructions in English by her attendant Alice be written much less as fun as it is). Of course there are Henry’s rousing speeches to his troops (“Once more into the breach, dear friends”) and the Chorus’ attempt to paint the scene (“Can this cockpit hold/The vasty fields of France”) as prime examples of Shakespeare’s word sorcery.  In short, “Henry V” is a rich buffet and the Rep’s production serves it all up with flavor to spare.

1. Celebrate Mike Nichols.  With this production, Mike Nichols, the Rep’s resident set designer and technical director Mike Nichols, celebrates 30 years with the company. His set for “Henry V” is another one of his signature playing spaces. Wood beams shoot to the sky beside a platform equipped with a pair of wooden screens. It is both functional world for the army of actors and a visual knockout which is, of course, exactly what a theatre space must be. Rep audiences are truly lucky to have someone as talented and dedicated to his craft as Nichols. There are simply not that many designers who have remained at one theatre for the course of their career. An exhibit of Nichols’ work – sketches and photos from past shows – is on display in the bar on the second mezzanine.  It is worth the time to check out the singular creative output of this master artist.

Medieval Weaponry, King Henry’s War

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Watch as Fight Director D.C. Wright explains the history and use of the Medieval Broadsword, and how weapons and armor were used during the time of Henry V and during the famous battle of Agincourt. 

 

 

Henry’s motivation to invade France may certainly be bolstered by the urging of the clergy, who have self-interested motives as evidenced by the parliamentary bill mentioned at the play’s start. But the seed for such action had been planted by his father at the end of 2 Henry IV.

The English army began the invasion with a siege on Harfleur that lasted for 5 weeks. The land on which they were fighting was made of marshes, which were swarmed with flies, and the only available food (rotten fruit and shellfish) led to fever and dysentery. Within a month, some 2,000 English soldiers were dead. Many more were sick enough to be sent home to England.

Though Harfleur was won on September 22, the victory was at a devastating cost. Henry had lost at least a third of his men.

Still, the king made the decision to advance to Calais, 150 miles away. They were met along the way by the French, near Agincourt. It had been raining for a week at Agincourt and rained heavily the night before the battle. This development would soon prove to be the English army’s salvation.

On the morning of October 25, the Feast of St. Crispin, both sides prepared for battle. The English formed three lines across, with archers in between. Henry himself led the center line. Sharpened stakes were set in front of the men as a defense against the French cavalry.

Because the French army was so large and the space was so small, a line formation was impossible. Instead, the French formed a column, deployed in three ranks one behind the other, with cavalry on each side and crossbowmen between.

When the French cavalry and infantry began their attack, their heavy armor began to sink in the mud, making them easy targets for the English archers. The few French who managed to reach the English line were met with short swords, axes and mace clubs.

The second wave of attack met with the same fate, and the third wave fled, leading the English to declare victory at Agincourt. The French losses were extraordinary. Out of approximately 20,000 men, 7,000 were dead. The English had lost around 1,600.

Watch the battle of Agincourt unfold and the story of young King Henry V play out live on stage. Purchase Advance Tickets to Henry V today.

Against Incredible Odds: Henry V

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Avery Clark goes to war as King Henry V in Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s production of Henry V. Photography by Justin Bolle, ThinkDero Photography. © Copyright 2012 Arkansas Repertory Theatre. All rights reserved.

In a muddy field in northern France, a small group of English soldiers prepare for the battle of their lives. After marching in the rain for days on end, they are sick, soaked, and starving. It is October 25, 1415.

Against incredible odds, outnumbered and depleted, they will fight valiantly and victoriously to triumph in a battle that will become one of the most famous moments in English history. Their leader is King Henry V.

Shakespeare’s Henry V is one of a series of eight plays on medieval English history. We meet Shakespeare’s Henry in the plays which come just before it in sequence – Henry IV, parts 1 & 2 – where he is portrayed as the young, riotous, defiant Prince Hal.

Henry V is where the young king becomes the full-fledged hero of British folklore. He is determined, brave, brilliant, eloquent and charismatic. Henry makes the bold decision to invade France to renew an old claim on the French throne.

Henry is burdened with the task not only of facing the force of the enemy, but of unifying a wide variety of voices and perspectives into one nation. The king is also at war with his own past, mindful of the fact that his father came to the throne by overthrowing the previous king.

Following the astonishing English victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the King of France declared Henry V heir to the French throne and gave him his daughter’s hand in marriage. Princess Katherine of Valois thus became the Queen of England in 1420.

Shakespeare’s stunning play highlights the contradictions of war, its horrors alongside its glories, and creates in the character of Henry V a man who struggles to reconcile the ambiguities of his own existence. The result is a story that is dynamic, thrilling and powerful.

“From his confrontation with the close friends who betray him to his wooing of the French princess, Henry V is such a compelling character,” says Director Bob Hupp. “A young king, untested, driven by ambition, strives for redemption and power through the cauldron of war and redefines his world in the process.”

Learn more about The Rep’s upcoming production of Henry V at our preshow talks, our luncheon panel at the Clinton School of Public Service or our Laman Library series.

Advance Tickets to Henry V are on sale through Sept. 7 and can be purchased here.

The Life of William Inge, Playwright

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William Inge was one of the most successful playwrights of the 1950s. He had a run of noted Broadway productions with Bus Stop and the Pulitzer Prize winning Picnic being his signature works. Inge, born in Independence, Kansas, brought well-constructed portraits of midwest characters to audiences in New York and then to film audiences around the country.

Inge’s fascination for the theatre began early. In the 1920s, Independence boasted many cultural events as top artists and shows played one night stands between performances in Kansas City, Missouri, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. The small town of Independence had a profound influence on the young Inge. He would later use this knowledge of small town life in many of his plays, most of which revolve around characters who are products of small towns like Independence.

“Well, I’ve got to write a play.”

In 1930, Inge graduated from Independence High School and later earned a degree in Speech and Drama from the Uiversity of Kansas at Lawrence. From 1937 to 1938, Inge taught high school English and Drama in Columbus and then moved St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked as the drama and music critic for the St. Louis Times. It was while he worked at the paper that Inge became acquainted with Tennessee Williams.

Inge accompanied Williams to a performance of his play The Glass Menagerie in Chicago. “I was terrifically moved by the play,” said Inge. “I thought it was the finest (play) I had seen in many years. I went back to St. Louis and felt, ‘Well, I’ve got to write a play.’”

With William’s encouragement and within three months, Inge had completed Farther Off from Heaven. Inge next turned a short story into Come Back, Little Sheba, which earned him the title of the most promising playwright of the 1950 Broadway season.

Success and Failure

In 1953, Inge’s Picnic opened at The Music Box Theatre in New York City. Along with the Pulitzer Prize, Picnic earned a Drama Critic Circle Award, The Outer Circle Award and The Theatre Club Award.

Inge’s next success came only two years later in 1955 when Bus Stop opened at The Music Box Theatre in New York City. The film version of Bus Stop was released by Fox in 1956 with Marilyn Monroe, Don Murray and Eileen Heckart in starring roles. Inge’s success continued as The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a reworking of his first play Farther Off from Heaven, opened on Broadway in 1957.

In 1959, the Broadway production of A Loss of Roses suffered numerous cast and script changes, opened to poor reviews and closed after three weeks. Inge was said to be devastated by the criticism. Yet in 1960, Inge’s first screenplay, “Splendor in the Grass,” was filmed in New York starring Natalie Wood, Pat Hingle and newcomer Warren Beatty. “Splendor in the Grass” was a triumph for Inge and won him an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

His next two plays, however, were not successful and he fell into a deep depression. Inge moved to California and wrote two novels while teaching playwriting at the Irvine campus of the University of California. He committed suicide on June 10, 1973 at his home in Hollywood. He was 60 years old. Inge was buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery in his hometown of Independence. His headstone reads simply, “Playwright.”

Since 1982, Independence Community College’s William Inge Center for the Arts has sponsored the annual William Inge Theatre Festival to honor playwrights. The “William Inge Collection” at the college is the most extensive collection in existence, including 400 manuscripts, films, correspondence and other items related to Inge’s work.

Notes on the stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird

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Playwright Christopher Sergel’s stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird necessarily condenses the many incidents in Lee’s novel. The play concentrates its energy around the trail of Tom Robinson and the children’s interest in the mysterious Boo Radley.

Sergel, who was president of Dramatic Publishing from 1970 to 1993, published a short essay on his adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Here is an excerpt from that essay.

Meeting with Harper Lee to discuss the stage adaptation of her extraordinary book To Kill A Mockingbird was an event about which I felt much trepidation.

My father, Roger Sergel, was had been Professor of English at the University of Pittsburg and who had been close to many leading writers of his day — Sherwood Anderson dedicated a book to him — particularly admired Harper Lee’s book. He died before I met with Harper Lee, but I can still remember his unqualified enthusiasm for her work. When To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize, my father said, “This is the first time I entirely agree with the Pulitzer Prize.”

Prior to meeting directly with Harper Lee, I had a number of useful discussions with Maurice Crain who was a creative force in her life, as to some extent he was in mine. Lucille Sullivan of that office was also a source of excellent advice on this project.

The meeting with Harper Lee, as I recall it from twenty years ago, took place at the Hotel Pierre in New York City. It began as an early lunch and lasted several hours. As we discussed the adaptation and the reasons for the choices being made, I had a sense that she felt the work was on the right track, which, of course, was due at least in part to the good advice I’d been given earlier by Maurice Crain. The good discussion continued with Harper Lee as we walked down the hotel corridor. Passing a row of public phones I had an irrational wish that I could call my father and tell him that I’d met with Harper Lee myself and the meeting had gone well.

A taxi stopped in front and I opened the door for Harper Lee. She embraced me and was gone. I’ve never seen her again. Perhaps the essence of what I believe she does better than any writer I know is captured in a brief response Atticus makes to a question from his daughter Scout. In the book as in the play, Tom Robinson, a black man, is wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit and is later shot down by prison guards as he tries to escape. In anguish, Scout asks her father how such a thing could be done to Tom. Atticus replies, “Because he wasn’t ‘Tom’ then.” The special beauty of Harper Lee’s work is that she takes us inside the people in her book, and in their various ways, each becomes “Tom” to us.

-Christopher Sergel

 

Biography of Harper Lee

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Nelle Harper Lee was born 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. The youngest of four children, Lee’s father was a lawyer who also owned a portion of the town’s newspaper. Her mother hardly ever left the house and likely suffered from undiagnosed metal illnesses.

Lee was a self-described tomboy and grew up alongside fellow writer Truman Capote. During high school Lee developed her interest in literature, later enrolling in Huntingdon College for girls in Montgomery, Alabama. Lee was part of the literary honors society at her college and her stringent work habits kept her out of the social scene.

She later transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she continued to study literature and also wrote for the school’s newspaper and humor magazine. Lee was accepted in the University’s law school but didn’t last long there. She soon moved to New York to pursue a career in writing.

It was 1949 when the 23-year-old Lee arrived in New York City. She was reunited with her childhood friend Capote, and was also introduced to Broadway composer Michael Martin Brown and his wife, who both became close friends. For years the young writer struggled financially, working as a ticketing agent for various airlines. However in 1956, the Browns gave Lee a Christmas present. They offered to support her for a year so she could devote all her energy to her writing. During the year she did a majority of work on To Kill a Mockingbird

Lee finished the manuscript for her novel in 1959 and shortly after went to Kansas with Truman Capote to research the murder of a family there. Capote’s New Yorker article about the murders would later evolve into the non-fiction classic, In Cold Blood.

To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, and almost immediately captured the attention of readers. The Book-of-the-Month Club picked up the book and an excerpted version also appeared in Readers’ Digest magazine. In 1961 the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and playwright Horton Foote was selected to write a screenplay adaptation for the 1962 film. The movie took home four Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch.
 
Though she was rumored to be working on a nonfiction book throughout the 1960s, the work was never published. To Kill a Mockingbird remains Lee’s only published novel, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s she largely retreated from public life. She now lives a quiet life in both New York City and Monroeville, where she lives with her sister and is active in her church and community.

Lee typically avoids any interviews, though she did attend a ceremony at The White House in 2007 during which she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for the book.