Proudly Political Playwright
Playwright Naomi Wallace, who has just won a MacArthur ("genius") award, sees a parallel between the United States now-at the turn of the millenium, and depression-era America. The latter is the setting for her new play, "The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek," that bowed Off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop, June 30.
An anti-youth sensibility and a relentless belief in the American Dream (a notion that is destined to fail), define both periods, she asserts. "There is the ongoing belief that if you work hard enough you will get ahead and when that does not happen the anger gets turned inward and people see themselves [as opposed to the system] as failures. This is especially true for the working class who, although they're the majority, are rarely talked about today, and held in contempt.
"I set the play in the '30s because I felt the distance of time would make it easier to see certain themes with fewer complications," she continues. The 38-year-old Kentucky native is talking to us on the phone from her part-time home in North Yorkshire, England. Her husband, whom she prefers to call her "partner," is a Yorkshireman.
Shaped by poverty and awash in boredom, teenagers Dalton and Pace (Michael Pitt and Alicia Goranson) attempt to entertain themselves in "Trestle" by playing a dangerous game of running across railroad tracks to beat an oncoming train. In the end, the girl is killed and the boy is charged with murdering her, although his culpability is debatable.
Wallace contends that despite the inherent bleakness in her play-a mood sustained by consistently dark lighting throughout much of the piece, juxtaposed with blaring white lights and screeching train whistles, heralding an approaching train-it's in some ways affirmative. Lessons have been learned, change has occurred.
"At the end, Dalton says that Pace "made me hesitate in everything I did.' We assume that's negative. It's not. Pace made him think there may be other ways to be and relate. Contrary to what we're taught, we can change, we want to change, and other people do have the power to change us. Mainstream America believes if change-healing-is possible at all, it lies in the self. I believe you're transformed through community, although you have to be open to it and that takes courage."
Best known for her Obie Award-winning "One Flea Spare"-a story about London's 1665 plague-Wallace is unabashedly political in her subjects and sensibilities. "Political plays are not popular today," she notes. "Playwrights will go out of their way to deny that they're political. But you put two people onstage, there are politics involved. All relationships are about power-and that's political.
"I'm interested in relationships of power-who has it, how he got it, why-and who doesn't. I'm interested in class, sexuality, race, and how those elements interact. The interplay of personal experience and history interests me. I admire the work of Adrian Kennedy, August Wilson, and Emily Mann because they write about these interrelationships with a certain forcefulness."
Clearly many in the theatre community also think highly of Wallace. She has rolled up a host of honors including the 1995 Mobil Prize; the 1995 and 1996 Susan Smith Blackburn Prizes; the 1996 Fellowship of Southern Writers Award; and the 1996 Kesselring Prize.
"I hope my style changes from play to play," Wallace stresses. "People have said my work is "poetic.' It's a term I don't like. If I hear that a play is poetic, I'll go to a movie instead."
Still, language is the key to her esthetic, she emphasizes, acknowledging that "finding language that is not archaic is my biggest challenge. I don't write in a realistic style, but it has to be realistic within the world of each work."
Wallace wants her plays to boast a kind of cerebral aloofness in both acting style and overall sensibility. Indeed, her ideal director, she says, has a "Brechtian vision. He understands that language carries emotion."
Similarly, the actors who are most in tune with her work are able to "restrain their emotion. They let the language tell the story. The "method' is fine once the actors have had the characters' experiences [whatever they are] and then pull back from them. I don't want displays on stage. If the actors are crying and laughing onstage, the audience doesn't have to."
Appreciated Abroad
The daughter of a farmer, Wallace recalls always wanting to be a writer; indeed she started writing poetry in the second grade. At Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., she majored in women's studies and later went on to earn two master degrees-in theatre arts and writing, respectively-from the University of Iowa.
"I found writing poetry isolating. I wanted to do work that was more community-based. That's why I turned to theatre." Still, she has continued to write poetry and in 1995, her book of poems, "To Dance a Stony Field," was published in the U.K. She acknowledges that her poetry, like her plays, is political in nature, and suspects that's why she couldn't get published in the States.
"In England they're not bothered by politics. In the mainstream American poetry establishment there's the belief that poetry should be above politics, as if that's possible. And they [the establishment] feel that if it's political it can't be good poetry. You need an education to develop a taste for poetry," Wallace underscores. "It's not taught in America and much of the American public can't relate to it. If people are so busy trying to make money, they don't have time to worry about their spirit."
Throughout her career, Great Britain has been more welcoming than the States, Wallace points out. Many of her plays have been launched in the U.K. and despite the myriad American-based awards she has received, her works are still not being produced very often in America. "It could be my subject matter or the fact that some of these plays have been done in England first. Perhaps, that turns them [American artistic directors] off. I don't know."
Wallace concedes she's had an oddball career, frequently garnering mixed reviews at best, unexpectedly followed by prestigious award-wins. In fact, she maintains that some of the very same critics who were unkind to her may have voted for her to walk home with the awards, thus suggesting two discrete set of standards: One for the public at large-voiced in the reviews-and another for the culturally knowledgeable. The latter expressed in the bestowed awards.
Winning the six-figure MacArthur Award has changed her psychological landscape. "Now I feel to hell with the critics. I'm working on a trilogy of plays about American labor and I'm no longer worried about what the [American] critics will think. The award also represents a blessing from a certain cultural strata."
A degree of secrecy shrouds the MacArthur Award handed out-by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation-to practitioners in an array of professions. "No one is entirely sure who gets nominated or how," Wallace says. "You don't submit an application or anything like that. I was told that the MacArthur people had been considering my work for years. They contacted my agent two years ago. They also contacted various theatres where my plays had been produced, looking for nominees. If a name keeps reappearing they'll look into that person's work."
Her future projects notwithstanding, she is currently thinking about "Trestle" and hoping that "audiences will leave the theatre disturbed, but in a way that makes them think. I want them to question assumptions about the American Dream, the ways in which boys and girls relate to each other, and the nature of change." q