The MacDowell Colony
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Top left, front row (l to r): President Susan Davenport Austin, Edward Albee, and Executive Director Cheryl Young. Back row (l to r): Resident Director David Macy, Chairman Michael Chabon, and Mike Nichols. Top right: Edward Albee greets the Medal Day crowd.
Honor For only the third time since it was first awarded in 1960, the Edward MacDowell Medal was given in tribute to a playwright in August — a giant in the field who has made an indelible impact on American theatre with his courageous and emotionally wrenching work: Edward Albee. Medal Day has become a not-to-be-missed cultural event, and this year was no exception; more than 1,500 guests made their way to the Colony to celebrate Albee and his work, including acclaimed film and theatre director Mike Nichols, who introduced Albee to the crowd as
Michael Chabon
Chairman of the Board
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. My name is Michael Chabon, and I am thrilled to be here for this day of personal firsts: my first Medal Day, my first time presiding over Medal Day as the new chairman of the Colony, and the first time that my long-suffering children get to see this fabled and cursed and unimaginable place, far away on the other side of the country from our home in Berkeley, California: The MacDowell Colony, its name so strangely evocative of a hive of ants, perhaps, or a
sanctum where, amid the beeches and alders, on a moonlit night in the deep of February, with a phrase of Melville in your head, and a thousand words under your belt, and a well-cooked supper in your belly, you cannot hear your children crying to watch another episode of Spongebob, no matter how loud they scream. I’ve been trying to draw a line between my work and that of our distinguished — I am tempted to use the word revered — Medalist, Edward Albee, and the common theme that I keep coming back to is the tension, whether fruitful or destructive, between the family and the freak, between what you inherit and what part of that inheritance you spurn. Freaks, by definition, betray their heritages, and in the work of Mr.
the raw materials of earth, stone, and steel; to generate vivid illusions and waking dreams; to harness the kinetic energies of their own bodies; and to connect, directly, with the thoughts and emotions of another human being. Sound like anyplace you know? My attention as a writer has always been drawn to our second families: to the families we find, make, invent, contrive. Because so many of us — whether or not we make art or can turn our bodies into organic vibranium — feel like freaks, like mutants, oppressed by the heritage that defines us, born, as the covers of old Marvel Comics used to routinely put it, INTO A WORLD WE NEVER MADE! There is the world you are born into, and the world you make for
“ There is the place you come from, and the place where you belong. For so many of us — mutants, artists — that second place, that refuge, is MacDowell.” Medalist Edward Albee shares a moment at Medal Day with MacDowell Chairman Michael Chabon.
domed city on an alien planet, which for many years now has swallowed up both their father and their mother for weeks on end, with only a postcard picture of a picnic basket, the proverbial lousy t-shirt, and another damn novel to show for it. My first residency at MacDowell was 15 years ago. I was driven to come here by the eldest of those children (we now have four), whose infancy and toddlerhood were taking up far more of my time and attention than I, or my career as a writer, had reckoned on. But maybe “taking up my time and attention” is not the correct formulation. Maybe it would be more exact to say “sucking me dry with a fiendishness that approached the vampiric.” One day — at the time we still lived in Los Angeles — I was sitting around kvetching (I mean, conferring) with a colleague, the brilliant novelist Mona Simpson, who was also newly a parent. It was Mona who first revealed to me the mysteries of this pastoral
Albee we see, so often, how the heritage, the family, and the society one is born into try to exact their revenge for that betrayal. Thinking of freaks makes me think about comic books. Of course, some people might suggest that everything makes me think about comic books, but I don’t see any problem there. Understand comic books, my friends, and you understand the cosmos. Now, in the world of Marvel Comics, some of your costumed heroes have their powers thrust upon them; some achieve their powers through work and dedication; and some strange and tormented souls are just born that way. These last are known as mutants. Freaks. Outcasts, hunted and solitary, often despised by the rest of humankind. The luckiest among them find their way to Professor X’s big, rambling country estate somewhere to the north of New York City, where, in the company of their own strange kind, they are welcomed and sheltered and fed, and given everything they require to fulfill their freaky potential, to draw out and find the limits of their power: of their ability to light up the darkness; to generate new sonic textures; to shape and control
yourself out of choices and affinities and love; out of words, rebar, quarter notes, or pixels. There is your family of origin, and the family that you choose for yourself, that you luck into. There is the place you come from, and the place where you belong. For so many of us — mutants, artists — that second place, that refuge, is MacDowell. No matter how alone, how isolated, how misunderstood, how just plain weird you feel, you come here, and you look around the dining table, and you say, “Wow, I’m actually a lot more normal than I thought.” No, what you think is, “I’ll be safe here. I will be understood. I will be encouraged, and supported, and challenged to measure up to my own goals and ambitions for myself and my work.” Those are all things that every self-respecting family, I believe, ought to aspire to provide for its members. MacDowell has been doing it, and doing it in style, for more than a century. Welcome, then, to Medal Day. Welcome to MacDowell. And welcome, my fellow mutants, to the family.