VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE - Lincoln Center Theater Review by Lincoln Center Theater

Fall 2012 Issue No. 58

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Fall 2012, Issue Number 58 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor

The New Yorker called Christopher Durang “one of the funniest dramatists alive.” Durang’s newest play, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, commissioned by the McCarter Theatre and opening here in New York at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, adds a dollop of wise ruefulness to the mix of his comic genius. The play looks at family, at middle age, and at ambition and where it all ends up—as it does in Chekhov’s Photograph © Tamar Cohen.

Lincoln Center Theater André Bishop Bernard Gersten Artistic Director Executive Producer The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary Linda LeRoy Janklow John B. Beinecke Jane Lisman Katz Dorothy Berwin Kewsong Lee Jessica M. Bibliowicz Memrie M. Lewis André Bishop Robert E. Linton Debra Black Ninah Lynne Allison M. Blinken Phyllis Mailman Mrs. Leonard Block Ellen R. Marram James-Keith Brown John Morning H. Rodgin Cohen Elyse Newhouse Jonathan Z. Cohen Elihu Rose Ida Cole Stephanie Shuman Donald G. Drapkin Josh Silverman Curtland E. Fields Howard Sloan Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. David F. Solomon Bernard Gersten Tracey Travis Marlene Hess Robert G. Wilmers Judith Hiltz William D. Zabel

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Anna E. Crouse, Ellen Katz, Ray Larsen, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE

less fans have relished the sheer funniness and wisdom of his work over the past thirty years. Christopher Durang writes about his encounters with Anton Chekhov’s work, beginning with his first

Mark Doty describes the tattoo he got after the end of a long relationship and the way we look back on the choices we make, big and small. Our co-executive editor John Guare has a lively conversation with the brilliant writer Francine Prose about aging, the fun of spying on your own funeral, and her summer

My Life with Chekhov by Christopher Durang

job in a New York City morgue. Guare also interviews Paula Fox, the highly lauded novelist and mem-

oirist, about her difficult childhood, her family, and her powerful instinct to live. Robert Brustein, critic and producer and playwright, and for twenty years the dean of the Yale School of Drama, remembers

Cousin, Cousine by Mary Gordon

Durang at Yale, when he was just beginning his playwriting career. We’ve also reprinted the Maxwell

Anderson lyrics from from Kurt Weill’s “September Song,” which beautifully capture the play’s relationship to time. The absurdity and wit of Craig Morgan Teicher’s marvelous poem “Money Time” tap into

The Surprises of Aging: A Conversation with Francine Prose

our own fears and hang-ups about money and how time flies and makes us laugh. Vanya and Sonia

and Masha and Spike is at once hilarious and wise, able to delight and provoke, and it has inspired an issue that walks a similar line.—The Editors

A Greeting to the Future by Mark Doty

Money Time by Craig Morgan Teicher

Survival Instinct: A Conversation with Paula Fox

Christopher Durang, Cherubic Gadfly by Robert Brustein

Christopher Durang: Chronology of Work

Center Theater Review is a tribute to Durang’s humor and his humanity. We salute him just as his count-

only child, writes about her friendship with a beloved cousin; and the celebrated poet and memoirist

The Rosenthal Family Foundation is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor. Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

of classic Durang hilarity, even the most profound moments will elicit a smile. This edition of the Lincoln

attempt to read The Seagull as a young boy; Mary Gordon, the deeply compassionate novelist and an

Cover illustration by Yunmee Kyong, 2012. Back cover photo © ultra.f/Corbis.

September Song “September Song” words by Maxwell Anderson, music by Kurt Weill © 1938 (renewed) Chappell & Co., Inc. (ASCAP). From the Musical Production “Knickerbocker Holiday” Words by Maxwell Anderson; Music by Kurt Weill TRO–©–1938 (Renewed) Hampshire House Publishing Corp., New York and Warner Chappell Music, Inc., Los Angeles, CA Used by Permission

John B. Beinecke Linda LeRoy Janklow Chairmen Emeriti

plays—at that “certain age” when much of life is behind us and much is left to live. Through the lens

Music by Kurt Weill Lyrics by Maxwell Anderson

This paean to the under-celebrated later years is a reminder of how quickly life passes and, as we grow older, how keenly we understand the dearness of it.

Oh, it’s a long, long while

When I was a young man courting the girls,

When you reach September.

I played me a waiting game:

When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame,

If a maid refused me with tossing curls,

One hasn’t got time for the waiting game.

I’d let the old earth take a couple of whirls,

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few,

While I plied her with tears in lieu of pearls

September,

And as time came around she came my way,

November!

As time came around she came.

And these few precious days

From May to December, But the days grow short

I’ll spend with you, These precious days I’ll spend with you.

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE

less fans have relished the sheer funniness and wisdom of his work over the past thirty years. Christopher Durang writes about his encounters with Anton Chekhov’s work, beginning with his first

My Life with Chekhov by Christopher Durang

job in a New York City morgue. Guare also interviews Paula Fox, the highly lauded novelist and mem-

Cousin, Cousine by Mary Gordon

Durang at Yale, when he was just beginning his playwriting career. We’ve also reprinted the Maxwell

The Surprises of Aging: A Conversation with Francine Prose

our own fears and hang-ups about money and how time flies and makes us laugh. Vanya and Sonia

and Masha and Spike is at once hilarious and wise, able to delight and provoke, and it has inspired an issue that walks a similar line.—The Editors

A Greeting to the Future by Mark Doty

Money Time by Craig Morgan Teicher

Survival Instinct: A Conversation with Paula Fox

Christopher Durang, Cherubic Gadfly by Robert Brustein

Christopher Durang: Chronology of Work

Center Theater Review is a tribute to Durang’s humor and his humanity. We salute him just as his count-

only child, writes about her friendship with a beloved cousin; and the celebrated poet and memoirist

The Rosenthal Family Foundation is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor. Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

of classic Durang hilarity, even the most profound moments will elicit a smile. This edition of the Lincoln

attempt to read The Seagull as a young boy; Mary Gordon, the deeply compassionate novelist and an

Cover illustration by Yunmee Kyong, 2012. Back cover photo © ultra.f/Corbis.

John B. Beinecke Linda LeRoy Janklow Chairmen Emeriti

plays—at that “certain age” when much of life is behind us and much is left to live. Through the lens

Music by Kurt Weill Lyrics by Maxwell Anderson

This paean to the under-celebrated later years is a reminder of how quickly life passes and, as we grow older, how keenly we understand the dearness of it.

Oh, it’s a long, long while

When I was a young man courting the girls,

When you reach September.

I played me a waiting game:

When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame,

If a maid refused me with tossing curls,

One hasn’t got time for the waiting game.

I’d let the old earth take a couple of whirls,

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few,

While I plied her with tears in lieu of pearls

September,

And as time came around she came my way,

November!

As time came around she came.

And these few precious days

From May to December, But the days grow short

I’ll spend with you, These precious days I’ll spend with you.

MY LIFE WITH CHEKHOV

THREE SISTERS

By Christopher Durang

I read plays from a very young age. Probably because my mother did. She read to me from Winnie-the-Pooh when I was little—not a play, of course, but lots of good dialogue. My two favorite characters were windbag Owl, who bored everyone, and gloomy, worrying Eeyore. My mother loved James Thurber and Noël Coward and The New Yorker. Thurber had lots of wonderful dialogue, too. And I find the arch sound of Coward’s dialogue very funny. My mother’s and my favorite Coward play was Hay Fever, about the chaotic and grandiose Bliss family and how they ignore and insult their houseguests. So I was hungry to read the famous plays, the classic plays.

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 1 (Chekhov in my childhood)

When I was fourteen, I tried to read my first Chekhov play. I always looked at the cast of characters to figure out who was who. The Russian names in Chekhov, though, intimidated me. Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina (Madame Treplev by marriage) was the first character listed in The Seagull. Much harder to take in than Judith Bliss in Hay Fever. Then there was Konstantin Gavrilovitch Treplev (Kostya), who was Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina’s son. But below him on the list was Boris Aleksyeevich Trigorin, who was “a writer.” And the character names in the text were Arkadina, Treplev, and Trigorin. And the last two names seemed similar to me, as well as unfamiliar. And the characters had very long speeches, and after a while I felt that I wasn’t ready to read Chekhov. So I went back to reading Blithe Spirit or the musicals I loved, such as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. I wrote comic plays of my own, as well as two musical comedies that my Catholic high school put on. My college guidance counselor was a smart and worldly priest, and he suggested I apply to all these famous schools. My grades were good but not spectacular, but he told me that I should stress the playwriting I had done in school. To my utter surprise, I got into Harvard.

(The Seagull)

Harvard did not have a theater major, which I knew when I applied. I thought that, as a would-be playwright, maybe I should be wellrounded. Which I am not. In terms of my education, I ended up only semi-rounded, with large, gaping holes in my knowledge. I really couldn’t be a contestant on Jeopardy!.

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE

THE SEAGULL UNCLE VANYA

HOOTIE PIE THE CHERRY ORCHARD

Illustration © Tamar Cohen.

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 2

The English department did offer some theater classes. And during the first week of my freshman year I auditioned to get into an acting seminar. The list of who got in was posted, but there was a throng of people standing in front of it. I decided to wait until the crowd thinned out, and I stood by a striking young woman who was barefoot and wisely avoiding the crowd so as not to have her feet trod upon. I was bushy-tailed and friendly my freshman year (before I entered the Dark Night of My Soul sophomore year), and I asked the barefoot young woman how her audition for the George Hamlin acting seminar had gone. She looked at me and said, in a resonant voice, “Mr. Hamlin said my Saint Joan was the finest he had ever seen.” Well, that was a bit of a conversation stopper. I later wished I had said, “Ah, that’s what he said to me, too.” But I didn’t. Plus, he hadn’t. I think he found my Saint Joan to be mediocre. And she got into the seminar, and I didn’t. But a few years later I got to see her in a student production of Three Sisters, and she was very good. But I am ahead of myself. I still hadn’t figured out how to read Chekhov. I signed up for an enormous lecture class called “Contemporary American and British Theatre, From the 1950s Through the Present.” This sounded like bliss to me. And it was taught by a famous professor who was also a playwright—William Alfred, a much beloved teacher and scholar, who in 1965 had had an Off-Broadway success with his Irish-family play Hogan’s Goat, which gave the actress Faye Dunaway her first professional success. The class was in a large lecture room. Professor Alfred walked to the podium. He announced that in order to fully understand modern American and British drama, we needed to know something about the plays that preceded them. And so we were going to read a Greek tragedy, a Roman play, a Molière, a Shakespeare, a Chekhov, a Shaw, etc., until we got to the modern-day playwrights. This was rather far from the published syllabus, but it also sounded terrific. The assigned Chekhov was The Seagull, the play I had tried to read when I was fourteen. I did better reading the play this time—and I made my own character list, which was easier to follow. But it wasn’t until Professor Alfred read scenes aloud that I had the door to Chekhov opened for me. In a rumpled suit, and with a friendly Irish face, Alfred was a brilliant lecturer, full of wisdom, but he was also a wonderful reader of plays. For some reason, he read aloud not from The Seagull but from Three Sisters, which I had not read yet. He chose the complicated

MY LIFE WITH CHEKHOV

THREE SISTERS

By Christopher Durang

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 1 (Chekhov in my childhood)

(The Seagull)

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE

THE SEAGULL UNCLE VANYA

HOOTIE PIE THE CHERRY ORCHARD

Illustration © Tamar Cohen.

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 2

scene where Baron Tuzenbach is talking to Irina, who says that she will marry him even though she’s not in love with him. She no longer believes that she can be happy. The baron accepts this, and they are to marry the next day. But there is an unspoken upset between them, because they both know that he is about to go off and fight a duel. And they are saying nothing about it. And Professor Alfred read this scene with such a sense of fragility and the uncertainty of life that I suddenly heard how the characters were meant to chatter and then to express something deeply felt, but then to rush back to chatter again. I feel that he showed me the enormous vulnerability and sadness that can lie right beneath commonplace conversation, both in Chekhov and in life. My senior year, I was lucky to be accepted into a small playwriting seminar that he taught.

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 3 (The Seagull and Vanessa Redgrave)

I went to the movies a great deal in college. And, in my sophomore year, suddenly there was a movie version of The Seagull, directed by Sidney Lumet. It was meandering, and the talented Simone Signoret wasn’t right for Arkadina. But, oh my, there was Vanessa Redgrave playing Nina. I think it’s an impossibly difficult role, but Redgrave’s portrayal was the perfect Nina I had imagined when I read the play for Professor Alfred’s class. Her Nina was charming but so, so intense—her youth was painfully raw, her insecurity palpable, her infatuation with the theater was almost humorous, and she gushed at everyone a bit too much. She was spectacular. But the character’s youthful hope dies very quickly. Konstantin falls in love with her, but when she doesn’t respond he suddenly deposits a dead seagull at her feet. This was seemingly his extremely inappropriate way of saying, “Please don’t ignore me. I love you.” Nina, meanwhile, falls for the writer Trigorin. They fall in love, she has a baby, the baby dies, Trigorin loses interest in Nina. In Act 4, she comes back secretly to visit Konstantin. In despair and grief, she keeps saying, “I am a seagull.” It is very hard to play that scene. But Ms. Redgrave knew how to make that mad scene work. It’s an imperfect film, but watch it for her sometime.

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 4 (Three Sisters)

I mentioned my Dark Night of the Soul during my sophomore year. It might also be called depression. And it lasted into my junior year as well. I lost my Catholic faith (I left it on the ground, like a dead seagull), and I lost my bushy-tailed exuberance and could only react to dark, despairing literature. A teaching fellow whose small class I was in correctly pointed out to me that I didn’t like the poet Wordsworth because I was angry that he wasn’t Beckett. That was quite an accurate statement he made, and his taking the time to try to unravel my brain helped me a lot in managing to pass his course. Later, in my thirties, I grew to like Wordsworth. But all that rattling on about nature drove me crazy in my youth. I wanted psychological angst and hopelessness. That is, I didn’t

want it, but it’s what I was feeling, and I needed it reflected back to me so I felt less alone. The melancholy of Chekhov suited me very well. In my junior year, I saw Three Sisters. It was being done by the Harvard Dramatic Society. The production was directed by an undergrad, Leland Moss, who had been inspired by Jerzy Grotowski, a famous experimental Polish theater director. This inspiration made for some nontraditional staging in the play—when the star-crossed lovers Masha and Vershinin had a scene, other actors would say their dialogue, while Masha and Vershinin would get down on their knees and growl and purr and paw each other. I guess they were leopards in love or something. Maybe they were lions. I don’t think they were raccoons, because they weren’t eating garbage. Sorry to be flip, and I’m sure the growling-crawling behavior is far from a fair description of what Grotowski meant. And I know that he was significant in the history of experimental theater. Though, as a comic writer, I find it hard not to look back at the “inner animal” sections and find them kind of funny. Besides which, what I really liked about the production was all the regular acting in it. Most of the play—two-thirds, maybe?—was just young actors embodying their roles with intelligence and passion. And the play was new to me; I had not read it. Of course, I did know that the recurring lament of the three sisters was their desire to “go to Moscow,” where they grew up and where life seemed stimulating and hopeful. I already liked Beckett and the existential feel of waiting for Godot, who never came, and the three sisters seemed a precursor to that. They longed to go to Moscow, and yet they never went. The ending of Waiting for Godot is this: Vladimir: Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go. They do not move. End of play. Which is similar to Olga, Masha, and Irina. “Oh, my sisters, let’s go to Moscow.” They do not move. The cast was excellent. That barefoot girl who got into the acting seminar played Masha and was terrific. (Her name was Susan Yakutis.) Nancy Cox was very good as the oldest, already spent sister Olga. And the sisters’ beloved brother Andrei was played by a Harvard senior named André Bishop. Yes, that André Bishop, who is the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. (I didn’t know him then.) He was poignant and tortured as Chekhov’s Andrei. A strange thing happened in this production. Laurie Heineman was so good as Irina that she became the protagonist for me. It is Irina’s “name day” (birthday) in Act 1, and Heineman’s Irina was so convincingly full of excitement and youthful hope for the future that I was riveted. When she was onstage, I watched only her. I clocked her every movement and emotional shift. In Act 3, time has not been kind to Irina. She has a boring job at the Town Council. She imagined she’d meet the man of her dreams once they moved to Moscow. But they keep not going to Moscow,

and instead her only choice is a loveless marriage to Baron Tuzenbach. She is disappointed in her beloved brother Andrei, who has made a disastrous marriage to the bullying Natasha and is gambling and has given up his dreams of being a professor. They have all given up their dreams. Heineman’s shift from joy to despair was riveting. Starting with a startling “Where has it all gone to?...where is it?”, Irina quickly progresses to how hopeless her life seems, how she feels muddled and is forgetting everything. She says, “I don’t remember the Italian for ‘window’ or ‘ceiling.’ And every day I’m forgetting more and more….” Because I had never read the play, the weird specificity of forgetting foreign words for “window” and “ceiling” jumped out at me as a beautiful and heartbreaking line. It positively haunted me. It embedded itself in my brain. I guess Three Sisters is actually my favorite Chekhov play.

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 5 (Oh, Uncle Vanya)

I read Uncle Vanya on my own. And I saw a wonderful production directed by Mike Nichols in 1973 at Circle in the Square, with an exciting cast of George C. Scott, Nicol Williamson, Julie Christie, Elizabeth Wilson, Lillian Gish, and Barnard Hughes. I paid ten dollars for standing room, and it was thrilling to see. And if the “Italian for window and ceiling” lines haunted me in Three Sisters, it was Sonia’s devastating lines at the end of the play that transfixed me here. Vanya has had an emotional meltdown and has tried to shoot the professor, missing each time. And now Vanya and his niece Sonia are left alone, both rejected by the people they love, and both with no hope of any kind. Like me on Mondays. (No, just kidding.) And Sonia says, “What can we do? We shall go on living. We shall suffer through a long succession of tedious days and tedious nights.” Reading the play, I stopped right there. “Long succession of tedious days.” I don’t feel that every day, though I did during my middle two years at college. And I don’t know why I find that such a despairing sentiment doesn’t depress me; it moves me. It shows me that other people feel awful at certain times. It’s the opposite of the people who rush in and say “Cheer up!” to you when it’s the wrong time to say that. Oh, I don’t know. I guess I love the emotional sadness in Chekhov.

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 6

(Chekhov meets Dostoyevsky meets Chris and Albert) My senior year at college, my depression lifted. A longer story, but lifted it did. I was accepted into the Yale School of Drama with a play that I had written in two days—a burst of energy after not writing for a couple of years. I made three important friendships at Yale: fellow playwright Albert Innaurato, actress Sigourney Weaver, and fellow playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Albert and I were both raised Catholic, and we both had nuns in our plays. We had a brief period of distrust—was the school big enough for two nun-writing authors? However, Albert made me laugh, and we became friends. We co-wrote and performed in two cabaret pieces. And we also wrote a

very odd, playful musical together—The Idiots Karamazov. The setup was that Constance Garnett was translating The Brothers Karamazov, but she was old and crazy and kept mixing it up with Chekhov and Eugene O’Neill and Charles Dickens—it was a literary roller coaster. It was done first as an undergrad project (directed by Albert). Then it was a Drama School project, starring acting student Meryl Streep as Constance. (Whatever happened to her? Ha-ha.) And then, as a professional production at the Yale Repertory Theatre, still starring Meryl, and I was unexpectedly cast as the monk Alyosha. In the first scene, Constance introduces the Karamazov brothers, but when they enter they sing a spirited song called “O, We Gotta Get to Moscow.” The lyrics included these lines: “O, we gotta get to Moscow, make a check-off list and pack, and we’ll leave this town behind us, and we’re never coming back….O, we gotta get to Cleveland, San Francisco or L.A., and we’ll sell the cherry orchard, and we’ll give the pits away.…Goodbye now, Uncle Vanya, don’t you cry now, Gotta get to Moscow, Moscow right now!” It was a crazy and chaotic play, and it was Albert’s and my first professional production.

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 7 I had the idea to write Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike a few years ago, when I realized that I was now the age that Vanya was (or seemed to be). And, like Vanya and other Chekhov characters, I started to reassess choices made in the past. I live in a stone farmhouse with my partner, the writer-actor John Augustine, on a small hill in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I choose to live here for the quiet and the trees, and there is a small pond where a blue heron comes and sees what is available to eat. But I started to think to myself, What if I didn’t live here with my partner but with my adopted sister, and the two of us had spent fifteen years taking care of our elderly and eventually incoherent parents. What if we never left the house we lived in as children, and felt jealous of our older sister, who was a glamorous stage and film star. She sends us money, but our lives feel empty and unexciting. What if my life had been closer to a Chekhov play? By the way, I also have cherry trees around the house. About nine of them, I’d say. Very pretty two weeks a year. My play is not a parody. It is set in the present day. Once I finished the first draft, I started to say to people, “The play takes Chekhov characters and themes and puts them into a blender.” Throughout my life, I keep reacting and reacting to Chekhov. Christopher Durang is an award-winning playwright whose work has appeared on and off Broadway, including the Tony-nominated A History of the American Film, the Obie Award–winning Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, and Miss Witherspoon, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. With Marsha Norman, he is the co-chair of the Playwriting Program at Juilliard.

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 3 (The Seagull and Vanessa Redgrave)

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 4 (Three Sisters)

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 5 (Oh, Uncle Vanya)

CHEKHOV ENCOUNTER No. 6

COUSIN, COUSINE

by Mary Gordon

©Thomas Allen, Electric, 2012. Courtesy Foley Gallery, New York.

In the world in which I was reared—the Irish Catholic world of the 1950s—being an only child was not only anomalous; it bordered on the shameful. Most people I knew had a minimum of three siblings; some families, praised from the altar, had nine children, or ten or twelve. And so it wasn’t just that I was lonely; my family situation made me feel all wrong. I particularly wished for an older brother. I didn’t have that, but I had my cousin Peppy. Two years older than I, providing me a shelter, a canopy, a refuge from the wind and storm. He has done this all my life. He is still doing it. He is the son of my mother’s younger sister. Our mothers were the only ones of nine siblings who had any appetite for pleasure. Peppy’s mother was interested in fashion, and my mother in Broadway. My aunt, a beautician, gave me my first home permanent. A Tonette. My mother treated Peppy and me to our first Broadway show—The Music Man, starring Robert Preston and Barbara Cook. The others in the family considered our mothers the unsensible sisters. They may have been, but they had more fun. In the family, he is called Peppy, although Joseph is his given name. But I can’t call him Joe, as all his grown-up friends do, because Peppy seems so entirely right for him—a sign of energetic joy. We lived only ten minutes from each other, and so we saw each other several times a week. His father had more money than anyone else in our large extended family; he worked in a liquor store, an elegant one…he had had some college. He was a model of quiet generosity, and so he and my aunt were the hosts of many family holidays. Importantly, they had a television, the first in the family. Later, my grandmother got one, but at my grandmother’s we were only allowed to watch Bishop Sheen. At Peppy’s house, we watched My Little Margie, My Friend Irma, Our Miss Brooks. At every dinner, Peppy and I always scrambled to sit next to each other. Almost immediately, we would begin laughing. Laughing over nothing, over everything—uncontrollable laughter that would make milk come out of our noses or force us to pat each other on the back to avoid choking. As soon as this laughter began, one of the mothers would say, “All right, separate those two. This laughter is bound to end in tears.” Forty years later, Peppy said to me, “It was the first time I realized that grown-ups might be wrong about something. Because it seemed at least possible to me that laughter might not end in tears. It might end in more laughter.” He has always been more at home in the world than I. We were both forced to go to a summer camp run by our aunts and uncles. I was miserable, mortified by athletic failure. He tried to help me with softball and running bases. He would sit beside me at the campfire when we toasted marshmallows. And sometimes around the fire something would happen, something that made us both laugh, and that magical, intoxicating laughter would take us both over, and I would think, It doesn’t get better than this. I was a more successful student than he was, because he actually had a social life and I had none. When he was in eighth grade and I was in sixth, he asked me to write a speech for him for the CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) speech competition. He said I was a much better writer than he was but he would like to win the prize, it would be fun. I never questioned that I would write a speech that he would claim as his. I felt honored that, at last, I could do something for him. I understood exactly what the desired tone should

be. I wrote him a speech about a crippled woman who organized a Shut-in League, a kind of pen-pal club for the disabled. I remember the first line of the speech: “God’s design for Mary Ellen Kelly was not an accident but part of the divine plan.” He won first prize. Two years later, in a speech competition for Catholic high school students, he recycled the speech. This time it didn’t work so well. The last line I had written was “Therefore it behooves us to follow her example.” His friends, sitting in the back of the room to support him, became hysterical with laughter at the word behooves and, seeing them he burst into laughter himself and came in last. When we talked about this only a few months ago, he said, “How could you have done it to me? How could you have sent me in there with the word behooves? I said, “You know perfectly well that was who we were then. I could say behooves without cracking up. You couldn’t.” He was a beautiful adolescent boy: pimple-free, always naturally tan, neither thin nor fat, with wavy brown hair. He prided himself on looking like Richard Beymer, who played Tony in West Side Story, the movie we were all obsessed with. We both went to the same high school dances—sock hops, they were called—and I would see him in the center of the floor, doing the latest dances (the frug, the swim, the Bristol stomp) with the most perfect girls, having a kind of fabulous time my friends and I only dreamed of, as we stood talking to one another, trying to look like we were having fun. He would always ask my friends to dance—this was incredibly kind of him, because it was really dancing down—and the cachet of being asked by him added to their social luster as nothing else could have. He didn’t work hard at school, so most summers he had to go to summer school to make up for the courses he hadn’t passed. I, too, went to summer school, but I was taking typing and shorthand, because my mother thought it was a good thing for a girl to know how to do. He would invite me along with his friends to go to the beach, and I would sit in the back of their convertibles as they sang along to the Beach Boys, feeling that I had stolen grace. Even though Peppy’s really smart, he only applied to a secondrate Catholic college. He’s never credited his own intelligence. When, in his fifties, a consultant he hired to work on a new résumé told him to list his strengths, he wrote, “Lighting design, archery, plausible lies.” The consultant suggested that he was not being serious. I, however, was always serious. I got a scholarship to an Ivy League school. I was demonstrating at the Pentagon, marching for abortion rights. He was the president of his fraternity. We saw each other only at Christmas, and the differences in our identities as college students were irrelevant; people were still telling us that we had to be separated at the table because we were laughing so much that we couldn’t finish our meals. One Christmas he brought a wonderful girl, Marilyn, who laughed just like we did. He had graduated from college then and was living in New York, working for NBC. She was a social worker, and they met every night after work and went out. In the summers, they rented a timeshare in the Hamptons. One of their favorite pastimes was setting themselves down at the beach beside a particularly elegant couple and, when they went to the ocean, looking through their bags for an address book. If they found one, they would put their own names and addresses in the glamorous couple’s book. Or else they would write “Fred and Ethel Mertz, 124 E. 68th St.,” or “Rob and

COUSIN, COUSINE

by Mary Gordon

©Thomas Allen, Electric, 2012. Courtesy Foley Gallery, New York.

Laura Petrie, 27 Bonnie Meadow Drive.” Everyone thought they’d be announcing their engagement at any time. But it was the early seventies, and there was no rush. Then, another Christmas, instead of the wonderful girl he brought Bill. He was older than Peppy, attractive in a young Jack Nicholson way, smart, acerbic, a chain smoker, a heavy drinker. He liked to laugh, but his laughter had an edge to it. He and I argued passionately about Vietnam. He was for it; I was wearing a turquoise minidress with gold peace symbols. I wasn’t living in New York then, and we didn’t see much of each other. And then I got a call from Marilyn. She was weeping. Peppy and Bill were leaving New York. They were moving to Florida. Did I know about them? Did I know they were a couple? She always thought it was just a phase he was going through, that eventually he would come to realize that he was meant to be with her. Would I talk to him, she begged. Would I tell him that he was making a terrible mistake, that he needed to be with her. I told her that I couldn’t possibly. I phoned him and told him what had happened. I never asked him why he hadn’t come out to me; surely he knew that I would be fine with it. He said that he loved

Bill and they were happy, and would I try to be nice to Marilyn, and he was sure that eventually everyone would be friends. Marilyn died a year later; she had a heart attack while she was playing tennis. When I asked him what he felt, he said that when he thought of her he pretended that he was in Topper and she was a glamorous ghost, watching over him, keeping him from harm. I’m sure that one of the reasons Peppy and Bill moved to Florida was to get away from Peppy’s mother. But she followed him down there, never acknowledging his relationship with Bill. After they’d been living together for twenty years, and working together side by side in their lighting business, my aunt asked why I thought Peppy didn’t get married. I said, “Oh, Aunt Lil, he’s so busy at the store.” She said, “That’s what I thought.” I told Peppy that night and, ever after, it became part of our private lexicon. When we want to say someone’s gay, we say, “He’s busy at the store.” As the years passed, Peppy and I shared the problem of lovable but difficult mothers, neither of whom aged well. One Christmas vacation, when I had brought my mother down to Florida to spend the holidays with her sister, Peppy and I had the insane idea of suggesting to our mothers that they move in together. As if with one voice, they both intoned, “Ohhhhh, no.” We asked them to think about it. That night, they explained why it was impossible. “We like to watch different shows,” my aunt said. “I like Dallas and Falcon Crest, and she likes Ironside and Magnum P.I.” My mother nodded in vigorous assent. We pointed out that there were many different rooms in the house, each with its own television. “Ohhhhh, no,” our mothers said, in one voice. We gave up. We understood that if we didn’t laugh about our family we could get really morose about them. At my daughter’s wedding-rehearsal

Mary Gordon is best known for her novels, memoirs, and literary criticism, including Spending and Circling My Mother; her latest book is The Love of My Youth. She is the MacIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College.

THE SURPRISES OF AGING: A Conversation with Francine Prose

Ed Ruscha, The Beginnings, 1987, acrylic on canvas. ©Ed Ruscha, courtesy of the artist.

I particularly wished for an older brother. I didn’t have that, but I had my cousin Peppy.

dinner, being introduced to her new in-laws, Peppy turned to me and said, “Do they realize yet that they’re a better family than we are?” Because we are a family with deep Irish roots, funerals are an important index to who we are. When Peppy’s father died, I was three weeks away from delivering my first child. Legally, I wasn’t supposed to fly. When I told him that, he said, “Yes, but if you come we can laugh, and if not it will be a nightmare.” I got on the plane, lying about my due date. Sure enough, bad behavior was rampant. Two of my uncles had to be pried apart; they had come to blows, shouting at each other, “God speaks to me, goddamnit, not to you.” At his mother’s funeral, Peppy had to prevent one of our aunts from taking the flowers off his mother’s grave. “She doesn’t need them—I can use them,” our aunt said. Peppy insisted she put them back. “I guess if you’re made of money you can afford to think like you do,” she said. A few years later, after Peppy had heroically cleaned out this aunt’s filthy house and arranged for her to be in a nursing home, he told her that he was going to France for a vacation. “Vacation again, pleasure boy,” she said. He immediately called me to tell me this, and instead of being furious we just laughed. What Peppy did for our aunt, a mean woman he didn’t even like, demonstrated his incredibly effective kindness. He is literally always there for me, as I learned when I called him in a panic from my husband’s London hospital bed. Peppy and Bill bought a house in the Dordogne, and my husband and I visited them on one vacation. A week later, on the London part of our trip, my husband came down with Legionnaires’ disease and almost died. I was alone in a strange city, desperate, worried that our insurance wasn’t good abroad. Of course, I called Peppy. His immediate response: “What do you need? Do you need money? Do you need me?” I said I might need money soon, but that right now I needed him. He got on a plane and met me at the hospital. “This is the plan,” he said. “Every night we find a fabulous restaurant and we eat a wonderful meal.” At one of these wonderful meals, I grew weepy with gratitude. When the waiter came to take our order, Peppy said, “And we’ll have the escargots for the lady with the tears.” Bill, who died this year, didn’t like to travel, so mostly I saw them on my visits to Florida. When I visit Peppy, we love lying in bed next to each other, watching the old TV shows we used to watch as kids. We particularly enjoy spotting the hidden gay overtones in these shows. Like Bishop Sheen. “He’s just a step below RuPaul,” Peppy said. And the boy dancers on The Lawrence Welk Show, “Do you think the Lennon Sisters knew?” he asked. One night I said to him, “I’m not being judgmental, but I’ve always wondered. What were you and your friends doing when my friends and I were demonstrating about civil rights and Vietnam?” He put his arm around me and said, “Well, you are being judgmental, but the thing is, I didn’t believe there was anything I could do to change the world. I thought you were all kidding yourselves, and I wanted to be happy. And, as it turns out, the world really hasn’t changed. And I was happy. I still am.” He still is, and he makes me happy. Laughter and kindness—a whole life’s worth. It doesn’t get better than that.

This past summer John Guare, co-executive editor, discussed mortality with best-selling writer Francine Prose. Her books include My New American Life, Goldengrove, and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Francine Prose: I think very few people really have intimations, serious intimations, of their own mortality. I was talking to my husband, Howie, who is a painter, about this. He said, “Well, there are certain people who seemed to have lived with death

every moment and it really was the driving force.” Picasso, for example, seems never to have forgotten it. There are beautiful pictures of Picasso, I think on his ninetieth birthday, and he’s got cake, and a knife that he’s about to stab the cake with. You can tell that death is very present to him. It’s an epistemological problem as much as anything. How could you possibly know that such a thing is going to happen to you? People can’t seem to understand anything until it happens to them. They under-

stand it in a sort of cerebral way, like, “Oh, yes, people get old, this happens to some people.” But it doesn’t really hit home until it actually happens to you, like falling in love or falling ill. John Guare: When did you realize: Oh, this is my life. I’m no longer dreaming of the future. This is where I’m going to live. This is what I’m going to do. FP: I guess I must have realized it just now when you said it. No, actually I can remember very clearly when it hit that I wasn’t going to be a child forever, and that was shocking knowledge. I remember crying and weeping and just being beside myself. JG: What were you afraid of? FP: Being an adult. JG: What was scary about being an adult? FP: I liked being a child. I liked my family. I liked not having to make any decisions. I was happy being a child. I liked living with my family. But, in terms of having a “this is my life” moment, I still feel I don’t know what’s going to happen. It would be one thing if I had the kind of life where you work in your job for a certain number of years, then you retire and you get the gold watch, and you’ve made some plans. But so much of my life is still [knocking on wood] surprising to me that I don’t feel that those surprises are necessarily over. The process of aging is surprising; it is another one of those things that people don’t think is going to happen to them. My mother, who died when she was eightynine, seemed to have no fear of death, insofar as I could tell. Although I think when she finally realized that she was dying it was a bit of a shock to her, because she had somehow thought, as so many people do, that it wasn’t ever going to happen. My father died when she was in her late sixties. She essentially said, “The worst thing has happened to me, so after this I’m just going 11

THE SURPRISES OF AGING: A Conversation with Francine Prose

Ed Ruscha, The Beginnings, 1987, acrylic on canvas. ©Ed Ruscha, courtesy of the artist.

I particularly wished for an older brother. I didn’t have that, but I had my cousin Peppy.

Nostalgia is terrible, especially if you’re a bit of a sentimentalist, as I am. No one knows it, but it’s true. about the death of a sister, a child and not a grown-up, but it was the thing that enabled me to get out of bed in the morning. I think art, in addition to its other functions, is an incredibly useful way of dealing with the specter of mortality. Not even necessarily your own mortality, but others’ mortality, which in many ways is more frightening to me than my own. JG: Yes. I knew that, too. My parents lived in dread. My mother lived in dread every day. My parents used to say, “We lived in terror that you’d be kidnapped.” I said, “Well, who would want me? We don’t have any money.” My mother would say, “Who wouldn’t want you?” FP: In the early fifties, when I was a kid, there were tons of kidnappings. There’s a great line in Diane Arbus’s book Chronology—you know, she came from a wealthy family—where she said something like “I used to think about being kidnapped. I used to wonder how much they would pay for me.” There’s nothing that you don’t pay for in some way. One of the prices that you pay for having a happy family life or having a long, close marriage is the knowledge that, barring the train wreck or the plane crash, death is going to separate you,

came and about a hundred people came from America, Italy, and Europe. They filled up the church and people performed. She was dressed in black and sat in a chair way in the dark part of the chapel and watched it. My wife, Adele, wouldn’t go, because she was sure that when we came out our friend would be floating in the canal. FP: (Laughter) Surprise! I think it’s a common fantasy. And I think it’s partly because the idea of extinction is so hard for people to get their minds around. The idea that you won’t be present at your own funeral service is almost unimaginable. Perhaps that’s why it’s common in many religions to think that the spirit of the living hovers around the body or in the world for a certain period of time. Who came up with this? The living came up with this because they couldn’t imagine extinction. They thought, I’m just going to hang around to find out what people say about me after I’m dead. So I think that in many people’s minds there’s the fantasy of being present at their own funeral. JG: Do we ever find a way to deal with our mortality, or are we just crushed by it? FP: There’s probably a spectrum between terror and acceptance that everybody falls into, but any place on the spectrum can be used by the person for any number of things—for productivity, for creativity, for self-pity….

JG: Did you think much about mortality when you were a teenager? FP: When I was fifteen, my father, who worked at the Bellevue Morgue, got me a summer job in the morgue. It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. This was before they separated out the Medical Examiner’s Office from the mortuary, so all of the crimes in New York had come through the Autopsy Room. It was the weirdest subculture you can imagine. Everyone who worked there knew the history of every crime that had happened for the last twenty or thirty years. I was a kid. I’d bring my lunch and they’d tell me about these bodies they found in trunks and floating in the river, and I just loved it. I was actually next to the Autopsy Room. It smelled sort of horrible. And everyone who worked there would say, “If you think this is bad, wait till they bring in a floater.” Which was someone who had been in the river. And I’d say, “Well, how will I know?” And they’d say, “Don’t worry, you’ll know.” And, sure enough, two weeks before the summer was over I walked in and there was no doubt in my mind what had happened. It was intense. And there we all were. JG: Does the smell stay on you when you get home? FP: Yes. But we went on. We were eating our lunch, gossiping.

JG: In the room next door? FP: Yes. It was weird. JG: Did you see bodies? FP: I did—the door was open. I got kind of macho about it. The medical residents’ rotation was in July, and there would be all these residents green and grabbing their knees out in the hall. I’d say, “What’s wrong with you? You can’t take it?” JG: Did your father think that was odd? FP: No, he didn’t. Isn’t that weird? But that’s what my father did. He was a pathologist. He did autopsies every day. That’s what he did. So it was totally normal to him. That was our dinner-table conversation. He would talk about what had shown up on the autopsy table. JG: Where we’ll all end up eventually. Let’s drink to that!

Clockwise from top left: Ed Ruscha, The End, 1991, lithograph, Age 1964, graphite on paper and Self #1, 1967, gunpowder on paper. ©Ed Ruscha, courtesy of the artist.

to have fun.” And she did. She had a whole other life in old age. JG: So you know Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”? FP: I was actually thinking about Wordsworth the other day. Isn’t that poem about not dwelling on the past and finding strength in what lies beyond? JG: Yes, yes. FP: It’s very useful, because one of the hardest things about getting old, especially if you’ve liked your life, is nostalgia. Nostalgia is terrible, especially if you’re a bit of a sentimentalist, as I am. No one knows it, but it’s true. JG: Is that how you feel about your kids? FP: Absolutely. I had their unconditional love. They were around all the time. Of course, I’m editing out all the nightmarish moments when they’d be slamming each other in the back seat of the car and Howie and I would be screaming, and it was chaotic and miserable. But I remember it as this idyllic time to which nothing can compare. JG: How do you deal with mortality in your art? FP: I think that anyone who writes or makes art or turns any element of their life into a creative work has some idea that that’s just a way to handle mortality, a way to deal with it. At really difficult times in my life, I would take some little element of my life and put it in a story or a novel and think, Oh, how does anyone who doesn’t do this deal with this? After my mother’s death, I started writing my novel Goldengrove. It’s

which terrifies me. I’m hoping that I predecease everyone in my family, frankly. JG: How will they deal with that? FP: They will be much better prepared to deal with it than I will. JG: Really? FP: Well, the kids, obviously, because it’s the natural order. And Howie, because he’s a competent human being and I’m not. I can’t function. So I think he’d be much better off. He’ll get a dog. (Laughter) JG: What do you think motivated Chekhov? FP: Who knows what motivated him, but I would guess that what kept him going was an endless curiosity about what it was like to be inside the skin of another human being, which is another way of dealing with mortality. If you’re able to exist inside people, and record what it’s like to exist inside other people, maybe that frees you from the entire burden of “This is my life, this is all it’s ever going to be.” He wrote, what, six hundred short stories? You could say that he had six hundred lives—you could certainly believe that, reading the stories. JG: How many is that a day? FP: It’s a high rate of production, to say nothing of his having been a doctor, working in the theater, building schools, hospitals, going to Sakhalin Island. He was a busy guy. JG: What would your tombstone say? FP: I will leave that to my various beloveds to figure out. But, on that subject, I recently went to a dissatisfying memorial service. Every so often I think, Well, gee, you know, it would be nice to have this piece of music at my memorial service, or to have someone read a poem. But after this dissatisfying memorial service I thought, You know what, I don’t want one. I don’t want a new set of uncontrollable variables being introduced into the lives of the people who love me. You know, maybe four years after I’m dead if they want to do it, fine, but right after? No. JG: A friend of ours was planning for her memorial service and she thought it was so beautiful that she decided to have it. FP: When she was alive? JG: Yes. FP: Oh, that’s excellent. JG: She picked the music. She picked the chapel in Venice where she wanted to have it. She asked me to write her eulogy. She

Clockwise from top left: Ed Ruscha, The End, 1991, lithograph, Age 1964, graphite on paper and Self #1, 1967, gunpowder on paper. ©Ed Ruscha, courtesy of the artist.

A GREETING TO THE FUTURE

By Mark Doty

Last July, when summer was at its height, my relationship of sixteen years came to an end. Lest it sound like I’m beginning a dark story on a dark note, let me hasten to say that I’m fine, he’s fine, and our friends have not (as far as I know) hurried to take sides. Paul and I are friendly, if a bit careful around each other, and we have both quite happily moved on to the state of being actively involved with someone new. There is loss here, certainly, but no tragedy, and little to regret. Though as soon as I write that pesky and magnetic word regret, I realize I’ve wandered into slippery territory. Of course there are things I wish I’d done differently, or wish he had done or not done—how could there not be, after sixteen years? In truth, I do not wish the outcome had been a different one. We’d have to be different people, without the particular intertwined knot of strengths and flaws that make us ourselves. Would I really have wanted either of us to be someone else? Our good years ran their course, and then it was time for the next step, and perhaps all I really regret is that we didn’t take that next step a little sooner. What is regret? Merely an inevitable mood, a momentary cloud darkening the emotional landscape? A permanent aspect of the self, as if we’re each born with a certain amount of space in our psyches devoted to wishing the past had been other than it was? A spur, an incentive to live boldly, to miss few opportunities? Who wants to wind up like people in Chekhov, letting out long sighs as we consider what might have been if we’d only gone to Moscow after all? I, for one, have always regretted what I did not do more than anything I did. The things that I did choose—a move to New York City, for instance, when my worldly goods consisted of six hundred dollars and a yellow Chevette—seem always to have led forward. Years later, scraping together every penny I could find, and cashing in what bit of retirement savings I had to buy a cottage in the country that I couldn’t quite afford—well, I am sitting in that house now as I write, and outside metallic-blue dragonflies are flashing over the pond. The golden retriever, with his head on my right foot, is squeaking a bit in hopes that I’ll let him out there to hassle the frogs. It’s a perfect house. Not one thing I’ve ever chosen—not a marriage, a divorce, a job, a mortgage—seems to have had consequences entirely negative. But “the road not taken” is a different matter, and it looms large in the imagination simply because it wasn’t taken. Where might we have traveled, what unknown possibilities might have opened if only…I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on this, but I’m aware that there’s a shadow life beside me, a dimension of could-have-been that multiplies over time, like some strange thought experiment in physics: right beside what takes place, the multiplying, increasingly vast dimension of what could have happened. I imagined, when I asked my friends about regret, that I’d hear something akin to my own understanding. But—as might well have been predicted—regret turns out to be a roomy place, and people have surprisingly different things to say about it. Carol said, with barely a moment’s hesitation, “I’m like a regret jukebox—press Childhood, press Marriages, press Love Affairs, press Family, press Children.” She even e-mailed me a few hours later to add some other categories: Pets, Students, Friendships.… Matthew hardly ever feels regret; mostly, he’s fairly certain he’s made the right choices. But now and then it steals up on him, so intense and painful it’s nearly immobilizing, and he can’t do much of anything at all. Dara believes that regret is useless; nothing that’s done can be changed, and, therefore, to spend time and energy wishing it otherwise is entirely a vain endeavor. Of course, the occasional tendril of regret comes creeping in, but she’s made the decision that it will have very little part in her life, and it doesn’t. Dara’s best friend regrets only what she kept on doing, what she should have stopped before she did. Michael points out that when you choose one course you reject others. He who orders the cashew chicken may never know the glory of the basil vegetarian duck that particular evening. Choosing and refusing are not separate acts but more like two sides of a coin, except in this case the coin has perhaps hundreds of sides, and to choose one is to say no to a burgeoning host of possibilities. And that means that a distinction between regretting what one did or what one didn’t do isn’t, indeed, of much use. I’m not sure I am grateful for this insight. 15

A GREETING TO THE FUTURE

By Mark Doty

MONEY TIME

Lisa believes the real question is whether you believe that what you do makes a difference, whether you think you can actually change the course of things. If you believe you have this power, then regret is inevitable; if you think you’re just one little bit among a great chain of causation, or that things happen as they do no matter what, then what’s to regret? But Lisa also regrets things that she didn’t cause—regrets that the ice is melting, that she has food and other people on earth don’t—and that’s a different form of regret. Just one thing was the same in each person’s response: about two minutes into the conversation, each of my friends began to get a darkish look, demonstrating a suddenly gathering distress. No one found this an easy matter, and I began to feel a little guilty for asking my friends to confront it. Though I have to say that, the evening Dara and her friend and I drank plenty of gin, we all thoroughly enjoyed trying to talk the question through.

Mark Doty won the National Book Award for poetry in 2008, for his Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. His nonfiction book, Dog Years, was a New York Times best-seller. A professor at Rutgers University, he lives in New York City and on the East End of Long Island. 16

A couple of months after Paul and I broke up I got a large tattoo, and not one of the subtly concealed sort, either. It’s splashed across my chest, and quite beautiful: an open palm faces out to the world, arising out of a swirl of cloud, supported on either side by a wing that spreads out to the tip of my shoulders. (A word to the wise concerning tattoos involving one’s collarbones: Ow.) This is not my first tattoo. I’ve had another discreetly tucked away on my back for several years. I put it there because I thought I’d like not being reminded of it all the time; I could look at it if I chose to, but it wouldn’t be an everyday presence. But something changed, in this new life: I wanted a plainly visible sign that I’d stepped out, opened the door, that a new wind was blowing through my days. So I went to see a young man with a private studio up many flights of stairs in the East Village, and told him what I had in mind, and he went to work sketching and daydreaming, and a week later I found myself lying on his table, eager to be inscribed. The next three hours began with a mild scratching, like being grazed with a fingernail, then proceeded to a needling intensity. By hour three, I felt like someone was scraping my skin away with a razor. When I was completely inked, I was woozy, inflamed, and floating a ways above the neighborhood’s low skyline. That was just the outline of the tattoo, but when the Saran Wrap and antibiotic jelly came off and I looked at the result, it didn’t need another thing. The hand was delicately drawn, the wings outlined in a tracery that might have been tongues of flame, and somehow it looked both classic and new all at once. I couldn’t have liked it much better. The indigo fingertips poke just above the top button of my shirt, and people are curious. I suppose it’s no surprise that, while most people seem to like it, there are those who can’t get over the sheer size of the thing. A couple of friends have definitely associated it with something like a midlife crisis: You got that when you guys split up, didn’t you? I had been pretty much immune to doubt about my commitment to this big signpost on my chest until sometime this spring, when I caught myself in the bathroom mirror one morning and felt, well, horrified. What had I done? The body itself is always changing, in a state of natural flux, and wasn’t it vain to scrawl something unchanging upon it? What if I wanted my chest to say something else, or nothing at all? Did I think I could make something better than skin? This feeling persisted for exactly two weeks, during which I felt a mild panic that I more or less kept to myself. I was a bit ashamed to reveal that I had such doubts about my decision, that I feared I might have marred myself in some dumb, irreparable way. I suspect that you’ll have already understood what I couldn’t see just then: that my regrets weren’t for the tattoo itself; they were doubts about the transformations in my life that the ink stood for. What’s more obviously metaphoric than to write upon one’s skin, to choose the emblems we’ll wear to face the world? And here I get a little gleam of understanding of something that might be essential, even helpful, about regret. If I could move forward from this life-changing moment without looking back, without a wave of uncertainty sweeping in sometimes, that would be too glib, too easy. Big change requires a process of emotional registration that takes time; we need to look back at how we’ve written on ourselves and say, Did I do that? Was that what I wanted to do? Doubt is a balancing force, an opportunity to pause, to let our choices sink in, to feel ourselves on the path we’ve chosen. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but there was a moment when suddenly the tattoo looked fine to me: confident, bold, at home. A hand open to whatever was coming, a greeting to the future. A sign of fearlessness. If I find myself doubting it again next year—well, probably so much the better. The open hand welcomes—or, at least, tries to welcome—discomfort, too, taking everything in as an opportunity to know more, to remain receptive to whatever comes, to see what it might have to show me.

By Craig Morgan Teicher

Supposedly, time is money: money will buy you time assuming you have money to spend, as well as time to wait while your money grows. However, time spent waiting can be like money misspent—it’s often time wasted, even if money is made, a kind of time not worth spending, so money isn’t necessarily time. Maybe time is money if you make with your time something else that makes money, though most of the time it’s not your money you’ve made with your time. And money isn’t even money, necessarily, in a time like this, when money loses value and time is misspent losing money. And time isn’t even time, necessarily, if it’s lost money on which you’re wasting time, nor is money really money if it’s wasted on wasted time. Still, sometimes, time is money, but only if you have money and time. Craig Morgan Teicher is a poet, critic, and freelance writer. He is the author of To Keep Love Blurry, Cradle Book, and Brenda Is in the Room, which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry.

MONEY TIME

By Craig Morgan Teicher

SURVIVAL INSTINCT:

Co-executive editor John Guare visited the acclaimed writer Paula Fox at her Brooklyn home. She is the author of numerous novels, memoirs, and award-winning children’s books, including Desperate Characters, Borrowed Finery, and The Slave Dancer.

eleven or twelve. Then, when I was in Cuba for two years, we wrote. I remember getting a black-bordered letter, and I knew his mother had died. In fact, I wrote about that. And then I went to see him when I was eighteen or nineteen. He died very soon after that. JG: When you decided to write it down, was that a way of saying, “I can’t lose this, because it will all go away?” PF: That’s very interesting that you should say that. I wrote two memoirs. The second one is The Coldest Winter, which was about my year in Europe after the war. The first was the one you read, Borrowed Finery, which I began writing after a trip to Israel. Martin, my husband—Martin Greenberg—and I went to Jerusalem about fourteen years ago. The first day we were there, we met up with Irving Howe’s widow, Ilana, who is Israeli. It was Friday evening and everything was closed for the Sabbath, but some of the Israelis pay no attention to that. So we went to a terrible restaurant and we had a lot to talk about, because we were friends who hadn’t seen each other for a long time. We went back to Mishkenot, where we were going to stay at a scholar’s residence where we both had fellowships. On the way back, they went a little ahead of me. It was very late, 10:30 or 11:00. I was attacked; I was assaulted. I was knocked on the head and my bag was taken—my passport and my money. Ilana and Martin were ahead of me, and she found a couple walking in the night and they called the Hadassah hospital. So I spent the whole month in the hospital, and then a week in Columbia Presbyterian when we came back here. When I recovered I thought, I will now have to write about myself, because otherwise it will be gone. It took me three months to write ten sentences, because I had brain damage. I couldn’t read. I was unable to read books when we came back. When I first began to read, I read a book about brain injuries and there was a story about a composer who had been assaulted in Paris, a French composer; he lost the capacity to read music forever and he was a composer,

Photograph © Floris Neusüss. Courtesy of Atlas Gallery London, where an upcoming show by Floris Neusüss can be seen from 8 November 2012-12 January 2013. www.atlasgallery.com

John Guare: I wanted to talk to you because you’ve had so many lives. Did you have a different identity for each home you found yourself in, or did you always feel that you were Paula? Paula Fox: I felt shapeless. Except during the first few years of my life that I spent with Amos Elwood Corning, who was a minister and state historian of New York State, and who was an absolutely wonderful man. My father was a Hollywood screenwriter for a while, among other things. He had been a playwright. He was also a drunk. He took me to California when I was six, and Mr. Corning stood in Balmville looking at the train across the river taking me westward. But within two weeks my mother said, “Either she goes or I go.” And so my father sent me back to Mr. Corning. JG: Your mother did not like you? PF: No, no, she had hated the sight of me from the time I was born. She didn’t want a baby. They put me in a foundling home right away, and my grandmother came from Cuba, where she was the companion of an old cousin who owned a sugar plantation. She had heard from my Uncle Leopold, who was the only Spanish relative I cared about, that my father, against Leopold’s urgings, had agreed to put me in this foundling home. My Uncle Leopold was a homosexual and he lived with a man who had family in Washingtonville, New York, and they took me in. Their minister was Mr. Corning. He saw me when I was five months old and he said, “I’ll take her.” JG: With all those identities and abandonments, did you come to an early awakening and say, “Oh, this is my life and nobody is going to look out for me but me?” PF: Probably I did. JG: Was there a point when you said, “Oh,

this is my life and I can no longer look into the future. I’m in my future?” PF: Oh, no. From the time I was first conscious of its being my life, I knew I had to take care of myself. My instinct to live is very powerful. JG: Was change good, or terrifying? PF: I didn’t think that way. I didn’t think it was good or bad; I just thought it was the way things were. In some way, I knew that change was everything for me in my life. JG: Did that mean a new identity? PF: I never had an identity that I knew of. JG: Did you think about mortality? PF: Of course, as one gets old all you think about is death...and eating. Once, when I was a little girl in Redlands, California, there was an earthquake and the whole earth opened up. I remember standing on the porch and looking at the dust and then this crevice appeared in the road. JG: Well, that’s an intimation of mortality. PF: Oh, yes. I’ve always had that sense of being on the edge of a precipice. I still have it. JG: Is it dread? PF: It’s a mixture of dread and hilarity. I’m composed of those two elements out of five thousand possible ones. But things seem very funny to me. JG: Were you frightened as a young girl moving from home to home? PF: I was really always in a state of terror, fear. Everything alarmed me, but I controlled it, because I knew it was dangerous to show. JG: Do you think that if one is rootless, as you were, and living in terror, you don’t dare have that moment of facing your future? PF: I don’t think I’ve ever looked ahead, but I was capable of feeling kindness and people were very good to me, except for relatives. JG: Except for relatives? PF: Yes, and people, you know, who were out to get me. But I found people to care about. Like Mr. Corning. He was a very powerful influence. There is his picture right there. JG: Did you see him again after the age of six? PF: Oh, yes. I went back to see him when I was living with my grandmother. I had terrible ear trouble, and she sent for him when I was

A Conversation with Paula Fox so he could only play what he knew. It took me a year before I could write. I mean, literally. Not to mention using the typewriter. Borrowed Finery is what came out. JG: What started you writing before? Was it because your father was a writer? PF: Well, it had something to do with that. Also, his sister Jessie had written some novels. They’re very obscure novels now. And he had a cousin named Faith Baldwin—she was the Danielle Steel of her period. JG: You have half–brothers and sisters—do they ever appear in your life? PF: Jim Fox, whose picture I have downstairs, and I have gotten to be very good friends. I have very long conversations and long e-mails with my sister, half–sister, Louise, who is Canadian. She’s in her sixties. So I always think of her as a young girl, a beautiful young girl. JG: Do you share a past with them in any way? Do you feel that they’re siblings, or that they’re just younger people in your life? PF: I don’t name things very much. The word sibling makes me nervous. But I think I feel a certain closeness or intimacy that I assume is familial with them, with Louise and Jim, which I feel with my own children, of course, and with my daughter Linda’s children. JG: You’re about to be ninety. PF: I think about death all the time now. JG: How do you think about it? PF: I’m puzzled by it. I’m terrified of it. I’m glad. You know, it’s a mixture of feelings. JG: What scares you about it? PF: Pain, for one thing. I’m very frightened of pain. I’ve had a lot of it in my life. But I also feel curiosity—how I’ll be in a hospital bed or here—and relief, you know, at the thought of it, being free of everything. JG: Are you at all religious? PF: When I was with Mr. Corning, I was very comforted by a Christmas tree. JG: And as an adult? PF: My religion is Mystery. That’s the name of the religion. And it is religious. JG: Like the medieval text The Cloud of Unknowing? PF: Yes, exactly. I have no belief. But I do think that the fact that the earth itself and

outer space are so mysterious…that we invent these little stories to comfort ourselves against the power of not knowing anything. JG: Did you have to control everything in your life? PF: Oh, no. I felt the opposite. Everything was out of control around me. I was so grateful when people smiled at me. JG: When did you finally get dealt a hand that made you say, “This I can live with”? PF: When my first novel was accepted, and my first children’s book. I loved my editor, Richard Jackson, who was my children’s book editor for all twenty-three of my children’s books. And I loved Henry Robbins, who was my editor at Dutton and died early. JG: When you said, “I can live with this hand,” that was a joyous thing? Saying, “I’m home now. I know who I am.” PF: Yes. JG: So an intimation of mortality doesn’t necessarily have to be that of dread. I must say, I feel the same way. I don’t dread the future. I feel very lucky that I knew very young what I wanted my life to be, and it’s remained the magnet under my life. PF: Yes, exactly. In that, we are brother and sister. Twins. JG: It’s interesting that life does not necessarily require a Chekhovian dread. PF: Well, I don’t think Chekhov felt dread, even though he died very young. Do you think he had dread? JG: Do you think Chekhov was ever Chekhovian? PF: No, I don’t think he was. But, at the same time, he thought about death all the time. In the same way that I do. Everything was hazardous, so there was always death, but somehow I had merriment at the same time. It’s a strange combination. JG: How lucky you are to have that life force of joy. PF: I’ve seen people who went through far less than I did and they’re absolutely depressed forever. But it’s the nature of the being that I am, and I don’t know to what I owe it.

SURVIVAL INSTINCT:

Photograph © Floris Neusüss. Courtesy of Atlas Gallery London, where an upcoming show by Floris Neusüss can be seen from 8 November 2012-12 January 2013. www.atlasgallery.com

CHRISTOPHER DURANG, CHERUBIC GADFLY by Robert Brustein

Reading through Chris Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike was a little like time-tripping for me. I was suddenly back in New Haven, in the winter of 1972, watching a fledgling student playwright beginning his journey toward a well-earned place in the pantheon of American dramatists. Chris was then in his second year at the Yale School of Drama, where I was the current dean. He had come to us from Harvard, having received little encouragement except from William Alfred, who, like his predecessor, George Pierce Baker, knew a playwright when he saw one. So did his teachers at Yale—Howard Stein, Jules Feiffer, and Richard Gilman—who quickly recognized the originality of this shy, gentle-voiced, babyfaced mayhem-maker. In New Haven, Chris virtually expropriated the Yale Cabaret, which we had opened in 1968, in a nearby fraternity house, as an outlet for musical explosions, satirical incisions, and political purgatives. It provided precisely the kind of uncensored, freewheeling venue that his anarchic spirit needed for nourishment, and it was the place where he and his classmate Sigourney Weaver began their long and fruitful collaboration on an intimate stage, taking revenge on reality in song and dance. It was also the place where Durang was to work with another close Yale friend, Wendy Wasserstein (“When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth” was the title of one of their memorable collaborations). And he drew support and talent from other gifted members of that legendary student body, including (and this is a short list) besides Sigourney and Wendy, Ted Tally, Albert Innaurato, William Hauptman, Robert Auletta, Stephen Rowe, Lizbeth MacKay, Charles H. Levin, Kate McGregor-Stewart, Christine Estabrook, Lewis Black, and Meryl Streep. I have called Chris Durang an “anarchic spirit,” but he was and is one of the best-mannered people I have been honored to know. His early efforts to avoid eternal damnation from the New Jersey Jesuits turned him into an American Alyosha who, at least on the surface, was courteous and self-effacing in the extreme. But who knew what was going on in those subterranean depths? I have more than once described Durang as “an angelic choirboy with poison leeching through his fingertips.” But although his plays may seem like the work of Lucifer hurling firebolts at the damned, the man with the

throwing arm is unfailingly tender, soft-spoken, and gracious. And that, I think, is one of the things that makes him so unique in our theater. He has the capacity to imagine the most absurd and dreadful things that can happen to a human being, with a combination of fierce outrage and wide-eyed surprise. Take that series of hospital scenes in what is surely one of his finest works, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, where the doctor drops one blue-blanketed baby after another on the floor to dramatize Bette’s innumerable miscarriages. These are moments that are, at the same time, unbearably cruel and unbearably funny, proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain that finds pain, not pleasure, in other people’s misfortune. The reason I say that Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike took me back in time is that the very first thing I ever saw by Durang was another satire on Russian literature, a student show that he wrote in collaboration with his classmate Albert Innaurato. It was called The Idiots Karamazov—or, at least, that was the title I requested for it. The authors originally called the play The Brothers Karamazov, in cheerful violation of whatever remained of czarist copyright law. The show began with Dostoyevsky’s three brothers (Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha) rushing onstage to sing, “Oh, we got to get to Moscow,” as if they were indistinguishable from Chekhov’s three sisters (Olga, Masha, and Irina) performing the opening number in a Frank Loesser musical. By the time the play was over, the stage was littered with the remains of the Western lit-crit reading list, shredded on the library floor. I was so crazy about this piece of mayhem that I scheduled it the following season as the second offering in our professional season, in repertory with Andrzej Wajda’s production of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (in an adaptation by Albert Camus). Meryl Streep played Stavrogin’s mistress in The Possessed, and on alternate nights the ancient “translatrix” Constance Garnett, bane of all graduate students, in The Idiots Karamazov. In the Durang-Innaurato play, Streep was pushed around the stage in a wheelchair by Ernest Hemingway, who, at the same time, was trying to commit suicide with a shotgun, while Constance was brandishing her cane and shouting at the audience, “Go home! Go home!” The radical switch she made from Dostoyevsky’s tragic beauty to Durang and Innaurato’s ancient crone—a wart on her nose, her eyes 21

CHRISTOPHER DURANG, CHERUBIC GADFLY by Robert Brustein

Awarded the 2010 National Medal of Arts, Robert Brustein is the founder of the Yale Repertory Theatre and American Repertory Theater, and the author of seventeen books and twelve plays. His latest play, The Last Will, opens in New York in April 2013.

CHRISTOPHER DURANG

ans; and he lost his religious faith when he realized that the heavens do not often reward virtue or punish sin. This is not to say that Durang is a facile apostate or a knee-jerk agnostic. The character of Angry Black Woman in Media Amok, for example, reveals that he mocks not only people who think in stereotypes but those who behave like stereotypes as well. But underlying Durang’s sometimes vitriolic satire is a fundamental religious melancholy. Reared as a pious Roman Catholic, Durang gradually learned that God doesn’t often answer prayers (“He does,” argues the nun in the eponymous Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, “but sometimes the answer is no”). And God certainly doesn’t seem very eager to reward the innocent, either. (“I don’t think God punishes people for specific things,” a character in The Marriage of Bette and Boo says. “I think he punishes people in general, for no reason.” It was following this discovery, I suspect, that Durang’s early Christian piety eventually gave way to a profound disenchantment, his fraying innocence punctured by a lacerating sense of the absurd (“I don’t believe in God anymore,” says a character in Beyond Therapy. “I believe in bran cereal”). This kind of unexpected juxtaposition—between the metaphysical and the mundane, between spiritual aspiration and material reality—provides the fuel for much of Durang’s comedy, which is why it manages to be at once so supremely sad and outrageously funny. In Durang’s world, if not in Einstein’s, God does, indeed, play dice with the universe, and usually turns up craps. The same kind of division can be found in Durang’s simultaneous embrace of high art and popular culture. His greatest artistic influences

CHRONOLOGY

...although his plays may seem like the work of Lucifer hurling firebolts at the damned, the man with the throwing arm is unfailingly tender, soft-spoken, and gracious.

have often been avant-garde icons such as Ionesco, Beckett, and Orton. But his style also dances to the rhythms of Broadway musicals, and dresses up in the gilded Hollywood fashions of the 1930s and the 1940s (an interest he fully explored in his Broadway musical A History of the American Film). It is hardly unusual for serious artists to borrow from popular culture. The plays of both T. S. Eliot and e. e. cummings embody the influence of vaudeville and the music hall, just as Brecht’s plays find their roots in Berlin cabaret. Waiting for Godot could scarcely have been written in the same manner without the example of Chaplin and Keaton. Ionesco is deeply indebted to Groucho Marx. So, by the way, is Durang, and he may owe a few shillings to Monty Python as well. The compressed, staccato influence of farce, burlesque, and (inevitably) cabaret have been on view from his very earliest writings—like Das Lusitania Songspiel (a satire on the Brecht-Weill Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, created and performed with Sigourney Weaver). Durang later went on to satirize sadistic nuns (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You), both the Vietnam War and those who wrote conscience-stricken plays about it (The Vietnamization of New Jersey), psychotic psychoanalysts (Beyond Therapy), mismatched marriages (The Marriage of Bette and Boo), mindless television (Media Amok), brainless child-rearing (Baby with the Bathwater), shy homosexual serial killers (Betty’s Summer Vacation), and almost any other contemporary lunacy you can name. Durang has become the voice of a seething, if often silent, humanity, inveighing against all forms of lapsarian behavior. And he has been passing on this heritage on to his playwriting students at the Juilliard School, where, since 1994, he and the playwright Marsha Norman have served as co-chairs. In his latest play, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Durang again exercises his genius for mixing up genres, this time with characters from a variety of Chekhov plays—Vanya and Sonia from Uncle Vanya, Masha from Three Sisters, and Nina from The Seagull, plus a menacing figure named Spike, from the world of rough trade. All are now in Bucks County, and they are even further mixed up with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with Nina dressed up as Dopey, Vanya as Doc and Masha, played by the brilliantly versatile Sigourney Weaver, as their adored Snow White. Once again, Durang is exploring the geography of world literature, including The Oresteia, with Cassandra as a weather woman announcing both the end of the world (“Chunks of Florida fell into the ocean yesterday”) and the death of Leslie Stahl. It is as if the apocalypse had arrived in the character of a Chekhov heroine dressed up like a fairy godmother starring on American Idol, and it proves what a generic artist Christopher Durang has become. Durang’s works describe an orbit that scans the tragicomic universe from the viewpoint of a bemused and stoic extraterrestrial. May this cherubic time traveler long continue his journey in outer space.

OF WORK

oozing plum-tree gum—was an early manifestation of her genius for character transformation. Streep’s aging Maggie Thatcher in The Iron Lady (performed at the age of sixty-two) contained more than a hint of her aging Constance Garnett (performed at the age of twenty-three). As for Chris, he continues to fascinate us with his divided self. One senses alienation in every bone in his body, but he is not by nature a radical. What he has been rebelling against is an autocratic system that ruled his early childhood years. One would guess that an inordinate number of Christopher Durang’s plays have been inspired by a loss of faith in traditional values. He abandoned his trust in the possibility of happy families when he saw his alcoholic father abuse his pregnant mother, who miscarried; he lost his enthusiasm for patriotic affirmations when he watched the land of his birth embark on brutal imperial adventures abroad; he lost his belief in equality under the law in the face of discrimination against blacks, gays, and lesbi-

THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF THE UNIVERSE, Harvard College, Loeb Experimental Theatre, Smith College 1971; Direct Theatre, 1974

SISTER MARY IGNATIUS… & THE ACTOR’S NIGHTMARE, Playwrights Horizons, 1981; Westside Arts Theatre, 1982-84

‘DENTITY CRISIS, Harvard College, Loeb Experimental Theatre, 1971; Yale Repertory Theatre, 1978

BEYOND THERAPY, Phoenix Theatre, 1981; Brooks Atkinson, 1982

BETTER DEAD THAN SORRY, Yale Cabaret, 1972; American Shakespeare Festival’s Black Box, 1973

BABY WITH THE BATHWATER, American Repertory Theater, 1983; Playwrights Horizons, 1983

I DON’T GENERALLY LIKE POETRY BUT HAVE YOU READ “TREES?”, Yale Cabaret, 1972; Manhattan Theatre Club, 1973 (co-authored and co-performed with Albert Innaurato)

THE MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO, (full-length version) Public Theater, 1985

THE LIFE STORY OF MITZI GAYNOR; OR, GYP, Yale Cabaret, 1973 (co-authored and co-performed with Albert Innaurato) TITANIC, Yale School of Drama, 1972; Direct Theatre, 1975

LAUGHING WILD, Playwrights Horizons, 1987 NAOMI IN THE LIVING ROOM, Home for Contemporary Theatre, 1988; Ensemble Studio Theatre, 1990 CHRIS DURANG AND DAWNE, Cabaret act, various venues 1988-96 MEDIA AMOK, American Repertory Theater, 1992

DEATH COMES TO US ALL, MARY AGNES, Yale School of Drama, 1972

FOR WHOM THE SOUTHERN BELLE TOLLS, Ensemble Studio Theatre, 1994

THE MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO, Yale School of Drama, 1973 (one-act version)

DURANG/DURANG, Manhattan Theatre Club, 1994

THE IDIOTS KARAMAZOV, Yale Repertory Theatre, 1974 (co-authored by Albert Innaurato, music by Jack Feldman) WHEN DINAH SHORE RULED THE EARTH, Yale Cabaret, 1975 (co-authored by Wendy Wasserstein) A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FILM, Hartford Stage, Mark Taper Forum, Arena Stage, 1977; ANTA Theatre, 1978 THE VIETNAMIZATION OF NEW JERSEY, Yale Repertory Theatre, 1977

SEX AND LONGING, Lincoln Center Theater, Cort Theatre, 1996 A MESS OF PLAYS BY DURANG, South Coast Repertory, 1996 BETTY’S SUMMER VACATION, Playwrights Horizons, 1999 MRS. BOB CRATCHIT’S WILD CHRISTMAS BINGE, City Theatre, 2002 ADRIFT IN MACAO, New York Stage and Film, 2002; Philadelphia Theatre Company, 2006; Primary Stages, 2007 (book and lyrics Durang, music Peter Melnick),

SISTER MARY IGNATIUS EXPLAINS IT ALL FOR YOU, Ensemble Studio Theatre, 1980

MISS WITHERSPOON, co-production of McCarter Theatre, and Playwrights Horizons, 2005

DAS LUSITANIA SONGSPIEL, Chelsea Theatre Center, 1980 (co-authored and co-performed with Sigourney Weaver)

WHY TORTURE IS WRONG, AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM, Public Theater, 2009 VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE, McCarter Theatre, 2012; Lincoln Center Theater, 2012