Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder: Keep Your Eyes on Your Own Work

by Amy Cuomo

As a storyteller, playwright, teacher and full-time mom, Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder lives by a credo a teacher shared decades ago.

“I was in geometry class, paralyzed by fear that I was going to fail a test I had worked hard to prepare for, and desperately trying to catch a glimpse of the test beside me,” Wilder told her Friday keynote audience at the 2019 SETC Convention. “The teacher walked by and, without anger or judgment, simply whispered in my ear, ‘Keep your eyes on your own work.’ I turned in the finished test. My teacher placed her hand on mine and said, ‘Trust your own work.’ ”

Like most excellent advice, it immediately rings true, but is not necessarily easy to follow in real life. Years later, Wilder recalled, she found herself at a high point in her career. She had graduated from New York University (NYU) with an MFA in dramatic writing, had scored a major production of one of her plays, Fresh Kills, at London’s Royal Court Theatre, and was working as a writer for a television show in Los Angeles. From the outside, it looked like she was living the dream. However, on the inside, she was comparing herself to others and worrying about a lack of external recognition. And that, Wilder said, “robbed me of the opportunity to celebrate my own success.” It was then that she heard it again: “’Keep your eyes on your own work.’ This time,” Wilder said, “it came from my mother. I didn’t realize it then, but I would hear that gentle reminder time and time again, and it applies to every aspect of our life: to parenting, to relationships, to our work.”

For Wilder, keeping “your eyes on your own work” has led to success in writing plays such as Gee’s Bend, Furniture Home, The Flagmaker of Market Street, Everything That’s Beautiful, The Bone Orchard and White Lightning, with characters and stories that carry her own unique stamp as a playwright.

In introducing Wilder at her SETC Convention keynote, Preston Lane, artistic director of Triad Stage in Greensboro, NC, noted the success of his theatre’s recent production of Wilder’s play White Lightning, about moonshining and the evolution of NASCAR, which he said “brought brand-new audiences to my theatre. It far surpassed all our expectations at the box office. And the thing that I loved most is it brought people who had never been to the theatre before, and they were blown away by the story, and some of them bought tickets to come back.” He highlighted Wilder’s ability to “create essential Southern stories” and said, “I celebrate her work because it reconfirms that the characters of our region are more than stereotypes, and their stories deserve to be told and seen on stages across America and throughout the world.”

Wilder’s play White Lightning, about the moonshining origins of NASCAR, was commissioned by Alabama Shakespeare Festival, where it premiered in 2016. Above, Becca Ballenger and Matthew Goodrich appear in the ASF production. The play also was presented in February 2019 at Triad Stage (see cover photo) in Greensboro, NC.

Stephen Poff

From the South to New York

While many of her stories are set in the South, Wilder’s work transcends borders, taking its place in a larger, national narrative. She creates characters, both Southern and not, who are compelling and touch our hearts – an accomplishment that no doubt derives in part from her roots in Mobile, AL.

“I grew up in the South, and in the South, we tell stories,” she says.

During her childhood, Wilder learned the art of storytelling by listening to her grandmother. As a child, she came to see the world through a storyteller’s eyes – and became interested in theatre. After winning a role as a Lost Boy in Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s production of Peter Pan at 15, she worked at a frozen yogurt shop to save money to go to New York. And, one month before she turned 17, the summer after high school graduation, Wilder traveled to New York – a trip that changed her life. She stayed at the Markle Evangeline Residence for Women, which provided meals and clean linens, and barred admittance to men under 65 years of age. She recalls that she lived with actors, dancers, law students and “four Russian prostitutes who we only saw at breakfast.”

It was from this home away from home that she experienced theatre and the city. She got a job with the Shubert organization, serving as an usher for productions in New York – work she continued off and on for the next decade. Wilder described it as “the perfect job because I got to see all of the shows that I otherwise couldn’t afford to see … I also got to see every new production in the fall and the spring – the rage of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Cherry Jones’ seamless descent down the stairs in The Heiress, Bernadette Peters’ showstopping “Rose’s Turn” in Gypsy, not to mention the new plays like I Am My Own Wife, Topdog/Underdog and Anna in the Tropics.”

A year after moving to New York, Wilder started school at Purchase College, just north of New York City. Her career as a writer had yet to begin. “I knew that people wrote plays, but as far as I could tell, you had to be an old white guy,” she told her keynote audience. “But then I saw Madeleine George’s play The Most Massive Woman Wins, a play written by a young woman my age.” After the show, she spied playwright Wendy Wasserstein in the lobby, and, according to Wilder, “held her hostage while I spewed forth my entire life’s story.” Wasserstein’s response changed her life. She told Wilder to “go home and write a play.” Wilder did just that. “Sometimes that’s all it takes, just one person telling you that you have the ability to do something,” she said.

She wrote her first play, and then she wrote another. She took a playwriting class at Purchase College. Her first full-length play, Tales of an Adolescent Fruit Fly, received a reading in New York, with a Tony Award nominee participating. “When I heard the audience laugh for the first time, I knew I’d found my place,” she said. “When I graduated from college, it was produced by a fledgling theatre company in a little black box theatre one floor above a strip club on 42nd Street. And at that moment in my life, I couldn’t think of anything better.”

Finding Your Tribe

In that same little black box theatre above a strip club, Wilder also found what she needed to move her career forward: people who would support her and her work. They were a group of six women who met monthly to discuss, as Wilder put it, “relationships and auditions and grad school and breakups, and we arrived en masse to support one another’s artistic endeavors. Smart, talented, funny and kind, these women taught me what it meant to be a friend.”

Later, Wilder, who had returned to school to earn an MFA in dramatic writing from NYU, again found a tribe of artists who valued her work and would foster her career. She became a member of Youngblood, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s collective for emerging professional writers under 30, which provides artistic guidance, peer support, feedback and production opportunities. “What I learned in the darkness of those Broadway theatres I refined while I was in Youngblood,” she said. She credits the program – which included playwrights such as Christopher Shinn, Amy Herzog, Qui Nguyen and Leah Nanako Winkler – with sharpening her skills as a theatre artist. In addition to providing staged readings, Youngblood reinforced the fact that theatre is collaborative. Wilder and her fellow artists “ushered for shows. We put up posters in coffee shops and asked family members to donate money,” she recalled. “We swept floors, took tickets, ran lights … We were a motley crew of young writers all working multiple jobs while trying to make theatre and hone our craft.”

Gee’s Bend, featuring Roslyn Ruff and Billy Eugene Jones (above), premiered at Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2007 and earned Wilder critical acclaim.

Phil Scarsbrock

Coming Home

In 2004, Wilder received an offer that would prove pivotal in her life and her career. The Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s Southern Writer’s Project commissioned her to write Gee’s Bend, a play about a group of women who live in the hamlet of Gee’s Bend in Alabama and are known for carrying on a tradition of quilt making that began in the 19th century. The quilts, and the women who have made them, have garnered attention from historians and art critics. In doing her research for the play, Wilder went to Gee’s Bend. She describes it as another great lesson in her playwriting career: “On my first visit to Gee’s Bend, I sat in the living room of Mary Lee Bendolph, listening to the women tell stories and patiently answering my questions. I knew that they were trusting me with their story, and I had a duty to get it right. As I left that night, I thanked the women, and Mary Lee took my hand, and she said, ‘Just write it honest.’ I wrote that on a slip of paper and taped it to my computer: ‘Just write it honest.’ Great advice and words that every young writer should live by.”

Gee’s Bend received a strong positive response from critics, audiences and theatres. After a staged reading in 2006 and its premiere in 2007 at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, followed by productions at other theatres, Wilder was selected for a prestigious honor in 2008 – the Osborn Award, given to an emerging playwright by the American Theatre Critics Association.

Meanwhile, Wilder had left Los Angeles – where she had been living and working as a writer for CBS – when the two TV shows that she was working on were canceled amid a writer’s strike. She had returned to Alabama, planning to pursue a playwriting career as she waited for the strike to end. Then she fell in love, married and had a child – and stopped writing.

“Somewhere in all of that, I had lost myself,” she said. “One day, when my daughter was still an infant, I was wearing a purple velour tracksuit for what was probably the third day in a row … when my daughter projectile vomited over one foot and our aging cat puked on the other. And I burst into tears, and I cried out, ‘I used to go to really cool parties with famous people.’ But the only ones who were there to hear it were the baby and the cat, and they were not impressed.”

Dealing with the realization that her marriage was a “disaster,” Wilder couldn’t turn for advice to the person who had for years been her confidante and her guide – her mother, who had died four years earlier. But as she struggled to get back on track, Wilder remembered the last days with her mother. “I was there with her when she died,” Wilder said. “Her last words were, quite fittingly, ‘I wanna get off my ass.’ … As I laid in bed with my daughter wondering what to do next, I thought of those words, her last piece of motherly advice, and I thought, ‘I wanna get off my ass.’ So that’s what I did.”

Wilder wrote her way out of a tough situation. She created The Chat and Chew Supper Club, an interactive one-woman show that brought the playwright together with an audience interested in hearing her personal story. Shortly after, she was offered a year-long playwriting fellowship at Sewanee: The University of the South – which was the start of a long-term relationship. For the last seven years, she has served as either a visiting assistant professor or the university’s Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence, teaching and guiding students while also writing plays.

Defining Your Own Success

Wilder acknowledges that “keeping your eyes on your own work” is a constant challenge. She still worries if her writing is“commercial enough or relevant enough,”or if the next opportunity will come at all,but she was quick to remind her SETC audience that “the most compelling characters in the stories we tell are those that are flawed and imperfect just like we are.”

While she encouraged her SETC audience to define success on its own terms, she also noted that “keeping your eyes on your own work doesn’t mean that you should ignore the work of others. You still need to read plays and see plays … Just don’t let their success overshadow your own.”

At the end of her keynote, Wilder shared what success looks like at this point in her career: “I teach something I love to students I enjoy. I have a job that celebrates my work as a writer while allowing me to be the parent I want to be. I have a kid who is smart, creative, inquisitive and funny. I have a charming man in my life, and once a week we drive to the Starbucks halfway between where we each live and have tea,and every night he asks about my day, andfor now that’s enough. There are theatres who believe in my writing enough to invest their time and their resources into producing my work. I have a world premiere being produced next season and new plays waiting to be written. I own a house and a car, and I go on great adventures with my daughter. And I am here with you, my fellow travelers, artists, storytellers and creatives – and my heart’s full.”