The Bluffs at Lost Creek: A Memory of Dad

On May 16, 2021, over one hundred family members and friends gathered at the Sumiton Community Center in Walker County, Alabama, for a memorial service for my father, who passed away that February from a form of bone marrow cancer. The numbers were overwhelming, but not surprising. My father made sure everyone he ever met remembered him. His name brought smiles to so many faces they felt like they had to be there.

Being the writer in the family, the responsibilities of the obituary and eulogy fell to me. I reprint the obituary here so you can get a sense of the man, my father Luther L. (Luke) Tittle:

"Luther L. (Luke) Tittle, beloved husband, father, and grandfather, passed away on February 20, 2021 at his home in Sumiton, Alabama, aged 79.

"Luke was born January 27, 1942 in Townley, Alabama to Cullin and Nora Idean Tittle (née Townley). On July 8, 1967, he married Lasenda Joan Grace of Nauvoo. They raised two sons, James Cullen (m. Kelly Denise Kilpatrick) and Ryan Cole. He was the proud grandfather of Joshua Cade and James Colby.

"With a remarkable sense of humor and a love of life, he made an impression on everyone he met. Working many years as a salesman, he often said, 'What you are selling is yourself' and he made sure no one ever forgot him.

"Luke was preceded in death by his father, mother, and sister Rose Marie Warren. He is survived by his wife, sons, grandsons, sister Kim Annette Winslett, nieces, nephews, and a host of family members that loved him dearly and considered him their brother. The family would like to thank Dr. Noah Fitzpatrick of St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dr. Carter Capra of Alabama Oncology, Amedisys Home Health Care, and SouthernCare New Beacon Hospice for their assistance during his illness.

"In lieu of flowers, send donations in his name to Shriners Hospitals, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Easter Seals, or the Alabama Head Injury Foundation."

So, even though we had a minister to give the proper memorial, it was time for me to get up to speak. Intermittently, throughout his last years, I recorded Dad telling stories and tried to jot things down, realizing most of what he knew I'll never carry with me.

So, near the anniversary of his birthday, I reprint my eulogy here and send it up to him today.

"The family would like to thank everyone for taking time out of your day to celebrate my Dad—seventy nine years of love, laughter, and life to the fullest. Many of you travelled great distances to be here today and we are thankful for each and every one of you and know those who couldn’t be here are with us in spirit. Let me also say that I am so proud of my loving mother, how she has continued on with the day-to-day and proved her awesome energy and determination time and time again. I love you.

"In addition, we would like to thank Dr. Noah Fitzpatrick, Dad’s doctor for the last twenty-five years of his life. We couldn’t have kept him all these years without such wonderful care and attention.

"Not everyone gets to know their fathers as adults. When I was a child, Dad was often gone before daybreak and home after 6. I remember the one time he was able to chaperone on a field trip in elementary school was such a big deal for me, they put his picture playing with all us kids on the trip in the yearbook.

"But, while he worked so much when I was a kid, these last twenty-five years, we became true best friends. I hope I soaked up all I could learn from him in that time. I would give anything to have him back, but I know he’s in Heaven today and that’s what I wanted to speak of.

"Several times these last years, he told me about a recurring dream he had. A dream that seemed so real, he never forgot it. Many of you know he loved playing near and swimming in Lost Creek as a kid. Well, one night, he laid down and had this dream.

Bridge overlooking Lost Creek.

"One day, Lukie was at Lost Creek, playing. It seemed like any other day, but something was different—something he had never seen before. Around a bend on the creek, he saw two bluffs towering over the water and, between them, the creek was flowing somewhere else. He decided to get a boat and go between the bluffs and see where the creek was leading him. He didn’t have much gas, but he had to see what was back there.

"So, he approached the opening between the bluffs. He could barely make anything out but a flicker of sunlight. Finally, the light got brighter and, as he came out the other side, it was like a wonderland. Water everywhere, boats, beautiful creek banks. Not many people, he saw, but he realized those who were there were for him. He stopped by a pier where there was gas. The attendant told him to fill up his tank—the gas was always free. So, he spent the rest of the day in a kind of paradise behind a cove—swimming, boating, eating great food—the food was also free, anywhere he went.

"On certain days, he would go back behind the bluffs to see if it was all in his mind—but it wasn’t. He would go and, again—free gas, the open water, freedom, happiness.

"Is Heaven pearly gates and mansions for us all? Or do we get more of what made us happy here when we get there. If I had my choice, I would hope Dad’s Heaven is behind the bluffs at Lost Creek. I hope he’s on a boat with a full tank of gas, living his afterlife with the same hope, positivity, and that incredible smile that made everyone here love him and never forget him.

"I love you Dad and I’ll see you again someday."

Dad & Me.

On Wagner and Disconnect

I get into obsessions. After weeks of reading Browning’s poetry, I’ll switch to Sondheim and there will be weeks of listening, humming, scouring Youtube for bootleg videos. Then, I’ll switch to historical research and that will obsess me a while, then something else will come down the pike.

I don’t know where these little obsessions come from, but they crop up every now and then. They thrive, then run out of steam somewhere down the line, and my mind races off to the next obsession. The recent obsession? I found myself researching a bevy of material on Richard Wagner. I had “The Ride of the Valkyries” stuck in my head for four days at one point. I have recently recovered.

I am not a classical music buff, to be sure. Now, there are pieces I adore—Bach’s Double Violin Concerto always takes me somewhere outside time—but I am not shuffling between Brahms, Vivaldi, and Mozart on the car stereo on the way to work. As I grow older, though, I am more and more receptive to the layers of depth and beauty in classical music.

Fry, Wagnerizing.

A few years ago, I watched Stephen Fry’s documentary Wagner & Me and, in those 90 minutes, Fry very nearly turned me a Wagnerian, almost gave me full-blown Wagneritis. In the film, Fry attends rehearsals for the famous Bayreuth Festival, where Wagner’s works are showcased in a theater he designed himself. Fry’s passion, shown onscreen through various moments of pinching himself to see if he’s still subsumed in Wagnerama, was contagious and I found myself an overnight fan, though more casually than Stephen.

To this day, I am deeply moved by the breathtaking climax of Tristan and Isolde and thrilled at the story of a man who spent nearly a quarter century writing a 15-hour opera that he knew would be a success and realized the dream of many an artist: he built a palace just to showcase his gift to the world.

DER RING.

The Ring of the Nibelung is, in many ways, both the crowning achievement of opera and something else entirely: a new form—Wagner called it epic music drama—or it could be simply called opera on steroids. There is hardly a musician or musicologist worth their salt that wouldn’t bow to what Wagner achieved. The world was given a true masterpiece—the word is overused now—and that’s what makes Wagner’s antisemitism all the more unsettling, as if such a thing wouldn’t be already.

While Wagner’s work is not tarnished, the man has become, culturally at least, irredeemable. He joins a long, long list of figures from history in that regard. And yet, when one keeps combing through history looking for corpses to reawaken and kill again, you find you can’t just stop at one person. If all history could be “corrected” to reflect our current moralisms (no matter how correct), wouldn’t we be shouting Hallelujah? But, that ain’t how the world works.

Even in writing this essay, the fact that I have not inserted in large, bold faced font the words “I denounce antisemitism in all its forms...” above opens me up for possible scorn. Incidentally, I do denounce antisemitism. That’s what makes liking Wagner hard, as Stephen Fry, whose relatives perished in the Holocaust, so achingly demonstrated in his film. The difference with Wagner and contemporary pariahs is that Wagner’s political views troubled fewer of his countrymen than you might think. Antisemitism in German literature hearkens back to the vitriol of Martin Luther and perhaps before. The 19th century German bon vivant was most likely, if only fashionably, antisemitic (again, that does not make any of this right). Therefore, Wagner was not a pariah in his own time and, therefore, the qualities of his music have still been appreciated despite his invective and he has never been ejected from the canon.

Man and myth.

With Wagner, it seems one can separate the artist from the art and yet our contemporary cultural critics ask us more and more to ditch even the attempt at compartmentalizing. How can a sensitive, intelligent writer like me support the work of a man so consumed with antisemitism that he published his thoughts, under his own name, in a pamphlet called Jewishness in Music?

Well, it comes down to complexity. I understand the inherent complexity and dichotomies within the human being. We are all capable of great evil and unconscionable good (let’s try the good) and we are often able to do both on the same day. How can one live with such dissonance?

Soberly. Like a grown-up adult. Like someone who sets their eyes toward the future rather than trying to rewrite the past. Like someone who judges not lest we be judged but leaves the judging to a higher power. I would encourage others in this direction, but you might think I was cryogenically frozen in the past and have returned to disseminate ideas which are now, what is the word they use, “problematic?”

One simply doesn’t want to see an entire generation wasting their time and energy scouring the classics to bellow with compunction, “Oh, my! How could the human race ever have been so naïve!” Such useless exclamations must not be listened to, but must needs be written on a 6x8 index card, which should then be folded, as Dick Cavett said, five ways and inserted where the moon don’t shine.

So, we are left with uncomfortable disconnects, much like living life.

Someone put all this about Wagner better than me, though. In my research, I came across a wonderful BBC documentary on Wagner’s life and work. Near the end of the special, the late philosopher George Steiner commented on the disconnect in Wagner. I thought his comments especially enlightening, though if he had said these things in 2023, I wonder if they would try to awaken Prof. Steiner only to bury him again.

“Now, you can go at that [disconnect] in a number of ways. My own conviction is that people like ourselves—perfectly ordinary people—cannot grasp what is going on in the mind of a titanically complex creator ([someone] who can create Parsifal) and then say absolute barbaric inhumanities. So, I prefer to say that the man who has given us what he has musically lies certainly outside my range of understanding. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t make me bitterly, bitterly disturbed—ill-at-ease—but that, to put it very vulgarly (if I may)—that’s my problem, not his. How can you have among the highest achievements of beauty or speculative elegance and audacity of the human mind and conscience and guts and viscera on the one hand, and the awfulness on the other? Wagner’s music, as they say in a law court, is Exhibit A.”

The late Prof. Steiner (1929-2020).

The Juvenilia: First Words

Everyone has apprentice plays. Most people don’t know Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams wrote dozens of plays (rarely performed now) before their first real successes with Beyond the Horizon and The Glass Menagerie, respectively. My output from age eleven to nineteen consisted of a few blackout sketches/monologues, six or seven complete short plays, and three full-length plays that burgeoned on success and helped make me the writer I am, though I would never show any of them to you, of course.

At eleven, I was accepted as a Theatre Arts major at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA) in Birmingham, which I had always thought was some private college, but turned out to be a public middle and senior high school for people like me—those who would’ve been beaten up in public schools. I suppose it is known now for the school that produced the author of The Hunger Games (another Theatre major).

The moment I was handed the little Samuel French acting edition of Jean Giraudoux’ Intermezzo (in America, known as The Enchanted), I was mesmerized by even the type in the little booklet. Being an acting edition, it gave no indication of how a play should look in manuscript style, but it didn’t matter: the italics of the stage directions, the gorgeous language in English translation from French (by Maurice Valency)—it all turned a budding actor into a budding writer.

Typewritten; ca. 1994-'95.

My first attempt at dramatic writing (technically) was a screenplay. I was born, of course, the year Star Wars, Episode VI: Return of the Jedi came out, so I was a movie buff before I fell in love with the dust of theatre curtains. The script, which I typed with two fingers on an old typewriter my Father gave me, was essentially a version of The Muppet Movie as, if it had been filmed, it would have featured all my puppets. I used the twin girls down the street whom I hated as the villains and planned to shoot it with my elementary school friends. Sadly, Out of this World, a comedy mostly set in Outer Space, never got greenlit.

My first attempt at playwriting was a collaboration. An older student helped me over the phone pen my first opus—a roughly twelve page two-act play entitled (forgive me) To Eric(a) is Human. This was a lame attempt at getting even with a student I hated but my collaborator loved a boy named Eric and I was trying to impress an Erica.

I have no idea the contents of this handwritten piece (odd that it was handwritten because I typed my screenplay so I wouldn’t have to decipher my own MD-like handwriting) and it is the only work of mine that I destroyed, doing this once I discovered the intended Erica for whom it was written didn’t care much for it. In the words of David Ives, “Probably my best work.”

I stuck to writing three-page sketches for the next couple of years, rarely showing them to anyone. A sketch about a New Year’s Eve party called “The Bathroom” was reworked into a twelve-page (what was it about that length?) one-act called Resolutions...Elsewhere, a title so good I pillaged it later for a much better play I wrote as part of the short play cycle Youth and Age (2013) and have rewritten since.

My “career” as a playwright (such as it was/is) began with a fully-fledged (but still bad) play I wrote on March 28, 1997. While most of my friends in my prepubescent life were girls, this changed rather quickly when my overly emotional libido and sexually repressed upbringing caused a bipolar zonk that made me abscond all female friends for male ones. But Last Call had a sympathetic female protagonist. A good deal of my plays do—it comes from being raised by very strong women.

Although everyone at ASFA was pretty much Southern, we did not identify with the South and tried to escape it every chance we got. We were wannabe New Yorkers and Angelenos. The setting of Last Call was LAX and had decidedly WASPish characters who are about to fly on their honeymoon. I don’t recall the plot machination that revealed the husband was already a serial cheater (and I certainly don’t understand how he snuck a gun past security even in a pre-9/11 world), but the play was given a concert reading at the very first student-run coffee house night we hosted at ASFA. The playwright (who also played one of the stuffy parents) was born. I introduced the play by randomly dedicating it to a rival and the girlfriend he recently broke up with. That caused more of a stir than the play, but the applause was something from which I never recovered.

One of the summers of Shakespeare. Me as Titus Lartius, left, in CORIOLANUS..

In the summer of 1998, in between school semesters, I took on two community theatre roles. I hardly ever did work outside ASFA because we were low on men, and I was usually exhausted by the summer (I played eighteen roles before I was eighteen). The combination of being in Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sir Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream unconsciously brewed in me a short play with music called Life’s Labor’s Love. Filled with terrible puns, I also forget most of the content except for the stichomythic Seinfeld-type dialogue I was shooting for. At that time, no writer of comedy was not influenced by Seinfeld and no budding playwright wasn’t influenced by David Mamet, so the back-and-forth of the main characters in the bar-and-grill setting showed off my facility for two things most young playwrights don’t have: a sense of stage time (quite different from real time) and rhythm. As a percussionist, that last facet makes sense.

The play was not performed at the coffee house night for two years because I had other things going on. When it was produced, it was the first production I decided to give over entirely to other people to stage. Our Black Box studio space had room for you to stand under the raised seating and there I stood, writhing in pain as my words were mumbled, jumbled, and largely improvised by a cast that was embarrassed by the juvenilia. It caused me to resent actors for many years. I trusted no one—not even other directors I liked—with my material in the heady days after.

My secondary school magnum opus was another Seinfeld parody with the simplest set-up in the world: two guys at a bar discussing women. It was divided into twenty blackout scenes where honest questions about the opposite sex (which were intensely juvenile for characters who were supposed to be in their ‘20s—I was fifteen after all) would be lobbed back and forth. But it also introduced a theme in my work still present today. Half-way through the play, the pair decide to take a trip out of the bar to experience life instead of talking about it. The result is disastrous and there they remain back at the bar at the end of the show and invent a deliberately wrong interpretation of the title Hopeless Romantics—not seduced and abandoned lovers, but romantic people who are totally hopeless at life.

The first production was a staged reading. The women in the audience, offended by the curt cuts I was secretly lobbing at them threw fruit and shoes on the stage. It was a miraculous night. It was also the first one of my plays seen by an adult—my acting teacher Elizabeth Adkisson—who started taking my interest in playwriting seriously. With her help, I submitted it to Southern PlayWorks, the only Birmingham company devoted to producing new work (sadly gone now) and they oversaw presenting the Apsey Award. I was given it by a freelance playwright who had won the award himself for his most successful play Holmes and Watson. Lee Eric Shackleford had been a story writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation and, while being Playwright-in-Residence at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), he has become a very successful writer of radio drama.

Me and part of "Shack"'s head.

Shackleford (“Shack”), I assume, was impressed by the facile, precocious nature of the writing. The award offered money, a certificate made out to someone called “Ryan S. Tittle,” and a concert reading.

My next effort was, for all intents and purposes, my first serious work. Though short, and only written because I stared at a book on my desk called Christopher Durang: 27 One-Act Plays and thought, “I’ve got to write more plays,” A Plumber’s Story was a fairly sophisticated idea for a drama by a teenager.

A PLUMBER'S STORY.

Set in a cyclical world where a plumber teaches his young apprentice the basics of plumbing and the basics of life only to die of a heart attack and in the final scene, the student has become the master and the dialogue starts over again for a new apprentice, much like the ending scene of La Cantatrice Chauve. In the end, I think it was an unconscious attempt to write about the cyclical nature of blue-collar work and my fear I would end up a salesman like my father, to whom it was partly dedicated.

This was followed by another short comedy initially entitled A Short-Handed Affair. It was a request from a friend who was coming up on his senior-directed one-act and was interested in directing my work, giving me the opportunity to have two of my short plays in the season of my junior year. A Plumber’s Story was short, so it needed a companion piece to make a full evening. The idea behind the romantic comedy was two young twenty-somethings (who wants to produce a play about teenagers? I was one and didn’t even understand what the word teenager meant) who experiment in a pre-internet dating service where they keep detailed notes of negative thoughts during their dates and share them nakedly, eventually abandoning them in favor of accepting their faults as they fall for each other. As Elizabeth felt the word “affair” implied a sexual triste, I took the new title from Extreme’s pop hit “More Than Words.”

The first production of MORE THAN WORDS.

Unfortunately for me, I was not allowed in the rehearsal process of the productions of A Plumber’s Story and More Than Words. When I sat down at the premiere to view them, Story was played very straight with little or no changes and had a beautiful, kinetic set. More Than Words turned out to be more like Life’s Labor’s Love. What was a ten-minute romantic comedy became a mostly improvised piece that reminds one of a bad Ben Stiller rom-com (as if there were another kind). I can even remember an improvised scene where the male character offered to cook dinner, which turned out to be Hot Pockets that he burnt. I was mortified.

While Elizabeth was certain Story was the superior effort, our Equity Actor- in-Residence Instructor and Theatre Arts Chairperson felt Story weak and Words strong based strictly on the familiarity of its naturalism and the laughs, most of which were invented by the director and his cast.

I sent the original version of More Than Words to the Young Playwrights Festival at the Horizon Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, where we were all named finalists. The previous production, however, had embarrassed me so much, I rewrote it to be more of a dramedy (a kind of Same Time, Next Year) and I brought the new draft with me to Atlanta, where it was accepted for a concert reading. While there, we also had to write a ten-minute play and mine was a Shakespeare parody called The Two Noble Playwrights (I forget the plot—I think Mamet was a character). Anyway, the new More Than Words was received politely with the only feedback from the strung- out, drug-addled teenage playwrights, “I get what you’re trying to say.” Not exactly the kind of review you bank on.

This was now 2000 and “Shack” had a novel idea. A close friend of mine had begun writing plays. “Shack” read my new version of Words and he dreamed up an evening of one-acts (two of mine, two of the friend’s) for what would be Southern PlayWorks’ final season called Four Blinks ofthe Eye. They would be linked by a wistful song of youth for which “Shack” wrote the lyrics and his father composed the music. This was my first professional foray into the business. We would be paid professional royalties and the cast would be Birmingham talent and the show would be performed at the Library Theatre at the Hoover Public Library.

HOPELESS ROMANTICS at the Library Theatre.

Stretched too thin as producer, designer, and director, “Shack” let my friend and I do our jobs the way we wished. At that point, I had been burned too many times by improvising actors and I refused to let any changes—not a word—be touched in either script, though I did end up writing a new scene for Romantics.

MORE THAN WORDS: The Dramedy.

The cast for Romantics was perfect though the actors still struggled with the adolescent mindset of their adult characters. The cast for Words, despite the actress who played the creator of the dating service, was less than stellar (let’s just say audiences “got what I was trying to say” again). The other playwright, my friend R. Daniel Walker, made changes left and right, sometimes cutting and hacking his pieces in ways I could never dream even now! His drama landed, his farce was a disaster people still enjoyed (farce is hard). Still, we landed interviews in the now much-missed Birmingham Post-Herald and got nifty checks, part of which we used to celebrate with a dinner at Waffle House.

The Post-Herald Photo.

I had one more short play in me during high school—a 2001 play about an interracial marriage entitled Call Waiting. While never performed, I submitted it to the Young Southern Writer’s Project at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and received an Honorable Mention (one dramaturg told me, if it had been her, my piece would have won). A Plumber’s Story even received a Judges’ Special Recognition at the Alabama Writers’ Forum’s Literary Arts Awards, courtesy of Elizabeth and my creative writing teacher Michael Florence, a gem of a human being. But that elusive full-length play was still hovering over me.

By the end of my junior year, I was comfortable enough with Elizabeth to chat about possible shows for us to do. She had come across a very old Russian comedy called Nedorsl (The Minor) by Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin. It is both a view of country life in Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great and a play about education and ignorance. She offered for me to write a full-length version of it (the dialogue and the action—she would adapt the story and create the character names) for my senior project, which was news to my ears because I had no interest in directing a one-act. Plus, it would be the mainstage show for my senior year and would include student set, costume, and lighting design.

She gave me two time periods from which to choose for the adaptation— 1850s France and the future. I chose the latter not because I was a fan of science fiction, but because the idea of writing dialogue for a nineteenth century French costume drama made me ill. Besides, I would not write science fiction, but a futuristic comedy. I accepted. Over the Summer and early Fall, a mammoth manuscript emerged where I tried to keep all Fonvizin’s subplots and even some of his dialogue. The first reading in class was given a tepid response—one young actress said we could not pull it off. But Elizabeth and I could not be dissuaded. It was fun stepping in another writer’s shoes to discover why he made the choices he made. I have loved adaptation ever since.

A frisky moment in DISCORDIA.

Discordia ended up being the most expensive production in ASFA’s history if, for no other reason, that it had two suspended fifty-inch television monitors flanking the stage. As rehearsals progressed, Elizabeth began inserting little bits of interstitial dialogue to help cover scene changes, tramping on my turf just a bit, but I had learned not to sweat the small stuff. After all, I had to do rewrites all night, memorize my own lines, and then listen to the actors complain about the material backstage every day for two months. Somehow, we pulled it off—we always did. The costumes and set were amazing. The script, neither mine nor Fonvizin’s, could be performed today. It is simply too out-of-fashion. But we were tickled to send a copy to the Library of Congress.

College, of course, loomed large. As a junior, I had applied early decision to Bennington College, the famously progressive liberal arts college where Helen Frankenthaler invented abstract expressionism, Martha Graham invented modern dance, and Bret Easton Ellis graduated as a New York Times best-selling author. It was the third figure that grabbed my attention, of course. I had grown tired of acting and was trying my hand at being a person-of-letters. Through Michael, I started writing (unbelievably bad) poetry, intellectually interesting but clunky short stories, and even an outline for a novel.

So, off I went to Bennington to be a “writer.” But a mistake in my class selection (there is no core curriculum offered there), put me back in theatre courses and, since auditioning for and acting in plays was the only way I knew to have a social life, I acted for two more years. But I also had my first professional playwriting teacher.

Gladden Schrock. 10 foot bear of a man.

Gladden Schrock was the first Playwright-in-Residence at the Yale School of Drama and a founding member of the Playwrights Unit of the Long Wharf Theatre, created by his Yale roommate Jon Jory. His novel Letters from Alf had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but as finalists were not announced at that time—and don't get the prize money—he spent years as a commercial herring fisherman in Maine and taught playwriting in colleges, founding the Drama department at Manchester College.

His first reaction to things like Hopeless Romantics and whatever other piffle I gave him was, “You’re very facile” (I had to look up the word), “but you’ve never written one real character in your life.” I dutifully marched to the library every Sunday where the only copy of George Pierce Baker’s Dramatic Technique was held and could not be loaned. He would have me read hundreds of pages at a time—I think he hoped to wean me out of his class. But it didn’t work. Gladden’s prodding only made me even more keen to impress, but he hated people trying to impress him. This is a man who, after all, was taught playwriting by John Gassner, the great anthologizer of American drama and Gassner was taught by Baker himself, the first person to teach playwriting! It took two years for Gladden to warm to me and that was probably helped tremendously by spending two Winter terms as a personal intern for David Henry Hwang in New York City.

David Henry Hwang.

David had been my favorite playwright for as long as I had been reading plays. The way he melded Broadway-style comedy and Asian theatre techniques and yet told such universal stories was inspiring. So was his dexterity—he’s written teleplays, screenplays, song lyrics, musical libretti, texts for dance pieces, and he’s the world’s most performed living opera librettist. He made a name for himself with the Obie Award-winning FOB in his early 20s (I wanted to be a success at that age too, but alas!) and followed this years later by being the first Asian-American to win the Tony Award for Best Play for the international success M. Butterfly, which also won the Gassner Award, the Drama Desk Award, and was a Pulitzer finalist. But David was much more than M. Butterfly. His daring work continued with the Obie Award- winners Golden Child and Yellow Face and the libretto revision for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. He was taught by Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes, the latter largely considered one of the great playwriting teachers in the world. So, I had quite the legacy from both my teacher and my mentor.

It was under David’s tutelage in 2002 when I wrote my first play set in the South. I had never considered myself Southern until I moved away and realized how differently I thought from most other people. The short play was called She’s Standing Behind Me and it is my first piece of mature work. But, its newness, its Southerness—everything about it—made me hide it from Gladden for two years. I don’t know why. Sometimes, something happens in you that’s so new and personal, you feel you must keep it a secret. At any rate, the first staged reading of it at Bennington gave me hope that all my work till then had not been done in vain.

Still, two more pieces of juvenilia followed. The other play I started with David was not unlike M. Butterfly or Amadeus in that it is largely a monologue delivered to (in this case) a conjured audience. The story involved Greg who, as a student teacher, had been falsely accused of inappropriate behavior with a female student. His life over before it has even begun (another recurring theme in my later work), he takes to his room where he finds solace in watching video tape after video tape (this was 2002) of episodes of The Brady Bunch, in particular the ones involving Marcia Brady. Not only does she remind him of the student who accused him, but she reminds him of a long-lost childhood romance. He lectures the audience on the brilliance of the Bradys, running through every series incarnation and how it is the only world in which in just twenty-two minutes, everything turns out alright. He is frequently visited by his psychologist brother, who is trying to lure him out of his room that is covered in Brady memorabilia (and who we see in flashback playing with his kid brother at ages eight and ten).

Somehow, Greg got it in his mind that Marcia herself would appear and save him from this life. In the eleven drafts of the script (hint: if you’re ever past seven drafts, you have no idea what kind of play you want to write), she eventually never comes, and Greg is slowly coaxed into reality. But what always made the material work was the lecture on Brady-living (which was funny and touching every time it was done in private, concert, and staged readings).

One day, in an effort to solve the play, Gladden told me to read Peter Shaffer’s Equus. It was a devastating experience. First, because it is one of the finest commercial plays I’ve ever read. And, secondly, because I realized Shaffer had already written the play I wanted to write. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia was an interesting experiment and for naught.

By 2003, I had a collaborator who had inspired many plays. We met performing in a workshop of the first act of an exciting student-written musical about the Matawan shark attacks in New Jersey (and, yes, it worked!). The following year, she was to give her senior voice recital. We decided we wanted to perform together and, either by force or by kismet, she happened to also have passion for my personal Shakespeare, Stephen Sondheim.

The beautiful poster for the revue.

The idea was to do a totally illegal musical revue of his work (in the vein of Side by Side by Sondheim, et. al.). It was to be called Not a Day Goes By. I would write the continuity (the story and sketches that move the piece from song to song), but I wanted to do it in such a way that it would tell a genuinely interesting and moving story. The story concerned two formerly married cabaret performers George and Fay (named after the hero of Sunday in the Park with George and the heroine of Anyone Can Whistle) who meet at a party and reminisce in flashback over their up-and-down romance and career, which almost killed their love entirely. A rueful, bittersweet show, the staged reading included songs from every Sondheim show written to that time, including “Good Thing Going” from Merrily We Roll Along, “It Takes Two” from Into the Woods, “Loving You” from Passion, and so on.

It turned out, though, the continuity worked just fine on its own. I rewrote it, added some material and public domain songs, and called it As the Days Go By. Cheeky, old-style Broadway material, Gladden figured I had tossed it off in a weekend and was dismayed when I told him it took time. To my surprise, though, it was a semi-finalist for the Mildred and Albert Panowski Award from Northern Michigan University.

And so ends the apprentice plays that brought me to the playwright I am today. What to learn from them? Not much, I suppose. Sam Shepard once pithily wrote his first plays seemed like they were written by another person. And they were, as were mine, though I think mine were a little better. Sorry, Sam. Grimace in peace.