In my first decade at A.C.T., my task was to marry the very public demands of producing, public speaking, and fundraising with the much more private rehearsal-room explorations I was engaged in as a director. But that truly private act, which is writing, found no place in my early life at A.C.T. There were not enough hours in the day, it seemed, and the frenetic pace of my life as an artistic director and a parent left little time for introspection. But fate intervenes in strange ways, and just as I was beginning to yearn for the opportunity to tell my own stories again, an invitation presented itself.
In my early twenties, long before I started to direct professionally, I had written my first full-length play, The Colossus of Rhodes. It was an epic with songs that juxtaposed the secret love affair of mining mogul Cecil Rhodes (who created the famed Rhodes Scholarships) and the young Englishman Neville Pickering in South Africa in the 1860s with the music-hall antics of Jewish vaudevillian-turned-diamond-magnate Barney Barnato, who became Rhodes’s nemesis. An early draft of the play had found its way into the hands of the late, great producer Lucille Lortel, after I made my directorial debut at her White Barn Theatre in 1983. At the age of eighty she hosted a reading of Colossus in the heady atmosphere of her Sherry-Netherland apartment on Fifth Avenue before an audience of one. Lortel’s own story was a fascinating one: A successful young actress who trained briefly in Berlin under the legendary Max Reinhardt, Lortel (née Wadler) married a man who refused to permit her to continue her life as an actress; after spending fifteen years trying to find an alternative theatrical pursuit that would be acceptable to her husband, Lortel opened the White Barn Theatre on his estate in Westport, Connecticut, and began a career of supporting new and experimental work both in Westport and in New York, which included her landmark production of Marc Blitzstein’s version of The Threepenny Opera at the Theater de Lys in 1955. This visionary theatrical maverick was one of my earliest and fiercest champions; she inspired a kind of artistic courage and idealism in everyone who met her, especially me. Not only did she engage me numerous times to direct at her theater, but she championed my writing and committed to producing The Colossus of Rhodes at the White Barn, believing that it perfectly suited her sense of theatrical adventure. Alas, Ms. Lortel passed away before that could happen, and shortly thereafter, I was hired to run CSC. Once I took up my post at CSC, I put the play and my playwriting ambitions aside for quite a long time.
I’m not sure why this happened. Perhaps proximity to geniuses like Harold Pinter made me wonder why I would want to add to the store of mediocre plays in the world when there were such extraordinary writers in my midst. Or perhaps the stories I wanted to tell weren’t urgent or insistent enough yet to demand realization. Perhaps at the time I wasn’t brave or tenacious enough to buck the odds. And perhaps this was a “female” reaction: it was clear that getting a play produced in the American theater was difficult enough, but for women it was triply difficult. (The sad statistics still prevail. It has been widely reported that only 17 percent of the plays produced in the United States are written by women, and if those plays have female protagonists, that number is cut in half.) Whatever the reason, I stopped writing and focused my energies on directing and on learning how to be a nimble producer, first at CSC and then at A.C.T.
It was over a decade later when Vincent Curcio, general manager of the White Barn Theatre, set about to reanimate the legacy of Ms. Lortel by producing a series of new plays at the White Barn, and one of the first projects he wanted to do was the premiere of The Colossus of Rhodes. He called me out of the blue in the spring of 2001, shortly after I had turned down the Yale job. Thus it happened that in August 2001 I went to Westport for Loy Arcenas’s beautiful production of my first play. By then, I had been leading A.C.T. for almost exactly a decade. Naturally I was pleased when Variety critic Markland Taylor wrote, “With The Colossus of Rhodes, a bold theatrical exploration of Victorian England’s Cecil Rhodes, Carey Perloff can add playwright to her résumé without blushing”—but of course, I was blushing! By this time, I was not the twenty-something emerging theater artist who had written the play, I was an executive and a leader of a major American theater and I had no idea how to fit this very private part of my personal expression into the larger public context of my life. So I all but hid the fact that I had had a play produced from my colleagues and trustees at A.C.T.
When I was invited to the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference the following summer to further develop the play (adding a crucial female character), I became acutely aware of my bifurcated self. I wanted to be seen purely as one of the O’Neill writers in residence for the summer, but I knew that to the other playwrights I was an artistic director who had the power to produce their plays. It was an awkward balance to maintain, but Jim Houghton (then the O’Neill’s artistic director) did everything he could to help give me permission to be a playwright. That experience with Rhodes changed my life.
Once I dove back in, I became addicted to writing. I realized to my surprise how much of myself had ended up in this epic tale about nineteenth-century diamond mining. Despite his manifold flaws, Rhodes was a character for whom I had intense empathy: he was an outsider looking in, a restless soul who could never remain still, a complicated striver with antagonists on all sides. No wonder I identified with him! At the same time, of course, I identified equally with Barney Barnato, whose music-hall patter, Jewish jokes, and self-deprecating humor erupted onto the page with manic energy. Having directed Brecht and the Greeks for so many years, I felt free to interrupt scenes with a song or dance directly addressed to the audience, before diving back into the emotional and moral tug of the play, enlarging the personal lives of those conflicted men by setting them against the epic landscape of British colonialism in Africa. The Colossus of Rhodes was a young effort filled with all the usual first-time mistakes: I had done so much research on 1860s South Africa that I had a hard time letting go of my favorite details, and the late-breaking addition of an African woman as Barnato’s lover was not as well integrated as it might have been. But the gradual and ultimately painful love relationship between Pickering and Rhodes was specific and compelling enough to draw audiences into this unusual and unfamiliar world and to stimulate some interesting comparisons with our own.
And so began my somewhat-secret other life as a playwright. Stories began emerging, in the quiet of my study after midnight, or on the weekends when I could steal time or my family was otherwise engaged. The next play, Luminescence Dating, began with a single line that came to me without any explanation. It was a woman emphatically saying to a man she loved, “I’d rather be right than be desirable.” That slightly disturbing thought launched a thriller of sorts, set in the world of classical archaeology. The title (a natural metaphor for a certain kind of courtship), refers to the scientific practice of dating an ancient object by analyzing the radiation given off by the dirt in which the object has been buried. Luminescence Dating takes place in a museum basement much like the one at University of Pennsylvania where I had spent my teenage years engaged in the piecing together of broken pots. The seed of the play had been with me since childhood; during one of our Sunday visits to the Smithsonian, my father and I heard a speech by Iris Cornelia Love about her famous excavations of the temple of Aphrodite at Knidos. I was captivated by that sexy female archaeologist in fishnet stockings whose name was Love and whose passion was to find a lost statue of the goddess of love in the Turkish ruins. This particular statue, sculpted by the great Praxiteles and memorialized in the poetry and travel literature of the day, was said to be so lifelike and erotic that grown men had been seen trying to make love to its cold stone body. Praxiteles’ Aphrodite disappeared without a trace, and despite heroic efforts on Love’s part it had never been found. I was haunted by the story of a massive missing sculpture and the woman who longed to find it, and Luminescence Dating was my way of solving the puzzle, getting inside the competitive male world of archaeology, and watching a female practitioner pursue an obsession that nearly destroyed her.
Perhaps because the name of the inspirational figure was Love and the search involved a statue of Aphrodite, the play naturally evolved into a love story, as well—or, rather, multiple love stories. As always, I was fascinated by what happens when professional and personal lines become blurred and it seems a choice has to be made between love and success. In addition to the warring archaeologists in the play (Nigel and Angela), I created a character called Victor (written specifically for A.C.T. core company member Gregory Wallace), who is an African American queer theorist looking for evidence of male-to-male love in burial practices in ancient Greece; Victor carries a torch for a young scholar who in turn only has eyes for Nigel. In the midst of this romantic chaos and professional struggle, the goddess Aphrodite tries desperately to right the ship and to bring the lovers and their professional theories to a successful conclusion. “Nothing is more exhausting than being the world’s oldest love object,” she sighs.
Luminescence was a difficult beast to wrangle: the weaving together of scientific and romantic subplots required deftness and precision, and I was helped immeasurably by a variety of colleagues, first among them Curt Dempster, artistic director of Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) in New York, whose opening salvo to playwrights in search of their play’s motor was always the question, “What’s the emergency?” Curt believed that if that could be answered, the rest of the play would unfold. In San Francisco, I teamed up with actors I knew well, led by director Mark Rucker, who helped me chart both the internal and external journeys of their characters in a way that I had been unable to do alone. With a Sloan Foundation grant awarded by EST, where Luminescence premiered in 2005, I was able to conduct research on the play’s scientific aspects, and a second grant was used to help produce it at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in 2006.
Meanwhile, my life at A.C.T. was as busy and chaotic as ever, and I was able to function as a writer in addition to everything else in part because my (then) associate artistic director, Johanna Pfaelzer, insisted on making it possible. Luminescence Dating was happening at the same time that we were producing The Black Rider, commissioning David Mamet to adapt The Voysey Inheritance, hosting the Canadians with The Overcoat, wrangling Edward Albee with The Goat, and undergoing significant changes in the school. Johanna consistently gave me the breathing room and encouragement to write, convincing me that the producing tasks were not on my shoulders alone and that it was crucial for me to nurture another side of my creativity if I was to avoid becoming completely squeezed dry by the scale of the job. Because I felt guilty about every moment that I wasn’t devoting full-time energy to A.C.T., I was very quiet about my writing, even with my family. It seemed like a betrayal, an activity that didn’t belong in the rest of my proscribed universe. Even when the A.C.T. board, alongside the Magic’s trustees, attended opening night festivities for Luminescence at the Magic Theatre and were vocal in their approbation, I felt shy and cautious about this new adventure. One of the few people I confided in was Sue Yung Li, the trustee who knew me best artistically and personally. And thus transpired one of the more surreal life-meets-art experiences of my life.
Shortly before the San Francisco premiere of Luminescence, Sue Yung invited me to her home to meet her college roommate from Smith. When I arrived at the house, an attractive woman in her seventies, holding a small dog, opened the door. “Hello, I’m Iris Cornelia Love,” she said. I stared at her in wonder, as Sue Yung smiled merrily behind her. How could I explain to Love that her Smithsonian lecture thirty years before had changed my life, that I had grown up wanting to be exactly like the woman she had been, an archaeologist on a mission of discovery, and that I had just written a play inspired by her life? But it turned out she had long ago abandoned archaeology for dog training. The challenges of Knidos had been replaced by the Westminster Dog Show. I invited her to Luminescence, but she wasn’t able to come. It was probably just as well. Her obsessive quest had become my own, and she was perfectly happy with her dogs.
Although Luminescence Dating was running in my own backyard, I continued to try to keep my playwriting self and my artistic director self as separate as possible. It was interesting to be a quasi-beginner again, but challenging to do so when I was also the head of a major institution; the public/private separation in my life often seemed unbridgeable. And while it’s certainly vulnerable to direct a play or to stand before an audience as a producer, there is nothing quite as terrifying as revealing your passions, fears, and obsessions through your own writing, to people who know you well. But I was energized to be steadily developing my craft as a playwright. I had learned a great deal about the architecture of plays from having directed so many genres of work: from Ibsen and Sophocles I gleaned the power of detonating a secret from the past at precisely the right moment in the present; from Brecht I understood how a specific and particular encounter could become epic; from María Irene Fornés I absorbed the ways in which visual cues can shape the silent language of a play; from Pinter I learned to appreciate the claustrophobic theatricality of a single room, and from Stoppard I learned to revel in the delights of the English language.
At heart, I am a theatrical beast, I love creating events that find their essence onstage, that have a dramatic muscle to keep a story moving forward. I can usually intuit what actors will need and relish onstage, and how much can be left out of a script if one really trusts the performers. My directors have consistently opened my eyes: Robin Phillips taught me to stop staging my own plays in my head as I wrote and to trust that the story I was trying to tell could be fleshed out by a director afterwards. Maria Mileaf made me erase all my metaphors and become ruthlessly specific. Chay Yew taught me how to set up my own set of rigorous rules and then follow them consistently, and Rebecca Taichman made me dig into the backstory of my characters to flesh out their contradictions. Every time I go back into rehearsal as the director of someone else’s work, I know that it fuels my own writing, and vice versa.
The summers became my precious time to develop work, and I have done so across the country, at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, at the O’Neill, at the Perry-Mansfield New Works Festival in Colorado, at the Orchard Project, and most notably at New York Stage and Film (housed on the Vassar College campus), which has become my second home summer after summer, play after play, and where I have always felt totally free and supported. Having physical distance from my job at A.C.T. gives me the stillness to enter areas of my imagination I am otherwise unaware of. And for me, stillness is the most elusive quality in the world. At the very end of Luminescence Dating, Victor says to Angela, “A kiss that good and you feel—nothing?” and Angela slowly replies, “I feel—still. Very still. Like something is about to happen.” The luminous stillness that opens one’s heart to the world is something I have studied via such practices as yoga and the Alexander Technique for many years, but it has never come easily to me. I long for it, but I am normally much more like a shark, feeling alive only when on the move.
One of the obvious preoccupations for me is the legacy of my mother, Marjorie, and the other formidable and almost too brilliant women amongst her female ancestors. My father’s New Orleans family came from Polish peasant stock and were practical, wise, and full of their own secrets. But the expectation of genius amongst the women on my mother’s side of the family was considerable and daunting. One summer, armed with tiny black-and-white photographs of the women from both sides of my family, and inspired by some reading on genetics, I began writing a play called Waiting for the Flood, in which Natasha, a geneticist panicked by her upcoming pregnancy, sits in her car and confronts the ghosts of her exotic female ancestors. I thought I was writing a comedy, a funny and fanciful piece filled with women clothed in forties attire emerging from the dashboard of a car speaking German, Italian, and Southern American in rapid succession. But underneath its humorous surface, the play began to get rather dark. If writing a play is about confronting your biggest fears, Waiting for the Flood unearthed a plethora of feelings in the face of my family history, as well as touching upon anxieties about being a truly good parent and about the impossibility of controlling one’s own destiny.
My long-standing friend and collaborator Chay Yew directed a workshop of Flood at New York Theatre Workshop (and then again at Roundabout Theatre Company), and every day at the end of rehearsal he would say to me, “It’s all very lively and interesting, but you’re writing around the hole.” “What hole?” I would ask. “You have to write Natasha’s mother.” Every day I resisted. I said I had no interest in writing a mother-daughter play, I wanted to write about the double helix and genetics, ancestry and history. Then, the night before the public performance at Vassar, I went home, turned on my computer, and Natasha’s mother, Marcia, walked into the play. She scared me to death. The scene between the mother and daughter was fierce and mean and disturbing. Who was this woman, and why was she so angry? Who was her daughter? And why were they tearing each other apart? I wrote the climactic new scene all in one go, saved it without rereading it, and before I could chicken out, called Chay and told him we’d need to find an extra actress for the reading the next day. Which we did. Of course, Chay turned out to be absolutely right—the entire journey of Flood, and all of Natasha’s encounters with the charming and relentless women of her past built up to the moment when her mother finally appeared and confronted her. Natasha and Marcia said the kind of awful things that only mothers and daughters can say to each other, about pregnancy, mortality, abandonment, and disappointment. Marcia wasn’t me and she wasn’t my mother, but somehow she was the mother the play needed. She asked questions I had avoided asking, and exposed things I usually resisted thinking about, about my own past, about having children, about genetic predisposition, about race and class, love and marriage, and compromise.
The aspect of playwriting that involves the characters’ backstories is slippery and fascinating; often characters will appear on the page without announcing anything about themselves, and it takes drafts and drafts to unearth who they might be. It’s not that all the information has to be provided (Pinter refused to provide any backstory, and yet his characters are completely three-dimensional), but to be rounded, a character has to have a believable past. The more you dig, the more you learn, both about the play and about yourself.
I was somewhat startled when I got to the end of Flood. In the play’s penultimate image, the women all stand at the lip of the stage, waving and calling out to their children as a flood threatens to engulf them. And then they are gone, leaving the bewildered Natasha alone, blinking in the bright sunlight of a beach in Santa Cruz. I remember sitting with Johanna Pfaelzer, Mark Linn-Baker, and Duncan Sheik at that first reading at Vassar, and we all wept as we watched those forlorn women with their hands in the air. The play was a mess, but it was a mess with some degree of originality and vitality. I felt as if a barrier had broken. I could let my imagination run wild, I could go to the darkest places in my mind, and I could trust the play to bring us out at the other end in one piece. There was real joy in that discovery.
Writing Flood made me realize how preoccupied I had become with ancestry and, in an odd way, with faith. My next play, Higher, took these issues further, in ways that surprised me. As I often say, I am a bad Jew. Although I was raised to feel very culturally Jewish, I never followed specific religious practice, and I married an agnostic Anglican who had no use for organized religion. (I had worried that my Jewish parents would be unhappy when I introduced them to my thoroughly WASP boyfriend in 1981, only to discover that with respect to Anthony, being British trumped being Jewish in my parents’ eyes, because it was Churchill who had won the war and thus saved us all.) I made a halfhearted attempt to introduce my children at least minimally to Judaism, and Lexie was one of those little girls who had read every book about children in the Holocaust by the time she was twelve. But as a family, we rarely went to either temple or church. (One Christmas Eve, I even tried to persuade the family to go to midnight services at Grace Cathedral to hear the last sermon of my friend Dean Alan Jones before he retired. Anthony demurred, Lexie agreed to accompany me because midnight mass was on her “life list,” and Nick rolled his eyes and announced that he refused to go to church at midnight because he didn’t want to be “lied to and sleep deprived at the same time.”) So it surprised me, as I began writing Higher, that it wrestled so actively with the desire to believe, and with the relationship of faith to art and to memory.
Higher is about a starchitect named Michael Friedman who has made his career designing visionary memorials. Michael has a gay son, Isaac, who is a deeply observant Jew and is thus appalled when he discovers that his father is competing to build a memorial on a sacred site in Israel. The other architect in the competition, unbeknownst to Michael, is his lover, Elena. Both must try to win the approbation of the elegant and sarcastic Upper East Side widow Valerie (modeled on so many of the philanthropists whom I have known over the years). The play asks questions about how we memorialize grief, about crossing international borders and presuming to understand the emotional and physical landscape of other cultures, about parents and children, and about the price of ambition. It was a piece I loved researching: I am an architecture aficionado and spent hours in the firms of friends of mine, watching pitch sessions and observing the delicate dance between architect and client that can sink or sustain a project. The director of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Connie Wolfe, produced a reading of Higher in the “Yud” Gallery of their new Daniel Liebeskind building, and it was rather amazing to hear the play in such a brilliantly site-specific way.
But beyond architecture, the heartbeat of the play was about choosing to believe. Despite my lack of religious feeling, I had been wondering, in the midst of all the day-to-day struggles, why it was so difficult to find a bigger picture to hold on to. I asked my friend David Lang, the brilliant composer, how it was that after being raised as a secular Jew he suddenly became observant in his twenties. He said very simply that he had chosen to do something “hard.” For him, adhering to the behavior of his ancestors was hard. Prayer was hard. Observance of dietary laws was hard. By doing these hard things, he felt connected to his history. But my own questions remained unanswered, and when I wrote the scene between Isaac and his father in Higher (the only scene that has remained in every draft of the play and is still the strongest writing in the piece), the conflicted feelings and confusions about belief and family came tumbling out of the mouths of this estranged father and son. One of the joys of playwriting is to set in motion a dialectic that allows all of one’s own contradictory beliefs to collide in real time and with equal force. Interestingly, sometimes it’s the opposing argument that gets the most air time, as Shaw demonstrates in Major Barbara by giving his capitalist weapons manufacturer, Andrew Undershaft, stronger arguments than his heroine, Barbara. In Higher, I found myself, in the mouth of Isaac, arguing for a commitment to faith that I knew I could never practice in my own life.
My resolve to keep my writing and producing lives separate dissolved in 2011 when Higher won the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Theatre Visions Fund Award, which came with a sizeable check to support a production of the play. A.C.T. Executive Director Ellen Richard was a strong advocate for Higher, and with her encouragement we finally decided to produce it at Zeum, a small space near The Geary that was inadequate to the task but had been used on occasion for our conservatory and new works productions; again, the play would be directed by my trusted colleague Mark Rucker. It was the first time my A.C.T. team was completely central to the development of a play of mine, and it was far easier and less conflict laden than I had expected, though the challenge of bridging these two parts of my creative life was made even more acute by the timing of things. As it happened, I was directing an enormous production of Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched (a kind of Middle Eastern Greek tragedy) at The Geary at exactly the same moment that Higher was in rehearsal; thus the early months of 2012 were spent running down the hall from one rehearsal to another, literally switching hats midstream as I went from director to playwright and back. In the end, A.C.T. audiences seemed delighted to discover the writing aspect of my work, and Higher had a very successful run.
My next play emerged during one of the hardest eras I’ve yet faced at A.C.T. When the bottom dropped out of the economy in 2008 and we found ourselves struggling once again for survival, my professional confidence hit the skids. We had been having real success after years of change and struggle, and then suddenly all bets were off. I’m sure every responsible artistic leader felt panicked that year, as audiences and donations dried up across the country, but I went through a particularly dark period. I have always taken failure very much to heart, and I felt great sadness and despair as I wondered whether I had it in me to weather yet another storm—this one particularly enormous—and to keep my institution alive and its mission secure. I’m sure part of my bleakness had to do with turning fifty, and with watching my daughter leave home. I had come to A.C.T. as a young woman with nowhere to go but up. Now I felt middle-aged, out of steam, and adrift. I was also living through the dissolution of my professional partnership with Executive Director Heather Kitchen, something that had been under way for several years and was being exacerbated by the economic recession. While A.C.T. desperately needed new financial leadership, Heather had contributed a great deal and we knew that the change was going to be wrenching and complex. My crisis of faith in my own capacity to continue on in the face of such dire circumstances and daunting challenges broke something loose in my creative process, and suddenly, in the wee hours of the night as I thought about the future, I found myself writing something much less structured and far more exposed than anything I’d ever tried before.
In the summer of 2009 I was slated to direct Phèdre at the Stratford Festival, so off I went to Canada in the midst of the financial crisis. I spent three months with the finest classical actors in North America, plumbing the depths of Racine’s play about passion, power, humiliation, and shame. Almost instinctively, as I was simultaneously worrying about what was happening back home and working intensely on Phèdre, I began writing Kinship, a play that mines a similar vein of passion and transgression. In Kinship, a successful newspaper editor becomes besotted with a young journalist in her employ. She obsessively confides in a very close older friend (based on Phèdre’s nurse, Oenone), who turns out to be the young man’s mother. (The credit for that idea goes to playwright Morris Panych, who lived across the hall from me at Stratford and plied me with martinis while I shared the outline of my tortured new play.) I called the characters SHE, HE, and THE FRIEND, so as not to label them in any way—I just wanted to set their desires and obsessions in motion and watch the train wreck happen.
Out of the sadness and sense of failure of that time came a play that wasn’t about plot or contrivance, that wasn’t clever or crafted, but rather emerged almost intact from my bleak heart. It was an incredible relief to write the play, to give myself permission to give voice to those feelings of humiliation and failure, hope and hunger. Perhaps that’s why Kinship feels more visceral and intuitive than my other plays. I took everything I had learned from directing Mary Stuart and Phèdre, from my life as a leader and from the loneliness a woman can feel in that position, and I poured it into the story of a woman who nearly wrecks her career to pursue an irrational passion for a man who turns out to be less than she had imagined. I have always been fascinated by obsession and by the lengths an obsessed person will go to in order to keep infatuation alive, and I vividly remember writing the section where SHE begins to steal things HE has left behind and hide them in her purse, just to hold on to a piece of him. I passed no judgment on the characters or their behavior, assuming that I would put this play in a drawer and never show it to anyone after purging myself of so much anxiety by writing it.
And then, nearly four years after beginning the play, a door opened where I least expected it. In the fall of 2013, while I was in Saint-Étienne doing a workshop with French acting students, the great French actress Isabelle Adjani was given Kinship by translator Séverine Magois, with whom I was working at the time. (She had rendered Waiting for the Flood into French.) For years, Adjani had been looking for a role that she felt would challenge and inspire her, and when she read Kinship she was convinced she’d found what she’d been looking for. She immediately said that she wanted to star in a French production of the play as soon as possible. Magois completed a stunning French version in about three weeks, signed on with enthusiasm, and off they went. I got to experience firsthand the eye-opening transformation that happens when work in one language enters the world of another. Kinship is a play about intimacy. Of course, in French the moment when a relationship stops being professional and crosses the line into something personal is precisely indicated in the language. Magois didn’t even ask me about it—as the play moved from the scene at a speakeasy in which SHE and HE first acknowledge their love to an afternoon in the country when they are “together,” the translation segued from vous (the formal way of saying “you” in French) to tu (the more intimate, personal term), and the transgression was utterly clear. Hearing my voice in French was strangely freeing. No one in Paris knew me, so I had nothing to hide. (No wonder when Beckett left Ireland he never wrote in English again!) At the same time that Kinship was preparing to open in Paris, we were developing it on this side of the Atlantic with the equally fascinating Cynthia Nixon. Nothing has made me happier than to know that on two continents, two powerhouse women were taking the stage to create a complex female character that I had actually invented.
As I write this chapter, I am at work on a new play called The Rowboat Widow, which I began on a dare to myself while in residence at the Orchard Project. Surrounded by so many inspiring and fearless twenty-somethings, I wanted to write my way to the end of a play in a week without having any foreknowledge about what form it would take. On the last day, I wanted to gather the apprentices and artists there in the mountains that week to hear the play and, in some bizarre way, “crowdsource” the ending. The play is a mystery about a man who is presumed dead and then suddenly reappears, unannounced, at his home in the Rockaways, which has been torn apart by Hurricane Sandy. There were a dozen ways the mystery could get resolved (or not), and that summer we had a joyful and inspiring time concocting possible scenarios. I have now tucked the story away in the back of my brain, where I hope it is evolving in my subconscious, ready to take on new life when I finally come up for air long enough to continue writing it.