ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When you have been working on a play for the past fourteen years, as I have on Passion Play, there are many people to thank. But the biggest debt of thanks is due to Paula Vogel, who encouraged me to write my first full-length play, which became the first act of Passion Play. She and I would sit at a little café in Providence on Wickenden Street called Café Zog and she would buy me a cookie and read ten pages of Passion Play. Had Paula not said: “I think you should write that play,” with the characteristic gleam in her eye, I would now be dissecting the imagery of wax in the Victorian novel. I would never have had the strange audacity to write the first sentence of a full-length play. At that time I wrote primarily poetry and fiction, and Paula snuck Passion Play into the New Plays festival at Trinity Repertory Company. Seeing that production, directed beautifully by Peter DuBois, was what made me decide to become a playwright. I arrived at the production after a car accident on Hope Street where I blacked out, woke up, showed up to Trinity Rep down the hill, saw Passion Play, and then the next fourteen years unfolded. Thank you, dear Paula.

Three children and seven plays later, I’m still tweaking Passion Play to get it ready for a production in Brooklyn at a beautiful old church, produced by Epic Theatre. Along the way, here are the people who helped to birth this play: Molly Smith, who beautifully directed the first incarnation of all three plays and commissioned the third act along with Wendy Goldberg who was then at Arena Stage; Mark Bly who served as dramaturg there; Rebecca Brown who did many readings of Passion Play in New York. And these wonderful actors who helped greatly with the process at Sundance, Arena Stage, Brown University and Lincoln Center Theater: Jefferson Mays, Felix Solis, Howard Overshown, Amelia Campbell, Annabel Capper, Michael Cerveris, Alan Cox, Carson Elrod, David Greenspan, Marin Ireland, Polly Noonan, Keith Reddin, Thomas Jay Ryan, Daniel Talbott, Joaquín Torres, Rebecca Melsky, and I know I am forgetting to write some of you down who have been in and out of this play over the last fourteen years, I am so sorry and thank you! Thanks to the directors Howard Shalwitz, Shira Piven, Chris Fields and Scott Illingworth. Thanks also to Tanya Palmer for her dramaturgy.

I am so grateful to the brilliant Mark Wing-Davey, who had the patience and enthusiasm to direct four very different productions, from a production in London that cost two hundred pounds, to one in Chicago that cost quite a bit more, to one at Yale where I think we finished the play, to the site-specific one we’re working on now. Dear Mark, thank you, and some day we will take “Spring Song” on the road. To Oskar Eustis for being the first producer of Passion Play at Trinity Repertory Company and John Emigh for being the first to put on Acts One and Two together at Brown University’s Leeds Theatre. To Kathy Sova for her very fine editing. To Bruce Ostler, as ever. To Bob Falls for having the courage to do a second production of a difficult and large play, and to James Bundy for understanding that sometimes playwrights need a third production to finish their rewrites. And thanks to Zak Berkman for having the vision and patience to put on Passion Play in an old church in Brooklyn.

Thank you to my parents who always entertained my metaphysical doubts even while they sent me to Catholic Sunday school. Thanks to my husband for helping me to keep the home fires burning while I have been at rehearsals. Finally, thanks to Professor David Hirsch at Brown University who taught Holocaust Literature, knew Melville inside and out, and who said to me once about a paper: “I am surprised. I would have thought you would have written something larger.” Dear Professor Hirsch, I hope this is large enough (at any rate it is long enough), wherever you are now presiding, somewhere in the ether entreating people or shades to be ethical, to be literate, and to be large.