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Lanford WilsonA Playwright
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MANY writers are reluctant to admit that there are autobiographical elements in their work. Lanford Wilson is one of the exceptions. Sitting at his dining room table here on a hot summer day, he talked about how he had become a playwright by pointing to a scene in his 1983 play ''Angels Fall.'' In the scene, Zappy, a tennis star, reflects on his childhood. ''When he was 11 and skinny,'' Mr. Wilson said, ''he walks by these two guys playing on a tennis court. He watches them, and as a joke they throw him a ball and a racket, and he tosses the ball up in the air -- and whams it across the net. There's no one over there, but that was an ace, man.'' Mr. Wilson laughed and then seemed to choke up. ''I get emotional talking about this,'' he said. ''And Zappy says: 'I knew I was a tennis player. That's what I do.' '' Mr. Wilson added, ''Well, that's what happened to me.'' In his case he was working in the art department of a Chicago advertising agency in the late 1950's and thinking about becoming a graphic artist. He wrote short stories in his spare time. He had never thought about writing a play. Then one day he had an idea for a story and said to himself, ''Oh, that's more of a play than a narrative.'' ''I started writing it as a play, and by page two, I decided I'm a playwright. Clear as day. I had a real talent for writing dialogue, for getting the essence of a character. And doors just flew open all down the hall. There was nobody over there, but that was an ace.'' As he spoke, tears came to his eyes. Zappy became a tennis champion; Mr. Wilson became a Pulitzer Prize-winner and one of the leading American dramatists of the last 30 years. He is being celebrated this year with an entire season of his plays at the Signature Theater Company, which annually presents the work of a single American playwright. Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard and John Guare have been among those honored. ''It's long overdue for Lanford,'' said James Houghton, the Signature's artistic director. In 17 full-length plays and more than 30 one-acts, Mr. Wilson has created a luminous portrait of Americans asserting their individuality in a country that encourages conformity. Many of his characters are outsiders -- prodigal spirits looking for a home -- and, in the words of the playwright Robert Patrick, ''trying to find a perfect family.'' As Mr. Wilson once said, in a statement that sounds Chekhovian, ''I want people to see -- and to read -- my plays and to say: 'This is what it was like living in that place at that time. People haven't changed a damn bit. We can recognize everyone.' '' In his booklined study in Sag Harbor, there is a sign on the desk, a reminder to himself: ''You're only telling the story of what happens to these people -- and then what happened was . . . '' Through the 1970's and 1980's, when Mr. Wilson was at the center of the Circle Repertory, which he had helped found in 1969, his plays filled Broadway and Off Broadway theaters. Regional theaters have staged his work in recent years, but the plays have been absent from New York. Now, with Signature presenting two new plays, two revivals and readings of several other Wilson plays, theatergoers will once again be made aware of the range and the richness of his work. The Wilson year opens at the Union Square Theater on Thursday with a revival of ''Burn This.'' Born in Lebanon, Mo., 65 years ago, Mr. Wilson has written plays that are both pastoral (the Pulitzer Prize-winning ''Talley's Folly'') and urban (''Balm in Gilead''). They are gently lyrical and also, as in ''Burn This,'' surging with visceral emotion -- and they are underlined with a longing for a disappearing past. Like that wistful young woman in ''The Hot l Baltimore'' who listens for the distant sound of passing trains, Mr. Wilson's characters search, sometimes hopelessly, for values that can sustain them. As Mr. Albee said recently, ''In all the years I've known Lanford's work, he has remained firm in his ambitions, retains his fine ear and has never lessened his scope in order to be 'popular.' I always look forward to his plays, for I know I will always learn something about both craft and ideas.'' In ''Burn This,'' Edward Norton and Catherine Keener play the roles created by John Malkovich and Joan Allen on Broadway in 1987. Mr. Norton is Pale, Mr. Wilson's most volatile character, the manager of a restaurant, and Ms. Keener is Anna, the tenderhearted dancer. An unlikely couple, Pale and Anna move through a pas de deux that is both romantic and confrontational. The title of the play refers to a confession in a letter (or by inference, in a work of art) that is embarrassing, even frightening, to the writer. Mr. Wilson borrowed the phrase from E. M. Forster's ''Howard's End.'' In the novel, it appears at the end of a letter in which a character, writing to her sister, refers to her statement that ''life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama.'' Before going to New York to watch Mr. Houghton begin rehearsals of ''Burn This,'' Mr. Wilson welcomed a visitor to his home in this seaside town, a large, rambling house built in 1845. When he bought it more than 30 years ago, he restored it and furnished it with American antiques and lined the walls with outsider art. The place, which exudes a feeling of comfort, is cluttered with the possessions of a playwright who would prefer not to leave home. Behind the house is a gloriously lush garden, Mr. Wilson's own private Giverny, with a lily pond and trees and plants with colorful names like Mt. Etna Broom, Monkey Puzzle and Starfire phlox. The garden is as intricate as a maze, carefully designed and tended by the playwright so that something is always in bloom. After a sleepless night, Mr. Wilson seemed decidedly restless, but he gradually relaxed into a conversation that circled his life and his career. Even when everything seems to be going well, such as now, with the Signature season, Mr. Wilson worries, not so much about his plays as about the hazards of daily life. Lighting up the first of many Lucky Strikes, he said that he had every phobia, except claustrophobia, and seemed to be waiting for that one to attack. He listed his phobias, starting with a fear of flying. If he has to travel, he goes by train or bus, or, slowly, by car. ''I'm terrified of heights,'' he said, ''and I'm terrified of machines.'' Even at home, he feels threatened when he sees a knife or broken glass. Trying to explain, he said: ''You see a knife, and you imagine cutting your throat. You see a tall building, and you want to jump out the window.'' Waiting for a green light so that he can cross the street, he sometimes holds on to a telephone pole ''to keep -- mentally at least -- from throwing myself into the traffic.'' The central character in a play he is writing shares these fears. ''You can see why I'm not too enthusiastic about that play,'' he said sheepishly. For years Mr. Wilson wondered about the source of his anxieties. Then one evening at a party, he had a conversation with a psychiatrist. He told her about his phobias, and she said, ''You probably didn't have them growing up in Missouri.'' He agreed, and she responded, ''Probably not until you started getting recognized.'' He realized that what she said was true. Once his plays were staged and he began to be noticed as an artist, he said, he was struck by the sense that he was unworthy of the acclaim. That led to ''a self-destructive impulse,'' even though, he added quickly, he has always been aware of the quality of his work. Asked if he had ever tried to do anything about his problem, he said, ''No, but I carried that psychiatrist's card around for a while -- and that helped.'' He had had a relatively happy childhood, despite the fact that his parents divorced and his father moved to California. He studied briefly at Southwest Missouri State College, then went to California and looked up his father (a story paralleled in his play ''Lemon Sky''). Eventually Mr. Wilson moved to Chicago, and, after writing his first play, he signed up for a playwriting course at the University of Chicago -- and started writing in earnest. In 1962, he came to New York. He was excited ''just walking under the lights of Broadway,'' but he was disappointed in the shows that he saw -- until the evening he wandered into Caffe Cino on Cornelia Street, and saw ''The Lesson'' by Ionesco. It was, he said, a revelation, and inspired him to write ''So Long at the Fair'' and ''Home Free,'' which were presented at Caffe Cino. They were followed by other plays, and, along with Sam Shepard and other new writers, Mr. Wilson was discovered -- and the phobias began. ''I came out of Caffe Cino,'' he said, ''and I was afraid to cross the street.'' At the Circle Repertory Company, he found his theatrical home with an ensemble of actors. He began his lifelong habit of writing plays with specific actors in mind for roles, an approach that would dismay many playwrights. Since then, Mr. Wilson has never stopped writing plays and has written only the occasional screenplay, including three versions of ''Burn This'' for a movie that was never made. W HEN the Circle Rep ended in 1996, Mr. Wilson felt homeless. Finally, he pulled himself out of his depression. He wrote a one-act for the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, then regained his stride by finishing several plays on commission for various theaters, including ''Book of Days'' and ''Rain Dance'' for the Purple Rose Theater Company in Chelsea, Mich. The executive director there is Jeff Daniels, who had acted in ''The Fifth of July.'' In that play, Mr. Daniels portrayed a gay man who is a gardener and helpmate to a crippled Vietnam veteran. Mr. Daniels's character, Mr. Wilson said, was ''a very glamorized version of me.'' Aspects of the playwright appear in other plays. In ''Burn This,'' he said, he is a combination of Anna's gay roommate who works in an ad agency and Burton, ''the writer who is always talking about his work.'' Pale, he said, is drawn from three people he knew, including an actor who was ''a real wild man'' and a bartender who was once the manager of Da Silvano restaurant; Anna is partly based on a dancer friend in Chicago. As Burton says in ''Burn This,'' ''Nobody is safe around a writer.'' Although Mr. Wilson's plays generally focus on families, they are also concerned with social and scientific issues. In ''Book of Days,'' the second play in the Signature series, a community theater production of ''St. Joan'' is crosscut with problems at a local cheese plant, a factory like the one in which his stepfather worked in Missouri. In other plays, he has written about archaeology and astronomy. ''Rain Dance,'' which closes the Signature season, takes place at Los Alamos in 1945 on the night before the Trinity atomic energy test. The other play scheduled is a revival of ''Talley's Folly,'' his valentine to romantic love. Mr. Wilson has finished another new play, ''A Sense of Place, or Virgil Is Still the Frogboy.'' Although it is lighter in tone than his other work, it is, he said, still another ''life crisis play.'' One character is a failed dancer but an inspired chef. Speaking about her cooking, she says, ''If I know it's extraordinary, it doesn't matter if someone else knows it or not.'' And a friend responds, ''That's as good a description of an artist as any I know.'' |