* * *
I enjoyed dorm life. The term hanging out wasn’t in the vernacular then, but that’s what I did quite a bit of the time, with Mike, with the guys across the hall, and with whoever happened by. Looking back, I think I learned more about life in those bull sessions than in any of the classes I took that year.
The classes were very different from my Georgia county high school’s. Expectations were high. I was called Mr. Uhry. Before that, Mr. Uhry referred to my father only. There was a wonderful European history survey course taught by Professor Walter George. It was a big lecture class, meeting in Alumnae Hall on the Pembroke Campus. We had assigned seats, and a spotter in the balcony checked for attendance. Professor George was very dignified and very theatrical at the same time. He had the ability to hold the entire room spellbound.
Toward the end of that freshman year, I met a sophomore from Brooklyn named Robert Waldman. He had written the music for the annual Brownbrokers musical with a graduating senior. He asked me to collaborate with him on the musical for the next year. Brownbrokers was a competition. You had to submit an entire show—book, music, and lyrics—and a committee of upperclassmen picked the winner. The offer from Waldman was like a call from on high. He was a seasoned veteran, a pro in my eyes. Of course I said yes, overjoyed and terrified to be working in such rarefied climes.
I think my real life began during my sophomore year. I don’t remember much about the courses I took, but I didn’t flunk anything, so I must’ve done all right. What I do remember is writing the book and lyrics for that show. We called it Barney ’n Me. The title was an in-joke because Barnaby Keeney was the newly appointed president of the university. The Barney in the show was a set of fake dinosaur bones. I loved collaborating. I loved writing a draft, meeting with Bob, and then rewriting. I loved fitting words to the music he wrote. I was bitten hard by the theater bug. Our show was selected to be presented. The rehearsal experience was stimulating and exciting. We were like a sports team, flexing our muscles and practicing our moves and getting ready for the big day. My family came up from Atlanta to see the show. I thought it was wonderful. I was deliriously happy. We got panned in the Brown Daily Herald. I was monumentally depressed. Those wild mood swings connected with whatever show I am doing have lasted to this day—though Prozac has helped a lot!
Three things changed my life forever during my junior year. First, we wrote another show. It was called Fiddle De Dee and it was based on a Chekhov fairy tale. Writing it, rehearsing it, and getting it on left no doubt in my mind. I was going to go into show business. Bob Waldman and I were going to be the next Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Second, I enrolled in a course called English 23–24. It met four afternoons a week. It was more than a course—it became a way of life. We traced the history of the theater from Greece to modern times. We spent a month on each period and put on a workshop production of plays from each one. It was very detailed. We never got past the seventeenth century, which was fine with me. I was a sponge, soaking up every drop of information and lore fed to me by two remarkable professors, Janice O. van der Water and James Barnhill. So much of what I learned from them became the foundation of my working life.
Sock and Buskin was the name of the theatrical society at Brown. I hear it still is. S & B presented four shows a year. One was invariably Shakespeare. One was a recent Broadway hit, and the two others varied—a Greek tragedy, Shaw, Chekhov, O’Casey. The Shakespeare that year was As You Like It. I didn’t know the play. Well, I had seen a production of it when I was in high school. At least I saw fifteen minutes of it. It was so boring and incomprehensible to me that I sneaked out as soon as I could. This time it was different. I was the stage manager, so I had to attend every rehearsal. I came to know most of the lines. The words were so lofty and so witty and so beautiful. And the play was so romantic and so funny! Here was this wonderful spunky girl having to pretend she was a guy, and the actual guy she was falling for didn’t know she was really a girl. It was all worked out so cleverly. It’s still my favorite Shakespeare play.
The third thing that happened that year, the biggest thing of all, was that I fell in love! Her name was Joanna Kellogg. She was also enrolled in English 23–24, so I spent every afternoon with her. She was drop-dead beautiful, with oversize brown eyes and shiny brown hair. She was an actress, too. She played Celia, the second lead in that production of As You Like It. There it was. I fell in love with show business, the classic theater, and Joanna all at the same time. I’ve never fallen out of love with any of them.
* * *
Waldman graduated that June and went back to New York to study music composition at Juilliard. I stayed on at Brown for my senior year. We had already decided that after I graduated, I’d go to New York and we would embark upon a professional career. I remember being in New York once during my senior year and realizing that, except for Bob, I knew not one single soul in New York City, let alone in show business. How the hell was I going to do this? I decided not to think about that and charged ahead.
In my senior year I sort of viewed myself as a grand old man, a veteran of two Brownbrokers shows and an authority on musicals. I didn’t write another show, but I did chair the selection committee. We chose a piece written by three women—a first in the history of Brownbrokers. Joanna was a year behind me, but we planned to go to New York together upon her graduation. In 1958 that meant marriage—there were no other acceptable possibilities.
When I was looking at those pictures of the class of 1908 on the weekend I graduated, I knew pretty much what I wanted to do with my life: live in New York, write shows with Bob, and marry Joanna. And I did all of those things. Bob and I never became Rodgers and Hammerstein, but we both were and still are working professionals. Bob is still my best friend. Joanna and I were married two weeks after she graduated and we still are. She decided that one showbiz career was enough for one family, so she devoted herself to education. She now holds an EdD and is a long-tenured professor at Fordham University, where she is a world-renowned authority on dyslexia. We became the parents of four daughters and are now the grandparents of six more girls and two boys to boot.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I went from a dreamy, lazy high school kid to a guy with concrete life plans in my time at Brown. In other words, I grew up. Well, more or less. I still haven’t completely managed to do that. Where would I be now if I hadn’t come to Brown in the fall of 1954? I have no idea.
My Honorary Degree and the Factory Forewoman
EDWIDGE DANTICAT
My mother once offered her boss, a factory forewoman, my first novel—Breath, Eyes, Memory—for Christmas, the novel I completed at Brown, the novel that would later be an Oprah’s Book Club selection.
My mother planned to tell the factory forewoman, “My daughter wrote this book at university.” We said it many times together. “My daughter wrote this book. My daughter wrote this book at university.” I still imagine this daughter, not as myself, but as a child my mother and I share—a dream offspring, a graduate and later even an honorary degree recipient from Brown.
I spent an entire day pondering an appropriate dedication for a woman I didn’t know, except through a few details my mother had mentioned. She was Chinese. She was fat and rarely impatient. Finally I scribbled, “To Mary, Merry Christmas. Thank you so much for being nice to my mom.”
I once went with my mother to another factory from which she had been laid off. I was fifteen years old and we had gone there to pick up some money she was owed for making two dozen purses a day at minimum wage. The room was dim and dusty, the air laden with tiny leather and thread particles, which the large overhead fans spun in a hazy whirlpool above the crammed rows of antique Singers. I couldn’t imagine my mother spending every day there, and not getting paid on top of it. But at fifteen, I could only make vows. This would never be my life. I would never work for anyone. I would get my bachelor’s degree, then go to graduate school. And in grad school, I would write books.
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My parents, it seemed, also silently shared part of this dream. While they believed that daughters should never live far from their parents—I had commuted as an undergraduate at Barnard—they hadn’t simply put me on a plane or a bus and wished me well; they rented a van and, bringing along my three brothers, they drove me to Brown from our home in Brooklyn. While I was at Brown, they told people that I was studying to be a teacher—one could teach with an MFA after all. This was what they understood of writers.
Teaching was indeed one of the things I did for the first time at Brown. I had a class full of undergraduates who were hoping to have one of the famous novelists on faculty as their instructor. My students were mostly experimental writers and many of them thought that “But this is what I was trying to do” was a proper explanation for everything they wrote. Somehow we all managed to survive the semester.
While at Brown, I also fell madly in love with the entire canon of African-American literature as it was taught by the brilliant professor Thadious Davis. I joined an African-American sorority—Alpha Kappa Alpha—whose kind and elegant women inspired me to think of more than writing. My two best friends were a poet from California and a novelist from China. I joined a small Haitian church, where I met many people who had fled Haiti in the wake of the violence that followed a US-backed coup d’etat against Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. I wrote an op-ed for the Providence Journal about the coup.
I found small pockets of home on my own. I found my voice.
I wish my father could have seen me get my honorary degree from Brown in May 2008. He had died four years earlier. My mom could not make the trip for health reasons. Perhaps this is why, more than anything else, as I received my degree from then-president Ruth Simmons, all I could think of was my mother wanting to give her factory forewoman my book.
Back then, I told myself, maybe my mother’s gift had puzzled that factory forewoman. Had she been able to reconcile the fact that my mother would still need to work in a factory even though she had a one-book authoress daughter, newly graduated from a master’s program at a fancy school?
Years later, when my father was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, he found a pulmonologist to whom he became quite attached. I had a book of short stories out around this time, and my father asked me to sign a copy for his doctor.
It has taken me some time to decode both my parents’ message to me in giving away my books—that somehow some of my vows and theirs, concerning my life, were the same after all. Just as they had shown with that family ride to Brown in the rented van, they were totally on board. They believed in me. And even though they valued their privacy so much that they always locked their bedroom door to have even the slightest disagreement, they never complained about anything I wrote while I was at Brown and all those many years after. Neither my misguided “truths” nor my deliberate distortions of the family stories ever bothered them.
They couldn’t have known that I would earn the extraordinary privilege of getting an honorary degree from Brown, or that my books would find an audience. All they knew was that I was somewhat on the right path.
Is playwriting teachable? (the example of Paula Vogel)
SARAH RUHL
People often ask me if I think playwriting is teachable. Making a soufflé, tap-dancing, changing a tire, and making stained glass are all teachable activities—and making a play is not so different from making a soufflé, tap-dancing, changing a tire, and making stained glass all at the same time, but on paper. Why, then, do many see the writing of plays as such a mysterious activity that it cannot be taught? Is it because our culture has such a high regard for individualism that it has such a low regard for teachers? Almost everything in the culture is taught, one way or another, but for originality, which cannot be taught and is therefore judged to have the most value. And yet, in most art forms, the originality of the individual is assumed, whereas the form transmitted through history is taught and teachable. For example: This is Middle C. This is how to point your toes. This is how to sharpen your pencil. (Which I don’t take lightly. I remember when a drawing teacher actually showed me how to sharpen my pencil properly when I was twenty and it made all the difference. But I digress.)
Is playwriting teachable?
Rather than trying to answer the question in an abstract way, I’d like to tell a story. Paula Vogel begins How I Learned to Drive: “Sometimes, in order to teach a lesson, you have to tell a story.”
And so. I met Paula Vogel at Brown University when I was a junior. I was twenty. I had just returned from a leave of absence after my father’s death. I was very close to him, and he’d died of cancer, in Chicago, the summer of my sophomore year. The first two years of college were a difficult blur, spent mainly studying and racing back to Chicago on a plane at the first opportunity to see my father. He was diagnosed with advanced bone cancer during Thanksgiving of my freshman year. I thought about transferring to the University of Chicago, and even obtained an application, but my father would have none of it. He wanted everything to be as “normal” as possible and didn’t want me to live at home among bedpans. Of course nothing was normal, but I tried to be as normal a nineteen-year-old as I knew how, while thinking of death and illness much of the time. I think my heart was broken. I wonder if my father knew somehow that I couldn’t leave Providence before I’d met Paula Vogel, or my future husband.
At any rate, I took a semester off from Brown after my father died and spent it back home in Chicago, teaching special education classes by day. At night, my mother and sister and I shared the same house, but each in a private house of grief that could not be shared. I came back to Providence the spring of my junior year and was having trouble concentrating on my studies. It was hard for me to read and hard for me to write. I lived in a blue house on Hope Street. It seemed dark much of the time; the light itself seemed darker, though the seasons were as they always had been in Providence—in winter a damp cold that got inside the bones, and in spring all flowering trees. Regardless of the trees, it looked dark to me. And then I met Paula Vogel. She was teaching my advanced playwriting class.
I could talk about the content of what Paula taught me. All of her students (and these include Nilo Cruz, Quiara Hudes, Lynn Nottage, Dan LeFranc, Jordan Harrison, and Bridget Carpenter, to name a few) speak the same language of Russian formalism (how to make the familiar seem strange) and plasticity (the visual landscape of the stage and how it’s created on the page) and stage directions that are impossible to stage. But what strikes me most when I remember Paula’s teaching is her presence as much as the content of her teachings. I think in this country we have an obsession with content and curriculum, all the while devaluing presence and proximity, which are two teaching values hard to describe or quantify (or, indeed, teach). Paula has a tremendous gaze, a tremendous listening power, and the most intelligent curiosity of anyone I have ever met. She took me seriously.
And so when I was in her class and told her that I was having trouble writing about the things that mattered most to me, Paula gazed at me. She understood grief, and she knew that I’d just lost my father. She said, “If someone asked me to write a play about my brother Carl who died of AIDS, I’d never have gotten out of bed. Instead, I wrote about a kindergarten teacher taking a trip through Europe, which became Baltimore Waltz. And I was able to write about my brother.” Then I remember her looking at me with that uncanny penetrating gaze she has, the gaze of a brilliant scientist making a diagnosis, but with a nonscientific laserlike empathy, and she said, “Write a play in which a dog is the protagonist.”
“Okay,” I said. And I did. That was a play called Dog Play and it was the first thing I was able to write after my father died. It viewed his illness and death through the eyes of the family dog.
I found in Paula’s approach to playwriting a great deal of pleasure, and a great deal of play. It was almost too pleasurable, too decadent. I always thought I’d be a poet, which gave me pleasure, but
a solitary ascetic kind of pleasure, not the kind that makes you laugh out loud or stay up late into the night with others. And so I thought her class was a wonderful diversion, and that I would now go back to my chosen path, to be a scholar, and write a slim volume of poetry every once in a while.
I went to study in England for a year and came back a little more mended (baths, tea, grass, and daffodils, I suppose) to my senior year at Brown. I asked Paula to be my thesis advisor. I wanted to write a thesis on representations of the actress in the Victorian novel. Paula said: “No, I cannot advise that thesis. But if you write a play, I will advise your thesis.” I felt an almost strangled joy in my chest. I told Paula that I did have an idea for a play. “What is it?” she asked with that characteristic gleam in her eye.
I stammered, “W-what about a play where this town is playing the Passion Play year after year, and the guy who always has to play Pontius Pilate really wants to play the role of Jesus, played by his cousin?”
I remember again that time slowed down as Paula looked at me in her uncanny way and said: “I think you should write that play.” (How many plays has Paula helped conjure into existence, I wonder, by saying to another playwright: I think you should write that play? Hundreds or thousands, most likely.)
And so I did write that play, under her guidance. It took me twelve years to finish, and it was called Passion Play. My senior year, I met with Paula every week at Café Zog on Wickenden Street. Over coffee and a cookie, she would read my new ten pages, and she would tell me every book I needed to read, and always, she named the exact book I needed to read at the exact time I needed to read it—a kind of psychic superhero librarian. I devoured medieval theater and German expressionism. I finished writing the first act of Passion Play.
The Brown Reader Page 25
