Knowing that I began my writing life as a rather retiring poet, Paula treated me with much tenderness and guile, sneaking my play into the New Plays Festival at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, along with plays by her graduate students. (This is one of Paula’s chosen teaching methods, which she fully admits. She attempts to make students addicted to the actual dust backstage, that barely-there stuff you have to inhale.) I was elated and terrified. I never thought my little one-act would ever be up on its feet. I wrote it only for pleasure, and for Paula, and for the drawer. She assigned me a wonderful director, Peter DuBois, for my very first production. Big Nazo made the fish puppets. Peter got identical twin girls to play Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers.
The night of the opening, my mother flew into town from Chicago to see the play. We were driving down the hill toward Trinity Repertory Company to opening night when we were blindsided, hit by a car going very fast on Hope Street. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt in the backseat and I hit my head and blacked out. Before I blacked out, I remember thinking: this is how death comes, quickly.
I woke up and my mom thought maybe we should go to the hospital for an MRI and I said: are you kidding let’s go to my play we’re almost late. So we went to my play and there was a standing ovation and I remember feeling such an out-of-body sense of rapture seeing the play in three dimensions with actors acting and lights lighting and people watching. I knew then that I would spend my life doing this and not look back. (I got an MRI the following day. It was normal. It did not register the change of vocation.)
When I reflect on all the things Paula taught me—among them Aristotelian form, non-Aristotelian form, bravery, stick-to-it-iveness, how to write a play in forty-eight hours, how to write stage directions that are both impossible to stage and possible to stage—the greatest of these is love. Love for the art form, love for fellow writers, and love for the world.
It is fitting that she and her wife, the eminent biologist and feminist theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling, got frocked for the day and married me and my husband. My husband was a student of Anne’s. After years of my mother looking at my course selections and finding only courses in the humanities, and saying to me: “Please, just take one history of science course so that you’re educated,” I married a historian of science turned doctor.
I never did take a history of science course. My husband (long before he was my husband) and I were both in my beloved David Konstan’s class “Ancient Tragedy and Its Influence” freshman year, but it took seven more years for us to actually meet, when we were in graduate school. My husband, Tony, had done an independent study with Anne in the history of science as an undergraduate before going to medical school. Paula and Anne claimed that they used to talk about us over the dinner table before we met, and when we did start dating, they said they held their breath. It seemed fitting that two teachers who were both so life-changing and transformative for each of us would bind us in front of a community.
After we were married, and as I made my first forays into the professional world, it was always Paula I would call first with personal-and theater-related dilemmas. She was one of the first people I called when, slightly panicked, I found out I was pregnant with twins.
“Come to Cape Cod for a week,” Paula said. “We’ll take care of you.”
On Cape Cod, Paula entertained my big girl Anna with making Kleenex into puppets. Anne grilled fish. We swam in ponds. This was the house that Paula had taken me and two other graduate students to, years ago. She had told us to look out on the deck at the view of the Atlantic Ocean and say to ourselves, “This is what playwriting can buy.” (She bought the house with the proceeds from How I Learned to Drive.)
Now, pregnant with twins and terrified for my writing life, I sat and looked out at the same blue. Anne is a great naturalist and bird-watcher, and a great many birds flew over. In a quiet moment I asked Paula, “Will I ever write again?”
She gave me her penetrating gaze, which I think is almost a form of hypnosis, a summoning. If I were a soldier, Paula would be a general, coaxing me into battle. She said: “Of course you will.”
We named our twins Hope and William. Hope Street and Williams Street is the intersection in Providence where my husband and I met. And where we grew up. And that is most of my story.
So, back to the abstract question: Is playwriting teachable? Of course it’s not teachable. And of course it is teachable. It lives in a paradox. It is as teachable as any other art form, in which we are dependent on a shared history and on our teachers for a sense of form, inspiration, example, and we are dependent on ourselves alone for our subject matter, our private discipline, our wild fancies, our dreams.
The question of whether playwriting is teachable begets other questions, like: Is devotion teachable? Is listening teachable? Is a love of art and a willingness to give your life over to art teachable? I believe that these things are teachable mostly by example, and in great silences. There is the wondrous noise of the classroom, the content, the liveliness of the teachings themselves, the exchange of knowledge, and then there is the great silence of relation. Of watching how great people live. And of their silently communicating: “You too, with your midwestern reticence, can go out into the great world and write. And when we fail, we’ll have some bourbon, and we’ll laugh.” This is all part of the teaching of playwriting over time, and it’s unbounded by the classroom. Just as love is unbounded by time.
I find myself thinking of Paula a great deal now that I am teaching playwriting for the first time to graduate students at Yale. I began as Paula’s substitute teacher. I wonder what I can possibly give to the students, and whether it will be a dismal fraction of what Paula gave me.
Having young children, I think about preschool a lot. About Maria Montessori, who revolutionized early childhood education by giving children the ability to be independent learners. I think: what would the graduate playwright version of the Montessori classroom look like? It would give playwrights freedom and implements, and would let them direct their own courses of study. In short, it would give playwrights actors. The teacher would be a listener, a first audience. It strikes me that people who are defensive about the teachability of playwriting are uncomfortable with the humble but important position of being a first audience. Or perhaps they worry that if playwriting is teachable it dampens their originality, or the originality of their students. But I believe that humble, anti-guru teaching like Paula’s encourages originality by respecting the privacy of her students, never interfering with their unconscious processes.
Speaking of gurus, I am working on a play right now about reincarnation. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, when a great teacher or lama dies, the student goes out and looks for his teacher’s reincarnation in a baby. The student then brings up this baby, his former teacher, in a monastery and teaches him what he himself was taught. I find this continuity very moving. In the Western tradition, we have no such cyclical tradition that preserves an unbroken chain of knowledge. In the playwriting tradition, many of the transmissions are oral. It is then essential that we get into rooms together and share knowledge, and share presence.
I would be a different person if I hadn’t gone to Brown, if I hadn’t met Paula. I’m not sure who that person would be. Less brave, I think. And so the best I can do to thank her is to try and encourage other young writers as they test their fragile bravery on the world.
How I Became a Freelance Writer at Brown
MARA LIASSON
In my sophomore year at Brown I talked my way into a class taught by John Thomas. It was a seminar called “Early Twentieth-Century American Radicals.” The title alone was a siren song I couldn’t resist, being a self-styled late twentieth-century American radical, junior grade. It was a seminar for upperclassmen. I can’t remember what I said to Thomas to get him to let me in but he agreed. And I don’t remember much of what we discussed in class, just that the small lecture hall was dim and Thomas smoked cigarettes, which back then made him seem a lit
tle tough and hard-bitten—not suicidal.
I wrote a paper for that class about Alfred Stieglitz and the artists he showed at his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. I submitted it to a student essay contest at a magazine I had never heard of called American Art Review. It got chosen and appeared in July of 1975 as “The Eight and 291: Radical Art in the First Two Decades of the 20th Century.” I received $100 in prize money. I was a published writer.
I remember how excited I was as I opened the magazine—it was glossy with full-page illustrations—and then the sick feeling that came over me when I realized the first line of my essay had been rewritten. Instead of a “sea change” there was now the clunkier (I thought) “radical transformation.” I was a published writer—with an editor.
In September of that year, my roommate answered a knock on the door of our dorm room and found a man who announced himself as a “dealer” who was looking for Mara. She flipped out and ran to find me at Faunce House, certain that I had gotten involved in drugs over the summer. But he was an art dealer from Boston who had read my essay in American Art Review. He had asked the Brown registrar how to find me, was told where I lived (something that would never happen today), and tracked me down—at my dorm!—to offer me a freelance writing assignment.
He had bought the entire output of a painter called Gerrit A. Beneker and needed someone to write the catalog essay for an exhibit of Beneker’s work at the Vose Galleries in Boston. He would pay me $500, which I thought was a huge fee. Beneker was a kind of socialist Norman Rockwell who painted portraits of factory workers in Ohio. I signed up for James Patterson’s psychohistory class, wrote a biography of Beneker, and then turned that into the catalog essay.
Looking back, the whole thing seems so improbable. Everything that happened seemed like a series of happy accidents. Brown was teaching me that this is how the world works. One thing leads to another. I started thinking that maybe I could make a living doing this—or something like this.
Meanwhile, I took every class of Professor Thomas’s that I could and in my senior year I wrote my American History honors thesis with him. It had the embarrassing-to-me-now title “The Federal Writers Project and the Folklore of Cultural Pluralism.” My husband jokes that I should have called it “The Federal Writers Project and the Single Girl” and left it at that.
The process of writing a thesis with Jack Thomas (everyone knew him as Jack) was scary and sublime. Tacked to the door of his office in the History department was a newspaper cartoon of an old-fashioned bomb (the kind that looks like a bowling ball with a lit fuse) with arms and legs. That was meant, I guess, to illustrate his infamous temper, although I personally never witnessed a Thomas explosion.
Jack Thomas was tall and solid and he had a crushed-looking nose, which, someone told me, he had achieved in a boxing ring. It was a great story—and much too good to check! To me he was larger than life.
He held office hours at four p.m. I can still recall going to see him with a draft of a thesis chapter. He sat behind his desk with his back to the window, the late-afternoon sun streaming in. He was a huge hulking shadow wreathed in cigarette smoke. The chair for students was right in front of the desk facing the window. It was very cinematic—a perfectly lit set for an intimidating academic experience. As he worked his way through my draft there was nothing for me to do but tremble and squint. I still believe that he planned it this way.
Thomas was exacting but also warm and encouraging. He wasn’t just interested in my ideas—he expected me to have some. And he marched my thesis down the field and helped me heave it over the finish line, chapter by rewritten chapter. I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher, or editor.
In the thirty-five years since, I’ve thought a lot about what I learned from him about American history: about how ordinary people as well as elected officials make history, how ideas matter and how the intellectual seeds of reform are planted decades before they ever come to fruition. And above all, because Jack Thomas was a great writer of history, how important it is to communicate in simple clear language.
There probably wasn’t a straight line from Jack Thomas’s American history classes to covering American politics at NPR, but it feels like there was, because Brown gave me the confidence and the freedom to navigate my own ship, even before I had any idea where it would end up.
In Troy There Lies the Scene
MADELINE MILLER
One of the phrases I heard most often during freshman orientation was comfort zone. And, according to a legion of well-meaning peer counselors and student leaders, the purpose of Brown was to get out of it. In that first week we heard inspiring stories about rugby-playing musicians, biologists who were fencing-team MVPs, and Egyptologists who had started their own nonprofits. Adventure, exploration, experimentation! Go forth and change your life with something new!
I listened, dubious. Yes, I knew that breadth was good, but what I really longed for was depth: the chance to immerse myself in something I loved. Freed from requirements, I planned to dive into Latin and Greek literature and not come up for air until four years had passed.
I did, however, have one interest that was suitably uncomfortable: since childhood I had harbored a secret love of the stage. A strange choice for someone as terror-stricken by public speaking as I was, but the candle continued to burn bright, and I had promised myself that one day I would give theater a try. Emboldened by my peer counselors, I thought: Maybe now’s the time.
So I tried, I really did. I lurked by tables at the orientation activity fair; I picked up audition flyers; I attended information sessions. But everything seemed hopelessly intimidating. The main-stage productions were run by grown-ups, for god’s sake. And Production Workshop, which was supposed to be the friendlier, student-produced workspace, was populated by terrifying black-clad sophisticates who could quote Beckett by heart. Acting classes were no easier. The first question on the application was: previous acting experience? Somehow I didn’t think my turn as the Little Match Girl in second grade would count.
No matter. My disappointment was quickly forgotten amidst the glories of the classics department: tutorials, lectures, secret libraries, an archaeological dig. In the years that followed, I had the good fortune to find not one but two brilliant mentors, Michael Putnam and Joseph Pucci. Comfort zone? I was in heaven. I decided to stay on and earn my master’s as well.
Then, in the winter of my senior year, my boyfriend Doug said, “I’m thinking of codirecting a play for Shakespeare on the Green.”
Shakespeare on the Green was a relatively new theater group that performed the Bard’s plays outdoors every spring. And thanks to Doug, who’d been with them since freshman year, I had seen every one of their shows. I loved that they were outside, which nicely complemented the loose-jointed directing. I loved their genuine enthusiasm for Shakespeare and that many of the actors were environmental scientists or linguists who just happened to also like acting.
“That’s wonderful!” I said.
“And I think you should codirect with us,” he said.
I remember being startled; Shakespeare was way out of my field, and directing was even more opaque to me than acting. And anyway, if he already had another codirector, why did he need me?
“Because,” he answered, “we want to do Troilus and Cressida.”
I’d heard of it: Shakespeare’s darkly comic retelling of the Trojan War. References to the play used to pop up in the more ambitious footnotes of my classics texts, but I had never sat down to read it. I hustled over to the bookstore and bought a copy.
The Shakespeare critic Harold Goddard called Troilus and Cressida an “intellectual twin” of Hamlet because it grapples with many of the same themes: corruption and hypocrisy, alienation, the shattering of illusions. In fact, Troilus and Cressida is what might have resulted if the melancholy Dane himself had taken up a quill and tried to write the Iliad. It’s one of Shakespeare’s angriest, edgiest, and most problematic plays; it’s also one of his funniest. In a
single scene, the tone veers from absurdism to scathing satire, from pathos to bathos and back again. I was in.
Except, I didn’t have the first idea how to turn the play’s brilliance on the page into a performance. Sitting down with my codirectors, Doug and Joy, I became aware of just how much practical stagecraft I didn’t know: how many minutes each page of script would take, what a stage manager did, how to run auditions. I spent those early meetings in the background, just listening and trying to follow the new vocabulary: tablework, sides, blocking.
Then we started discussing the play. And though I may have been stricken with terror onstage, I learned that backstage, I was the terror. I had opinions, big ones, honed on four years of close-reading classical literature at the feet of my professors. For instance, Achilles and Patroclus. Obviously lovers, I said.
My codirectors raised their eyebrows. After a half-hour lecture on the historical treatment of Achilles and Patroclus’s relationship, I finally got to the point: the play says so. Here, I pointed. And here. And I had some further thoughts on the character of Agamemnon. In the Quarto version of the text . . .
I could see my boyfriend wondering if he had created a monster.
Few monsters were ever so happy. The three days of auditions were some of the most intellectually exhilarating of my life to date. My hand ached from writing notes, and we talked ourselves hoarse about who would make the perfect Ulysses, the funniest Ajax. Just as important were the personalities of the actors: we wanted fun people, game people, not necessarily the most experienced. NO PREVIOUS ACTING NECESSARY, I had typed on the audition information sheet. And then underlined it, twice.
One of our biggest points of contention was the role of Thersites, Shakespeare’s scurrilous, bitter chorus. My top choice was an actor who had come to the audition wearing a torn trenchcoat and huge half-disintegrated flappy sandals, with socks. He ate sheets of seaweed paper straight from a pocket. I thought he was great: eloquent and nastily bitter as the character demanded.
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