Heather McDonald on the myriad inspirations behind An Almost Holy Picture.
Heather McDonald’s plays include Dream of a Common Language, Rain & Darkness, The Rivers and Ravines, and Faulkner’s Bicycle. Her production of Dream of a Common Language received four Helen Hayes Awards, including one for Outstanding Play.
FRONT & CENTER: How and when did you start writing plays?
McDonald: I started writing plays in college but didn’t really think much about it because I was a nerdy English major with minors in art history and religion. I had always written stuff, but there was no precedent in my family for being a writer or working in the arts. I grew up in Canada. My mother always took me to the library as a special place and my Papa (grandfather) was a great singer and in this quartet, but no one had the opportunity to go to college, no one finished high school. So I got this idea that if you’re a writer, you should be a journalist and work for a newspaper and I did that for a time, but my secret longing was to be a real writer. And live in New York City!
I wrote a terrible novel at 17 and then another in college. I turned to playwriting when I was 21 or 22 because I thought it was impossible to figure out what people were really thinking or why they did the things they did (as you have to do with a novel). I still think that people are unbelievably mysterious, magical and infuriating—but as a playwright, all you had to do was write down what they did and what they said, and I thought, "I can do that." As a student at New York University, I was so hungry for the craft. I still love it – probably more than ever. I want a play to be bigger and its own, and not try to be like movies or television. I love the theatrical magic of real spectacle; there is a visual world that belongs only to the stage, and I love that metaphorical, dreamlike world.
Looking back, it seems to me that my first plays are— in very different ways and places and people and settings—about the effort to find one’s way through very limited or squashed circumstances. I was interested, and still am, in how people find small ways to thrive in confining situations. It reminds me of a quote I kept for a long time, though I’ve forgotten who said it: "Style is the manifestation of a free will on a limited environment."
F&C: Which writers do you admire? Which have been influential for you?
McDonald: They come from fiction as well as playwriting. I love Chekhov, especially Uncle Vanya. I would most like to have tea at the Plaza with Tennessee Williams and his sister Rose, who believed herself to be the Queen of England, and then go shoe-shopping (all three of us). I love Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, Maria Irene Fornes’s Fefu and Her Friends, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and everything by Caryl Churchill.
Poetry also inspires me. For years now I have had a poem by Leonard Cohen, called "Anthem" taped over my desk. It goes: "Ring the bells that still can ring. / Forget your perfect offering. / There is a crack in everything. / That’s how the light gets in."
Also visual things—paintings, images—usually set my playwriting in motion. I’ll see an image somewhere that just won’t go away, and then I start writing in order to try and find out what it means or who it is.
"There is a visual world that belongs
only to the stage, and I love that
metaphorical, dreamlike world."
F&C: How did you come to write An Almost Holy Picture? Perhaps because it is so concentrated on a single character’s experience, it appears to be a deeply personal play.
McDonald: In the past ten years or so, since having children (Louise is 10, Marilyn is 6), I have found that I am writing about loss in one form or another. There is a line in An Almost Holy Picture that says something like "Loss is what defines us." I think this is true. Not in a bad or depressing way. But it is what sculpts us. This play came out of a time in life when I was thinking about that a lot. I was seeing these enormous and bewildering losses in my own life and the lives of dear friends and family. It caused me to look back to childhood and remember a terrible time in my family for my parents and my sister, who are real presences in this play. My father, my sister and my mother haunt this play.
As I was writing it I thought it was just in one-person form temporarily, and that the other characters Samuel mentions (like Miriam or Inez) were so clear to me that surely they would wander in to the play at some point. But it just came to me in his voice, and I decided, "well, even if I hate one-person things, I ought to trust this." Finally I determined that this is a journey you truly go on alone and that’s why only one man stands there onstage by himself.
Kevin Bacon is going to be terrific in the part. He is smart, fierce, self-deprecating and has a way of being both unsentimental and tender. And I am so grateful to have Michael Mayer with me as An Almost Holy Picture completes its long journey into New York. Michael directed the premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in 1995, and another production at the McCarter
Theatre in Princeton.
F&C: Samuel Gentle, the anguished character at the play’s center, faces a crisis of faith in a time of family tragedy. Is this a timely play for New York audiences?
McDonald: I am interested in how people go on after loss or catastrophe. How people move through fear toward some kind of faith. Especially the deep sorrows that never go away. Things you have to attend to every day. Things for which there is no cure.
|
