By Anne Undeland
Photos by Stephanie Zollshan
On being a playwright in the Berkshires
The mountains and the architecture, the culture and the history—they endlessly inspire. Add to that, I’d argue there are more theater artists per square inch than any other rural place in America. Toss a pebble and it’ll surely land on an excellent director, actor, designer, technician, or playwright. There’s a sense of community among us—all of these artists make my work so much better.
The Berkshires have been incredibly hospitable to me, too: “Lady Randy” (about Winston Churchill’s extraordinary American mother, Jennie Jerome) and “Wharton Between the Sheets” (formerly “Mr. Fullerton,” about Edith Wharton’s passionate, unexpected midlife affair) premiered here. I’m now at work on “Madame Mozart, the Lacrymosa,” inspired by a short story by Gerald Elias about Mozart’s wife.
This play is a commission from Great Barrington Public Theater that I’m workshopping with the dream team of Ryan Winkles and Tara Franklin, acting under the direction of Judy Braha, with Larry Wallach consulting on the music. The future of any play is always uncertain and I don’t know whether it will be produced—but I do know these people can make the words of any playwright sing.
The origin of the idea
It always starts with a woman. Then some variation on the question: How dare she? I’m a historian at heart and love digging up women’s stories—especially stories of women over 45. A woman who breaks the rules always gets my attention (it’s even better if she’s underestimated). History’s full of them: if you were a woman of intelligence, drive, and sensuality, society would do everything in its power to make sure you were none of those things. The conflict’s right there, gold for a playwright.
But I need more to sustain the writing of an entire play. I need relevance. A little anger helps. To that end I take note of the tone with which my woman’s described. Constanze Mozart keeps appearing as stupid, grasping, and, worst of all, a bad housekeeper. Jennie Jerome is forever tsk tsk-ed for being too sexual (she had lovers without apology) while Edith Wharton is tsk tsk-ed for being too cerebral to be sexual, too privileged to be vulnerable. I can’t help but notice how little opprobrium is reserved for men who exhibit the same behaviors—then and now.
Cherchez la femme. The play will follow.
But is it true?
I’m writing plays, not lectures. And please God, not sermons. I look for emotional truth. Which isn’t always the same as factual truth, though it’s lovely when the two coincide. I’ve found—and I feel heretical saying this—that I can’t let the history box me in. Timelines will conflate, facts will be left out or finessed, characters will be made up. Imaginative flights are necessary; it’s what historical fiction is.
The internal process
I have to physically feel the world of my characters. How did their clothes feel on the skin? How did they bathe? How did they travel? What did their hair smell like? What did their children’s laughter sound like? Were they ever hungry? What did they see when they looked out the window? Once I’m in that imaginative space, I think of an event that happened or might likely have happened, and then try to conjure what people might have said to each other.
Living in the Berkshires has been integral to this fuzzy, intuitive, addictive writing process. Edith Wharton was the easiest to invoke, as I wandered through her pet cemetery, drank wine on her veranda, ate local eggs and tomatoes, and motored through the Berkshire hills, thinking of Ethan Frome and Charity Royall. Jennie Jerome’s in the air here, too (in a nice historical twist, she and Edith were friends); she reputedly attended school in Lenox and later, fleeing London to hide her husband’s insanity, she visited relatives in Williamstown and sewed purple rosettes for the Williams College baseball team—the first time they used those school colors. It stuck. Jennie was a Gilded Age girl, one of the first “dollar princesses” (American heiresses marrying impoverished European nobility). Constanze Mozart’s harder to find here, though there have been evenings where I laid on the lawn at Tanglewood, fell under the spell of her husband’s music, and filled myself with thoughts of her. What must it have been like to be in the room while he composed? What would their daily lives have been like? How could she possibly have survived losing him so young? Suddenly, Constanze’s there.
What comes after the draft?
Other people get involved! This is the best part and “Madame Mozart” is in the thick of the collaborative process. Working with director Judy Braha (the best of the best) and GBPT Artistic Director Jim Frangione, I’ve made about a million revisions so far—the show has morphed from being a solo show to a two-hander—but the magic really happens when the actors and musicians get involved. I can’t wait to see what they’ll do! This is the power of theatrical collaboration. It’s what keeps me coming back to this crazy, maddening, beautiful art form.
