Photo of Karl Miller by Clinton Brandhagen

Jacqueline Lawton: The Talented Mr. Ripley, adapted from the novel written by Patricia Highsmith, is a brilliant psychological thriller set in lush Italy in the 1950s.  What compelled you to write this play?
Phyllis Nagy: I was commissioned to the write the play by Giles Croft at the Watford Palace Theatre (UK) in the late 1990s, after he’d been appointed artistic director there upon leaving the National Theatre’s literary office. Giles had been a friend for some years, and as such he knew of my friendship with Pat Highsmith, whom I’d met in New York in the late 1980s. I almost did not take on the adaptation because of that friendship. I had already written drafts of two Highsmith adaptations, both for film, both of which were undertaken with Pat’s blessing. Those were easy. Ripley, on the other hand, was as daunting a challenge as anything I’ll ever undertake. I kept hearing Pat’s complaints about Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train as I adapted Ripley. In retrospect, I’m pretty happy that I ignored her voice but was still pleased to have its malevolent joy in my ear while I wrote.

JL: Throughout the play, we see Tom – a charming, amoral, sexually ambiguous conman and occasional murderer – constantly re-invent himself/his past and attempt to control his dreams. Ultimately, he is confronted by his past, the truth of who he really is, and learns that he can never return home to America. With all of this, why do you feel that audiences/readers root for Tom?
PN: Tom Ripley gives an acceptable voice to the transgressor in us all. He does this in an under-the-radar way that naturally appeals to that big closet within which we all hide our most awful impulses. He “passes” for all the things he is not, right out there under clear skies, bright sunshine. He’s urbane, good looking, sexually undetectable to the naked eye. What’s not to root for? But when the dust of his actions settle, do we still root for him? Should we? That these questions largely remain unanswered accounts for Highsmith’s brilliance in charting the course of this darkest heart. Keep them guessing always works.

JL: Which aspect of Tom’s character do you most relate to? What aspect of Rickie’s character do you most relate to? Then, of course, there’s Marge, who loves Rickie, unrequitedly, do you see yourself in her at all?
PN: I most relate to Tom’s lack of genuine insight into his true calling. The quest for insight keeps him a murderer in the same way it keeps me a writer. Rickie has a superficial social effortlessness that I’ve always envied for about ten minutes at the start of every party I’ve attended. He’s a person who gravitates to the center of each circle. I’m a person who gravitates to each corner I encounter. Marge presents a pleasant, deceptive surface and has more balls than any other character, including Tom. Because she understands her own heart and follows it, however reckless or headlong, into potential oblivion. Marge is a natural gambler. Gamblers don’t care about losing, they care about playing. That’s what I most relate to in her. Would that I had her ability to swim canals and climb psychological blocks in order to communicate the purity and intensity of her feelings for those she loves.

JL: What was the most challenging part of adapting The Talented Mr. Ripley into a play? Which character’s voice or situation was the most difficult to capture?
PN: Several things. The trickiest was translating Pat’s structural obsessions in a way that did not take me outside of my own structural obsessions. For as interested in psychological progressions as Highsmith was, as a novelist, she’s far more interested in linear progression than I am as a playwright. More “natural” adaptation fits for me would be novelists like Nabokov, Amis, Hawthorne – The Rhapsodics, as I dub them. So this was difficult. But as soon as I understood that Pat’s odd literal interests were as fluid as they were, as watery as they are, this became much easier. I could then approach the composition of this piece of writing as I approach every other piece of writing – as a sort of symphonic mess for multiple instruments.

Then there was the excavation of the novel’s subtext – Tom’s relationship to his kin, to his sexual identity, to his own self-hatred – all of these things are what truly make theatrical adaptations work. The stuff that’s written yet not explicit in the source material. In this case, for instance, there are casual mentions of his childhood rearing – fascinating, tantalizing. And that is where Aunt Dottie came from. Tom is very much the product of his genes, though his narcissism would never allow for that thought to emerge in the forefront of his mind.

And lastly, I endeavored for the dialogue of the play to allow an audience of Highsmith fanatics to believe that they are hearing her voice whilst hearing mine. (Yet another instance of “doubling” surrounding this play) In a rare display of immodest behavior, I’ll step out on that limb and say that I think I’ve succeeded in this. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single line from the novel in my adaptation, yet I believe Pat’s voice is everywhere, like a virus or a spreading infection. And I think she’d laugh and raise a glass to me for comparing her to a virus.

JL: You handle the element of time in a very exciting way in this play. There are moments when Tom is placed in two different timeframes at once. Can you talk about how this developed for you?
PN: As I struggled with how best to make theatrical the absolute void of a personality schism that is Tom Ripley, the simplest idea – rendering the metaphor of duality in literal, visceral terms – became the best and only choice. So often, writers complicate things in an attempt to complicate their writing. The easiest way to build complexity is to choose simplicity. This is something composers understand much better than writers. You build a song, a sonata, note by note. Not idea by idea. Same with plays.

JL: The play is performed by seven actors, with five actors playing all of the characters in Tom and Rickie’s world. How did you decide which roles would be doubled? Was this something you knew would happen at the very beginning of your writing process?
PN: This was always the plan, in keeping with the doppelganger imagery (people and places– complex geography, indeed) that runs right through the novel. The doubling in the play is purposeful, not random, and this is precisely how Tom Ripley himself would “see” these characters merging, becoming a blur of white noise in his fractured mind. And remember, Rickie is Tom’s double, too. In Tom’s mind. The entire cast of characters is duplicated in one way or another. I also tend to “see” things in duplicate. So it’s a natural state of being for me.

JL: What surprised (continues to surprise you) you about The Talented Mr. Ripley? Whether it’s the audience response or your own response when you see it?
PN: The honest answer to this is that it is a constant surprise to me that I am as fond of this play as I am. I have a complicated relationship to my adaptations, which includes an unhealthy dose of Tom Ripley’s own barely suppressed self-loathing. But Ripley is very much my own, and in this way, it honors Pat Highsmith’s blazing talent and memory in a way that I never feel the other adaptations quite manage. This is the closest I will get to living in another human being’s mind.

JL: What next for you as a writer?
PN: I’d like to take a break from writing in the next two years and focus on directing. But that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen, with two original screenplays and a screen adaptation of a non-fiction book I’ve just optioned filling my mind with images of not meeting deadlines so that I can then go on to direct the damned scripts. That’s always the way, though. Fear of not doing something keeps me doing it. I’m also finally ready to write a new play, which fills me with both dread and optimism.

- Jacqueline Lawton

The Talented Mr. Ripley is onstage at Round House Theatre Bethesda September 8 through 26, 2010.
Jacqueline Lawton is a member of Round House’s Artists’ Roundtable

Playwright Phyllis Nagy

I recently had a conversation with The Talented Mr. Ripley playwright Phyllis Nagy. Her stage adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel runs at Round House Theatre Bethesda from September 8 through 26, 2010. Here’s part one of our talk.

Jacqueline Lawton: So to start could you tell me a little bit about where you live (maybe where and what sort of neighborhood) – describe the street where you live – what can you hear if you open a window, what can you see if you look out that window.
Phyllis Nagy: I live in downtown Los Angeles on the ninth floor of an early 20th-century office building that’s been converted into a residential loft building. It’s a corner unit with south and west exposures, so both sunrise and sunsets are full of dramatic light and pretty special views of the city skyline and its iconic buildings. Downtown is L.A.’s only truly urban neighborhood. Though it doesn’t much remind me of New York, where I was born and raised, it has the energy that New York had before it became Disneyland and thus, I adore it as I adore no other part of L.A. It’s still relatively sparsely populated, but is the only place in town where you don’t need to hop into a car to buy a carton of milk. When I open my windows, I hear a city and its sounds – terrifying and familiar – rather than the drone of cars merging onto freeways or the obnoxious whirr of leaf blowers. Like you hear everywhere else in Los Angeles.

JL: Then tell me a little bit about your favorite place to write. Do you write in the same place or in different places? Describe your favorite place to write.
PN: My favorite place to write is the only place I write: my desk, a big old metal 50s tank desk. I can’t write an early draft anywhere else. But I can revise a piece of writing from virtually anywhere else.

JL: Give us a little background on where you’re from originally, where you grew up, how you ended up where you are now…
PN: I grew up on St. Marks Place in the East Village in a semi-tenement apartment building. I say “semi-tenement” because there was an elevator that occasionally worked in the building. My family lived on the ground floor and my parents were the superintendents of the building. Five of us cramped into a 3-room apartment. But there was a little courtyard outside our front windows and I spent most of my time playing handball against the wall of the adjacent building and fantasizing about other places, other lives. It began a lifelong love affair with wanderlust, itinerancy. And I’ve subsequently put down roots, however temporary, in many different places. What these places hold in common is that they are all big cities. I could not live for long outside of an urban environment.

JL: In addition to being a playwright, you are also a screenwriter. How is writing for a live audience different (other than the form and format) from the other forms of writing you’ve done?
PN: When I write screenplays, I am writing for a live audience, or at least as “live” as any theatre audience. It’s the screenplay itself that is flat, two-dimensional, just as its eventual home (the movie screen) is two-dimensional. Plays are three-dimensional, always. That is not to say that screenplays can’t contain the kind of visceral beauty that plays contain. On the contrary, the challenge is to surmount the remove that screenplays automatically present to writers as the actors are not the primary conduits of the writer’s words– the director is the primary conduit, and the director can and does manipulate the actor’s interpretation of the writer’s words at will in post-production. That’s not a bad thing, either. It’s just entirely different from the process of creating a play.

JL: What is it about writing plays that draws you…as opposed to writing poetry, songs, or fiction?
PN: I’m not sure it’s a choice in my case. I’ve tried poetry and short fiction in the past and gave up on them because I just wasn’t very good at it. What defines a dramatist, ultimately, is his use of time. The temporal realties and nuances of drama as opposed to novels, say, is vastly different. The one thing I would like to do (and which would suit my abilities) that I have not yet done is write a proper opera libretto.

JL: Describe for me all the sensations you had the first time you had one of your plays produced and you sat in the audience while it was performed…what was different about the characters you created? How much input did you have in the directing of that work?
PN: My first professional production was Weldon Rising in a co-production of the Royal Court Theatre (London) and the Liverpool Playhouse. I did not direct that production, though I was in the rehearsal room every day. I said very little, as there was not much for me to add at that point. I also had no idea what I was doing at that time, and was smart enough to just sit and listen.  We began performances at Liverpool and moved down to London a month later. I was so sick with nerves and various crises of confidence at the first preview that I couldn’t tell you what the show was like or what my response to hearing an audience laugh or shuffle their feet in boredom was. The thing I do remember was an incident following that preview in the Liverpool Playhouse bar. A tough middle-aged woman, a Scouser through-and-through, approached me and asked me if I was the writer. I told her that I was. She told me that she and her husband had come to the theatre with tickets to see Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine, which was playing in the main house. They mistakenly walked into the studio and instead saw my play, which subjected them to an hour and fifteen minutes of a darkly comic, apocalyptic rumination on the consequences of renouncing one’s identity set on the blood-soaked streets of Manhattan’s meat-packing district, replete with a transvestite prostitute who refers to himself only in the third person, two drunken lesbians who shoplift beer and have pretty full-on sex while bridges collapse and tunnels explode and various other things I’m pretty sure do not appear in the play they thought they would see. I asked her when she knew she wasn’t at Shirley Valentine. She said: “When the tranny told the lesbians to go live in Brooklyn with the rest of their sisters, I knew something wasn’t right. He were interesting love, that tranny.” To this day, it remains my favorite audience comment.

JL: Who or what inspires you to write?
PN: Fear inspires me to write. Or, more properly, confronting fears. Exploring them. And love. Perhaps they are one in the same.

JL: What do you hope to convey in the plays that you write – what are they about? What sorts of people, situation, circumstances, do you like to write about?
PN: I want to provoke a single thought that perhaps did not previously occur to someone sitting in the audience. And I truly believe that a few laughs along the way never hurt the journey. I don’t have an agenda to push in any of the plays. What they mean to me is never what they will mean to any other individual. I can see, though, from looking at the body of my work that my obsessions and fascinations have to do with things like duality, identity, loss of identity, synchronicity, the intersection of fate and will. And I can also immediately see how a list like this makes the work seem like some ghastly dose of medicine. Which probably means that it’s never a good idea to make such lists.

Part two of my talk with Phyllis Nagy will be posted on this blog in the coming days. In it, we’ll look more specifically at her adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Jacqueline Lawton

I started this process hoping to find a unique theatrical language for Austen’s story on stage. Certainly, the structure of the adaptation has dictated a rhythm and pace of its own. Thirty-plus scenes flowing into each other. An epic story told in a single scenic environment. In the end, I think we’ve achieved a sort of hybrid production – capturing the familiarity of the story and characters through an imaginative visual approach.

Opening day. I am joined by Round House trustees Sally Patterson and Bonnie Hammerschlag, who have made the grand journey to lend their support. Such a lovely gesture. My wife, Connan, is here with our boys. I introduce everyone to my new friends from the Utah company.

The production opens. And I head home. It’s fun to know that the work will continue thru early September. I will begin rehearsing the first production of Round House’s new season while Elizabeth and Darcy continue their courtship out west. It’s been a treat.  But I’m geared up for The Talented Mr. Ripley. Bring it on.

Blake

P.S.  If you’re interested, here are a couple Pride and Prejudice reviews – from the Salt Lake Tribune and Salt Lake City Weekly.

This is the fifth year of my life with Frida. I’ve come to know myself better through this show; what I’m capable of as an actor, a playwright and as a woman. Restless with the roles being offered me as an actress, I went looking for someone whose story would take me into creating a work of my own. The passion and spirit of Frida inspired me, and began to write this show in collaboration with R. Dennis Green

I must tell you that I’m usually not a morning person but during the process of writing this play, the spirit of Frida would wake me at 5am so I would continue writing. I felt that it was urgent to write when my house was quiet and I couldn’t resist the call.  So some of the writing was done at dawn!

Frida was the kind of woman who overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles with determination and will. In spite of extreme difficulties, she always prevailed. She became a painter in her own right in an art world dominated by men, meeting life in every facet on its own terms. To this day, her work attracts for its beauty and power, its strong and sensual imagery.

Last year was a trying one for me. Major health issues of a close family member arose, and I thought often about the constant, life-long pain Frida endured, following a horrible trolley accident she survived in her teens. I used Frida’s inspiration to help me – and my loved one ‑ cope with the pain and frustration of her illness.

I’m proud to say that that I’m the recipient of an Individual Artist Award for Solo Performance for this show from the Maryland State Arts Council in 2010. Again, I have this indomitable painter to thank.

The show was directed by local director Jessica Lefkow, who remains engaged in the project.

- Marian Licha

Frida Vice Versa will be performed at Round House Silver Spring June 26 & 27, 2010.

- Caleen Jennings

Cream Soda and Crème de Menthe will be performed at Round House Silver Spring June 24 & 25, 2010.

The rehearsal room floor is covered with pieces of colored tape that indicate the edge of the stage and an array of imaginary barriers: walls, stairs, curtains, furniture and the like.  We live in this world for weeks, until the schedule says “move to stage.” It happens this week.

For the director, this is a tell-tale moment. The staging will shift to accommodate real walls and stairs. The actors will feel that they have less room, or a vast distance to cover, depending on the layout of the theatre. I find it extraordinarily exciting.

Here in Utah, with six productions in rotating rep, moving to the stage is the theatrical equivalent of a Rubik’s Cube. Scenery flies out, tracks off, and spins around in a matter of hours to create another world on stage. Today, it’s our turn to step on stage for that most artificial of moments: the photo call.

Marketing departments need images to promote the show. And so, even though the play is still growing and changing, we take to the stage. Actors put on costumes and wigs for the first time. Everything seems a bit odd, yet in this state of premature imagination, we mark through some scenes to get the good shot.  Here are a couple examples from the Pride and Prejudice photo shoot…

This week will hold many joys, challenges, and surprises. There is a growing sense of anticipation in the company. We’re on the verge of making new discoveries and letting the story drive us.

I am deep in Austenville.

Blake

In this season of Happenstance Theater remounts, Prufbox is the crowning revisitation. So first, an update on the others.

Photo of Sabrina Mandell courtesy of Happenstance Theater

We enjoyed seeing Low Tide Hotel and FarFar Oasis together for the first time at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in March. Both pieces had played at Round House Silver Spring individually, but they were built as companion pieces. The challenge and joy of that remount was managing the many fragments we collected from the two worlds: the desert and the ocean. We were pleased that when we actually put them together, the intended integrity of a theatrical “Diptych” worked. The trio of Mark, Sabrina, and Scott Sedar steadily guided the audience through a vast collection of thematic material. And it was really fun.

In April-May, The Seven Ages of Mime had a three-week revival at the beautiful new Performing Arts Center at Montgomery College in Silver Spring. That show had sold out with an extension when it first ran at RHT Silver Spring in January/February of ’07. This remount confirmed for us and a new audience what a beautiful little show it was. While some of our audience did not come to see it “again”, some folks who couldn’t get tix the first time were glad of the second chance. Some new Happenstance fans who had started following us in the meantime happily joined the crowd, too.

Prufbox is the show that began Happenstance Theater in 2006. In this, our first collaboration, we discovered our common aesthetic and began building our expressive vocabulary. Sabrina had a work-in-progress called ‘The Box Ceremony.’ Mark was invited to play. Its existential heroine seemed as lost as T.S. Elliot’s hesitant hero, so “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” became part of the material development. The original heroine became the women in Prufrock’s world, (In the room, the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo…) as he the men in hers. The “Box” of Sabrina’s original work was the portal to our mutual fascination and fondness for the Quixotic work of Joseph Cornell: his nostalgia, romance, and the “collected fragments” that make up his works.

Soon we were crafting the theatrical equivalent of a Joseph Cornell Box in which to capture and portray these two existential moderns, Sabrina’s woman and T.S. Elliot’s man. From the process and the response to the work (including invitations to perform it at The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and The Peabody Essex Museum in conjunction with the traveling exhibit of Joseph Cornell’s works), we knew that we had found a creative wellspring together. We were imagining the next project before the first run of Prufbox was complete. We soon married, and the creative output has continued unabated ever since.

Here’s a list of what we consider our major works:
Prufbox
The Seven Ages of Mime
Low Tide Hotel
FarFar Oasis
Manifesto!
Cabaret CooCoo
Look Out Below!
Plunkett and Tremolo

And there have been many “smaller” projects along the way, too…e.g. our duo show at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, incorporating new material each of the last 5 years…

We’re currently building Handbook for Hosts in collaboration with Banished?productions for the Capital Fringe Festival this July.

- Mark Jaster & Sabrina Mandell

(To learn more about Happenstance Theater, visit www.happenstancetheater.com/.)

A great adaptation honors the source material yet takes it in a new direction. Think to some of your favorite Round House productions. A Prayer for Owen Meany turned Irving’s sprawling novel into an epic evening of theatricality through the quirky, wonderful performance of Matt Detmer. Karen Zacarías put Julia Alvarez’s Garcia Girls onstage and somehow infused them with her own trademark wit and vivacity.

My goal for Utah’s Pride and Prejudice is to discover an equally unique take on Austen’s story. This adaptation – penned by a couple of savvy theatre directors, Joe Handreddy and J.R. Sullivan – has a style of its own. 32 quick scenes with wit and depth, no narration, and a loving focus upon the character of Elizabeth. She is the heart and soul of the story, and the play revolves around her (literally)! Longbourn, Netherfield, Rosings Park, and Pemberly come and go with the turn of a chair, a simple change of light. This production wants to be fluid, stylish, character-driven, and elegantly theatrical.

We’ve just finished the second week of rehearsal. So many scenes. So many transitions. So many characters. Sometimes I feel like a traffic cop, moving 20 people around a relatively small set. The actors know the frenetic pace of this festival, and many of them are off-book already. That’s such a gift. It can be difficult waiting for the play to take flight as the actors call for “line.” It’s a natural part of the process, but still frustrating. I’m hopeful that we might leapfrog this choppy stage of rehearsal out of sheer determination on the actors’ part. We end the week with a decent run-thru of Act One.

Day off: time to clear my head. Zion National Park is close by, so I go for a hike up Kolob Canyons. The brochure says that Kolob means “star closest to heaven.” It may be right. On the Taylor Creek Trail, I’m surrounded by red sandstone cliffs and a mountain stream cutting down the canyon. Here’s a pic of me at the top of the trail, in front of a picturesque “double arch.”

Now I’m ready to take on Act Two.

- Blake

Every once in a while, I work as a guest director at another theatre.  It’s fun to get out, meet new artists, and see how another theatre operates. I’ve just arrived at the Tony Award-winning Utah Shakespearean Festival to work on a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

It’s Big Country out here (Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon are nearby) and we have a big cast to match it: 20 actors gathered from across the country to participate in this mammoth summer festival.  What do I mean by mammoth? Well, USF produces six plays in rotating repertory over the course of three months. Everyone plays a part of two or three of them. So, for instance, the actor playing Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice is also playing Macduff in Macbeth. Mrs. Bennett moonlights as Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. It’s a busy, busy summer. You can check it out at www.bard.org

As a director, I’m here for a shorter burst of time. The schedule is challenging. We rehearse in 4-hour chunks. You’ve got to strike while the iron is hot, because you’ll lose the actors to another rehearsal before you know it.  Fortunately, the acting company is ready to go. They’ve come to the first rehearsal with choices made and a strong sense of character. And the English accents are good, too!

At our first rehearsal, we had a great discussion about Austen’s story. Namely, why do people love this book so much? It’s a classic amongst classics. And it speaks to generations of readers – especially female ones. Surveying the women in the company, it seems clear that everyone wants to be Elizabeth Bennett. We love her spirit. She is strong, outspoken, and honest. She doesn’t suffer fools, and she’s not drawn into the absurdities of social class that surround her. If you’re an independent spirit, you might hold her as your role model. If you’re shy, you harbor a secret inner-Lizzie who always has a witty, sensible quip at her disposal.

And then there’s Mr. Darcy. Tall, dark, handsome, and remote. His pride sets him apart from the crowd.  It’s infuriating but strangely seductive. For some, he’s that bad boy that you just know you can fix or bring out of his shell. For others, he’s the prototypical man of mystery. And of course, we see him open up over the course of the story. He comes to love Lizzie (and us!) for what’s on the inside. Who could want anything more?

Here’s a picture of me with Kate Cook and Michael Brusasco, the two wonderful actors who play these key roles.

Look to this space for a chronicle of my adventures out West. I look forward to taking this play out for a test ride – and bringing a little bit of Round House to Utah.

- Blake

Photo of Blake Robison by Clinton Brandhagen

If you’ve not already, I urge you to read Jacqueline Lawton’s wonderful two-part interview with Mark on this blog. And, while exploring our RHT Blog, check out Mark’s funny explanation as to why his stage adaptation of this classic adventure story doesn’t feature the famous balloon.

With the opening of 80 Days upon us, it’s not too early to look ahead to our 10/11 season. Due to the tremendous support of patrons like you, we’re able to expand next year from five to six productions on our Bethesda stage.

Our exciting lineup starts in September with Phyllis Nagy’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley – a breathtaking theatrical take on the classic thriller. We’re particularly excited to be the first regional theatre in the country to have this gripping play on its stage. Returning to Round House as Tom Ripley is Karl Miller, who recently won a Helen Hayes Award for his performance in Forum Theatre’s Angels in America.

In October, we’re proud to host the amazing artists of the Universes performance ensemble. Their powerful, entertaining new show Ameriville is everything contemporary theatre should be. It’s winning raves across the country – you won’t want to miss it.

We’ll then bring you the east coast premiere of A Wrinkle in Time, John Glore’s wildly theatrical take on Madeleine L’Engle’s sci-fi classic, and the world premiere of my adaptation of Charming Billy, based on the prize-winning novel by Bethesda author Alice McDermott.

We close with new productions of two celebrated plays, Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. Our staging of Bountiful will actually be the first time this popular work has been performed by an African American cast.

Download a copy of our new brochure to learn more about next season – click here.

I hope to see you at 80 Days. I also hope you’ll take a look at our lineup and join us next season as a subscriber.

Blake Robison
Producing Artistic Director