The following interview transcript with William
Gibson has been carefully broken down into
segments involving a variety of topics. Below
each segment is a link to the corresponding
video clip. Please attribute research sources to
Mike Wood, Interviewer and the William
Inge Center for the Arts.
|
|
Learning theatre in Kansas and Virginia |
| |
You know, other people go
to the Yale Drama School. I went to Topeka
Civic Theatre, and for…we lived there for eight
years while my wife was both in training and in
practice. And I had written a play in New York
before we went out there, and on the basis of
that play, I got an assignment as an apprentice
at Barter Theatre in Virginia, and I went down
there for a summer, and the play I’d written…my
agent, who had sold a short story of mine to
Esquire, got behind the play enough to show it
to the group theater, and I went in and talked
to Molly Day Thatcher who’s Kazan’s wife, and
she was the play reader, and she said, “Well,
this…there may be some talent here, but it’s not
for theater. You don’t know anything about
theater.” I said, “How do you rectify it?” She
said, “You should get a job in theater.” This
is in the middle of no jobs anywhere for
anything, this is 1939, so my agent got me this
apprentice slot down at the Barter Theatre, I
was down there summer of ’39, which ended with
the outbreak of World War II. When we went out
to Topeka, it was because my wife had gotten an
appointment, one of two slots, as psychological
intern to work at Menninger’s for no salary.
She got free rent and free laundry service, and
that was for three months. And the second three
months she would get ten dollars a month, the
third three months twenty, and the fourth
quarter she got thirty dollars a month,…a dollar
a day. She made a big hit as an intern. She
was really a spectacular young lady, and Karl
Menninger said to his chief of staff, “Don’t let
that girl get away,” after a lecture she gave.
And then Menninger’s sent her to KU to finish
her doctorate, and they supported her for a year
there, in Lawrence, and me too, they supported
me too, and she went on…she joined the staff
when she’d gotten a doctorate.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Writer's Block |
| |
It wasn’t just today I had
a writer’s block. I had it for months, and
kvetched everything out with the utmost agony,
and suddenly I was writing these ornate poems
with complicated stanzaic patterns and rhymes,
and was liberated by the form, by the bondage of
the form. And then I…after that I had bad
times, but they were occasional, they weren’t
professionally permanent, and…a difficult time
often, when I was writing nothing but plays, but
was in between plays. What’s the next play
going to be about? And you wait for something
to hit you. You don’t arrive at it logically.
Something hits you, and you sit down and you
write it. So in between there are periods when
you don’t know, when you’re waiting to be hit.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
A Cry of Prayers |
| |
Somebody from Kansas City we found to put up 500
dollars, and I was writing a play. I would like
to enter my play, but I’m on the Board of
Directors of the Topeka Civic Theatre. So I
sent the play, when I had a script ready, to my
sister in New York, and I had her husband enter
it under his name. Well, much to my surprise,
it did win the prize, and it went through a lot
of stuff. There were thirty or forty people in
the TCT who were reading these plays. Then it
went to three drama professors at KU, Manhattan,
and Emporia, I think. They were the three most
eminent theater departments in the state, and
those departments had picked out five plays
which then went to Eddie Dowling. Now Louis had
been to New York and lined up Eddie Dowling, who
was…he had been a song and dance man, but he was
now connected with O’Neill plays. He had done
Saroyan’s Time of Your Life, and was responsible
for a number of quality productions. He agreed
to be the final judge, so he had these five
plays, and he picked A Cry of Players, which was
my play, about young Shakespeare. And when this
news came back that my brother-in-law had won
the prize, I was very embarrassed. I didn’t know
what to do about this. I called up Louis and
said, “Look, this play is by me.” And he was
rather smitten with it. I said, “So what should
I do?” He said, “Don’t do anything, just stay
put.” And then the news. Now the theater was
supposed to also do a production of this play,
of the prize-winning play, and then it appeared
in the Topeka Capital that the winning
playwright was me, under a pseudonym, and it
looked and smelled so fishy, you know. It was
terrible, and the theater didn’t know what to
do. They had board meetings which I was not
invited to, although I was on the board, and
they said they would pay the 500 dollars, but
they would not produce the play, and they
thought it would be good if I resigned from the
board or something. I don’t remember whether I
did resign, but I was pretty pissed off at them
anyway. There was a…it was always an antagonism
between Louis and the board, because Louis was a
theater man and the board were not. The board
were different people in different professions,
and their job was to raise money and sell
tickets and have a good time, and Louis was
always very scornful of these tea-drinkers, so
there was a nasty situation. And that was how
that story ended, except that the play found its
way into the hands of two women, Carly Wharton
and Margaret Webster in New York who took an
option on the play. At this point it
began…began to appear in The New York Times
theater section that the play was going to be
produced in New York, and now the board felt
pretty damned silly, so they changed it. They
said, “We’ll do a production.” Now Louis said,
since this was such a significant event, it will
be a total community production, and Louis then
went into high flight. He organized everything
in the community. Working through the Chamber
of Commerce, he got two or three Jaycees—these
are junior commerce people—made into a committee
to produce this play. He went into every lumber
yard and got donations of lumber for the set.
He got donations of music paper—there was music
in the play—and enlisted the Washburn Symphony
Orchestra and their conductor to be there. He
got costume materials. All of this was free.
This was a community enterprise, really, and it
left the TCT board right in the back, because
Louis was not paying any attention to them. He
was setting up all these committees, and Louis
himself was given a leave of absence from the
meat packing plant in order to do this
production. A leave of absence on pay, you
know, and we didn’t do it at the Women’s Club.
Louis wanted a big house because we were getting
yards of publicity in the paper every time one
of these things happened, so we did the…the play
was actually produced in the Topeka High School,
which had over 1,000 seats. And afterwards, he
had made a deal with Washburn—or not with
Washburn, with KU—to use a number of their
actors in the production—it was a big company
thing—and in exchange, he promised to bring the
play over there for a week, so we ran it for a
week in Topeka and we ran it over at KU for a
week, and that was when I first met Bill, by the
way. And after that, Louis just resigned from
the Topeka Civic Theatre and never did any more
with them. And Margaret and I then left and
came east, where I was going to be a famous
playwright, and I found out that Peggy Webster
and Carly Wharton couldn’t raise the money, and
there was no production after all. And about
twenty years later, Lincoln Center did that
play.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Teaching and producing at the Riggs Center |
|
|
When we decided that we
were going to have a family, I decided I had to
give up this dream of being a writer. I had
written five unproduced plays, and I decided I
had to take a teaching job, because I had to
earn some money, and I took a teaching job at
Riggs, and I taught a literature and music
groups there, and until I got tired of talking,
and I said to the gang of patients, “How’d you
like to put on a play?” So they said sure, so I
went to the head of Riggs, Bob Knight, for
permission, and he said, “Well, it’s a crazy
idea, they won’t be able to learn lines, and if
they learn lines they certainly won’t be able to
perform it in front of people.” I had no such
doubts. I had all the confidence of total
ignorance, and I thought, they’re good people,
they’re like the people in Topeka Civic
Theatre. We’ll put on…so we had to make a
little try, so I found a one-act play by
Thornton Wilder called Pullman Car Hiawatha,
which is a very minimal play. You can do that
with six chairs on a stage and pretend they’re
Pullman berths or something. And we gave an
afternoon performance for the patient population
and an evening performance for the staff and the
secretarial staff, the medical and secretarial,
and that was the performance I was apprehensive
about. Because these… Now the point I’m making
here, is when Bob Knight said to me, “What makes
you think you can do it?” And I said, “Well,
the patients are not paying me to see themselves
at their worst, which is the definition of
therapy. So I don’t see them at their worst.
They have no interest in showing me themselves
at their worst.” And it worked out well. The
next play we did was Sartre’s No Exit, and we
were on high ground from then on. And that
theater group, that was 56 years ago, I guess,
that I started that. That was in 1953, well
fifty years ago. They’re opening tonight, and
they’re still in business, that theater group.
It turned out that it was a very healthy
activity for patients to do, and they’re opening
tonight in another play of mine called The
Butterfingers Angel,
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Study with
Clifford Odets |
| |
There were sixteen of us.
We met twice a week at The Actors Studio, which
in those days was in a business building up on
52nd, 53rd Street, and Clifford would just talk,
usually about one of our scripts. He’d sit at
the head of this room with the author, and
they’d go through the play page by page, but
really in infinite detail. It would take
sometimes, an entire week to get through one of
these plays, and sometimes Clifford would just
go off and talk about Ravel and, you know, all
sorts of painting. At one point he had the best
Klee collection in America, Paul Klee, and sold
all this off before he died to get money. And he
was a self-taught. He was an autodidact, and I
don’t think he finished high school.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
The
Cobweb: Novel & Movie |
| |
Involuntarily, I found
myself writing a novel, and it was…it became…I
didn’t see how to handle it as a play, and I
never thought I would write a novel, and I just
thought of writing a few expository pages as a
preface, and I just got into it, and the whole
novel just wrote itself over many months, and it
was published, and it was the first money I made
as a writer, and then it was sold to the movies,
and it was made into a movie, and that was a
good chunk of dough…I think that was 50 or 60
thousand dollars, and it meant that we could buy
this house and set up housekeeping really, and I
was offered another movie job after that. I
helped—it was a very interesting experience—I
talked myself into being invited out there, and
John Houseman and Vincent Minnelli were doing
that movie, and I went out, and they pretended
they wanted me to do more local color, but that
wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted a
re…rewrite the whole damn script, which was
pretty bad, and…so I did that, and they liked
what I did, and Houseman said, “You were working
very fast, don’t tell any of the…” because I was
writing ahead of the camera, really. I was
writing stuff. Houseman was picking it up at my
place I was in, bringing it into the studio and
putting it on, in front of the camera. And when
I finished my work, they still had a week or so
to go on the movie. And Houseman and Minnelli
invited me to do their next script, and I
thought, I don’t like this community out here,
and the people who are in it don’t like it
either, really, and… So, I said, “No, I have a
play, and I just bought a house here,” and came
back and finished Two for the Seesaw here.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Two
for the Seesaw: Casting |
| |
I got on the airplane, a
night flight, and got into New York the next
morning because I had a meeting scheduled at
Fred Coe’s office with an actress who was being
considered as a possibility for Two for the
Seesaw. Her name was Anne Bancroft, and she was
flying out to the coast an hour or so later, so
it was just this hour we had in Fred Coe’s
office, and she came in, and she said, “How was
the coast? Lousy, huh?” And she was ‘Gittel on
the hoofers,’ as Arthur put it later, but she
was acting it. I mean she knew what the part
required and she came in and sold herself. And
I said, “She’s marvelous,” to Fred. I said,
“Can you raise any money on her?” He said, “Not
a dime.” And she went out to the coast and read
for Arthur and Arthur said to Fred, “We’ve got
to have her,” and so we had her, but we had no
money to do the play, and it took them another
six months, I guess. Finally, Henry Fonda said
he would do the script. I never understood
afterward why, but Fred Coe said he fell in love
with Gittel, that’s all. He wasn’t playing
Gittel. And it was a tragic experience for
Hank.
Well, you know, he was a
big star. As soon as he said he’d do it,
everything fell in place. We got a theater, we
got money, everything. And we went into
production, and then Fonda found out that it was
the girl’s play. It wasn’t his play, and he was
the big star, and it was a couple of months of
constant humiliation for him. He didn’t take
it, perhaps, with the maximum grace. Arthur
said he’s a child or something. I didn’t think
he was a child. I thought he was a pain in the
ass, but he had a good reason to be, and he
stopped talking to me. He wouldn’t let me
into…because I wasn’t rewriting the play fast
satisfactorily. I was doing nothing but
rewriting that goddamn play, day and night. I
thought Fred and Arthur were driving me crazy.
I wish I could shoot both of them. But Hank was
wanting the play should somehow change so that
he could be the star again, and he wasn’t.
Annie was.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
The Miracle Worker: Live television |
| |
I never took The Miracle
Worker very seriously. Margaret was in the
hospital giving birth to our second son. We
needed money. The movie money that had supported
us for a couple of years was at its end, and I
called up Arthur (Penn), who was directing for
Philco Playhouse and so on-- Sunday night live
theater on television--and I said, “I have an
idea for a television strip,” and he said, “Send
it to me down in…send me something on paper.”
So I put down on paper a summary, really, of
what had gone on between Anne and Helen, which I
derived from Anne’s letters. As a matter of
fact, I had done this earlier. I had made a
kind of a narrative that would last for five or
ten minutes, I guess, drawn from this material,
and this narrative was...this drama group that I
had spoke of, at Riggs that I started, was
intended…I was going to do an evening of
one-acts or something, and I thought—we had a
dancer there, Mel Dyer-Bennett. She was the wife
of Richard Dyer-Bennett, you may remember that
name, was a folksinger—and I thought she could
do a dance. She was on the faculty, you know,
the activities program faculty for the Riggs
patients, and she can do a dance. And I had done
this for that purpose, but I never got to put
that one-act evening together, and so I sent
that down to Arthur. And he called me up and he
said, “I’ve sold it already. When can you write
it?”
And I said, “Well, you’re
gonna have to come up and tell me what a TV play
is, because we didn’t have a TV set at that
time. And Arthur did come up, and my wife was
in the hospital giving birth to Dan, and my
mother was here helping me handle Tom in her
absence, and Arthur came up, and we spent a day
or so going through this material, and he was
explaining certain features of live television,
which were very curious. I mean, he said, one
of the main problems; we have to keep the
cameras from photographing each other, and if
there has to be a change of costume for
somebody, you’ve gotta write something in
between to permit the costume change time, and
when we did the show, I saw exactly what he
meant, because we did it out in Television
City. We had a whole…like a gymnasium floor,
and in one corner there’d be a tree or
something. In another corner there’d be a table.
These were different sets, which looked like
complete places in the photograph, but if the
actor was moving from here to there, and it was
a different day, and she had to get out of her
nightgown, she had to do this while crossing the
stage, and I had to write something in there.
Well this, this was a very exciting production
to see, and we had Teresa Wright played Anne
Sullivan and Patty McCormack was the name of a
child actress at that time, and John Barrymore,
Jr. was Jimmy, and it was like doing a stage
play. And then we photographed it, and Arthur
was sitting in the control room with earphones
attached to each of the three cameras and
telling them, “Go here, go there, catch this,”
and so on, and then missing certain shots. Some
of the actors would be going up a flight of
stairs that led nowhere, and the camera wasn’t
there, and Arthur would say, “Missed it. Go to
so-and-so.” And he said afterwards, “It’s like
flying a B-52 bomber or something,” and he said,
“The older directors can’t do it.” And it was
true, because it required a different kind of
attack.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
The Miracle Worker: Anne Bancroft on stage |
| |
She said, “When Arthur
says something, I have to be so sensitive that I
can feel it like a spec of dust would fall on my
skin.” She responded so marvelously to Arthur,
and to her own sense, because the…she came from
the same part of the Bronx that I had come from,
but about fifteen years later, and there’s
something about the rhythms of these
characters…they were in her as much as they were
in me, so it was a very happy kind of
concatenation of talents. And while we’re on
the road with Seesaw, I said to her, “I have
another play.” It was The Miracle Worker. “I’ve
written one act of it, and I’ll finish it when I
come back. Would you like to do the lead in
it?” She said, “Sure. I’m with you,” or
something like that.
Arthur and Fred didn’t
like this idea very much, that I had ventured to
offer the part without even consulting them, and
it never occurred to me that I should have
consulted them. But then, they didn’t know what
the full play was going to be of The Miracle
Worker, anyway, and when we got to finally
produce The Miracle Worker, Annie was still
playing Seesaw. I mean, she’d played it for a
year and a half, and now I had the play, and she
was ready to go into it. And she left Seesaw
and went directly into rehearsals for The
Miracle Worker. And she played Anne Sullivan as
though she were Gittel, and I said to Arthur,
“I’ve made a terrible mistake.” And he said,
“I’ll fix it.” So he gave her an Irish accent,
a brogue, which Anne Sullivan did not have.
Anne Sullivan could do a brogue…there are
documents of Nella’s in which Nella repeats what
Anne Sullivan had told her, and Anne was talking
about what life was like in Tewksbury, which was
mainly an Irish Catholic institute by this
time…awful lot of Irish had come to
Massachusetts to work in the tobacco fields and
so on, and when they were derelict, they ended
up in Tewksbury. So a lot of this stuff that
Anne was reporting was in brogue, so I know she
could because Nella was putting it down, but
Anne did not have a brogue. But all over the
world Anne Sullivan has had a brogue ever since,
because Arthur was trying to get rid of Gittel
in Ann Bancroft.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
The Miracle Worker: The movie |
| |
I didn’t want to sell the
film rights to the movie industry with The
Miracle Worker because Helen Keller was still
alive, and I felt I was protecting the veracity
of the statement. I thought, if I sell it to
the movies they’ll have Anne Sullivan marrying
Helen’s brother or God knows what, you know.
And so the only way to do that was to make the
movie ourselves, so Penn and Coe and I formed a
company, and we bought the film rights from me,
and we got financed by Union…United Artists, and
they would only give us a million and a half
dollars to make the movie. They said, if you
make it with Audrey Hepburn, you will gross
eight million dollars, or if you make it with
Liz Taylor—who was actually in New York in my
agent’s office trying to buy the rights, and I
should have sold them, because I would have been
much richer today—you’ll get ten million
dollars, but if—these were figures they would
give us to make the movie with—but if you make
it with Anne Bancroft, she’s no movie name.
We’ll give you a million and a half. So we took
the million and a half. We made the movie, and
we made a little money out of it. But the
reason that I did that was really…simply to
protect the quality of the script.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
The Miracle Worker: Helen, Anne, and Nella |
| |
The success of The Miracle Worker ended a
lifelong relationship that Helen Keller had with
a woman named Nella Brady…Nella Braddy Henney.
Nella was the Doubleday editor who had been
assigned by Doubleday to work with Helen on her
manuscripts when Helen was living in Forest
Hills with Anne Sullivan, and Anne was well-on,
Helen too, by that time. And Nella would get
down and sit there while Helen was upstairs in
the attic, working on her Braille typewriter,
and Nella would sit…and Nella would sit talking
with Anne, and hearing Anne’s stories about the
whole relationship, and decided…and Nella
decided she’s got to write a book about Anne,
which she did, called Anne Sullivan Macy, this
woman behind Helen Keller. In the course of
that, she was told by Anne things that Anne had
never told anybody, including her years at
Tewksbury, which was the alms house in
Massachusetts to which she was sent when she
lost her home with uncles and aunts and so
on—not very far from here, this happened over
near Springfield—and Anne had always been
ashamed of these years in the Tewksbury alms
house, which was a junk pile. I mean, in those
days, was back in the 1870s, anybody who was
incapacitated from normal life was thrown into
Tewksbury, and that’s what happened to Anne and
her brother, and her brother died there. Anne
escaped, but anyway, she escaped by throwing
herself on a visiting delegation of trustees who
came, at the door…she couldn’t see very well.
She could make out masses of black and white,
but she threw herself on the head of the
delegation, and said, “Mr. Sanborn, Mr. Sanborn,
I want to go to school.” She was about thirteen
years old, illiterate, couldn’t spell her name,
went out, was taken to Perkins, and seven years
later she moved down into Tuscumbia, creating
this extraordinary act of bringing Helen Keller
into touch with the world. A ravishing story
and a ravishing girl, and if you read her
letters, which the play is built largely upon,
it’s incredible to think these were the letters
she wrote almost every day, while she was down
there, to her house mother at Perkins in Boston,
and she details in the letters everything she
did with Helen and everything Helen did against
her, and… So nothing between Helen and Anne did
I really invent. That’s all based on letter
reports. What I did have to invent was the
whole family, because she didn’t write much
about the family, and nobody knew much about
them. The fiction… The family in the play is
fictional. Anyway, Nella, then became a
lifelong companion and spokesman for Helen
Keller. She became, in a way, her press
secretary, you might say, like the guy who
speaks for the President from the White House.
It was through Nella that I had to move when I…I
just sat down and wrote the play, and then I
found out, I couldn’t do that with Helen Keller.
I needed to get her permission, so I had to go
through Nella to get her permission, and we got
to know Nella very well. And this…I mean, she
was always at Helen’s side. After the play was
a successful TV thing, Nella said, “You can meet
Helen now.” And so Helen bought us a lunch,
Margaret and me, at the Harvard Club in New
York, Helen being a Radcliffe girl, and Nella
was there. Anne wasn’t, she was dead. Polly
Thomson had taken her place. Well, when the
money from The Miracle Worker began coming in,
there were provisions in the contract that I’d
made a certain percentage to Helen, a certain
percentage to the American Foundation for the
Blind and so on, of the royalties, and these
began to be sizable sums, and there was a
percentage for Nella, too. And Helen, who was
in her dotage by now, conceived the idea that
Nella was stealing money from her, and she broke
off with Nella, and it broke Nella’s heart. She
wouldn’t see her. I even wrote a letter to Helen
saying, “Forgive me, I’d like to talk to you as
a Dutch nephew. You’re doing Nella an
injustice.” I don’t think Helen was available
for communications outside. She died not long
after this.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
“The
Miracle Worker—not workee” |
| |
the really difficult part
is Anne Sullivan, and it was Anne Sullivan, and
as I said to somebody, I said, “You know what,
the play is not called ‘The Miracle Workee,’
it’s called The Miracle Worker, and it’s named
after Anne, not after Helen.” But everybody
latches onto Helen. When Anne was getting an
honorary doctorate at some university, Helen was
there too, and everybody paid attention to
Helen, and Anne said to Nella, “Even at my
coronation, Helen is queen.” So that added
to…sort of attached itself to this material that
I have written here.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Monday After
the Miracle |
| |
Anne got married to John
Macy, who was a literary character at Harvard at
the time, when Helen was there at Radcliffe, and
it was an unsuccessful marriage, and there were
letters from Helen written when she and Anne
were on the road. There are letters that exist
where Helen is typing on her typewriter on hotel
stationary, but she’s typing across all the
print of the stationary, so you can hardly read
what she’s…because she doesn’t know the print is
there. She has just a piece of paper. And in
those she says, “John is getting tired of the
struggle,” and I guess it was a struggle, and
anyway, the marriage broke up, and it broke
Anne’s heart. And, strangely enough, this is
really weird. John then had a second marriage,
and he married a deaf-blind mute sculptress.
Isn’t that weird? Anyway, Anne suffered, and
had a very depressed latter part of her life,
and Helen wished that Anne had the comfort of
religion. Helen became, I think, a
Kierkegaardian or something, some Swedenborgian,
some type of religion, some type of Christianity
which I am not familiar with. And Anne was of
what she called “a lapsed Catholic.” That is she
became a secular thinker, she lost all her
religious consolation and was very depressed.
Well it seemed to me that that’s…that part of
the story had to be…ought to be told, too, and
that’s why I wrote Monday After the Miracle,
which was a flop. I just have a card out there
from Jane Alexander. I don’t think that
was…that wasn’t…I don’t myself believe that I
solved the problem that I set myself, but it was
a flop anyway because nobody wanted to see that…
The success of The Miracle Worker is predicated
partly on the fact that it’s a comedy. It’s
basically…I mean, by classical definition, it’s
a comedy. And nobody wanted to see that there
was any kind of a tragic aftermath. I was the
only one who wanted to make that point.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Golda: Research |
| |
I was invited by The
Theatre Guild to write a play…I’d just bought
the stage rights to Golda’s life or her
so-called life, called My Life, but she didn’t
write it, but nobody knew that at the time. And
they called…Philip Langner called me up and
said, “Would you like to do this?” Now Margaret
and I had been to Israel a few years before and
had a kind of re…you know, in 1970, if you went
to Israel, everybody who went there, especially
if you were Jewish, I guess, but I got it too,
felt a certain kind of renaissance in one’s own
soul. It was a spiritually very invigorating
place. And the story, of course, if you had any
interest in Bible history, you couldn’t resist
it. So I said to Phillip, you know, “I have a
lot of feeling about Israel, and, yeah, I’d
consider it.” So then I read some stuff and went
down to New York to meet Golda, who was there
for some UN event, and Philip took Margaret and
me into this hotel…Waldorf-Astoria hotel suite
where we were suspiciously looked at by some
young security people in the hallway and stuff.
And we got in, and there was this lady sitting
in a chair, waiting with a couple of other
people around, but she exuded—I’d never had this
experience—but she just exuded power. You just
knew, this is a powerful woman, the way she sat
there and smoked a cigarette, you just… Anyway,
I said…I said to her, “I’m interested in doing
this play, but I’m interested not in telling
your life, but only insofar as I can tell
through your life the history of Israel.” And
she said, “That’s fine.” And so I did it. Now
I then went to Israel and spent several weeks
there interviewing everybody who had worked with
Golda, and they all…Golda’s assistant, a woman
named Lu Kaddar, set up these appointments, and
everybody she talked to said, “Yes, yes, send
them over.” So I got to talk to everybody
except Dayan, who I could never get to. And
finally his secretary said, “The general says
no.” So I never talked with Dayan.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Golda: Technical Challenges |
| |
Golda, the original play, was a huge operatic
production. I mean it cost millions of
dollars. It was ridiculous. I wrote a preface
about this called “How to turn a phoenix into
ashes,” because we started out with…everybody
thought this is a sure-fire hit, and it wasn’t.
It fizzled, and a lot of that was my error. I
had made a huge mistake in the beginning. I
thought it would be helpful to document the war
and everything of that sort with
shots…background visual inserts. So we designed
a set that could accommodate a screen behind the
actual stage set and overhead cameras and—oh
God, that was so complicated—even with overhead
cameras going down on the desk, so that when
Golda looked at a map, a military map, the map
would be projected so the audience could…all
this simply reduced the human content to nil.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Golda: Golda’s
reaction |
| |
Annie was so distressed by
her reception. She and Golda had become very
friendly. Annie had gone there, and Golda had
entertained her for a week or two before the
production went in. This was supposed to be
Annie’s preliminary study of Golda. And when
Golda came to see the opening night, she was
very displeased with what Annie was doing. And
I went backstage, and there was Annie and Golda
in Annie’s dressing room, both of them sitting
in silence. And Annie was taking off her false
nose and made some remark about it to Golda, and
Golda said, “I wish I could do it too,” but that
was the whole conversation. The next day Golda
had a…she summoned us all to her hotel, and we
had an interview with her without Annie present,
and Golda said “If I looked and sounded the way
Annie does, I would never have been elected
Prime Minister. “ She hated what Annie was doing
as Golda, and it wasn’t that bad, but Golda had
certain blind spots about herself. She said, “I
don’t use these Jewish expressions, you know.”
And I said, “You just said, ‘That ignorant, I’m
not,’ and that’s the Jewish inversion.”
Annie…the writing…there wasn’t much of this in
the writing, but she didn’t like what Annie was
doing at all, and Annie was dest…and Annie was
allowed in for the rest of this, and Golda said,
“That’s all,” and she didn’t speak much more,
but Annie knew what it was, and Annie had to
leave that meeting to go play a matinee. I mean
it was terrible. She was destroyed by Golda’s
rejection of her, and she then had to try to
revise… She said, “You have to tell me, just
where do I put my hands in my pockets?” or
something like that to things that Golda had
objected to, and I didn’t see much… I didn’t go
to many more performances myself, because I
disliked the play.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page
|
|
|
Golda’s Balcony: Nuclear insights |
| |
Now, what was really, when
you look back on this, this is really fantastic
on Ben-Gurion’s part, because Israel was founded
in ’48. In ’56, that’s eight years later, he
sent Dayan and Golda and Peres to Paris to learn
from Jules Bonet(?) how they could build a
nuclear bomb in Israel, and that’s when it
began. And from then on, until I was there,
people were working on building thermonuclear
bombs, and nobody mentioned this to me, and
Golda was there so much, looking down into this
excavated nuclear plant underground. There was
an observation post, you know, glassed-in thing
where she could look down and see… She was there
so often they called this Golda’s balcony, and
that’s what the title of this play refers to,
because this play is different. The monologue’s
different.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page
|
|
|
Golda’s Balcony: Research |
| |
But when I wrote the play,
it was something that was bothering me, and what
I didn’t know was what was bothering me was the
question of power and the moral implications.
And that theme doesn’t exist in Golda, but it’s
the very cause of Golda’s Balcony. And I had a
great time in Israel. I lived like a student, I
traveled around with a backpack on the busses
that are now being blown up everywhere. And
they put me up in a place called Mishkenot
Sha'ananim, which is a guest house, a very fancy
guest house that the state ran, and foreigners
would come in. And I was there for six weeks,
and it was a lovely little suite overlooking the
valley of Hinnom, the south end of Jerusalem.
And it was thrilling, to me, to be walking in
places that I had heard about first when I was
in Catholic Sunday school as a kid. So yes, it
was a great deal of research that went into
that, but, I had asked Lou Kaddar, I said,
“Write me up a log of Golda’s weekly, during the
70s, Yom Kippur War, 73-week, who she saw every
day.” And so, Lou did this, you know,
nine-o’clock so-and-so, three o’clock
so-and-so. One day, eleven-o’clock, would have
an “X.” I said, “What is “X” instead of
so-and-so?” She said, “I can’t tell you.
Something to do with nuclear.” That was the
closest I came to it, and I took these notes,
which I was making, and brought back here, and
when I went back, when I got interested in
Golda’s balcony, I went back over those notes I
had made on the spot there, years before, and
there were none. There was this day with “X” on
it, and I thought, “Gee, that’s as close as I
came and nobody mentioned it.” And to this day,
they haven’t confessed publicly that they have
nuclear weapons. Everybody knows, they even
know how many. I was reading recently they
figure Israel has 200 nuclear weapons now.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page
|
|
|
Jonah |
| |
The
whole Jonah story is what Jonah dreams. He
falls asleep; he’s the lone survivor of the ten
tribes who have been wiped out. He lives alone
with a goat in the desert. He falls asleep, and
then the Jonah story happens, which the goat
tells him he has to go to Nineveh. Then he
kills the goat because he thinks it’s possessed,
and he flees, as it says in the book, to Joppa,
and there he’s a blind beggar picking up money,
and he runs into a fortune teller who works with
the tarot cards, but the point is that there is
a mys…a hidden character called the Seraph who
was in the goat, and who’s in the fortune
teller, and who was in the shipmaster who takes
the ship that they throw Jonah off into the
whale. And the whale is the transportation
device. It’s the only way you can get Jonah to
Nineveh. People didn’t…whenever this book was
written, say 650 BC, they didn’t understand how
difficult it would be to get from the
Mediterranean into the Euphrates, Tigris
things. It involves sailing around, out of the
Mediterranean, all around the…down the west
coast of Africa and up again into the Indian
Ocean, and then you can get into the mouth of
the Tigris/Euphrates, and then you’re at the
site of Nineveh. Well, that’s what the whale
does, in three days, and…so the whale transfers
Jonah, who is fleeing. He catches him in the
ocean and brings him there, finally vomits him
up, onto Nineveh, and then Jonah is in a
position to denounce Nineveh, and God changes
his mind. The Seraph at this…in-between, while
he’s in the stomach of the whale, there is a
trial of Jonah, conducted by the angel who
is…who finally reveals herself. And this trial
of Jonah finds him guilty. Of what? Of being
human. (laughs) He’s fallen short. That’s
his…and so, so that’s really. That’s the
serious underpinning, but the play itself is
horseplay.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page
|
|
|
