New Light Shine Read online

  THE YALE DRAMA SERIES

  David Charles Horn Foundation

  The Yale Drama Series is funded by the generous support of the David Charles Horn Foundation, established in 2003 by Francine Horn to honor the memory of her husband, David. In keeping with David Horn’s lifetime commitment to the written word, the David Charles Horn Foundation commemorates his aspirations and achievements by supporting new initiatives in the literary and dramatic arts.

  New Light Shine

  SHANNON MURDOCH

  Foreword by John Guare

  Copyright © 2012 by Shannon Murdoch.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).

  Set in ITC Galliard type by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Murdoch, Shannon.

  New light shine / Shannon Murdoch ; foreword by John Guare.

  p. cm.—(Yale drama series)

  ISBN 978-0-300-18485-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Brothers and sisters—

  Drama. 2. Family secrets—Drama. 3. Violent crimes—Drama.

  I. Guare, John. II. Title.

  PR9619.4.M845N49 2012

  822’.92—dc23

  2012012160

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  All inquiries concerning stock and amateur rights should be addressed to Shannon Murdoch at [email protected]. No stock or amateur performances of the play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of Shannon Murdoch, and paying the requisite fee.

  For ACM and KDW, for everything

  Contents

  Foreword, by John Guare

  Acknowledgments

  New Light Shine

  Foreword

  Francine Horn had the very good idea to establish a prize in honor of her late husband whose greatest ambition was to become a writer. His subsequent disappointment was never being published. Close, but never. He went into another line of work in which he found financial success. But that loose tooth was always there.

  After his death, Mrs. Horn, a very sprightly elfin powerhouse, took the advice of her lawyers and went to Yale University Press with the idea of founding a prize that would commemorate his memory by publishing new writers. John Kulka, a senior editor at the Press, told her that while fiction writers had many prizes open to them, playwrights were under-represented as well as being underpublished. She leapt at his point.

  Was there a model to follow?

  Yes, look at the renowned Yale Series of Younger Poets, which annually publishes the work of a previously unpublished poet under the age of forty. It is the oldest literary prize in America. That prize has always been awarded by a sole judge who must be a recognized poet. Over the years Archibald MacLeish, W.H. Auden, W.S. Merwin, and Louise Glück have taken on that distinguished role. Since its inception in 1919 it has introduced the work of young unknown poets like Adrienne Rich, James Agee, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, and John Hollander.

  The David Charles Horn Foundation/Yale Drama Series Prize, mirroring the poetry prize, would honor an emerging playwright of the English-speaking world annually. Yale University Press would publish the chosen play; the playwright of choice would also receive a cash prize as well as a reading of the play in an established American theater with professional actors. Would it be only for playwrights under forty? No. There would be no ground rules involving age or gender or theme. The only qualification: the playwright who enters the contest cannot have been published or have had a major production of his or her work. The only qualification was the entrant had to be alive and unknown.

  There would be one judge, a playwright.

  Edward Albee was the obvious choice to go first, a position he held for two years; David Hare took on the task for another two years. They passed the baton on to me this past year.

  My god! The 2011 contest received over eight hundred new plays from around the English-speaking world. They came from some small town in the American Midwest or Seattle or Brooklyn or a village in Ireland or Australia or Canada, the midlands of England or the center of London. And they read about this contest and they all wanted to emerge—another way of saying, How do I get noticed? In this cacophony of voices out there, how will my play aka me—how will I be heard?

  Edward and David advised me to assemble a team of readers whose taste I trusted, whose theatrical acumen I respected, and whose sensibilities were not mirrors of mine.

  I got my team. People like Thomas Keith, who edited new editions of Tennessee Williams’s unpublished work for New Directions, to help me get through them. Jamie Phillips and Eric Louie, who read for the Public Theater. Young playwrights on the brink of emerging like Michael Mitnick, Kim Rosenstock, and Susan Stanton, who knew being readers made them not eligible.

  Yale University Press sent us the entries, split up among the readers and myself. We dove in. How not to get lost?

  I asked another of my readers, Mary Pat Walsh, who had worked as my assistant for eleven years, then ran Nora Ephron’s production company, and now worked for Stephen Sondheim, how she proceeded in the task of reading these hundreds of scripts.

  She answered: “I read first and foremost for a voice. My second criteria is, ‘Are they attempting to tackle a story or subject matter that is specific and challenging’—this does not mean to me that it has to be complex but that they are writing from an original place and have a sense of how to tell a story. Some of the plays may not be fully realized but I leave them on my list because of the reasons I just mentioned. After I’ve read all of my plays I go back and reread the ones that have ‘made the cut’ and then it helps me make decisions based on the level of craft when considering them side by side … and then the decisions are easier.”

  I sent this to my other readers as a guide.

  The voice. An original voice unlike any other voice. Let’s look for that first. Some of the voices were muted. Other voices were more troubling, brilliant ventriloquists writing plays that echoed a TV sitcom or mimicked with varying degrees of success Mamet’s or Pinter’s or Beckett’s inimitable voices. Some plays began beautifully. Yes! Is this the winner? Then the play would crumble. Turn sentimental. Become formulaic. Chicken out. Other plays lay on the page DOA. What were these people’s lives like? Had they ever seen a play? Where did they go to see theater? Why did they decide to write a play?

  Six weeks later we convened to review what we had read so far and pass on to the others those plays we felt worthy of a second look.

  Someone brought up a point. A few respected novelists whose names we knew had submitted first plays. Were they “emerging”? I thought of David Horn and his disappointment at never being published. I decided we must disqualify those entries.

  But the question floated in the air: Who does qualify as an emerging playwright?

  I had assumed in a snooty parochial way that the winner would be a recent graduate of one of the playwriting programs around the country: the Yale Drama School, the granddaddy of them all, which George Pierce Baker started at Harvard in the teens, attracting young aspirants such as Eugene O’Neill and Philip Bar
ry. When Harvard unaccountably dropped it, Yale happily gave it a home in 1924 with a spanking new theater.

  For a long time Yale was the only game in town. But since the 1960s, playwriting programs have flourished all over the country. NYU/Tisch School of the Arts began a program for playwrights. Columbia, the New School followed suit. Playwrights even returned to Harvard at American Repertory Theater under the aegis of Robert Brustein. Terrence McNally and I started the tuition-free Juilliard playwriting program back in the ’90s. Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang have steered it brilliantly for two decades now. Paula Vogel chaired the successful program at Brown for an equal length of time; Tina Howe still runs the playwriting department at New York’s Hunter College, Lee Blessing at Rutgers. The University of Texas at Austin’s program for playwrights thrives under the guidance of Steven Dietz.

  I liked the idea of playwriting programs. It seems that once you’re accepted into a program such as any of these, you’ve begun emerging. Surely the winner would come from this pool. Or else from Chicago, that bottomless hotbed of theatrical tumult that had produced David Mamet and Tracy Letts. Not to mention the myriad of other programs around the country. The Royal Court in London regularly produces a steady crop of new playwrights. The National Theater under Nick Hytner encourages productions of new work. I didn’t know about Australia. Or New Zealand. Or Canada. But they must have their programs. I assumed the emerging playwright would come from one of these sources.

  And why wouldn’t I? I was a product of this route. I had gone to Yale Drama School from 1960 to 1963. Back in those ancient days, Broadway was the dreamed-of destination. That’s where A Streetcar Named Desire opened. That’s where Death of a Salesman began. But if that was the theater, it seemed a closed shop. Off Broadway was still a burgeoning phenomenon. Off-Off Broadway was in its infancy. Regional theaters like the Guthrie and the Mark Taper existed only on unimaginable drawing boards. How would I, an emerging playwright if there ever was one, find a place to work in 1963?

  In my last year at Yale, Audrey Wood, the legendary agent, who happened to be in New Haven, saw a play of mine at the Drama School, and signed me as a client! Better than my MFA from Yale was having the approval of Audrey Wood, whose eternal claim to fame would be her recognizing the talent of the young Tennessee Williams back in the 1930s. Miss Wood, as you called her, got me a slot in Edward Albee’s newly formed Playwrights Unit, which every week for six months of every year from 1964 to 1969 presented a new play at a theater in Greenwich Village. (NOTE: Helping new playwrights get their work seen was how Edward spent his royalty money from Virginia Woolf.) I had plays done at the Caffee Cino, which along with La Mama defined this new thing called Off-Off Broadway. In 1965 I became one of the twenty playwrights selected, along with Lanford Wilson and Sam Shepard, to start the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Center in Waterford, Connecticut, which still flourishes to this day. In 1966 I showed the first act of The House of Blue Leaves at the O’Neill, which got me a Rockefeller Grant. I had emerged. I began a life as a working playwright. I can trace it all back to the ministrations of Audrey Wood.

  So I liked the idea of playwriting programs. It seems that once you’re accepted into a program such as any of the ones I’ve mentioned, you’re on a fast track to emerging. I have this image of a chick pecking like mad to emerge from his or her prison of a shell and get started on life.

  But what about these writers whose plays I was in the august position of judging who did not have the fortune to study at a recognized temple of art. How would they get a leg up? There comes a time when a writer needs a simple Yes to keep on going. I wondered about my heroes when they were emerging. Eugene O’Neill had The Provincetown Playhouse to give him the necessary Yes. I thought of the boost Arthur Miller’s winning of the Avery Hopwood play-writing prize gave him while he was a student at University of Michigan. Imagine a young Tennessee Williams reading in Saint Louis an announcement of a playwriting contest in far-off New York City sponsored by the Group Theater, the home of Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan. He blindly sent in a group of one-act plays and won the first prize of $100, not to mention the attention of the miraculous Audrey Wood. In the ’60s, Lanford Wilson and Sam Shepard did not go to any drama school. They came to New York and started writing. A brand new Off-Off Broadway movement in coffeehouses was there to catch them. In David Mamet’s case, Chicago’s theater world gave him his first stage. The director Mel Shapiro found David Rabe’s work in a pile of plays and brought them to Joe Papp and the newly formed NY Public Theater.

  The Yale Drama Series Prize just might provide that necessary Yes. That for me would be the key to selecting a winner. This prize could be the trumpet blast announcing a new voice, the all-important Yes an unrecognized playwright needs, the one who might not have the chance of recognition because of geography, because of life, because of luck.

  Would the winner come from the drama schools or the streets? I hoped we’d find a writer who had fallen between the cracks. I’m all for Affirmative Action in the school system but that would have no place here. But no, the prize would not be a charity award. No, the best play, regardless of its route, would win.

  And then I picked up a play called New Light Shine. The playwright, Shannon Murdoch, lived in Footscray, Australia.

  Mary Pat Walsh had pointed out the play. I read it, put it aside, went back to it, couldn’t get it out of my head. It was—it was so odd. It wasn’t like anyone else’s play. A brother and sister were trapped in a past horror. He dreamt of a liberating future, a new light shining that would free him. His sister could not let it go. And what I found most interesting was her choosing not to let it go. The play had no recognition scene where change was foisted on the woman. Her battle not to lose the past, not to change, but to keep the horror alive, surprised me, interested me, moved me in a way no other entry did. I thought of Mary Pat Walsh’s guidelines. New Light Shine had a distinct voice, was by a truly emerging author, its subject was indeed challenging, it had a distinct sense of craft.

  And now you hold a copy of it in your hands.

  In the fall of 2011, Shannon Murdoch made the twenty-one-hour flight from Melbourne to New Haven to receive her award and don’t forget the check and attend a reading of her play at the Yale Rep. I was happy to meet her face-to-face and ask her about herself.

  She told me she received a Bachelor of Creative Arts in Theatre and Creative Writing at Griffith University in the Australian state of Queensland and then studied playwriting in 2005 at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, a school that counts Cate Blanchett and Judy Davis among its graduates.

  I noted that while the world seems to be open territory for Australian actors, I knew of no emerging Australian playwrights.

  What is the life of a young playwright like in Australia?

  What opportunities are opened to you?

  It’s hard. It’s hard for every playwright in the world but I think it’s hard here. We have a handful of competitions and we have the National Play Festival but getting productions at the major theater companies seems to be difficult for young playwrights. At least I know it has been for me. I’ve had one full-length produced here in Melbourne which I co-produced myself.

  Are you connected to a theater company?

  No. In my experience, none of the major theater companies in Australia has an open submission policy. We have Playwriting Australia, a development organization who does a great job, but they are wholly separate from any theater company. If you want it done here in Australia, chances are you will have to do it yourself.

  How do you balance your day job with your writing life?

  I don’t think I do it very well but then again I wrote plays and paid my bills. But it’s not the writing time you lose when you have a day job, it’s the thinking time. I’m not in a day job at the moment—thank you, Yale—and the thing I’m enjoying the most is staring into space for long periods of time, just thinking my thoughts.

  What was the genesis of New Light S
hine?

  I can remember when it jumped into my head—I was standing outside my day job and two characters—a brother and a sister—started talking about their dead mother. The phrase “mad old cunt” over and over again. That’s how it began. As it developed over numerous drafts I really focused on the character of Peregrine and it became her story. I like writing about women whom people/society want to change and how those women resist that change with everything they have. It wasn’t based on a real incident but when I was writing it, there was a string of bizarre murders in mundane Melbourne suburbs that no doubt influenced the story. I haven’t seen any productions of it yet/It hasn’t been produced yet. It was workshopped at the National Play Festival in Melbourne and then this reading at Yale … so far. But I have hope. Lots and lots of hope.

  Did your winning the Yale Drama Series Award open any doors that had not been opened before?

  Since the announcement, I’ve been contacted with requests for the script from about a hundred theaters—all of them in the U.S. and U.K.—and mainly from companies that I wouldn’t have dreamed of approaching on my own. So the big thing, for me, is developing relationships with these companies and building a future. Also, it’s been such an incredible confidence booster which doesn’t sound like much but has changed my writing and the way I go about it. I’m being bold in my writing, I’m challenging myself and I’m writing better than I ever have.

  What do you tell yourself each day that enables you to write your best—a mantra, a quote, a bit of wisdom?

  I have a quote from the playwright Adam Rapp above my desk: “…You have to realize that there’s nothing in it other than the love of doing it. I fell in love with playwriting because it’s a magical space that stories could happen in. There’s no money; it’s about poverty. So if you don’t enjoy sitting in a chair and trying to figure out how to make people not leave, or leave, or do things to each other, you’re probably not going to like it.”