EDITH WHARTON
Jun 16th, 2007 by admin
We sold our Newport house, and built one near Lenox, in the hills of western Massachusetts, and at last I escaped from watering-place trivialities to the real country … There for over ten years I lived and gardened and wrote contentedly, and should doubtless have ended my days there had not a grave change in my husband’s health made the burden of the property too heavy …
Gillian Barge as Edith Wharton leaving the Mount for the last time
SONGS was made for less than $60,000. Far too many independent filmmakers have similar stories to tell. Since SONGS, I have made films about Nicaragua, breast cancer, GE and its use and misuse of PCBs, and a young American GI’s year in Iraq. Along the way, SONGS got lost. You can learn more about what I have been doing since SONGS at bluehillfilms.com and what prompted me to let the world know about SONGS once more.
SONGS began as a play. I was in the midst of making a documentary about Shakespeare & Company (S&Co,) the theatre company founded by Tina Packer, Kristin Linklater, and Dennis Krausnick that was not only trying to create an international Shakespearian company in the U.S. but also occupy and renovate the neglected Wharton estate, The Mount.
Everything about the time and place was open and anarchic. On the surface, you could easily imagine Edith rolling over in her grave. But as I was to appreciate as the years went by and I re-read her work - book by book - in so many ways, these dedicated actors, these strange artists, were greater allies and closer to Edith’s inner lives than those who have claimed her in the years that followed.
In any event, I was acutely aware of the irony that I - in my earlier days a workingclass kid from the Bronx - was scurrying around at will on an estate that my Italian grandfather would have been lucky to work on. And a place that I would never have been able to sneak my way onto.
Everything in those days happened it seems when Tina had an idea. Tina had the idea about the documentary which brought me and my partner John MacGruer to the Mount in the first place. Then Tina had the idea about the Wharton contest. Each summer, in addition to their outdoors Shakespeare productions, S&Co presented an adaptation of a Wharton story in the Salon indoors at The Mount. Well, in an effort to improve the quality of the scripts, Tina decided to hold a contest. The winner would get $500 and have his or her script produced.
(By the way, just so you know, somewhere along the way, the Board of Directors and Managing Director decided that Tina’s idea about a documentary really wasn’t such a good idea, after all. I’ve still got boxes and boxes of videotape.)
Anyway, Tina’s contest turned me into a playright. I had this idea about revealing the inner life of the writer through her work. One of the first things I discovered when I arrived in the Berkshires in 1972, was that my local library had first edition Whartons sitting on the shelves. Nobody had taken them out in decades.
I went back to Wharton’s work, the novels and short stories, “The Writing of Fiction,” “A Backward Glance,” several biographies, and the official letters. And. of course, everything became just a bit clearer, with the Morton Fullerton letters.
It was an extraordinary and presumptuous journey - a man of my background taking in and taking on her story - but there is something magical that happens when you read and read someone’s work with care. You come, I think in the way an actor comes to learn lines, to transcend your own limitations. At a certain point, in the interests of economy, I had to make choices. After reading almost all of Edith I felt I had absorbed the language, her rhythm well enough to make the cuts seamlessly enough to do her justice.
My script was one of three finalists to get a read-through and ultimately won. I ended up using selections from “The Age of Innocence,” “The House of Mirth,” “The Custom of the Country,” “Ethan Frome,” “Hudson River Bracketed,” “The Gods Arrive” and the short story, “The Fullness of Life.” I can still remember my first harsh lessons as a playright. Almost immediately, my excerpt from Summer disappeared. I love Summer. But part of the idea was to keep the audience alert and awake enough to make it through an hour or so, before the heat upstairs crippled them, give them tea and a cracker, and send them on their way. I was particularly fond of Charity because I lived close by to where I imagined she grew up on the mountain between Monterey and Lee, and I admired her bravery. Anyway I reluctantly said goodbe to Charity Royall.
And then money matters, turned my three-person play into a two-person affair. I had imagined Edith, and a actor playing Edith’s male characters, and an actress playing the women. Lo and behold, Edith became her women. I quickly adapted. And Songs premiered in the Summer of 1984 in the Salon and Noni Pratt did a wonderful with Steve Birney.
Later on, John Hadden and Virginia Ness brought Edith’s world alive.
The play was very successful with audiences. In the many years since I’ve sat in the back of many performances of several other plays and there is nothing more telling than feeling an audience slip away one person at a time. When that is happening around me, I am prone to terrible migraines. My neck and shoulders tighten as if in a half-dozen vices. I wish for a quick death. But Songs was different. Edith, her men and women, took the audience to many different places, and I could feel them moving as if one.
It made me want to make Songs. Now I just had to raise the money.
