Shouts from a Third Act

“Let’s face it,” says the playwright John Patrick Shanley at the end of the podcast of his play Tennessee, “All of our attention spans were shattered long ago, and these little bits of things are easier.”

Easier for us to find time for, but no less profound for the brevity. And it’s free. Free and profound, what could be nicer in this age of Covid?

The play clocks in at 15 minutes, and the two actors (pictured above) are stellar. Even though it’s audio-only, I feel present, like I’m sitting in a Broadway theatre with my eyes closed.

The year is 2012, and we’re at an outdoor cafe in Mt. Juliet, a small town outside Nashville, Tennessee. Mike enters with a guitar slung over his shoulder, looking to speak to the young woman sitting alone at a table. Mike’s twenty and has just dropped out of college. He’s heard that Dewey can predict the future, and he wants her to tell him his. He’s also heard she’s a lesbian, but that’s just a rumor started by her ex-husband after she walked out, and it’s cost her the only job she ever loved–teaching piano. Dewey doesn’t want Mike to sit in the empty chair across from her. She tells him she’s saving it for “the opposition.” But Mike is persistent. When Dewey tells him things about himself that she couldn’t reasonably know, he keeps after her until she tells him his future. It’s a dark portrait that really upsets him, but the play doesn’t end there.

The discussion that follows the performance is with the playwright, the two actors, and podcast host Claudia Catania, and it’s as fun and thought-provoking as the play itself. Total time invested, including the play: 22 minutes.

“The Opposition,” as Dewey eventually tells Mike, is love. But the playwright explains afterwards that he was talking about “love” in the broader sense, not just romantic love. “There’s a way of looking at the world where you just sort of think of everybody and everything as an extension of yourself. And there’s another way of experiencing life where other sensibilities hit you and change you. And I guess I call that the opposition sometimes, and other times I call it company.” Shanley goes on to say he goes through fairly long periods where he doesn’t feel like he has any company. He feels like he never enters a place with the person across from him where their spirits interact in a way that changes them both and moves them forward.

Did you know John Patrick Shanley posts poems on Facebook? It comes up in the discussion. In the play, Mike’s just read a poem Dewey’s posted on Facebook. “A waterfall is a river broken in two.” He’s not sure what it means but says it has nothing to do with anything he hates and he hates a lot of things. Posting the poem, Dewey says, is her answer to loneliness. For Shanley himself, though, “To have another forum, especially one that’s free, is appealing to me. And the constant pressure to come up with something is good for me.”

As for the very short plays he often writes, he jokes that they’ve made him very wealthy. The serious reason is that they’re “test wells to see where the oil is.” His Broadway play Outside Mullingar started out that way, but then he realized he had a lot more he wanted to say. (A middle-aged man and woman, neighbors in rural Ireland, manage to find love despite different dispositions, a grudge dating back to grade school, and a land dispute between their parents.) I saw the play at a regional theatre in Dallas, pre-Covid, and loved it.

It’s fair to say John Patrick Shanley is living the American Dream. He grew up in the Bronx with a meat-packer Dad and a telephone operator Mom. He was put on academic probation his first year at NYU, but he returned there after serving stateside in the Marines during the Vietnam War. He graduated as the Valedictorian of his class. Today his resume includes 25+ plays, a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony win in 2005 for Doubt: A Parable (later made into a memorable movie with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, Amy Adams.) He also won an Oscar in 1988 for Best Original Screenplay for Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. (Still great–I watched it not long ago on Turner Classic Movies)

To listen to this particular podcast or other theatre freebies, check out PlayingOnAir.com.

While talking about one of the themes in Tennessee, Shanley says, “Knowing the future doesn’t save you from anything because we are irrational creatures. . . Marriage falls under that egis and so do elections.” Tennessee was recorded in January 2018, and the tumultuous Presidential election was still very much on his mind more than a year later. He said he was waiting for the dust to settle so we can have a coherent discussion and find a way forward that is healthy for society.

And now the next election is mere months away. Whatever our differences, don’t most of us want to live in a healthy society?

This Fire Tower sits at the top of a mountain trail in the Adirondacks. It’s no longer in use, except for hikers seeking exceptional views from up high–or for goal-oriented adventurers aiming to complete the “Fire Tower Challenge.” The challenge originated back in 2001, the brain child of a chapter of the Adirondack Mountain Club: a hiker has to climb at least 23 towers to qualify for the full-color patch. (Officially these Fire Towers are off limits to climbers during the pandemic, in order to promote social distancing.)

Reading up on the history of these Fire Towers fills me with nostalgia for simpler times. It feels good to read about a big problem that was solved with common sense. Up here in the mountains, fires were a big problem at the turn of the last century, sparked by the clear-cutting of forest trees and train engines criss-crossing the region. Almost one million acres of Adirondack forest were destroyed by two big fires in 1903 and 1908, and the following year the NY legislature tackled the problem with money and an idea: Forest Rangers and Company to the rescue! The first Fire Towers were built in 1909. Paid Fire Spotters manned the observation platforms at the top of the towers, each equipped with a circular map of the Adirondacks, a pointer tool to identify where the smoke was coming from, and a telephone to sound the alarm. Eventually over 100 Fire Towers were built, the majority in the Adirondacks, and many in the Catskills. My aunt, who settled in a small town up here as a young bride, remembers a Fire Spotter who kissed his wife goodbye every Monday morning, hiked up a nearby mountain to the Fire Tower, and settled in until Friday evening when he returned home. He was about 65 at the time and had been doing it for years.

By the 1970s, the Towers were on the wane. Spotting fires from aircraft was easier and more cost effective. The last of the Towers officially closed in 1990, but before the state could tear them all down, a group of local citizens intervened. They liked their Fire Towers. They liked to picnic there; they liked to climb them. Today 34 remain.

Up here in the Adirondacks I’m early to rise and early to bed, pleasantly exhausted from a day filled with so much fresh air and outdoor activity. Sometimes too sleepy to read, I discover the joys of The New Yorker fiction podcasts: a well-known author reads a favorite short story by another author and then discusses it with the magazine’s fiction editor. So far I’ve listened to four ‘bedtime stories’ and enjoyed them all, especially “Corrie,” written by Alice Munro and read by Margaret Atwood. Ms. Atwood’s voice was already familiar to me. Last fall I heard her speak in Dallas when she came to talk about her latest novel, The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m already nostalgic about last fall–last fall, for goodness sake!–if only because it was pre-covid. The podcast was pre-covid as well, recorded in August 2019.

“Corrie” opens in the mid-1950s, a time many Americans feel nostalgia for, and although the story is set in Alice Munro’s native Canada, small towns are like many small towns everywhere. There’s a social hierarchy. Most jobs come from one or two sources, like a mine or a factory. In the case of this story, there’s only one big employer in town, a men’s boot and work shoe factory owned by Mr. Carleton, a widower with one daughter. The story begins:

“It isn’t a good thing to have the money concentrated all in the one family the way you do in a place like this,” said Mr. Carleton. “I mean for a girl like my daughter Corrie here, for example, I mean like her, it isn’t good. Nobody on the same level.” Corrie was right across the table, looking their guest in the eye. She seemed to think this was funny.

Howard Ritchie doesn’t seem to think this is funny. Although only a few years older, his first impression of 26-year-old Corrie is that she’s a “spoiled rich miss. Unmannerly.” Mr. Carleton has hired the young city architect to restore the crumbling tower of the local Anglican church, not that Carleton is an Anglican. He’s a Methodist to the core. But he’s worried that the Irish Protestants that make up the Anglican church won’t do the job properly. They’re too poor; he’s the only one in town with any money. If he thought Howard might be a match for his daughter, he quickly finds out that the architect is “already equipped with a wife and young family.”

Nevertheless, Corrie and Howard embark on a long-term affair. Not right away, but after she returns from a trip to Egypt, having sent him a few silly postcards along the way. Now, though, her father has suffered a stroke and dies shortly thereafter. Corrie, for all her spunk, isn’t much good around the big house. She can’t cook or type or keep the fires going, but Howard is capable and helpful when he comes to visit. The fact that Corrie’s also lame in one leg–from the polio she got as a child–seems to make her more attractive to Howard, as ‘wounded maidens’ sometimes are.

There’s never talk of Howard leaving his wife, but soon there’s a complication: a young woman who used to do some housekeeping for Corrie wants money for not telling Howard’s wife about the affair. She wants it paid twice a year in cash to a P.O. Box; it’s not a large sum of money, for someone like Corrie, and she decides she should be the one to pay it. The affair continues happily as before, although changes come to the town. The factory is sold; the company that bought it closes it down. Corrie finds new ways to keep herself busy. But then there’s a twist. We should have seen it coming, but we don’t. (At least this reader didn’t.) It’s just a wonderful piece of writing and plotting. It’s the kind of story that keeps the reader (or the listener) thinking about the characters long afterwards.

Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood are both Canadians, and they know each other fairly well, having met shortly after their first books were published. Ms. Monro, now 89, announced she was retiring from writing in 2013, the same year she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was little known in the U.S. until The New Yorker started publishing her short stories in 1977, something I learned in the discussion afterwards. “Corrie” was a more recent story, published ten years ago when she was 79 (way to go, Alice!) When fiction editor Deborah Treisman asks Ms. Atwood if she thinks they were working in similar zones, Atwood says absolutely not, Alice was a Depression baby, born in 1931, and Margaret was a War baby, born in 1939. Only eight years apart, but a different world and mindset. It makes me think of all the writers who died before the current pandemic, and how all the writers still writing will be changed by having lived in the time of covid.