Influences

Although my plays are taught all over the world people still ask me why do you write as you do and who influenced you. Sometimes I start with my mother . . .


The setting:

Often my mother stood at the white kitchen stove, face pale and startled. I was a child. In winter I could smell the heat coming up from the floor registers from the coal furnace in the cellar

People my mother dreamed about:

In the morning I could hardly wait to hear about them. The stories she told of them were as exciting as the movies of Frankenstein and Dracula that I saw at the Waldorf.

These people my mother dreamed about continued to grow in my imagination. Like the people in the red scrapbook, they often knew each other and had known my parents when they were young.

I would list them in my mind as I sat on the front steps of our house (the steps that faced the orange tower).

Her mother who died when she was three.

Her stepfather who was killed walking across an electrified railroad track.

Her Aunt Hattie who died when my mother was pregnant with me.

When my mother was making oatmeal on winter mornings as I sat waiting with my bowl at the kitchen table, I secretly yearned that my mother would talk more about people she had dreamed about. There is no doubt that a person talking about the people in his or her dreams became an archetype for people in my monologues, plays, and stories.

Sometimes my mother would sometimes disappear to the hallway steps outside the kitchen and close the door behind her. I could hear her crying. When she came back into the kitchen, she wouldn’t speak but would dry the dishes or peel potatoes for dinner. I could not imagine why she cried.

Very often when I have taught at UC Berkeley and Harvard, my students and I talk about how the composition of characters can flourish from dreams like my mother’s combined with stories of real events.

Her stories of the past with its characters and the character from her dreams merged within my mind. Thus a rich composite is born.

My mother and Jane Eyre:

My mother often told me that she had been sent away to boarding school at the age of five and remained there until she was seventeen. Her mother was dead and her father thought boarding school was the best course for her. On holidays, she said, she would get very lonely and the headmaster of the school (in Fort Valley, Georgia) would invite her to his house. I thought my mother’s childhood life very strange. Everyone I knew went to a public school and I had never ever seen a boarding school, that “one” was sent away to. It was very difficult for me to imagine even though my mother spoke of it often. Finally when I was eleven I took a book out of the school library that was gray with green designs – a pretty book, I thought – and it was called Jane Eyre.

Almost before the first chapter was concluded, it was decided that the heroine, Jane Eyre, would be “sent away to boarding school.” How excited I was as I sat in the small rocking chair in my room. Here was a little girl who had a life like my mother’s. It was so thrilling that I read the first section about Jane Eyre at Lowood many times. I began to envy my mother’s exotic upbringing. It wasn’t fair that I would go every day to Lafayette Public School when she had lived a life like Jane Eyre’s.

As much as it was possible I used to imagine that I had been my mother when she was a little girl. I think after Jane Eyre, when she told me stories, I almost believed they had happened to me: her life at boarding school, her pictures in the red scrapbook of herself in white organdy dreses standing by a Model T Ford, the people in her dreams, and maybe most of all her incredibly pretty hair that everyone commented on. I think now that I often thought they were mine. They all belonged to me.

Years later my obsession with hair would again and again reveal itself in my work.
 
To add further complexity to character composites, remember your favorite writers and their lives. When I visited England, Haworth, the village, the stone house, and walked in the rooms they inhabited overlooking the cemetery, it was clear how the Bronte lives multiply their mystery and greatness. The preservation of the moors where I walked enhanced my love of the Bronte texts. Although it was June, the weather was damp and chilly exactly as described in the Bronte novels. The influences of their lives continues and continues.
 
Jane herself influenced me by walking to unravel her heartaches. I have often along Broadway in New York, on the University of California at Berkeley campus, thinking of Jane as she walked when she left Thornfield heartbroken after her wedding day to Edward Rochester ended in great catastrophe. I learned from her walking . . . that unexpected destinations await in your heart.
 
 
Back to my mother’s dreams:

Her mother Mary was one of the people she dreamed of. What did you dream about her, I would say. I saw her face, was all she would say. Once or twice she said she worked in Mr. Leon’s cotton fields (the white owner). She was about fifteen then, and people say she had a pretty face with brown skin and pretty eyes. She only said this when she dreamed . . . she died when I was three. Of course I knew Mr. Leon was my mother’s father. Mary . . . Who is a person whose child refuses to speak to her own child. For a writer she is a gigantic influence.

Then there is my grandmother. Besides Aunt Ella, people said I looked like my grandmother when she was a girl. In my great-aunt’s parlor, among the pictures on the wall was a large photograph of my grandmother in a long pale dress at about age nine. All of my grandmother’s friends said I looked exactly like that picture. At least the ones who didn’t say I looked like aunt Ella. But this picture of my grandmother at age nine was the course of many conversations, especially since I was about that age. I began, over the successive summers, to feel that picture was my image.

Now I wear jackets over dresses just as my grandmother wore jackets over her dresses. And I have always tried to arrange my furniture to look like her front parlor. She and my great-aunt were both servants in the same household, a family that owned a canning factory and lived in a house that, to my mind, looking like pictures of Monticello. That accounted for the fact that their (my grandmother’s and great-aunt’s) closets were filled with hat-boxes from Saks Fifth Avenue and they both wore dresses from Atlanta. Most of the things they both owned had once belonged to the M----- family, who were of English descent.

When I visited the M------ house with my grandmother, it was clear their rooms looked like the rooms in the movie David Copperfield. And other movies about England that we had seen at the Waldorf

When my grandmother went to work every morning, my brother and I walked down the road to Aunt Mary Lee’s house, but if Aunt Mary Lee was working (they were servants in the same wealthy household) then my grandmother would leave us at Sarah Clara’s house, a few doors away.

Sarah Clara, my grandmother always said, was the prettiest girl in Montezuma. She and her grandparents lived in a yellow-and-white frame house with giant sunflowers in the front yard. Sarah Clara was sixteen and told me stories of high school. Her boyfriend gave her a bottle of Tabu cologne and she let me smell the Tabu and even put a drop on my cheek, and she let me see her long yellow dotted Swiss evening dress that she had worn to the high school dance.

Many summer afternoons my brother and I sat on Sarah Clara’s porch until my grandmother came home. I daydreamed of a day when I would have a bottle of Tabu and a long yellow evening dress and go to high school. Sarah Clara! One day she even put on her long yellow dress and walked around the porch. How could I know that years later, one summer sitting in a house on Piazza Donatello in Florence, I would create two heroines, and one’s name would be Sarah and the other, heroine in a play called The Owl Answers, would be named Clara.

Their houses, surrounded by petunias, hedges, sunflowers, magnolia trees, their wells, their blue-and-white dishes, the dippers and bucket, their pot-bellied stoves, the porches and wicker furniture, the smell of wood burning in the stoves, the way the houses sat on the Georgia roads . . . the picket fences . . . these houses with their vistas of cornfields, vegetable gardens, fig trees, flower gardens that face the road, the porch that wound around the house, the stone paths that led to the steps . . . these houses were the most beautiful houses in the world to me.

Lewis and Tessa in The Constant Nymph (1943 movie) were haunting. I could hardly wait to see it on TCM. I had not seen it since I was 12 years old. I wrote in my book, People Who Led to My Plays, Charles Boyer loved Tessa, the young heroine of this movie. So for a summer I secretly called myself Tessa. One of my mother’s favorite movies was Hold Back the Dawn, which also starred Boyer. She also loved Backstreet.

Boyer’s character Lewis is a famous composer who visits a wild beautiful family who live in Switzerland. Years later in 1956, I named my first character in my first real play after him . . . a play called Pale Blue Flowers in the archives in Austin, Texas at the university. In my play my heroine Sandy is in love with Lewis, a mixture of the Boyer character and the gentleman caller in Glass Menagerie. At 12 how I longed to be Fontaine’s Tessa. There was a romantic complexity to Fontaine . . . She was Rebecca and Tessa. As Tessa, although she was no more than fifteen, she had ideas about music, about love, and transforms Lewis with her love.

The Constant Nymph is a fine study of people on precipices: Tessa’s father at death’s door, her sister upon her marriage, Lewis’s marriage, the collapse of their Swiss home, Tessa and her sister being sent to England, and finally Tessa’s death.

Margaret Kennedy really knows how to construct a story. Two pieces of work back to back on TCM were a delight. The next night was Elmer Rice’s Street Scene. We studied this play when I was a freshman at Ohio State. The professor said Rice captured reality. The following summer, I bought a sheaf of notebook paper and pencils. In the evenings I wrote my Street Scene play. I had never been to New York, so I stole Rice’s location and his plot. I think I just had the characters talk about the hot, humid weather. Halfway through about six notebook pages I gave up. I couldn’t forget that the professor said Rice captured reality. I kept the pages for a long time. They just seemed like pencil marks on notebook paper.


The Secretary:

The first piece of furniture my parents ever bought in 1930 in Pittsburgh, Pa. What power it had: a place to write, to put pens and paper in small drawers and cubicles . . . a top to close to hide your papers away . . . a top to open and sit and write. Today it sits in my Manhattan apartment. This secretary and my parents 1936 Philco radio are key to my love of and fascination for writing and pop culture.

People on Old Maid cards (1936, age five): Through make-believe one could control people on a small scale.

Paper dolls:
You could invent enchantment with paper.

The Blue Bird (1940 movie):
Somewhere, if I could find them, there were some steps, many, many steps, that led to the Blue Bird of Happiness. But I would have to climb them and they sort of sat just in the middle of the sky. It would be worth it, though. I wondered if they were in another city. What city?

Jack and Jill:
Went up a hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. What’s a crown? I asked my mother. His head, she said.

Blondine:
A heroine in a fairy tale who went though trials and hectic adventures to find happiness, until she befriended a tortoise who helped her destroy her nemesis, a wicked king. I had never seen a tortoise and didn’t know anyone who had one. I wondered if I had to confront that evil king – who would help me?

Elves:
I asked my mother, could we leave milk for the elves that came out at night?

Burglars:
They broke into our house one night when my mother and father and brother and I were asleep. One had a gun and put it to my mother’s side and took her wedding ring. Then they took the cash from the dresser. My father, who was a YMCA secretary, had just gotten paid that day. The police later discovered the burglars had followed my father home from the bank and had taken a side stairway to the attic and hidden there until almost midnight.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, The Pied Piper of Hamelin:
There was a world that existed where unusual terror reigned, a world my parents and friends couldn’t reach.

Joe Louis (the heavyweight champ):
We listened to his fights on the radio. His fame and popularity crossed racial boundaries.

June and Jean:
Twins in my class in kindergarten. They walked to school on the same street as I did. I walked as close to them as possible so I could study these two people who looked exactly alike.

Miss Elbert:
She said I was the best reader in the first grade.

My mother:
Some of her sayings –

“Every dog has their day.”
“You gotta get up before morning to fool me.”
“Don’t be a greedy pig” (when, at age six, I tried to eat a whole chocolate cake).
“Lord doesn’t love ugly.”
“Be a lady.”

Jim:
The hero of the 1930s song.

Our family:
We took drives in my father’s Plymouth every Sunday (unless there was a blizzard) after dinner, which was at three o’clock . . . in the summer, fried chicken, in the winter, pork roast or roast beef. We started from Mount Pleasant, where we lived, drove out Kinsman, up Lee Road to Shaker Heights, through the winding streets of Tudor mansions. Sometimes we drove downtown to Cedar Avenue, where my father had his office at the Y. The Y had a “ballroom,” a large room painted blue where I would one day have my wedding reception and where, as a teenager, I saw my father give many talks at Y banquets. Down the hall from the “ballroom” were rooms where guests at the Y stayed . . . small single bedrooms with plaid bedspreads and a desk. My brother and I peeked into the rooms that were empty. How could I or any of us know that it would be in one of these rooms were my father would spend the last days of his life, sick from emphysema, divorced from my mother and bereaved of his second wife?
But we didn’t know that then as we peeked in the rooms, and ran down the hallway to the stairway that led to the main floor and the reception room, past the office that had a plaque on the door with my father’s name.
My father would greet us, rushing out of his office, smiling, and we’d climb back into the 1937 Plymouth, where my mother sat waiting.
“Let’s drive by Lake Erie,” we’d say, and so we would drive along the lake until it got dark. “They’re going to build this lake up one day,” my father always said. My mother would finally announce that we should go home. And when we got home, she, my brother and I had chilled jello with bananas and vanilla wafers that my mother had carefully made the night before. My father smoked a cigar. I was excited and happy because soon Jack Benny would come on the radio, and we all loved Jack Benny and Eddie Anderson (Rochester).

My mother:
When we came back from the Imperial Theatre after seeing movies like Hold Back the Dawn or Kitty Foyle, she’d sit in her favorite maroon-colored chair in the corner of the living room and light a cigarette . . . a Lucky Strike . . . and talk about why she liked the movie. “When I was in school I acted in plays,” she’d say wistfully.

My son Joedy asked me to describe the events in a group of his childhood photographs that I had collected. So I did.
 
 
Paris, October 1960
Here we are on the steps of the Sacre Coeur. We had just arrived in Paris that morning from London. It was slightly overcast. From the train station we went to the Pensione. It had a dark lobby. The charming young woman behind the desk had a pony tail. A very old elevator had a gate. In five days there I preferred to walk. It was about October 10.
You have on the outfit that I bought at Best and Co. on Fifth Ave. I loved their children’s clothes. The jacket was basically brown with yellow, blue, red stripe, the pants grey.
Joe chose the places we went to.
I knew little of Paris. I’m not sure why we decided to go straight to the Sacre Coeur. It must have been near the Pensione.
From London that morning we had crossed the English Channel and taken the train to Paris. It was thrilling. The air was fresh.
 
June 1954
My parents’ friends kept their wonderful customs with them from the South and brought to Ohio.
 
Postscript June 1954
(Add a baby picture)
 
June 2003
Ohio State University. The morning of my Honorary Doctorate. Lobby of Hotel and my favorite photo. Adam, You, Eitra.
 
New York City, 1958
Joe’s graduation from Columbia University. You, his Uncle James, and his mother Cara Kennedy, and myself, and your Uncle James. Joe’s triumph, a PHD from Columbia University.
 
Mexico City 1958
The three of us at the bull fight.
 
Sunday, New York City 1955
In this picture we had been in New York less than two weeks.
 
Harvard, Cambridge, Mass. 2001
You in front of the Harvard Book Store on Mass Av. The great bookstore holds great happiness.
 
New York City, Fifth Ave, 1956, Easter
It was exciting to leave Bancroft and take the subway to Fifth Ave at Rockefeller Center. Easter Parade with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire was one of my favorite movies. Your complete outfit, including the Eton cap, was a present form my mother who mailed it from Cleveland. She came the next Easter but I can’t find the picture. She is standing in the courtyard of Bancroft in her favorite suit and little fox fur and straw hat.
 
Rome, Italy, August 1961
We are leaving Salvator Mundi Hospital with newborn Adam. The Sister’s name was Maria.
In the garden at Salvator Mundi, Joe took this picture of you before we left for the apartment on Via Reno. The red pants I bought in Florence.
 
London, Chalcot Crescent, Summer 1967
Here you are walking down Chalcot Crescent toward the house at 35. It was Sunday. I bought your vest at Carnaby Street. Later that day you, Adam, and myself went to a lunch at a writer’s house in Hampstead. They had a large pretty garden. The adults drank orange juice and vodka.
 
Ghana 1960, Winter, Achimota
Joedy leaving for school. Joe took this picture of you as we stood in front of the famous Achimota Guest House. You were on your way to the Achimota School across the lawn. Joe chose living at the Achimota Guest House, because it was near the school, which once had been for European children, mostly English children. We lived at the Achimota Guest House after Joe decided living in the house in Accra wasn’t near a school and was too isolated when he had to go into the bush for days and we would be alone.
 
Washington, 1980s; Sierra Leone; London
Adam and Joedy in Washington in the 1980s. My favorite picture of the two of you as adults. As children, in the garden in Sierra Leone with your dog Orion and in the garden in London.
 
Cleveland, Ohio, 1980s
I always loved the arch you’re standing in front of in the living room at 9013. The houses on Parmelee were built in 1910. They possessed features that were classical: stained glass windows, oak cabinets, arches leading to dining room, and one on the stairwell that you’re standing by.
 
January 1964, Park West Village
Frederick Eberstadt took these pictures of you (in another sweater from Best and Co). That day he took Adam’s picture too. The pictures were meant to be published in a “magazine.” But Funnyhouse closed, and Freddy couldn’t get them published.
 
Circa 1956
You are asleep with Joe holding you. We were on the train coming from Monhegan Island, and a friend of Jan Krukowski, who we met on the Island, along with his wife Nancy, took the picture. Joe held you a lot, something that often led to jealousy on my part. I felt he was sometimes trying to “mother” you.
 
Via Lombardia, Rome, Italy, Spring 1961
Photograph: doorway to Pensione Sabrina. Sabrina, Maria, their maid, Sabrina’s husband, their teenage son, lived at Sabrina. They were a joyous family. We lived there almost three months in Spring 1961. Every morning, Maria brought in the Continental Breakfast. Our window faced Via Lombardia. They served a wonderful star pasta soup, veal parmigiana. They called you Guisseppe and me Madam Kennedy.
 
Cleveland, Ohio, June 1954
In 1954, the doctors at Mt. Sinai kept new mothers in the hospital for five days. So you are five days old in this picture. Mother carried you into the house. We came in the back door, through the kitchen, and here we are out in the living room. That blanket was blue and white, and I had on the beige silk shantung dress that I wore on my honeymoon . . . a weekend trip to downtown Cleveland’s Statler Hotel (Joe was due at army base on Monday), and then again my going away dress when I set out for Denver to join Joe at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital (June 1953). The train was the famous California Zephyr.
But that morning in 1954, I think we stayed downstairs for about a half hour. It was close to noon. Then mother took you upstairs and lay you down in the white crib at the end of my room. Joe was in Korea, so I had my girlhood room with a small porch . . . mahogany furniture and blue flowered wallpaper. The June air was pure. Daddy who had driven us home from Mt. Sinai Hospital (in the purple Kaiser) had gone back to work at the Y. Before we went upstairs, Mother made us a tuna fish salad and iced tea. (You stayed on the couch).
(She would always say, “Could I hold the baby. Let me hold the baby.”)
(I’ve never seen my parents so happy).
In 1954 the people on our street Parmelee paid visits to newborn babies and brought a gift. It was a big ceremony. Mother dressed you. You had many baby organdy and cotton dresses. She insisted for the first month to do most of the lifting of you to go downstairs. I wasn’t supposed to go downstairs for at least weeks. So the visitors either waited for you to be brought downstairs (and presented) in the pale green living room, or if you were sleeping they came upstairs and peeked in the crib. It was the custom with our friends. So the first month you probably had at least fifty visitors bearing rattles, baby shirts, baby blankets, baby books, talcum powder sets, baby socks and shoes.
 
1958, Mexico City
We had just seen a bull fight, and for the rest of the month-long trip in Mexico, you danced like a matador. That sweater was from my favorite Best and Co.
 
1960, Christmas Day in Kumasi, Ghana
Joe took the Xmas Day picture of you outside of our Guest House. He bought this pink rubber foam elephant at a market. The temperature was 110.
 
London, Chalcot Crescent, Summer 1967
I did take a few pictures that summer with your camera. I didn’t own a camera, and neither did Adam. The garden at 35 Chalcot Crescent. You and Adam walking on the sidewalk playing a game. Because I love Charles Dickens so much, London very often was infused with great romance.
 
Cherbourg, France, October 2, 1960
The last day of the Queen Mary’s sailing. Early October. I did take this picture at dawn of you and Joe on a Cherbourg street. The Queen Mary’s first stop was Cherbourg. They let the passengers out for a brief time before sailing to Southampton. It was the very first time any of us stepped on European soil.
 
The Queen Mary, September 28, 1960
We sailed on September 28 from New York to Southampton, England. The ocean, the ocean liner, the air, the excitement put me in a daze. While I was sitting on a deck chair, you played shuffle board. Joe took all the pictures.
 
Sunday, January 1955, New York City, Central Park
Possibly our first Sunday in New York. Your snowsuit was blue. You were six months old. This was near the 66th Street entrance to the Park. We were staying with your Uncle James, who lived in the last of the walk-ups that were soon after torn down to build ABC. Stillman’s gym was nearby. I think James was teaching at LIU.
The walk-up was dark and the bathtub was in the kitchen. From one of his windows you could see a woman (in her Central Park West parlor, playing the piano).
 
Florence, Italy, June 1961

We took the train from Rome to Florence. In Florence, American Express sent us to an agency for a place to stay. At the office, a young Italian woman stood up and ran toward us, excited. “I have the place for you,” she said, “owned by two sisters. It’s by the month. We can walk there.”
It was very sunny. We walked along the Ne Arno and then into Piazza Donatello. We stopped at the corner of the Piazza, inside the dark stone house was a magnificent apartment in two floors. The grand drawing room was like a room in a palace. The Italian agent said the Florentine House was owned by two sisters in their eighties, whose family once lived there.
Beyond the main room was a large solarium that led to a garden. There were three bedrooms, one with cherubs on the ceiling, downstairs a white tiled kitchen. It was very inexpensive. The agent said most tourists thought Piazza Donatello was too far from the center. But I was enchanted. We took a bus past the Duomo and walked along the Arno to American Express, mornings, and to the café next door. You enjoyed walking along the Arno. Two very young women who we met in the café wanted to take you to Fiesole. Italians often stared at you. They had never seen a child your color. “Bello,” they would say. We celebrated your 7th birthday on a green marble table that overlooked the solarium with a chocolate cake from Doneys. Joe sent you a book he made in Nigeria. He wrote a story about the two of you. Florence was where I bought your red cotton pants and where a wonderful Italian barber was so happy because he did a good job of cutting your hair. “I’ve never cut hair like that,“ he said. “I did a good job.” We were in Florence 3 ½ weeks. Dr. Pignatelli, my doctor, said I must return to Rome to await Adam’s birth.
 
June 1, 2011
Dear Joedy,
 
Happy birthday. I sent you the note on your birth a while ago. May your dreams come true.
 
Love,
Mom

Secret Paragraphs about My Brother

My isolation from my brother . . . I tried to write about it. . . .

There have been killings in Cambridge.

They want me to help them find the murderer, but I can’t concentrate. The police feel there is a literary connection between the murders since all of those killed (except the nun from California) had belonged to an Upper West Side Video Club in Manhattan that had more than an ordinary number of writers as members. And at one time each had rented either The Vanishing or Vertigo.

It was the semester I dreamed of my son when he was sleepwalking. That was the winter before the summer of 1963 when my brother went for a drive in his car and was in the accident. I lay across the bed after I put my sons to sleep and suddenly painted one wall in the apartment red. My brother was in a coma for five months. When he woke, he was brain damaged and paralyzed. He died in 1972.

When I’m in Manhattan I retreat to the rooftop of my brownstone and read Russian classics – Crime and Punishment is my favorite. Some mornings I walk down Riverside Drive to 72nd Street. I often think about my brother.

Before he joined the Army, my brother went to Ohio State for a semester. He used to stand beneath my window in Baker Hall and practice his Spanish. Then one day he disappeared.

In Florence, July 1961, I didn’t know that two summers from then there would be a terrible accident. I had given up writing plays. I had come to feel hopeless.

During that month, after I left American Express, I would often stop at the American Library and read The New York Times. One morning there was an exhibit in the window called The Plays of Tennessee Williams. It had been a long time since I had thought of Williams but now, as I stood staring at the volumes of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, The Rose Tattoo, I realized how much I still admired what Williams did. Perhaps I could write another play. The work on my desk that I had started in Ghana was an unclassified assortment of pages. I had no idea what form it would take but there was a character, Sarah, who was concerned about her thinning hair and another character, Clara, who spoke of her journey on an ocean liner. I had these characters speaking intensely of Queen Victoria and Patrice Lumumba. And I had a Jesus character who was speaking to my heroi2ne. Perhaps I could write a play again, I thought, as I walked back to Piazza Donatello. But no, I couldn’t face that disappointment again. No matter how hard I had tried, I couldn’t sustain a play in three acts like Williams and I couldn’t achieve the density I so loved in Lorca.

Then one day not long after I had returned to Rome to await the birth of my son, my husband arrived from Nigeria. We lived on Via Reno in a lovely apartment with a terrace that faced Rome. One morning, again on the way to American Express, I bought The Times. It was a very sunny morning. There was an article about Edward Albee, about the success of his one-act plays.

I had not thought of one-acts since I’d been about twenty-three. They seemed an oddity. But at that moment I decided I would try one one-act play and it would be the last thing I would write. I called it Funnyhouse of a Negro. The accident would take place the summer after its first performance.

In 1977, I was flying from London to Budapest (on the way to a theatre conference) when I met a man who had been in Mannheim around the time of my brother’s court martial (1956). He said he now worked for the American Embassy in Haiti. It was a night flight. My fellow passenger did not say why he was flying to Budapest, but he questioned me carefully on my role in the theatre conference.

In Budapest, soldiers with guns surrounded us as we deplaned in the December night. During our days at Hotel Royal we were never alone. I bought my sons flutes and saw the Danube. In Berlin I went to see the Reichstag. I thought of Mannheim. Yet I was not able to go there. The conference office booked me for Hamburg but I didn’t go to Hamburg either. I stayed in Berlin and walked around the Alexanderplatz and took a tour through the Black Forest.

Sometimes I think I still want to go to Mannheim. Would I have to disguise my motives in order to get my brother’s old Army records? Perhaps (I) could unearth the story behind my brother’s trial. I want to prove he was treated unfairly.

When he got married, his wife, Felicia, said to me, “I don’t know where your brother is half the time.”
“What do you mean?” (I always knew where my husband was.)
“I don’t know where he is and don’t know who his friends are,” she said as we sat reading House and Garden and drinking Lipton’s iced tea.
“Where did he go and who were his friends?” I asked my mother thirty years later.
“No one knew what he was doing half the time. He’d come in at three in the morning. I don’t know where he’d been. He changed so after he came back from the Army,” she replied.
After he got out of the Army he sought work in the psychiatric ward of Mt. Sinai Hospital. He was seldom without his white orderly jacket.

 “Was your brother’s nickname Charlie?” asked the undertaker at my father’s funeral.
“I never knew my brother had a nickname,” I said. “We called him ------. And what made you think of my brother?” (He had been dead three years, and it was a different undertaker who had buried him.) This undertaker was a son of one of my father’s oldest friends. My parents married in their house in Dayton, Ohio in 1930.
“We were talking last night about your family and someone said didn’t Mr. ------ have a son called ‘Charlie?’ He knew it was a nickname.”
I said Id’ never heard that but I’d ask my mother.
When I got home from the funeral parlor I asked her. She stared at me.
“I never heard that,” she said. “I don’t know anything about a ‘Charlie.’”
Today I still wonder if he had a life as a “Charlie” and if she knew.

This reminded me of years ago and Rosemary and our Italian neighborhood. One summer evening I was playing jacks on the steps when I saw my friends run past my house toward the vacant lot on Signet.
“Aren’t you coming?” some said. “------- and Rosemary are getting married.”
I knew nothing of this and arrived at the edge of the field of weeds to see Rosemary and my brother standing before a boy I’d never seen. Rosemary was in her communion dress and my brother in his playsuit.
Just as I arrived they ran deeper into the field and disappeared.
“They went on their honeymoon,” someone screamed.
When my brother came home toward dark he stopped and stood in front of me at the porch steps.
“Don’t tell mother and daddy that I’m married,” he said.
He was six and I was nine.

Cars united them. It was a car in which my brother met his disfiguration. (He was driving to see Felicia.) And it was in a car that my father’s second wife was instantly killed in an accident that killed his spirit. The biggest argument my father and brother had was over a car – the silver-colored Kaiser. My brother wanted to drive it to a party. My father said he couldn’t take the car.

They stood in the center of the living room yelling. I ran down the stairs from my room. My father was small. Was my brother about to knock him down? I started crying. I could see my father was afraid. I feared the worst. My mother was in Maryland on a trip. I was about to run onto the front porch and call a neighbor when suddenly they stopped yelling. My father threw the Kaiser keys on the floor at my brother’s feet.

Soon after, my brother joined the Army.

It was spring when my brother left for Germany. He and Felicia arrived on the train from Ohio on the day the movie Guys and Golls opened in New York. I wanted to go to 50th Street and Broadway. Brando was playing Sky Masterson and the New York Post said he would be at the opening.

Often I dream of my father pulling the silver-colored Kaiser into the driveway, the same silver Kaiser in which my brother came back from a drive late one night with blood on the fender. He said he’d hit a dog. It remained a mystery. There were so many mysteries surrounding my brother. During those years, he and my mother would go into the bathroom and close the door.

“Mother, I want to talk to you,” he’d mumble and into the bathroom they’d go and run the water loudly. I don’t know what they talked about.
My mother would emerge, minutes later, and run into her bedroom. Often I could hear her sobbing.
“What’s wrong?” I’d say, trying to open her closed door.
Once, months lather, she said, “Your brother may have to go to court.”
“Court?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” And she walked away.

“Mind your own business,” my brother would say whenever I’d ask what was wrong. “Mind your own business.”

He died without telling me anything.

I saw the documentary on George Harrison, Living. It was exciting to learn about the genesis of “My Sweet Lord” and “Here Comes the Sun,” two songs I love.

Letters From Oakland

I lived in Oakland for a number of years organizing arts events with authors Ishmael Reed, Al Young, devorah major and others.  As artists the belief behind all of our work is the right of man to protest, to state our beliefs, and to demand justice.  Oakland is a beautiful city with great artists, and wonderful people.  Those in power need to remember that protest is the right of all Americans, and should be honored with applause, not guns, tear-gas, and clubs.
“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it. ”
― Howard Zinn

Kim McMillon, playwright
host of radio show Arts in the Valley
artsinthevalley.wordpress.com

Letters from London

Here are my thoughts.

 I am hugely critical of England.  Her foreign policy, the Conservative Party with its young elitists who appear to have little understanding of anything directly outside their culture and weak moral compasses, our lack of a real national identity, the dirt and decay of our inner cities -  I could go on for pages,

But here's the odd thing. I still think England is the best place on earth to live, despite ALL that I might criticise - I think the British on the whole are honest (this does not include our governments any more than yours!) I think our press is vibrant, our theatre and literature exciting and demanding. Our countryside amongst the most beautiful on earth and despite recent riots and a demonisation of our 'chav' culture, and an increase in knifings (a new and terrible development) I think we are inherently moderate - it may be that is partly because we are inherently selfish or disinterested. Our NHS whilst imperfect (and I have more experience than most) means that no one goes untreated and no family is impoverished in the process of caring for their sick.

I think Thatcher encouraged a vibrant thrusting culture and that she was genuine in her aspirations but the by product of that was the destruction of entire communities (not yet restored) and in striving to improved themselves, Thatcher's children were more selfish and less responsive to their fellow citizens than even previous generations. 

But I think we are seeing now what appears to be the young shoots of a generation who is more responsible/moral.  Our press ridicules Ed Milliband, but there is a growing understanding that  creating a two tier society, is no longer sustainable.I think Ed Milliband will be viewed quite differently as time moves on.

So all in all this is where I choose to live and die.  xx

-Virginia Constable Maxwell

Letter From Egypt

My Dearest Playwright,

How are you? I hope you to be in a good health. I want to tell you that everything here in Egypt is Ok.  What we do here nowadays is to protect our freedom and stability. Egyptians discover that their revolution have been stolen from them by the above constitutional principles. So, we (Egypians) decide to obtain our freedom and stability by going to Eltahrir and staying there. You know well that Eltahrir is a symbol of the Egyptian's revolution here. It is a most important place in Egypt. Actually, If we don't protect our revolution, we will return to the last regime of Mobark. This is what we fight to avoid. This is the last news in our country. Thank you.

Best wishes,
Nadia Maher

Letter About Tunisia By Lilia Larbi

Dear Mrs Kennedy,

Talking about trivialities is generally easy to do but when it comes to talking or writing about places that deeply shaped our personalities, it turns out to be rather a hard task to carry out.
I was born in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, yes the Tunisia that is in North Africa, a small country very close to Italy and France: two countries where many Tunisians immigrate looking for a better job, a better life, a better future...Though that wasn't my case, I was one of those who believed that Tunisians can still have a bright future and not leave their hometowns, neither their roots nor their families...

I was a very optimistic young girl, although when I started my teaching carreer in a nice touristy port town, I had soon realized how life could become futile and meaningless when I felt that my students sort of considered me as a third rate teacher because they weren't interested in the subject that I taught as my students were not specializing in English studies but engineering ones and I was an English teacher. Indeed, I understood that if you don't feel fulfilled you can't have a happy life. Then, I thought that the missing ingredient was love, building up a family, having children, etc. So, I moved to Italy following my instincts, my love, my dreams of happiness. Tunisia then was still a "safe", "peaceful" country, maybe it's even more peaceful now? But at that time nobody dared to talk about politics in public and so everybody pretended that the president was just PERFECT. Or people just avoided to give their opinion because who dares about politics when people's unique obsession was/is how to earn a living?

While my family and my friends thought I was "crazy" to resign from my teaching job, especially that I needed to pass a national teaching exam to have it, I thought to have found the missing ingredient to my self-fulfillment, to my happiness, but I was simply mistaken.
Now, what can I tell you about Tunisia? I don't want to fall into these clichés of a beautiful, sunny country...As a Tunisian, I feel it's my duty to tell you this country is full of history, mixed races yet one dominant religion: Islam, Though, the proximity with Europe and the heavy dependence of Tunisia's economy on tourism, made Tunisians very open minded and not afraid of who is "different."

My first contact with a foreigner was at an early age, I was around 5 years old and my French was rather poor and mechanic, but what I remember is my extreme happiness to have a dialogue, whatever minimum it was with a French native speaker. How thrilled I was, and how proud!

Now that I live in France, I'm not sure French people are that thrilled to talk with someone who is "different" from them.
Maybe it's because they feel they've been invaded by North Africans during the last years?
Or maybe it's due to the simple fact of lack of novelty!?
To be honest, I miss Italy so much. I miss people's spontaneous friendly smiles and their non artificial curiosity about my country.

Here in France, what I generally feel is people's indifference. Sometimes, I think I'm sinking into depression for even if I'm no more a young girl, I feel at moments so terribly lonesome and so fragile far away from my roots, far away from what really brightens up my life...
By no means do I want this note to become pathetic, and I keep hoping for a brighter future not only for myself but for all those who believe and believed in me, those who blindly sustained me, those who thought that I'm not just a silly romantic girl with no brain or ambition.
So I want to end up with a cheerful tone no matter how unfulfilled I still feel, because I truly believe that I am lucky to have lived in three different countries although I'm only 35 years old. And what's more important is the fact that I have met so many interesting and brilliant people who are the true treasures of my living experience.

Kindest regards,
Lilia

Letter From Egypt

Dear Kennedy,

How are you? I hope you to be in a good health. I want to say happy new year my dearest writer. I know well that you are concerned with the latest news in Egypt. Actually, things in Egypt are not bad. Egyptians cross the difficult road of Parliamentary elections nowadays. You Know, the participation of Egyptian women in the voting process since the beginning of the first round of the 2011parlimentary elections has been remarkably strong. The results of Egypt's first parliamentary elections after the 25 January Revolution have radically changed the political scene, confirming the popularity of Islamist groups and the retreat of Liberal and leftist political parties that dominated the stage over the past six decades. The results are not final yet, and there remain two stages of voting on 14 December and in early January. Till now Islamist groups are likely to win at least 60/70 per cent of the votes, if not more, forming a majority in parliament big enough to pass the legislation they want.

Yours,
Nadia Maher Ibrahim

Christmas 2011 in London

I spent every day last week drawing with a class in the National Gallery in London. It has been a wonderful preparation for Christmas - we started by copying pictures from the 14th century and eased our way slowly into the 20th century. I finished with a painting by Cézanne having sat in front of Bellinis, Verrochios, Veroneses, Titians, Velasquez and Degas on the way.  I find drawing completely absorbing and was able to forget abut the crowds in the gallery and more importantly was able to distance myself from the commercialization of Christmas. When I left at 5pm every evening the first thing I saw was the beautifully lit giant Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square - the tree has been an annual gift from the people of Norway since 1947 as a token of Norwegian gratitude to the people of London for their assistance during the years 1940-45. Now, a week later, when it is cold and wet and dark outside I can still conjure up those paintings and feel that as well as an inner peace, I have just a little more understanding of several European artists.

From
Sarah Anderson

Letter From "One in the 12 Billion"

Well, right now I'm mostly obsessed with two things, one immediate and disposable, the other sort of abstract.

The immediate/disposable is, of course, the magnificently absurd race-to-the-bottom that is the Republican primary campaign. So fascinating! Never have the fault lines of race and class in this country been so brightly highlighted - gone is the half-mask of political correctness or any attempt to conceal the true underworkings of conservative politics. The Tea Party rewards only unvarnished hostility towards the "undesirable elements" of American society, so you're actually watching candidates compete on the applause-o-meter for how many Mexicans they promise to electrocute or how they'll pass constitutional amendments to ghettoize Islam and homosexuality. Oh, and the criminalization of poverty! Let's not forget that.

But here's what's even more interesting: The farther the party drifts onto the shoals of reactionary nonsense, the more ridiculous it looks. In the end, it'll be Romney - because no one else halfway sane, rational and strategic is running - and the Tea Party will have to choose between apathy and its deep-seated hatred of Obama. It might choose apathy. Those crazies don't like half-measures, and, from their standpoint, Romney is the ultimate half-measure: half-a-Christian, half-a-conservative, and therefore only half-a-man. (My friend Anthony described him as "the Mormon John Kerry.") So far, this election reminds me a great deal of 2004: No one's thrilled with the current occupant of the White House, but the opposition seems disorganized and incoherent. (Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain were the Howard Deans.) As youthful and frowsy and often silly as the Occupy Wall Street Movement was, those tent-dwellers really did change the dialogue. Now we're not talking about "real Americans" versus "a bunch of losers" dragging down the economy (to appropriate the language of the Tea Party); we're talking about "the 99%." That phrase even showed up in the GOP debates! Pretty incredible.  

The other thing I'm fixated on is an idea of my own called "live like one of the 10 billion." Ten billion is where the earth's population will be in 2025 or so, and I'd like to enlist the minds of Silicon Valley - the great data aggregators - to calculate the actual amount of resources (energy, land, air, water, etc) each person would be allocated, in order for each individual of the 10 billion to live comfortably on the earth. Every citizen of the earth with a smartphone (and that's a great many citizens of the earth, even at this point) could calculate how far above or below the allowable average they are. I think something like this would bring it all home: how lightly we have to live on the earth in order to keep living lightly on the earth. We first-world, middle-class folk think of ourselves as average; in fact, we're extraordinary, in terms of resource consumption. We can't think about poverty and class until we start thinking about consumption - not thinking about it morally (though that'd be a nice side-effect), but thinking about it technically.

Picasso’s Guernica defines the world I see today. When I first saw the painting in New York in the 1950s at the Museum of Modern Art, I saw it as a great work.

During the fires from the Great Dismal Swamp

During the smoke in the woods and the August fires from Great Dismal Swamp, Canaan listened to Jay Z. We love him. He’s a force, the poetry of his lyrics. Dori played a game from Japan, Jacob played Xbox. I reread Adam’s screenplay Superior Man, about double identity and betrayal. Reneè worked on her gallery of nearly a thousand women. Then came news and more news of the coming hurricane. I kept asking Adam, did he have an underground passage to climb into. And always I could not stop thinking of being almost 80. The windows were closed because of the smoke. I sat indoors and read the Chronicling Greatness interview with Terralonge, a Tuskegee Airman and his bombing raids over Germany during World War II. I couldn’t help but think that in those years I was in junior high school, worried about what color blouse to wear to school and making my movie star scrapbook. Had Terralonge saved my life?

And I still ask him, please take me to the Great Dismal Swamp. I want to see where the fires were. I complain about the loneliness of living in the woods. I miss my Manhattan apartment, my red library.

To Read More go to Adrienne Kennedy's Blog

> Click Here to go to the Blog