Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

During lockdown, not being able to see plays, I read them. I made a particular project of plowing through the first ten years of Pulitzer Prize winners. What struck me about those ten is that there were two dominant themes – the economic and social subjugation of women, and the repressive nature of small towns. In some cases (like Miss Lulu Bett by Zona Gale) the plays dramatized both.

Some of this obsession with small towns has its roots in the playwrights’ experiences. Many fled where they were raised. Some of our most significant writers were gay and wanted to get away from the communities where they were, at best, tolerated or indulged, and, at worst, threatened with humiliation and violence. They left places where people tended to know and express opinions about their neighbors’ private lives (what Edward T. Hall called high-context communities) and migrated to the comforting anonymity of cities, where people mostly don’t give a damn about what others do as long as it doesn’t doesn’t intrude on their own lives. Once there, they found others who had fled and with them built enclaves based on mutual interests and shared enthusiasms. Lanford Wilson told me that in the Sixties his playwriting peers met regularly in the cafés of Greenwich Village to compare notes, debate new work and, despite the inevitable rivalries and jealousies, support and protect each other.

The fact that they had escaped to the city didn’t mean that they could forget the hold their hometowns still had on them.

William Inge, for example, returned again and again to Independence, Kansas, a place from which he had felt alienated since childhood. He dragged Elia Kazan to Independence for research when they were preparing to film Splendour in the Grass, and Joshua Logan chose to shoot much of his film adaptation of Inge’s Picnic in Kansas. Both of these films are about the pressure on women to conform to the roles assigned to them in small towns, and how the presence (in the movies) of beefcake like Warren Beatty and William Holden stirs them up. (The trope of visiting beefcake stirring things up was a common one of the time. Valentine Xavier in Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, Starbuck in N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker and Harold Hill in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man all set hearts a-flutter and threaten the social order by their presence.) It’s ironic that a man who had such ambivalent feelings about Independence should have his memory celebrated there by an annual theater festival named for him. In addition, statues representing characters from his plays decorate one of the parks.

The threat of violence haunts many of these plays. The Klan is a part of the back story of Orpheus Descending, Mayor Shinn in The Music Man is not inclined to discourage tar-and-feathers for Professor Hill when he is exposed, and a mob threatens to murder a returning black WWII veteran in Arnaud d’Usseau and James Gow’s Deep Are the Roots. In Orpheus Descending, Lady talks about speculating that any man she passes on the street might well been a part of the gang that burned her father to death. Certainly there are killers among the good folk in Lanford Wilson’s The Rimers of Eldritch and The Book of Days.

But Lanford also wrote of how charming and nurturing places like Lebanon, Missouri (his birthplace) could be in Fifth of July and Talley’s Folly. A community that could persecute those who challenge its values could also instantly leap to a neighbor’s aid. (As the song in The Music Man goes, “But we’ll give you our shirt/And a back to go with it/If your crops should happen to die.”) Being connected to others is a core part of Tad Mosel’s All the Way Home (based on James Agee’s A Death in the Family), Ketti Frings’s adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and, of course, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

The most positive view of a small town I can recall is in Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust (recently produced in the Roundabout’s off-Broadway venue). In a suburb of Rochester, NY, in a time vaguely placed in the recent past, a man named Kenneth has been spending his days working with minimal social interaction in the stacks of a book store and his evenings sitting in a corner of a neighborhood bar where he drinks moderately by himself, at least as far as others can see. His perspective is different from theirs. They see a man alone. He sees an imaginary friend who provides him necessary comfort and company.

Then, because the owner of the book store has to sell his business, Kenneth finds himself thrust with few resources into a world he is unprepared to engage. Booth has prepared us for the worst. We worry what will become of an unprotected Kenneth.

Except Booth shows us he isn’t unprotected. The people of the town, recognizing the challenges he faces, spontaneously come to his aid. They don’t make a big show of it. They just time and again refuse to disappoint.

As I watched, I realized that I have come to expect characters in stories to disappoint. In plays, movies and high-end TV, so often the big plot twist involves a character we in the audience have been led to believe is sympathetic falling short ethically or selling out. I often don’t wait to see if a betrayal will be featured in the plot. I assume there will be. Frequently, I wait merely to see who the traitor will be. I’m probably overstating this, but I sense a crummy, low-level, ongoing hum of cynicism as the constant in a lot of contemporary storytelling.

This is part of what makes Primary Trust so refreshing. Kenneth is an oddball. In fact, he is a black oddball in a small town which, according to the conventions we have internalized from years of consuming stories, means he is set up to be a target for abuse. But Booth refuses to go there. Primary Trust has the audacity to suggest that a lot of people–maybe even most–don’t capitulate to selfish or cowardly impulses but are pleased to help someone in need. My friend Jay O. Sanders, who was in the cast, said that it was the first play he’s been in in a very long time in which every action his characters took (he played multiple characters) was benign. (Except maybe for a snooty waiter in a French restaurant.)

Of course, in a side comment, Booth has one of the characters mention that in the years since the action depicted in the play, the town has been substantially transformed, with many of the stores that once gave it its charm having been torn down and replaced by expensive condos. Maybe she’ll revisit the town in a sequel and tell us if the behavior of its citizens has changed.