Ben Barnhart
Constance Congdon MFA '81
N THE OTHERWISE EMPTY THIRD ROW of a dimly lit theater in the Fine
Arts Center, on a Saturday afternoon in late spring, sits a small woman, her
short, blond hair rumpled and spiky from the fingers she keeps running through
it, a script held open on her lap. Several actors in bluejeans and odd bits
of costume a corset over a T-shirt, a motorcycle helmet are rehearsing scenes
from a new play. The woman chuckles aloud, sits forward on the edge of her
seat, and scribbles notes on her script as they make their way through the
charged moments and raucous speeches she has written for them.
It is April of 1998, and playwright Constance Congdon, who received her MFA in playwriting at UMass in 1981, is on campus to oversee the production of her play So Far, commissioned by the theater department to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary. At fifty-three and with her star still ascendant, Congdon may not be a match in name recognition for her friends and fellow playwrights Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, and Terence McNally, but her work has been produced to great acclaim both nationally and internationally.
Over the past twenty years, she's written twenty-five plays and received, among other awards and fellowships, New York Newsday's Oppenheimer Award for the Best Play of 1989, the W. Alton Jones Award for Playwrighting, and the first Arnold Weissberger Playwrighting Award. Her plays have been staged in New York, Chicago, London, and Helsinki. In the introduction to her collection, Tales of the Lost Formicans and Other Plays, Tony Kushner calls Congdon one of the best playwrights America has produced.
"Here is a writer who has not lost the understanding we all once had of the awesome power of dreams," Kushner wrote. "To spend time with these plays is to spend time with the splendid woman who wrote them; and she's all the reason anybody needs to want to try to save our species, if saving it is possible. Connie thinks it is possible, and I believe her."
Congdon seems unconvinced by the awards and
plaudits. "I'm really lucky in the sense that I know people
want to work with me, who want to read my plays,"
she says. "I'm certainly not a famous playwright, I wouldn't
even call myself a well-known playwright. But I have a good life
as a playwright," she adds.
MOST IMPORTANT
TO CONGDON is that she's able to support herself doing her work.
Teaching playwriting and dramatic literature at Amherst College,
she says, energizes her: "I don't feel disconnected from
my writing at all when I'm teaching. I actually feel connected
to it in a more profound way than if I lived in New York and
worried about career and the gossip and the politics, which are
kind of overwhelming.
"My students connect me with my writing
and what it's really about in a much more fundamental, healthy
way."
Congdon's best-known work is Tales of the
Lost Formicans, which probes life in suburbia from the perspective
of a few curious aliens. The new play, So Far, is a dark
comedy about a time "after everything bad has happened."
Although her plays differ in form, content and style, she agrees
that certain themes tend to resurface: "There's a lot about
American identity and what that is, how we fit in the world,"
Congdon says. "There is certainly a lot about sexual identity,
and an uneasy feminism. I say uneasy because it's sometimes at
odds with feminist rhetoric." She says she's also fascinated
by her native language. "English is the fastest growing
language on earth," Congdon says. "It may not be the
most beautiful language in the world but I think it's an incredibly
exciting one, and it's the chaotic nature of it that excites
me."
Congdon wrote her first play in 1975 while
teaching at St. Mary's College, a small liberal arts school in
southern Maryland. At that point she was a poet planning on an
academic career. But then, she says, "a friend of mine had
some production money and said if I wrote her a play she'd produce
it." Rising to the occasion, Congdon put herself on a schedule,
writing from the time her son boarded the bus for kindergarten
in the morning until he came home for lunch. Within three months
she had a play, and had decided she was more suited to writing
drama than to writing verse.
"I thought, `Well I like doing this!'"
she says. "I'm an extrovert so I like working with other
people, and poetry is not like that." When she moved to
Springfield with her then-husband in the mid-'70s, she applied
to a graduate program at UMass and was offered a teaching fellowship.
"I got a very good deal at UMass," she says. "I
taught English composition for three-and-a-half years and I wrote
four plays and they were all produced. One went to the American
College Theatre Festival, and one had a workshop in New York.
"I was rolling after that. After graduating
from UMass I taught at Western New England College while interning
at Hartford Stage. Then Hartford offered me a job as assistant
literary manager, and then literary manager and resident playwright,
so I stayed there for eight years." Later she freelanced
for several years during a period in which arts funding was declining
dramatically. "I was getting a little worried," she
recalls. "And then Michael Birtwistle at Amherst College
called me and asked me if I would be interested in a position."
She remembers returning Birtwistle's call from a pay phone in
New York, where she was paying $10 a night for a room and sharing
a bathroom with six other playwrights.
"Michael was asking me if I would be
interested in a job, and I looked around and thought, `Yeah,
I think so, absolutely.' So I came to Amherst College and it's
been a joy."
SOME WRITERS
ARE SQUEAMISH about seeing their own work in production, but
Congdon loves seeing her plays performed. "That's why I
became a playwright," she says. "When you write fiction
or poetry particularly fiction, I think you don't have the ability
to experience your work with your audience. Unless you watch
somebody read your book, which of course would be really irritating
for both people! But to sit in an audience and have them see
and hear something you wrote, and to have them laugh or be moved
or be interested, it's really great." That's not to say
she loves every production of her work: "I've had post-play
discussions where I've had to be nice because I didn't want to
bum the actors out." But that's just a part of the process
you have to put up with, says Congdon. She once saw a production
of Formicans done all in one color. "It was completely
blue, sets, costumes, lights, even the food was blue," she
recalls. "I hated it."
Still, apart from the occasional "blue"
production, Congdon says, playwright-ing is very rewarding. "Starting
a play is rewarding, finishing a play is rewarding. The middle
part sometimes drives me completely insane, but nothing is more
rewarding than having written well. And then having it produced
is rewarding when it goes well. When it's doesn't go well, it's
hell.
"But `goes well' can mean a lot of things.
It can mean the production was done in the most bare-bones way
with people who were all eighteen years old, but it was done
with great beauty and
elegance and love and joy. My plays are usually produced in those
smaller venues, but I've had major productions in big houses
with big budgets too. And those were not necessarily more satisfying,
by any means."
Historically, this a great time to be a playwright,
Congdon says. "I think we're living in an exciting period
for American playwriting," she says. "The sense of
form is completely open. It doesn't have to be one thing or another
thing, and audiences are quite accepting of all different kinds
of forms." She does note a shortage of publishers, however.
"In America we don't publish plays well," she says.
"In England you can go and buy a script of something before
it's even produced. Here there's a tremendous lag time between
the production and the publishing of the script, and sometimes
the script never gets published. Some of the most amazing work
of some of my friends hasn't been published. It's defeating."
The reason, she says, is money; plays don't
sell. "So those people who do publish plays, they have my
heartfelt thanks," she says. "And if I were a zillionaire
that is what I'd be doing," she adds. "I'd publish
plays. Beautiful editions of plays, so people would actually
read them and give them to each other as Christmas presents."
In the meantime, Congdon plans to keep writing plays herself,
and it's possible that more of us may hear of her in the future
by way of the silver screen. She recently received a commission
from producer Steven Spielberg, who solicits plays and retains
the right to develop them into screenplays. Spielberg likes to
fund work from playwrights, says Congdon, because "playwrights
write character and screenwriters don't. I mean good ones do,
but a lot of screenwriters don't write characters."
Congdon is working on more than one new script
at present and isn't sure which she'll submit to Spielberg's
Dreamworks. "I usually work on a couple of things at once,
so that I can move back and forth between them. Then if progress
on one slows down or stops, I just work on the other one. That
way I can still accomplish something every day as a writer, which
is important to me."
Inspiration can strike at any time, Congdon says. "For instance,
I was just awakened a few days ago very early, knowing that something
else was happening in my brain and I had to get up and write
it. I wrote twenty-two pages of a new play that's unlike anything
else I've written."
BACK AT REHEARSAL for So Far, Congdon
discusses a few lines of dialogue with one of the actresses. During a break
she paces the stage, peering at the bones of the set that will be finished
in time for dress rehearsal. She whispers and giggles with cast members as
they set their props for the next scene. Congdon says working on So Far
with UMass actors, crew, director Ed Golden, and dramaturg Virginia Scott
has been exhilarating and great fun for her. And it is obvious they are having
a good time working with her. "Sometimes when she's not sure about a
speech or some moment is not working, Connie will lean over to me and say,
`I think that moment is on life-support,'" Scott laughs. "Connie's
an awfully nice person and there's none of this `I'm the writer, you're the
peon' kind of thing with her. She's really interested in what the actors are
finding and how they are working."
Judyie Al-Balali, an MFA student and cast
member, says for her the experience has been wonderful. "Connie
loves actors, she listens to actors, she trusts actors, which
is a real gift," says Al-Balali. "She has a really
clear vision and she also knows that there's something that only
the live actor brings to the text and she's interested in hearing
that, and is open to it. You can tell she's been doing it a long
time, she's got such a confidence about her work. And she wants
to hear what you have to say."
"She's marvelous with the students, she's
marvelous with actors," says Golden, who met Congdon when
she was a student in the first acting class he taught at UMass
twenty years ago, and who's been among her close friends ever
since. "She's a perfect exemplar of the collaborative process
that this whole theater thing is supposed to be. And yet she
knows exactly how to preserve the play that she sees, that she
is convinced is right to be up there. And somehow she manages
to do that without denying anybody else. You respect her totally
for her point of view."
As for Congdon herself, she says graduate
work at UMass provided her with the skills to be a successful
theater artist. "I think UMass has a really good department,
and when I was there it was equally good. I was able to work
with great actors like Bill Pullman, Jere Burns, Andy Lichtenberg.
Wonderful actors. And I certainly learned how to work with great
designers" which paid off during her tenure at Hartford
Stage, where she found herself working with some of the countriy's
best.
Finally, says Congdon, "The thing I love about UMass is it's big, it's messy, it's very, very diverse. And sometimes it has that sort of out-of-control urban feel to it. There's an immediacy here that I still feel really aligned to."
