February 13, 2009

My father was born 2/4/04. If he was alive he would be 105.

I feel like I have had 2 lives. My life in New Orleans and my life in NYC.

I returned to the West Village midlife to recreate a fantasy I had as a girl. I had studied with Uta Hagen (the great originator of HB Studio) and Herbert Berghoff the genius director from whom HB Studios gets its name. Back then, I wanted to be a famous actress; now I wanted to be an acclaimed playwright. Superlatives still dominate my vocabulary.

Catastrophe and a one-time miracle had spurned this new birth. A divorce, death of both parents, and the exodus of my adult children had left me bereft. I was in New Orleans, had been running a theatre and teaching college for 20 years when miracle of miracles I won a Senior Fulbright Drama Specialist appointment from the American Embassy to teach and have my plays done in Europe. Living in New York, I could travel abroad easily. Fate was pushing me out of New Orleans.

I must confess that two of my four children were studying in New York so my flight was partly nest-driven. But I believe in signs. I had met a scientist on a Southwest plane when going to a playwright’s conference at Sewanee who said, “Go to New York. I can’t think of a playwright not in New York.”

At my daughter’s high school graduation tea, when I told one mother what I was doing, going to New York to be a published playwright, she said, “Do it for all of us.”

Shortly before Katrina hit New Orleans, I sold many of my memories and moved from 4000 sf in New Orleans to 500 sf in Manhattan. I subsequently married the clairvoyant scientist.

I was born and raised in New Orleans. All my family lives or is buried there.
But now I feel like a New Yorker. In the Village one is always young and life is fresh. In the playwriting class I take at HB Studio, students range from 17 to 83. They come from Russia, Georgia, France, South America, England, India, China. All of us are immigrants weaving our lives into tapestries for others.

Most of my plays are now published thanks to catastrophe and miracles. I have lost my past, but found my future. Stories set in pre-Katrina New Orleans resonate with New Yorkers. I have pressed flesh with artists who believed in me.

This cherished enclave of artists in the Village remind me that life is about what is lost and found. I feel the old world I left under my feet in the cobble stones of the West Village.

When I walk down Bank Street I recall the times I took a subway with two suitcases of props and rehearsed near the park on Abingdon Square to get the feel of authenticity that Miss Hagen required from her acting students.

I pass brownstones, which stare at me taunting me to capture their stories, much like the mansions and alleys in New Orleans called to me to pen theirs.

The sameness and vitality of the Village delights me, and I forget that I used to write and produce theatre in the French Quarter (I once was the founding artistic director of Southern Rep) and a full professor (the second woman to be one at Loyola University). I have joined the ranks of the carefree, the nomad playwrights who find delight in the Village. My theatre survived Katrina like HB survived the loss of its founders. The Cherry Lane Theatre’s doors are open, and the Rattlestick Playwrights’ Theatre has already done a reading of one of my plays,

Play readings abound in the West Village with actors and director eager to test out new material. Ah this is after all the Big Apple. And I am in it. As they say in Louisiana, “Laissez le bon temps rouler.” Let the good times roll!”

Joke time: Two seasoned professional actors were performing The Gin Game. One actor kept leaving his seat at the card table and going over and leaning over the actress across the table. I said, “Why didn’t you stay seated, and he said, “They put the tablecloth on backwards, and I had to go over and read my lines.”

On the horizon: Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer masterwork, Our Town (running through Sunday April 12) involves one of the largest Equity casts ever seen off-Broadway, and has led to a complete renovation and redesign of Barrow Street Theater. Discount tix may be available through
tminsider@theatermania.com