|
Currently
a playwright-in-residence at Chicago’s Victory Gardens
Theater, Claudia Allen has written eighteen plays both for
that theater and others across the country. She is also
well known as a teacher, both at Victory Gardens and at
most of Chicago’s major universities.
Two
of Ms. Allen’s plays, The Long Awaited and Still
Waters, have been honored with the Joseph Jefferson Award. In
1999, Chicago Magazine named her "The Best Playwright
in Chicago." Her plays have provided a showcase for local actors
as well as nationally known and accomplished performers including
Julie Harris, Tyne Daly, Sharon Gless, Mike Nussbaum and Studs Terkel.
Though
she has lived in Chicago for much of her adult life, she retains
a midwestern accent and an unpretentious manner that suggest her
roots in Clare, Michigan.
In
a recent conversation with Ms. Allen, I asked her why she prefers
drama as a form of expression over such other forms as the novel
or the short story.
"I
don’t absolutely, never write short stories," she said.
"But I can’t sit in a chair and watch people read a short
story or a novel. It doesn’t get me going in quite the same
way. I like to sit back and watch the actors and the audience. I
like the collaborative aspect of the theater.
"Every
once on a while, I get the urge to write a short story but it usually
becomes a play."
In
any drama, it is the characters, rather than the plot or the language,
who ultimately drive the action. Perhaps it is the desire to give
life to characters that provides the impetus to write plays.
"Part
of being a playwright is being a little schizophrenic," she
said, chuckling. "It’s better to write down those voices
in your head than to hear them chattering away at you."
As
she spoke of the characters she has created over the years, I wondered
which, of all of them, is most like her.
"People
have told me that Hannah Free is lot like me," she said. "And
that’s okay with me. She’s a funny, cantankerous survivor."
Hannah
Free, the protagonist of the play of the same name, is a strong
willed woman whose life-long lover, Rachel, is more introverted
and far less at ease with her sexuality, than her mate. The play
traces the story of their lives.
"But
part of the craft of writing a play is not to show too much of yourself,"
Ms. Allen said. "I like to create characters outside of myself."
As
an example of a play featuring a character outside of herself, she
offered The Usher, a play about a man who deals with his
angst about relationships and intimacy by retreating into his own
fantasy world. But though this character is outside of her experience,
he still reflects Ms. Allen’s sense of humor and creativity.
Likewise,
events in the playwright’s life can inspire the events of a
play even if the story is not autobiographical. Some elements of
Ms. Allen’s Still Waters are based on real events, though
the story itself is fictional.
Still
Waters is set at the end of World War II in a small town in
Michigan. The protagonist is a woman minister who has led her congregation
while the church’s previous minister was overseas. As the war
comes to an end, she finds herself under pressure from her church’s
elders to give up her ministry to provide a job for a returning
veteran. This leads to her fight to keep her ministry.
"People
still come up to me and ask me if my cousin ever got her church
back," said Ms. Allen, noting that her cousin was a minister
in the 1940s and was part of the inspiration for Still Waters.
"But she never actually lost her church. I used her losing
her church as a dramatic engine for the story. You’re always
drawing on yourself, your own experience as a playwright, but you
make it more dramatic."
And
the degree to which a character or event seems dramatic can change
can change over time. Ms. Allen originally wrote Cahoots
in 1987 as a send up of the "pompous playwright." But
by the time the play was produced in 2000, it had evolved into a
less satirical but far more complex work.
The
play begins in 1934 and follows the successes and failures of a
fictional playwright named Madeline Ballantine. The story centers
on her relationship with her collaborator, her showdown with the
House Un-American Activities Committee and the success she ultimately
finds at the end of her career. Along the way, the audience witnesses
changes the in the theater, and the world outside of the theater,
that took place in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
Similarly,
Fossils, a recent work about the lives of two elderly women
and the bond that forms between them, also demonstrates how attitudes
and views of the world can change over the course of one’s
life. Although the characters in that play are much older than Ms.
Allen is, she sees elements of her own experience in theirs.
"Someone
I know once told me that I wrote Fossils and then lived it,"
she laughed, "Writing a play like this gives you some control
that you wish you had in real life."
Fossils
deals with old age. Finding dignity and love after the prime of
one’s life is a recurring theme in Ms. Allen’s work. Winter
concerns the relationship of an elderly married couple, Marcus and
Miriam, and Dotha, whom Marcus wanted to marry in his youth and
for whom he still has strong feelings, even as the infirmities of
old age rob him of his independence.
They
Even Got The Rienzi follows an old man who, after a long hospital
stay, finds that the single room occupancy hotel in which he had
been living has been torn down, leaving him homeless.
"You
always write about people you care about," Ms. Allen said.
"Old people have lived very full lives and that gives another
dimension to their character. And they don’t appear on stage
very often. I also like to keep around the neat old gals I knew
when I was growing up but who are gone now. You can keep the feeling
of those characters around even if they’re gone."
After
talking with Ms. Allen about some of her better known characters,
it was clear that most of them in some way reflect her personality
and attitudes. But, in her view, which of her characters is she
least like? This proved to be a much more difficult question to
answer.
"You
really have to love all of your characters," she said. "You
have to make all of them three dimensional. You may not approve
of what they do, but you have to love all of them anyway."
And
all of the characters in Ms. Allen’s works comprise a very
wide spectrum. Her work ranges from the drama of Still Waters
and Winter to the wild comedy of Ripe Conditions and
the pop culture satire of Xena Live!
Ripe
Conditions is the story of two brothers in rural Michigan whose
lives are sent into turmoil when a woman with whom they are both
enamored returns to their town. One of Allen’s funniest plays,
it features a house demolished by a tornado, chain saw sculpture,
and a live chicken in the cast.
Xena
Live! is a staged version of the popular television series,
Xena, The Warrior Princess. Along with the familiar characters
and elaborately choreographed battle scenes, Ms. Allen brought in
some original elements, such as a musical number featuring dancing
ravens and Asian long horned beetles.
"I
did Xena because it was an interesting challenge," Ms.
Allen said. "I thought it would be fun to do something wildly
different from what I usually do. I knew I had an audience with
the people who liked Xena on TV, but I also wanted to do
something that people who were not into Xena would want to
see.
"While
it was running, one of my students said to me, ‘Wow, you wrote
Xena?’
All of a sudden I seemed more hip." she laughed.
But
just as there are always funny moments in the most serious of Ms.
Allen’s dramas, there are underlying ideas in her comedies.
Some fans of Xena Live! have admired the archtypal struggle
between good and evil that it portrays. Ms. Allen told me that one
audience member even cried during a performance.
And
though Ripe Conditions was conceived as a comedy, some audience
members have found elements of the characters that reach beyond
the merely humorous.
"Actually,
some people have said that Ripe Conditions says a lot about
sibling relationships," Ms. Allen said. "I’ve had
people tell me, ‘I know those guys. They live right down the
street from my mother.’"
Perhaps
it is this aspect of the theater that addresses the first question
I posed to Ms. Allen, that is, what is the attraction of drama over
other literary forms? Audiences of all of Ms. Allen’s plays
see something of themselves, or people they know, in the world she
creates in the confines of the theater. The theater provides immediate
communication between the cast, the audience and the playwright.
For Ms. Allen and many other writers, the desire for that communication
forms the heart of the work. 
|
