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Friends United Meeting |
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July/August 2000
A Clear Leading for the Protagonist, But Not for the Playwright
By Rich Swingle
The story of A Clear Leading, its creation--and revision--is a great
example of "leading" and "corporate discernment" and
is adapted by permission from an article that first appeared in Christianity
and Theatre, a publicaton of Christians in Theatre Arts (CITA). Rich Swingle
will be perfoming his new play based on Revelation at YouthQuake this
winter.
-- Editor.
One of my pastors recently pointed out the irony of performing the sixth major rewrite of a play called A Clear Leading. In fact, if it were software, it would be "A Clear Leading 6.7." The one-person play tells the story of John Woolman, who certainly had a clear leading. He spoke out against slavery in America and in England over a century before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
First, I need a script
It was my grand ambition to take the play all over England on a bike.
Woolman had spent the last months of his life there in 1772, the same
year that England abolished slavery. But first I needed a script. I began
to devour Woolman's Journal and Major Essays and I soon discovered
that there was a wealth of dramatic material in his life. I was planning
to move to New York City to get a graduate degree in theatre, but first
I enrolled in a playwriting class at Portland State University taught
by Pauline Peotter. I showed up at class ready to write a full-length,
two-act, one-person play, but Professor Peotter, laid down the rules:
our term project could only include one act, under an hour, and must include
between two and six characters. It was a set-back, but I counted it a
step in the right direction. Indeed version 1.0 was a wonderful stepping
stone to version 2.0, my first one-person draft.
My masters degree program at Hunter College of the City University of New York brought me into contact with a number of well respected artists.
Mac Nelson, now the artistic director of Shepherd's Voice, the in-house theatre company of The Lamb's Manhattan Church of the Nazarene, was the first New Yorker to look at my first draft of A Clear Leading. He gave me keen insights into the first one-person version. James Masters, at that time the literary manager for The Lamb's Theatre Company, has had something to say about each of the versions since then.
So with all this great input I mounted the first staged reading of the play. Because I was on staff at The Lamb's Church they didn't charge me to use...the nursery. We pushed the play toys to one side and invited friends. It was a huge flop. People were mostly confused about my transitions; however, I received enough positive feedback to press on. Besides, by then I had a second booking: The North Carolina Yearly Meeting of Friends had heard about the play and wanted me to perform it for their Tercentenary.
My friend Sean Gaffney saw me at an audition and said, "Hey, Rich, I was just hired as the managing director for Taproot Theatre Company in Seattle. I'm going to drive out there. Are you up for a road trip?" We worked up a program of one and two person pieces, laid out an itinerary, and performed all the way out. We spent a great deal of it talking about the play and even did a reading of it at the Salt Lake City Friends Meeting.
Back on my family's 70-acre farm, I took a few intensive weeks to raise version 3.0. Steve Prusko, a musician/actor, flew out to meet me and we toured back across the country. A church in Ohio had invited me back to do A Clear Leading, so that was our goal. We forgot the time zone change and showed up at the Ohio church an hour ahead of the performance, which meant we were right on time...except we hadn't set up. While the congregation kept extending their worship, I threw on my costume while Steve set up the stage.
Lights up on me playing the role of a slave being whipped without mercy. As I writhed in agony, the audience squealed with laughter. Version 4.0, here we come.
The next summer I had the opportunity to house-sit for my friends Brad and Leslie Whitaker and sequester myself for some focused writing. This resulted in what I thought was going to be the final version of the play. It received a positive review in OOBR, the Off-Off Broadway Review. The Review's editor, John Chatterton called it "an entertaining, interesting, and moving theatre piece." This is it, I thought, no more rewrites!
Historical criticism
Then I performed it at Earlham College. The day after the performance,
the student paper described the play's final scene in which John Woolman
urges the audience to buy a slave--who is about to be hanged--to give
him his freedom. "Thus," the reviewer said, "John Woolman
set out on his journey to abolish slavery."
Stephanie Crumley-Effinger, the campus minister who had invited me to the college, took me aside and showed me the review. She very kindly explained that a number of professors, including herself, were disturbed by the fact that I had gone so far beyond the bounds of what was historical, and that the student community had accepted it as historical fact.
She went down a list of historical inaccuracies: there was no almost-lynching; Woolman's parents didn't ever own slaves; Sarah Ellis was an only child (I had invented a brother, Amos Ellis, as someone to represent the frivolous youth Woolman had to work against as a teenager); Woolman was a little child, not a knowing teenager, when he killed a robin. Worst of all, I implied that Woolman had gotten drunk as a teenager.
Crumley-Effinger urged me to correct those things in the play which were known to be opposed to factual history, and she urged me to become accountable not only to the artistic community but also to the Quakers, the community I represented with the play. I took what she said to heart, but a play is like a machine. If you take out elements of the plot it doesn't work anymore. I needed a new plot. An opening in the performance schedule at The Lamb's Showcase Theatre gave me a deadline for the "historically correct" version 5.0.
I took out the near-lynching; pointed out how the senior Woolmans' stand against slavery inspired young John; Amos' last name was changed to Elkins, and he became a suitor to Sarah Ellis, the "well inclined damsel" Woolman would end up marrying. I had Woolman kill the robin as a little child, and I took out implications that Woolman ever got drunk. In this new version, I gave Woolman something even greater than a noose to work against: the historical fact that he didn't convince a single person to release a slave the first ten years he worked at it.
Before I gave it an audience, I sent a copy of the script to Sterling Olmsted, a Woolman scholar with a keen sense of how the Quaker community would receive it. He made a few suggestions, which I took to heart and keyboard, and he gave it his stamp of approval.
Of course it was still a play. It was still a work of fiction, but it no longer contained the glaring contradictions that were closing doors. After sorting it all out, I was tremendously grateful that Friends had pushed me past a good script to something better. I received another positive review from OOBR, and was relaxing with what I thought was the final version.
The day after it closed in New York, I performed one hour from the play at Furman University in South Carolina. After the performance my agent, Dale Savidge, (who had agreed to represent me after seeing version 4.9 at the 1997-98 YouthQuake) took me out to coffee. He told me politely that what he saw wasn't the hour he wanted to see at the CITA Conference near Toronto. He said I'd been with the material too long and no longer had an objective view of it. He challenged me to bring in the expertise of a dramaturge, to help structure it.
"James Masters! Do you have some time on your hands?" In fact he did and even wrote a totally new, 35-minute version, just to show me how the story could be told more succinctly.
I took many of his ideas and put them into A Clear Leading 6.0 through 6.7. I set it in the context of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1758, the year Woolman rose and had a significant part in convincing the Quakers of his day to disallow any Quakers who had anything to do with slavery from having a voice in church business.
Sterling Olmsted approved. OOBR hasn't seen it yet, but I've received very positive feedback. Modern day abolitionist groups are approaching me about using the play as a vehicle for making people aware of slavery in Sudan and Mauritania.
Am I done? Probably not, but I know I have a version that is artistically and historically sound. And I see, in hindsight, that it really was a clear leading that brought me from contact to contact, experience to experience, version to version that allowed God to teach me a lot about how our giftings work in community and through process. For this I am eternally grateful.
And I finally got to bring the play on a tour of England! Michael J. Austin, artistic director of Palaver Productions arranged an 18-performance tour throughout England featuring A Clear Leading. And I didn't have to do it on a bike. Mike Day, tour manager, drove me everywhere I needed to go. In fact he was dead set against me doing any driving at all.
Copyright (c) 2000 Friends United Meeting
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