November 9, 2006
Author of Pulitzer-winning play cycle to speak
Robert Schenkkan set out to be the next Orson Welles — an actor/writer/director. Well, two out of three isn’t bad. Next week the actor turned writer will give a talk on his writing process. The presentation is slated for 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 17, in 101 Suzzallo.
Schenkkan’s talk is part of his duties as holder of the Maxine Cushing Gray Visiting Writer Fellowship at the UW Libraries. The position is not one he sought out. “It was a bolt from the blue,” he says. “They called me and told me I’d won, and then they explained what it is.”
The fellowship was established in 1985 at the Seattle Foundation by friends and admirers of the late Maxine Cushing Gray, to honor her contributions to journalism and her tireless work to recognize and encourage excellence in writing. In 2004, the award fund was moved to the UW Libraries and renamed the Maxine Cushing Gray Visiting Writers Fellowship.
Schenkkan, who has lived in Seattle for 13 years, has many plays to his credit, but he is best known for The Kentucky Cycle, a group of nine one-acts that together tell the multi-generational story of one family in Eastern Kentucky. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1992.
Schenkkan is not from that area; he grew up in Texas and earned degrees in theater from the University of Texas and Cornell University. From there he established himself as an actor in New York.
“I wanted to be this great classical actor, and that really didn’t seem to happen,” he says. “Instead I found myself doing a tremendous amount of new work, world premieres. That’s how I learned how to write plays, by participating in the process through which plays were being developed — participating as an actor. I never formally studied playwriting.”
It was while he was appearing in a new play at the Humana Festival of New Plays in Louisville that Schenkkan became interested in Eastern Kentucky. One night he met a man in the theater’s bar who was from the region and said he was going back to visit. He invited Schenkkan to come along. Schenkkan went, and became fascinated with what he saw. He began reading all he could about the region.
“I got really excited about the Cumberlands as a metaphor for America,” Schenkkan says. “This was during the Reagan Bush era and there was a great deal of rhetoric about hearkening back to a golden past and a lot of demonizing of the poor as being responsible for their own situation. And I saw that this region had generated extraordinary wealth but left very little for the inhabitants. It was very provocative material.”
Initially, he wrote a one-act. And he enjoyed the experience of that so much, — the family he’d created — that he began to think about writing an earlier piece that would set up the situation. Those two plays were presented together at Ensemble Theatre in Los Angeles. Then, with encouragement from the Mark Taper Forum’s artistic director, he began to develop the full nine-play cycle. But when it was complete, the forum passed on producing it. So he and the director of the earlier production, Warner Shook, sent it out to a few theaters, including Seattle’s Intiman Theatre.
“Liz Huddle was artistic director at the time,” Schenkkan says. “She got the play on a Friday, she called us on a Saturday to say that she’d read the play, she was committed to doing it, she didn’t know how she could afford it, but she would produce it if it meant she would do the rest of that season on a unit set.”
The play debuted at Intiman in 1991, and went on to garner a Tony nomination in New York and the Pulitzer Prize. It also changed Schenkkan from an actor-writer to a writer and it brought him to Seattle to live. During the three-month production time in Seattle, he explains, he decided that he would set aside his acting career and concentrate on the play, which was a big gamble because he was making more money as an actor than as a writer. But, he says he had so much fun with the production that it was an easy transition to writing full time. These days he writes for film and television to pay the bills, and continues his playwriting as a labor of love.
It was also during the Kentucky Cycle production that he fell in love with Seattle and vowed that if he could find a way, he would relocate. A few years later, he did just that. “I once heard somebody say that one way to achieve happiness is to live somewhere where your inner landscape is matched by your external landscape,” he says. “I think that’s true, and I think this is very much my internal landscape.”
He now lives in a house with a beautiful view of Lake Washington.
The Gray fellowship carries with it a stipend and also gives Schenkkan an office in the libraries. He recently got a tour of Special Collections. “I’m interested in going back now and seeing what they have with the idea that maybe something I encounter will spark an idea for a play or a film,” he says. “It’s really about putting myself out of my comfort zone and in contact with a random selection of wonderful exotica and seeing what happens.”
In addition to his talk next week, Schenkkan expects to be doing a master class for theater students in January — a class geared toward exploring in an improvisational manner the idea of dramatic structure.
He’s currently at work on a new play on commission for South Coast Repertory Theatre, and he’s revised a second play that premiered last year at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He’s also working on a musical and has a number of film and TV projects.
As to the future, Schenkkan would like to get back to that Orson Welles dream and do some directing. He’s avoided it so far because of the travel necessary, but says that now that his two kids are older — his youngest is in high school — he can think about it again. In the meantime, he’s happy being a writer.
“The surprise of creation, the ability to still even at this time to sit down and start something and then have it go somewhere I hadn’t anticipated, a character I hadn’t planned for, is such a pleasure,” he says. ” To construct an entire world is a very satisfying feeling. And then to see that realized in three dimensions — when it’s done well, when it all works, and watch an audience be moved by this vision that was such a solitary vision to begin with, is extraordinary. To feel in some small way that you affect people, that you can change people — It’s not a small gift.”
The Nov. 17 lecture is free and open to the public; reservations are recommended as space is limited. To register, call 206-616-8397 or e-mail uwlibs@u.washington.edu.
