Capturing Characters on Stage for the College and Community: An Interview with Playwright Rex Stephenson
By Tina L. Hanlon, associate
professor of English at Ferrum College and the Hollins University Summer
Graduate Program in Children’s Literature. She is a coeditor of
Crosscurrents of Children’s Literature: An Anthology of Texts and
Criticism (2006) and director of the website AppLit.
Originally appeared in Virginia
Libraries (Vol. 54, No. 3-4), a quarterly journal published by
the Virginia Library Association).
Most people probably think
of theatres and libraries as being worlds apart, but Ferrum College’s
Sale Theatre and Stanley Library are next door to each other. Thanks
to recent renovations on campus, only a few steps will take you from
the library’s back door into the theatre, across an attractive patio
that theatre-goers enjoy during summer plays. Many of those plays have
been written by R. Rex Stephenson since he founded the Blue Ridge Dinner
Theatre in 1978. Even during years when getting inside the library required
more steps, there was plenty of traffic between the two buildings. Drama
majors writing and performing their own senior plays over the years
had no excuses for shirking on their research or writing skills, with
librarians and tutors next door in the library. Among many dramatic
requests for library resources, the most unusual one was probably a
trash can borrowed once for a prop. Librarian George Loveland had fun
putting a bar code on it, checking it out, and later sending an overdue
notice to get the trash can back from the theatre. Faculty members,
librarians, visiting actors, and local children who come together to
perform in summer plays pop into the library to read a magazine, use
the Internet, or do a little background research during short breaks
from arduous labor in the theatre. And Stephenson’s remarkable career
as a playwright, director, and actor often takes him to libraries and
archives for research and performances.
Soon after he came to Ferrum
to teach drama in 1973, Stephenson began adapting Appalachian Jack Tales,
traditional folktales about the magical adventures of a country boy
named Jack. In his seventies in the late 1970s, the renowned storyteller
and folklore collector Richard Chase visited Ferrum as a consultant
for Stephenson’s Jack Tale Players. Chase’s books The Jack Tales
and Grandfather Tales have made mountain folktales from Virginia
and North Carolina popular throughout North America since the 1940s.
“Wicked John and the Devil,” about a mean blacksmith who tricks
the devil, is a tale that Chase told orally to Stephenson so that he
could dramatize it without permissions expenses, and it is still a perennial
favorite with the Jack Tale Players. Since 1999 Stephenson has also
adapted tales with female heroes, such as “Ashpet,” “Catskins,”
and my favorite, “Mutsmag,” about a spunky girl who defeats a giant
and a witch. Stephenson’s own roles in “Mutsmag” range from playing
a door and a giant’s ugly daughter to a one-eyed robber and the king
of Virginia.
In December 2005 the Jack Tale
Players gave their thirtieth anniversary performance at Callaway Elementary
School, in the same auditorium as their first public show in 1975. They
have performed more than 3,000 times in 35 states and England, at schools,
veterans’ hospitals, parks, churches, conferences, and community centers.
One public performance last summer kicked off a library summer reading
program, “Tales, Legends, and Lore,” at the Spencer-Penn Center
in Spencer, Virginia.
In 2007 the Southeastern Theatre
Conference honored Stephenson with one of the most prestigious awards
in the field of child drama, the Sara Spencer Award. Nellie McCaslin,
who remained a mentor after supervising his doctoral work at New York
University in the 1980s, dedicated the eighth edition of her creative
drama textbook to Stephenson in 2005 just before her death ended a distinguished
career as a dramatist, scholar, and professor. She called Stephenson’s
summer plays for families “a unique and highly successful example
of intergenerational theatre,” praising the Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre
for the professional and social benefits of productions in which local
and professional actors, young interns, teenagers, and children work
together, drawing in parents, tourists, and others to enjoy the plays.
[1] This collaboration is also led by Executive Director Jody D. Brown,
a retired English professor and excellent actress. Emily Rose Tucker,
who started as a summer college intern, is musical director, composer,
and often a lead performer in BRDT plays.
Many characters that Stephenson
brings to life from the pages of folklore archives, historical documents,
and classic literature find themselves back on library shelves in his
published plays. His folktales appear in six published scripts and several
textbooks and journals. Eighteen other published plays are based on
historical events, from Galileo’s scientific discoveries to a trial
that freed a woman from slavery in Franklin County, as well as Bible
stories and literature by Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll,
Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain. Stephenson has also portrayed the American
master of fiction and social satire for many years in An Evening
with Mark Twain. [2] One of the first times Stephenson asked me
to serve as a script consultant, for The Jungle
Book, he ignored my protestations that I was not a Kipling expert,
so I went off to the library to read more about Kipling. Subsequent
research has taken me to Dickens’ homes in southeastern England and
to the OED to figure out whether words such as “Dad” and “teenager”
were anachronistic in nineteenth century dialogue. When I found myself
on local television with Stephenson and McCaslin in 2000, the interviewer
was amazed to hear how many variations of “Snow White” we had studied.
Thus I learned firsthand that these plays involve varied types of research
and offer interesting possibilities for educational projects. I prepared
study guides for several of Stephenson’s plays published by Pat Whitton
Forrest at New Plays for Children in Charlottesville, who likes to integrate teaching
materials with the scripts she publishes. I enjoyed digging deeper into
the playwright’s views on drama and research for this interview.
VL Were libraries
important to you when you were young in rural
Indiana, before you became a playwright
in Virginia?
RRS Because I was a
commuter at college, when I had free time, I went to the library; and
the more I was there, the more I discovered things. My biggest discovery
during my freshman year was the reference room. I found answers to every
question I have ever had in there. As a matter of fact, the reference
librarian got to know me by my first name. I didn’t make very good
grades my freshman year, but I learned a lot.
I like a library. I like the smells of a library. I like the feeling of being in a place where they have
everything I want. There’s
something about a book—you hold it and you look at the words and you
read it out loud. Then you go to the bibliography and you get to find
more books. Sometimes when I’m in a library I just pull out a book
at random and read a couple of paragraphs to see if the author is an
ordinary writer or a wordsmith. I worry that kids today don’t appreciate
a library. It’s gotten to be a generational thing. When my daughter
Juliet thinks of doing research she goes to the Internet. But libraries
are important for kids; they are safe, and generally filled with people
who enjoy reading and helping people find what they’re looking for.
VL I know you started
dramatizing Appalachian folktales in 1975 after your daughter Janice
brought home a copy of Richard Chase’s
The Jack Tales from school. I’ve heard that
many other storytellers and writers
were inspired by hearing a librarian or
teacher read these same folktales during
their childhood. Do you encounter many people who know the folktales
from books?
RRS It is amazing the
number of people that will come up to me after a show and say, “My
third grade teacher read us these stories when I was in elementary school.”
I remember once we were playing at a festival in Newport News and a
lady showed me her copy of The Jack Tales. She had asked for
it for Christmas because the copy in the library was always checked
out. I’m also astonished at the number of people I’ve met that had
heard Richard Chase tell stories. And all that have talked to me speak
of their encounter with Chase almost reverently. [3] I can say honestly
that Chase was the finest storyteller I ever heard.
VL
How important has research been since you began writing your own
plays?
RRS
When I first started dramatizing the Jack Tales, our library got me
all kinds of books on interlibrary loan on folktales and Appalachian
history. Back then, Appalachian Studies wasn’t “in.” I was over
there every other week bugging them. They were good about getting every
book or article I was looking for. Luckily for me later, I met Richard
Chase, Cratis Williams, and members of the Hicks family of North Carolina
storytellers. This combination of hearing the stories and listening
to the background of the tales plus the scholarly research included
in books by Chase and Williams gave me an appreciation I try to capture
when I dramatize a folktale. When I went to the American Folklife Center
at the Library of Congress, that’s when I discovered the work of earlier
Appalachian storytellers and collectors, such as Jane Gentry and Isobel
Gordon Carter. Raymond Sloan was another excellent collector of folktales
and folk songs in Franklin County. He told me stories, explained how
the Virginia Writers’ Project worked when he collected for the WPA,
and gave me names of people to interview.
Another fortuitous thing that
happened was just pure dumb luck. I was tracing back some of Chase’s
informants and I went to Wise County in search of Dicey Adams, who had
told Chase a number of Jack Tales. She was the widow of James Taylor
Adams, who had headed the Virginia Writers’ Project in southwestern
Virginia. When I talked to Dicey, she told me that everything they had
on folklore had been given to a local library. At the library, I found
the “lost” folklore collection that had not been published
when the Virginia Writers’ Project closed in 1942. It was thousands
of pages packed away in boxes, with all the WPA collectors’ original
stories from southwestern Virginia. Most of the folktales that I have
dramatized came from this collection.
VL
And the same James Taylor Adams Collection is now archived in Ferrum’s
Blue Ridge Institute. The links between the oral tradition, archives,
and books are fascinating. I’ve read that librarians spread the
art of telling traditional folktales to children around America and
Britain in the early twentieth century. In Chase’s books and many
other collections by storytellers, the authors encourage readers to
tell the tales out loud in their own way after reading them. In your
story theatre performances with the Jack Tale Players, I’ve heard
you encourage audiences to read the tales in books by Richard Chase
or the Grimm Brothers. How do you view the
relationship between your adaptations and stories in books?
RRS
At every show we try to do a little plug for reading. After we tell
the audience about the books, librarians sometimes say, “We don’t
have it but we’ll get it before you come back next time.” I just
want kids to discover reading and Mr. Chase’s books. Once I had a
rare invitation to say a few words to the audience when I attended a
production of my adaptation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court. I used this opportunity to encourage them all to read Twain’s
version. To me, an adaptation of a classic story should just be the
springboard that encourages children to go back to the original source.
VL Tell me about
your summer performances at the Franklin County Library. I’ve seen
the meeting room there packed with enthusiastic audiences of all ages
at Jack Tale shows.
RRS We used to perform
at the Rocky Mount Community and Hospitality Center in the old train
station, too, or the courthouse, but since the new library opened a
few years ago, we have performed there. The meeting room is not an ideal
space for a performance, but to do a show surrounded by books—it is
a great environment. Getting to know and working with a good children’s
librarian is important. Franklin County has one of the best in Joyce
Tuckloff. One of the good things about performing at the library is
that children and parents come to the shows together, or children and
grandparents, unlike our shows in the schools.
VL I agree with what
you’ve said about the joys of libraries and books. But librarians
also make valuable electronic resources available to us these days.
When my website AppLit was created
during a workshop sponsored by our library and the Appalachian College
Association in 2000, you ran over to the library several times bringing
me material for AppLit’s first bibliographies and study guides.
How has the Internet contributed to your work as a dramatist?
RRS There are things
on the Internet that would not get wide distribution if it were not
for sites like AppLit. The example that comes to mind is the
story Raymond Sloan told me, “Jack and His Lump of Silver.” I had
published his story in a small journal, and I doubt if many people read
it there. However, when it went on AppLit, I know a number of
people read the story. For example, my sister-in-law, Sharon Stephenson,
heard a storyteller in Indiana tell “Jack and His Lump of Silver.”
She said, “My brother-in-law tells the same story.” And the storyteller
said, “Yes, I got it on a website from a little college in Virginia.”
Whenever we do kids’ shows, we like to provide teachers with background
information. Now we just recommend the website, and not only do teachers
use it, but we’ve also discovered their students go to it.
VL
Writing your adaptations of classic literature requires getting to
know the books very well. Sometimes you even include the author as a
character in the frame story of a play. What kinds of research are involved
in writing these plays?
RRS
Most of the classics I have dramatized came out of my youth. They were
the books I read and reread as a child, like Treasure Island,
or books like Alice in Wonderland that I read to my girls. Then,
because I love them so much, to try to stay objective a little bit,
I’ll usually go over to Stanley Library and spend an afternoon with
criticism and biography so I can see what other people have said about
the story, or just sometimes to try to get in the author’s head, to
find out why he wrote this story. I try to tell the same story the author
told.
My research on Robert Louis
Stevenson led to the frame story about him and his stepson in my play
Treasure Island. I discovered that he wrote the book chapter by
chapter as a gift for his stepson when he didn’t have money for anything
else. It seemed like a logical frame, more appealing to modern children
because the relationship was through a divorce and remarriage. They
got along so well that they make good role models for families today.
VL
How do you research your plays based
on historical events?
RRS In most of the history
plays I’ve written, I’ve had historians that provided a lot of guidance
for me. Historians by their very nature always send you to the primary
sources. What constantly amazes me is how many primary sources you can
find in a library. When I was writing a play about Cecil Sharp, the
English folklorist who collected folk songs in the South and came through
Franklin County in 1918, I think I spent three days in London doing
research at the Cecil Sharp House (home of the Vaughan Williams Memorial
Library and the English Folk Dance and Song Society). After that, the
play wrote itself.
My most recent endeavor,
When the Lights Go on Again, is a musical revue about World War
II. I not only wanted it to encompass the music of the era, but I also
wanted the story line to be about something. Now, I grew up in a time
when people talked about the war a lot. Most of my relatives had been
in the service or had worked in defense plants, and I remember always
listening to their stories. And oftentimes the name Ernie Pyle came
up. One day in my high school library I ran across a copy of his book
Brave Men. I’ve been an Ernie Pyle fan ever since. I think part
of the reason that I almost memorized some of Pyle’s newspaper articles
was so that I could be included in the conversations with my relatives
about the war. It was just logical for me to go back and include excerpts
from his wartime articles in my musical revue.
VL Your family plays
have been supported by the Nellie McCaslin Endowment each summer since
your mentor at New York University died in 2005. Tell me about the special
relationship between Nellie McCaslin and Ferrum College.
RRS Dr. McCaslin was
always a strong proponent of inter-generational theatre—in other words,
blending performers of a variety of ages into one production—so it
was not really difficult for me to talk her into becoming one of our
actresses in some summer plays. She was, I think, eighty-four when she
did her first play for me in 1999. The youngest member of that cast
was seven, so it was truly cast in a manner that she had long advocated.
We were very fortunate at Ferrum
that Dr. McCaslin left her personal library to Stanley Library. She
had all the primary books from the early history of children’s theatre
and creative drama plus so many modern reference works and plays. Because
Dr. McCaslin’s tenure at NYU was so long, whenever one of her students
would publish something, they would automatically send her a copy. If
you add into that the fact that she probably knew personally most practitioners
of creative drama in the United States and England, and they would also
send her books, it was indeed quite an impressive and unique collection.
VL
I admire the way you capture the language and rhythms of
the original text when you adapt classic works of literature. Book lovers
often criticize dramatic adaptations or films because they don’t include
everything in the book. How do you handle this problem when adapting
a novel?
RRS Little Women:
A Musical is the play we are working on now and it’s been the
most difficult adaptation I’ve done since Alice in Wonderland
(1995). I think this is true because everything in Louisa May Alcott’s
book is so interrelated; everything depends on something else and the
characters’ relationships are so complex—yet they seem so very,
very simple. Deciding what to put into the play to capture the spirit
of the book in an hour and a half is challenging. In addition, there
is her use of language; it is very honest and yet it is emotional and
detailed and creates pictures. When I read the book, I had these images
in my head of how it would look on the stage. I also asked readers of
the novel which parts they most remembered. For most playwrights, their
job is to create a character; in an adaptation you have to
capture a character. Alcott’s words are also melodic and we used
some of them in the songs. Some things just can’t be said any better
than her exact words. For example, there’s no better way to write
about Beth’s long illness than to describe it as a tide going out.
Shakespeare couldn’t have done better. What’s always in the back
of my head, especially during this play, is that on opening night, Louisa
May Alcott has a seat right next to mine.
Jo
March’s last line at the end of Stephenson’s
Little Women illustrates the continuing relationship between
his plays and the books he adapts. Telling the
audience a little about her future, Jo says,
“If you want to find out more about what happens next
in my life, you can read Little Men.”
Notes
1. Nellie McCaslin, “The
Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre: A Recipe for Success,” Stage of the
Art, Winter 2002, http://www.ferrum.edu/news/
2. Tina L. Hanlon, comp., “Dramas
and Tales by R. Rex Stephenson,” AppLit: Resources for
Readers and Teachers of Appalachian Literature
for Children and Young Adults, Ferrum College, http://www.ferrum.edu/applit/bibs/bibrex.htm.
Provides details about publications.
3. Sandy Shuckett, “Regarding
Richard Chase: Two Memorable Meetings,” California Libraries,
August 2004, http://www.cla-net.org/events/newsletter/aug04_RichardChase.php.
Coincidentally, while this article was being written, an email from
California author Kerry Madden brought us a copy of librarian Sandy
Shuckett’s article about meeting Chase.