A hint of what success can feel like

“There is really nothing in this world so heady for a writer as theatrical success. It is unmistakable. It is instantaneous.”

— S.N. Behrman

Behrman ought to know. He was a supremely successful playwright from the 1920s through the ’60s. 

The Harder Courage hasn’t had a full production yet, but after its recent developmental workshop at Theatre 33, I have an idea of what Behrman meant by “heady.” It’s not every day that a developmental workshop earns a long standing ovation. I was in the back row watching people leap to their feet. And the comments afterward were so encouraging! It took me days to come down to earth.

I applied for the workshop because I knew the show was good, but there was something I was missing. The play needed new eyes on it to see what I couldn’t. Now that the show has been touched by such capable yet gentle hands, I’m confident in it.

Director Rod Ceballos took my two-character drama and made it so much better by suggesting I add two characters and cut back on the “information overload.”

Adding the men’s wives was exactly the right move. At first I was doubtful, but promised myself that I could always take the women out later if they didn’t work. But they did work. They are only in a few scenes, but they drive the scenes they’re in, and they add greatly to the men’s characters simply by being there. 

They drive the play’s only four-character scene, when the wives comfort their husbands on the morning of the hanging. When audiences were asked about what images will remain with them, many of them singled out that scene.

Their presence also allowed me to convert several monologues to dialogues, giving greater impact to the monologues that remain.

As for information overload, that’s a problem that all historical playwrights have. There was a discussion about it on the Official Playwrights of Facebook just the other day. We work so hard to dig up this information that we can’t wait to share it with the world. Also, we omit so much that we don’t realize how much we still leave in. What I have to remember is the same rule I follow as a storyteller: The audience is not reading a book. They don’t have the luxury of flipping back several pages and re-reading something. If you include information, make sure it’s essential to the story.

Two other things I did in the workshop: I rewrote some of the women’s scenes after I heard what the actors were bringing to the roles; and I made cuts throughout to bring playing time to under two hours. Omit needless words, as Strunk and White would advise. I found a lot of words that I hadn’t realized were needless until I heard them in rehearsal. I had to kill a few darlings to do it. For example, there’s a scene where Robert begins to tell a very difficult and important story from his past, but he deviates briefly to make a quip. It’s funny, and totally in character, and the actor loved it, but it interrupted at a moment when an interruption didn’t work for the play. Snip!

The cool thing was that the scenes all played better after the needless words were snipped. I honestly had no way of being sure until I heard the actors rehearse the new scenes.

Once the play was frozen, I took notes during the post-show audience talkbacks, which were very insightful. I have made a few changes to the script post-workshop based on some of the questions and comments. 

For example, one person wondered why a white man was playing the role of Robert. The short answer is that the real Robert was Caucasian. But it isn’t the first time people have asked, and I’ve puzzled for years on how to address it. A member of my writing group also had assumed Robert was black, and clear back at the first workshop in 2013, an audience member asked if he was black. In fact, I just remembered that in my very first telling of this story as an oral tale with the Portland Storytelling Guild, a member of the Holmes family in the audience said she always thought Robert was black.

I think they all assume this because (1) a lynch mob is after him; and (2) his complexion, as recorded in the jail roster, is “dark” and his hair is black. (Although the 2013 script did not include details about his appearance, and I still got the question).

Historically, lynch mobs in the Pacific Northwest were primarily motivated by mistrust of the law. They didn’t want the law to waste time on due process for people that the mobs believed were guilty of crimes. The majority of their targets were white men. But modern audiences understandably think immediately of the racial terrorism in the South after the Civil War that targeted mostly young black men and boys. There were nearly 200 lynchings in America in 1891 and more than 200 in 1892, the two years covered by the play, and the majority of those lynchings were in the South.

Lynching, for those who don’t know, is extrajudicial execution by a mob that acts as judge, jury and executioner. Hanging is often the method, and shooting is also common.

After the workshop, I ran across expanded details about the first Washington state lynching of 1891 (previously, I didn’t have enough details to use it). The victim was a 15-year-old Okanogan boy who was a material witness to a murder. His tribe was raising $1,000 bail when a masked lynch mob took him out of jail and hanged him. They assumed he had committed the murder, and when they later learned they’d killed an innocent boy, they just shrugged. 

In the rewritten scene, Ben and Robert are hiding from the lynch mob that’s after him. Ben tells Robert about the boy that was lynched. Robert has heard about the lynchings of black men in the South, and he asks, with growing panic, “Up here, are they lynching Indians? Because my black hair — people ask me if — I’m NOT, but —” Ben tells him that there’ve been three more lynchings that year in Washington, all white men. That doesn’t calm Robert’s fears, but it does tell the audience that he’s not a person of color, and the lynch mob in his case is not racially motivated.

I’ve never found evidence that anyone thought Robert was Native American (it would have been mentioned in the newspapers along with all the other rumors), but his youngest son, Frisco, was mistakenly assumed to be Native American several years later. Incidentally, I’ve combed through Robert’s genealogy and found that his maternal grandmother was Welsh. I believe that’s where he got his black hair and swarthy complexion.

I didn’t want to spend too much time on clarifying this, but it obviously took some people out of the play, so I needed to devote a few lines to it. The important thing to me is that this is NOT a play about a hanging or an attempting lynching or crime and punishment. It doesn’t even matter if Robert was guilty or innocent. It’s the story of a friendship.

Also at the workshops, many people wanted to learn more about Susan. I’m excited to report that a member of the Holmes family will be sending me a newspaper story about her and some of her poetry. I will have her voice! I won’t know what I’ll do with it until I have it.

So what’s next for The Harder Courage? On Thursday, Aug. 29, I held a reading, and we’re hoping to produce the play in 2020. After this appetizer, I’m hungry to know what real theatrical success tastes like!

I’ll keep you posted!

(also posted on WordPress: https://leslieslape.wordpress.com/blog/)