Idealism Betrayed: The Art and Craft of the Playwright in Sallie Bingham’s Plays
Author Sallie Bingham is known for her novels, short story collections, and memoirs. She has also had a career in the theater that began with backyard reworkings of Shakespeare’s classics at her Louisville, Kentucky, home. She dragooned her fourth grade class girl friends to perform in these productions while she wrote, directed, and acted the leads herself. Sallie heard an adult member of the audience whisper the following: “Shakespeare would turn over in his grave.” Not understanding the phrase, Sallie intuited that it was not high praise. By the sixth grade, her friends rebelled and the outdoor evening productions illuminated by car headlights were a thing of the past.
While at Radcliff, Sallie found herself on the stage in fellow freshman Arthur Kopit’s On the Runway of Life You Never Know What’s Coming Off Next. After some wheedling by the author, Sallie played a “retarded Southern stripper” who spoke mostly in baby talk; wore a revealing, unflattering costume; and carried around a stuffed animal named “Jefferson Davis Bear.” With howling family members and friends in the audience, Sallie “got through it” but understandably soured on the theater because “you are never in control.”
After a divorce, Sallie Bingham returned to her home in Kentucky. There the memories began to flood in, and she felt the need to express herself in dramatic terms. The result was Milk of Paradise, a coming of age piece of women at various stages of their lives. Only a serendipitous meeting with Julia Nichols, Assistant Director of the American Place Theater (New York City), led to that Company’s production of her play. After returning to Louisville, Sallie had left no forwarding address from her old New York apartment. As for the production of her first play, Sallie loved the collaborative nature of theater: “I had the most fun in my life…. It was absolute heaven to let go of the play and leave the problems to the actors and director.” To this day, Sallie believes that her plays “are enriched by others’ input.”
Sallie Bingham’s process in composing her plays is all her own. She takes “huge figures” from real life and “finds the voice in the character….I can hear the characters when reading my work on the page, and I loan these voices to the characters.” Sallie reveals that she doesn’t create voices from her imagination but the process is nonetheless “quite magical”: “I see a scene, but I don’t know enough yet to hear more than a line or two of dialogue… This process must be vivid and not reflective.” Once the writing process has begun, Sallie engages in “profound focus, much research, and rigorous rewriting.”
In response to a question of the conflict between a dramatist’s vision and the realities (and limitations) of the theater, Sallie argues that the conflict is always within herself: “My worst fear” is that audience members will make the physical and financial efforts to come to the theater, and “I will have created boring parts. This is an intolerable feeling.” Making an analogy to a bad dinner party, Sallie uses her ear and her director to help her edit her work: “I hear it and then cut it.” Sallie ended her self-critique by saying that the over-sized characters she chooses to write about have such complex life experiences that at times “There is a lack of clarity in my major characters.”
Sallie Bingham is quite objective about her early work. She attempted to dramatize Kate Chopin’s The Awakening but “failed because the work is so rich an interior narrative.” In her In the Presence, Sallie tells the story of Ann Brandon, author of The Wall between Us and writer for a Louisville newspaper, who was radicalized and molded by the experience of a local firebombed black couple. Sallie says that she is attracted to those people “who are willing to change no matter the cost.” This work received two separate productions and was a prizewinner, but was not “fully satisfying.” In a departure for her, Sallie created a ten-minute monologue of a man playing a video game, Custer’s Revenge, that was a “failed experiment in language.” Finally, Sallie opines about the failure of her Paducah, a satirical work that was also produced by the American Place Theater. The play is about a threesome of husband, wife, and husband’s mistress that “no one found humorous but me.”
Sallie Bingham’s most recent forays into the world of the theater have been fully realized plays about powerful, charismatic characters. Treason, produced at the Perry Street Theater’s last production before being turned into condos in June of 2007, is the story of Ezra Pound in the last years of his life. Sallie became interested in Pound through her love of H.D.’s poetry. The younger woman had a brief, intense relationship with the older poet in her youth. Sallie was intrigued by H.D.’s long-time devotion to Pound that she only seemed to relinquish with the publication many years after the relationship in her memoir An End to Torment.
Treason begs the question of why so many talented and intelligent women would attach themselves to the egoist monster Pound reveals himself to be throughout his life. While Sallie agrees that the women are “somewhat self-deluding,” she believes they are more “products of their time” that simply “follow in the wake of a strong, talented man.” What is central to Pound’s character is his “absolute and total self-confidence that he was the world’s greatest poet.” As a result, Sallie argues, Pound “never had to earn his spurs because he was certain he was born with them.” Only an egoist with supreme self-confidence could state that “a female is a chaos” and an “explosion of emotions” Since Pound could not always control women, he posited that they were “not rational” and, therefore, such behavior allowed a talented genius of his stature to move on to other acolytes. His self-absorption was the source of his attraction and his downfall; his multiple levels of betrayal—wife, daughter, lover, student, fellow poet, and country—were a reflection of his solipsism.
Sallie’s latest play, A Dangerous Personality (ADP) is a study of the melodramatic nature and character of Helena Petrova Blavatsky (HBP), the founder of the ethical and devotional movement Theosophy in the late nineteenth century. A quick glance at the epigraphs of both Treason and A Dangerous Personality suggests the artistic direction in which Sallie Bingham’s work is headed. The Pound play’s epigraph is bleak: “Time passes and pisses on us all” (William Carlos Williams) while the Blavatsky play’s epigraph offers a way out of the trap of purely rationalist thinking: “The fairest thing we experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion at the cradle of true art and true science” (Albert Einstein).
Theosophy with its emphasis on the occult, the non-rational, and the perfectibility of the race has had devotees as wildly divergent as Gandhi (an early advocate), Hitler, and Wayne Dyer. HPB is another of Sallie’s larger-that-life characters whose “incredible persistence” are both their strength and “their liability.” Though she was a dreamer and idealist who believed in and strove to create a “just society based on the native goodness of humankind,” HPB ultimately did not understand the social and gender limitations of her age, and her reputation was ruined and her connections to individuals and all of India were broken by her inability “to understand she couldn’t do what she did.” Her betrayals by her colleague Olcutt, her age’s gender expectations, and her nature are undercut in her play’s epilogue with her return to prominence in England. Reality may be too much with us, but it need not destroy us. HBP survives the slings and arrows of life.
I asked Sallie Bingham if she still believed that “one learns more when laughing.” She agreed and suggested (I’m uncertain how seriously) that there may be a musical comedy in the future. What I am certain of is the beauty of the image she left me with when discussing her writing for the theater: “I am a ballroom dancer and working in the theater is a form of dance with its partnering and fluidity, glamour, and excitement. It is as rewarding as dance.” And it is those moments of mystery and transcendence in Sallie Bingham’s plays that allows her audience, if only for a nanosecond, to defeat gravity and hover above the harsh realities of our world.
Sallie Bingham’s A Dangerous Personality goes into three weeks of rehearsal prior to a six-week run at the “Women’s Project Theatre’s” Julia Miles Theater (West 55th Street in Manhattan).
