Posted: Wednesday, 24 February 2010 11:12AM
Corbett, We Hardly Knew Ye
Steve Corbett Reporting
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
About 10 years ago I sat alone night after night after night in the attic of our home in Wilkes-Barre. Pondering deceit, delusion and love, I wrote a play that boiled deep within my psyche.
I didn’t really know how to write a play but wanted to try. I knew how to write newspaper columns and had even written a novel – unpublished to this day. But the construction of a play awaited my mental pick and shovel.
My friend Jason Miller, the late, great Scranton playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner for his own play “That Championship Season,” had agreed to read my first draft. I had asked the master, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as a tormented priest in “The Exorcist,” to guide me.
And guide me he did, with all the aplomb of a demon hurling me out the window of a Georgetown townhouse.
I still have the yellow legal tablet pages on which I took notes as he methodically took me and my play apart. I listened and tried to keep from crying on the phone. I had put everything into the play. Why did Miller have to beat me up and knock me around like a grizzled old pro hammering a young, untested fighter in the gym?
Jason pounded me because I asked for it and he wasn’t about to give me anything less than the expertise he learned from the West Side streets all the way to Broadway. You learn from a beating. And Jason wanted me to know the ropes and how they can strangle you if you get caught off guard.
But the more he spoke, tearing and ripping and moving me forward into the real world of theater, the more I understood that his criticism was as dead-on. He knew what I had to do to turn a primitive skeleton into a full-bodied three-act play. And he encouraged me to do it.
When we hung up, I sat alone, angry and feeling sorry for myself. But I knew that if I truly wanted a play, I had to take the criticism and the heat. I had to head back into the attic, where I spent about a year re-working the script. I shaped new words and scenes and characters into something I would be proud to turn over to Jason and maybe one day to the world.
A year later I packed up the pages and sent them to the Brooks Building, Jason’s home in the heart of the city he loved more than any other. Based in Scranton, my play is loaded with the kind of people Jason loved – misfits and simple heroes, the failed losers who sometimes become winners by virtue of the dignity they possess that money can’t buy.
When the phone rang this time, Jason said, “You did a hell of a job on the rewrite.”
Because the play has a rough edge of harsh reality and bitter cynicism, Jason said the play would better fit a stage in Philadelphia rather than a stage in Scranton. He said he wanted to direct it. He said we would talk. Two weeks later he was dead.
A heart attack felled him as he sat with his one true love Dana, a drink and a cigarette over the Sunday papers at a booth in Farley’s, just a few blocks from his home and the plaza where a bust now memorializes his spirit.
Friends and family held a memorial service at St. Pat’s in West Side.
Jason was gone.
But his spirit remains.
The Scranton Public Theater that he long supported and encouraged continues in that spirit of theater and life. As part of its mission, SPT actors, directors and supporters founded a playwriting project in Jason’s honor.
So when I saw a call for scripts last year, I sent them mine.
Sometime this month, the public will be invited to attend a live reading of that play.
The script is shorter now, thanks to another friend and theater master who helped me from the beginning, and will be ready for public reception in Scranton in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully the reading will occur before St. Patrick’s Day because the play deals with the sweet delusion and painful deception that shapes the underbelly of Irish America in Scranton.
Called “Paddy, We Hardly Knew Ye,” the title of my play is drawn from the 1972 book of memories about the late President John Fitzgerald Kennedy called “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.”
Lace curtain Kennedy had Camelot and the delusions born from privilege. My shanty Irish characters have Scranton and the delusions born from struggle.
My play might make you laugh and/or cry. My play might anger you so much that you walk out. My play might upset the new bishop because a Scranton bishop is a character.
Whatever happens, my play is a worthwhile experience. It’s all about Scranton and all about you.
If all goes well, SPT might mount a full-scale production.
I’m ready. Scranton is ready. Are you ready?
Like Jason always said, “Go Irish.”
|
Corbett
E-Mail
Print
