Introduction
A couple of years ago I was kind of fucked up in the head and the heart, and so I attended a sort of spiritual/wellness retreat down South. There was a woman at the retreat who had recently lost her mother to cancer, and she was very angry and very sad and very inconsolable and alone. The other people at the retreat were empathetic toward her at first, but she kept them at a distance, and pretty quickly they kind of just let her be. I started talking with the woman, and after a day or two she started talking back and sharing her story with me, and before long she was able to join the others and become part of the group, and I remember that I felt very good about that at the time. I kind of thought to myself, "Other people didn't seem to care enough about this woman, but I did. Other people kept her at a distance, but I didn't. What a good, caring guy I must be."
Four months later, I was smoking a cigarette and freezing my ass off outside a hospice in the Bronx where my own mother was now rapidly dying of cancer, and where I was now the one who was angry and sad and inconsolable and alone, and my thoughts suddenly turned to that woman from the retreat and those other people who were there, and I realized the following: Those other people were not uncaring; they had kept their distance because they were scared of the inevitable losses in their own lives. And what I had given that woman back then was really only a well-meaning but contrived appearance of intimacy—because the truth was that I had kept my distance just like the others, because I was scared too. And in that moment outside my mom's hospice in the Bronx, I wanted to call that woman and tell her about my newfound discovery and apologize to her, until I realized that she had already been through all of this, and therefore she already knew. I mention this for two reasons: first, because I've come to learn that the world can be soberly divided into those who've lost their mothers and those who haven't; and second, because in my particular case, my mom was very much alive when I started writing this play and she was dead before I was halfway through.
The play itself came about because I was fortunate enough in 2005 to receive a commission to write a new play for a theater in midtown Manhattan. I was excited about it, because all my plays have been done below Twenty-third Street and I liked the challenge of trying to write a play that would bridge the gap between my kind of audience (younger, downtown) with their kind of audience (um, not quite so young). Now, I'm not one of those people who roll their eyes and look down their noses at the older audiences. These are, after all, the people who have kept theater alive in this city for the last fifty years, and it's not because they're idiots. In general, they care a great deal about the theater, they support it generously, and they mostly know the difference between a good play and a piece of crap. These are people who saw Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie and Brando in Streetcar. They saw all the great musicals. Many of them saw the early Albee plays, and both witnessed and nurtured the birth of Off-Broadway. To my mind, these are folks who know a thing or two, and I wanted to try and write something that would speak to and challenge them as well as speak to and challenge my kind of crowd. I thought of my mom, who grew up in the $1.10 balconies of old Broadway, and I thought of my peers, and I thought of all the students still coming up. I thought of them all sitting together. And I got excited. And here was the clincher: the theater had these beautiful, plush red velvet seats. And as they took me on a tour of their space, I was, I admit, transfixed by those red velvet seats. In fact, as I sat in one of those very comfortable red velvet seats and stared out at the stage and its wings, I kinda started crying a little. I decided, right then and there, that I would write a family play. Everybody's got a family, so everybody might in some way relate to whatever it is I ended up writing. There. Done. I told the awesome Literary Manager my intentions, she said "Great," and that was that. I was pretty thrilled . . .
Of course, writing a play is easier said than done. And the process of writing this one was especially challenging—and then my mom just suddenly died. Before she died, I was kinda having a pretty rough time in general anyway, so when she became quite ill without warning and then passed away about a month later, the whole world essentially stopped. My sister and I took care of my mom every day and night until she passed, and then, the night she died, I immediately moved back in with my dad, where I still am, because he's old and his life had just gotten ripped out from under him, and I just couldn't imagine him being left all alone. So I moved in with him, and it was tough. My mom was the family's common denominator—she was the emotional linchpin, the alpha parent—and now everything just got real quiet. For quite some time. And since my play—though not strictly autobiographical—dealt with both family issues and aspects of my mom herself, I had no desire or ability to go sit back at a desk and deal with it. But eventually, after some months passed, I did. I would sneak off into the back room and try to write and nothing would happen, but at least I was sitting there. Then, one night, words started coming out, and I ended up being able to write what is now the first scene in Act Two, where the mom cross-examines the son about when he's going to get back together again with his long-gone 3500-miles-away-and-couldn't-be-happier ex-girlfriend. For other writers out there, I think it's true that some things are too fresh to write about until time has passed, and maybe that was true of me when I was writing this play, but in this particular instance, I realized later that what I had done was to take a side door back into the play. I wasn't ready to deal with the death stuff or the anger stuff, but I was able to have a little fun with the familiar reality of the overcurious and meddling mother, and the ex-girlfriend part was something I had enough distance from that I could dredge it up and see where it led.
I don't know that I've ever felt more grateful for having written anything than I felt after having written that scene that night. And then, after I wrote that scene, I was slowly able to move into more difficult territory, and eventually I had about two-thirds of a play. I called the theater with the red velvet seats, we had a reading, and the play was scheduled, but then it fell through. It fell through because of me. The play wasn't finished, and so the theater was nervous, but they still wanted to do the play—just not in the theater with red velvet seats. They wanted to do it in their other, smaller, non-red-velvet-seated space, which was more than reasonable, since the play was incomplete, but somehow, perhaps irrationally, it no longer felt right to me. People have sat on the floor during my plays—on broken seats, on milk crates, on folding metal chairs—but for some reason I just didn't want to do the play there without those red velvet seats. Stupid, I know.
Oskar Eustis at the Public Theater quickly and generously stepped in, and we ended up doing the play at the Public, where it probably should have been in the first place, and with my company, LAByrinth, as coproducers. We sold out the run and the extension, and the audiences were incredibly generous and receptive. It was interesting reading the reviews. (Why do I still read them? I dunno—'cuz I'm an idiot?) Some of the criticisms were pretty spot-on and valid, and yet I was amazed at how many reviewers just assumed that the play was my literal life story (one critic even opined, "The Little Flower of East Orange is proof that some lives are not worth dramatizing"). I bring this up because of something I learned during the process, which is this: I will never assume that anyone's work is purely "autobiographical" ever again, because the term is actually meaningless. We live in a world that has an insatiable need to break everything down into easily digestible bites. We are suckers for "context." I'm as guilty of that as anyone else. But any work (like a play) that requires the unconscious and the imagination and the deceptiveness of memory and emotion and feeling just isn't built to conform to our societal desire for easy context and literal truth. What we think of as "autobio graphical" is nothing more than a snapshot of a sliver of a feeling associated with a real or fabricated memory felt deeply while looking out a window on a Tuesday morning. I don't think it's any more or less than just that. If you want to know something about my life, read Jesus Hopped the "A" Train, which is about a serial killer and a bike messenger—and I'm neither. But it will tell you just as much about what keeps me up at night as Little Flower does.
Lastly I gotta say that being in the theater and being able to write plays and put them on is a privilege, and pretty much a joy. The experience of writing Little Flower and working with Phil and the actors is one I wouldn't trade for anything. We have plans to bring Little Flower back, and I am going to do some rewrites and revisions. Hopefully, you can come see it, or see it again. This play is not my story, but it was written, like all the others, in the hope that it may in some small way tell your story, or rather, our story. Thanks for reading this.
Excerpted from THE LITTLE FLOWER OF EAST ORANGE by STEPHEN ADLY GUIRGIS
Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Adly Guirgis
Published in 2009 by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
