Complex world

Eliza Anderson examines the 'small questions'

by Bill Rodriguez

The first play of Eliza Anderson's that I saw, back in 1989, left me impressed and shaken. The Lower Rooms dealt with a torture victim but it traded in its potential pathos for unflinching clarity, venting all accumulating rage through a girl going through adolescence, a time of figurative torment. The workshop production was by one of Paula Vogel's students in Brown's graduate creative writing program, and it went on to be staged at the Kennedy Center in Washington. I could only hope that the young playwright would muster the gumption, and perhaps the masochism, to stick with this usually thankless profession. I wanted to see more of what she could do.

Now, more than a decade later, Trinity Repertory Company is staging the world premiere of Anderson's The New England Sonata, through April 14.

The story it tells is a typically intense one for the playwright. Former company member Amy Van Nostrand returns in the role of Clara, a poet who lives with fellow writer and husband Wallace (Timothy Crowe) in a rural New England farmhouse. Their life of the mind is interrupted by a crisis of the body, as one of them is discovered to have a fatal illness. Their relationship and everything else comes under newly intense scrutiny, complicated by the arrival of one of their mothers (Barbara Meek) and Clara's meeting an unfettered young squatter (Andy Macdonald) in her woods.

As it happens, the Maine-raised playwright settled in Rhode Island after Brown, so we have all the chance to see her work over the years. She was the 1991 New England Clauder Playwriting Competition winner, which brought The Water Principle to Trinity before it went on to five other theaters, from Cleveland to LA. Her historically-based Mill Girls, commissioned by the local All Children's Theatre in 1999, has been staged frequently to fascinated community response. Several plays, mostly short one-acts, have been produced at Perishable Theatre. Of them, what most impressed me were two plays that threw together characters with opposite points of view, to see what the psychological sparks might ignite: In The Exchange, a pair of Christian proselytizers are let into the home of a forthright lesbian. In That All of Us Should Be Fed, an independent spinster in a seacoast town before World War I invites to tea a dour but neighborly woman.

The recipient of several playwriting awards, fellowships, and residencies, Anderson currently teaches playwriting at Trinity Repertory Conservatory and has taught at the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College, as well as at workshops in Boston and elsewhere.

Anderson is sitting over a cardboard cup of coffee in a café near Trinity, taking a break from rehearsal. What, I ask her, does she give for a quick summary when people ask what this play is about?

"My little quip is that this play is about creativity, spirituality, and mortality -- the small questions in life," she replies with a light laugh. "That, indeed, is what this play is about for me. And that's what I want to investigate."

Fortunately, Trinity and director Amanda Dehnert are more than comfortable with that sort of psyche-snooping, which makes for intensely involving theater when it works, self-indulgence when it doesn't. The structure Anderson has devised for the play has plenty of elbow room for exploration. The sonata of the title is more than metaphorical, since the play was organized to parallel that musical form, with themes emerging and pulling back, concluding with a sort of recapitulating coda. That has allowed Anderson to not lock in her approaches as she has shaped the themes.

"I've never done this kind of rewriting before," she says. "With the traditionally plot-driven play, you don't have the luxury of this kind of rewriting, because once you decide where the plot points are and you remove one of the plot points, you are removing one of the pillars of the play and the house falls down. It's that kind of thing."

The rehearsal we'd just stepped out of demonstrated yet another level of choices. I remark on how Van Nostrand was delving into the character, in a scene where Clara doesn't want her husband to comfort her. The actor's choice was to withdraw into anger, but the words on the page would have as convincingly allowed abject fear, or even denial.

Anderson is amused by that example. "It's a tremendous leap of faith for a writer to write something so open in that way. I'm relying on the interpretation of the director, relying on the impulses of the actors, I'm relying on the generosity of spirit in the room to see the play through. Every production of this play could eventually be hugely different," she explains. "What I've tried to capture is the complexity of us -- and by us I mean all of us."

It helps that she has, as she puts it, a great faith in actors. "I'm still in the theater only because of actors, I must say. I love actors. I love that time onstage when everything is unfolding and I don't know where I am any longer, in terms of me, my person, because I am so involved in that, I'm so swept up in that.

"That to me is theater. And no, it doesn't happen all the time. But we can always reach for the ideal. And that's what I choose to do with my time, reach for the ideal. And if I reach it -- it's pure gravy. And I can only do that through these people who are willing to take so seriously my craft and embody and make manifest these things."

She had started out our conversation declaring that she was tired and not likely to be a satisfactory interview subject. But by now the playwright is as enthralled by the subject as any audience member caught up in a drama. She thinks about opening night, the world premiere of a play she is proud of.

"If the actors find the source of these people, it will be a dynamite night of theater. I mean dynamite. People will be like . . . " and Anderson slackens her jaw, gapes and whispers: " 'Wow! What a play!'

"And it's not going to be because of my play, it's going to be because of the performance of my play and the director," she is quick to add.