Preparing for the play, HOME AGAIN

HOME AGAIN
A new play based on the life of Thomas Wolfe

I will be writing a daily blog about preparations for this the third play I have written with William Gregg, artistic director of the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre at Mars Hill, N.C. It is one of the great regional theaters in America and I consider myself very lucky to be involved with these incredibly fine actors and the director, Bill himself.

For starters, I’d like to do a rundown of how I see each of the main characters in the play:

THOMAS WOLFE was one great big 6’4” 245-pound bundle of contradictions. He was first and foremost passionately dedicated to his art, all else came second in his life. He never owned a home, never learned to drive a car. He was at times a brooding loner, at other times the most gregarious life of the party. His prose seemed to flow with effortless eloquence, however, he had a pronounced stutter when he was excited and trying to explain himself. Although a physical giant of a man, he remained boyish, the kind of man women want to mother and men want to protect.

ALINE BERNSTEIN was 20 years older than young Wolfe when they became passionately involved. It is a fact, he could never have written Look Homeward, Angel, without her financial and moral support. She was glamorous in contrast to Wolfe’s disheveled appearance, but not in the movie star sense. She was always neat a stylish down to the last button. She moved in the very highest artistic levels of New York, but there was nothing phony about her. In addition to being the most talented costume and set designed in New York for 3 decades, she was also a fabulous cook and the kind of woman who made here own clothes. She was every bit as passionate a romantic as Wolfe, but she had the practical down to earth side that he was missing. She never stopped loving him even though he broke off with her not long after Look Homeward, Angel came out. [He would keep coming back to her—for money and love—until his final illness…and she was one of the few he called to say he was dying.]

JULIA WOLFE was a stingy penny pincher, but she was never mean. She was very well educated for her time. Two of her brothers were among the wealthiest men in Asheville at that time and she herself had made a small fortune in real estate in Miami and Asheville. Her stinginess never extended to Tom, who would remain her baby boy until he died. He could do no wrong, even when he described her as the opposite to his father’s gregarious love of life and poetry. Wolfe could rave about the money-grubbers of Asheville [such as his mother] but the truth was her money sent him through UNC and Harvard and supported him until after Look Homeward, Angel came out. Hers was a textbook case of “smother love.” Her “baby” slept with her until he was a grown boy.


FRED WOLFE was the quintessential good old boy. Tall and somewhat awkward, he was always there to help. He never had an unkind word to say about anybody and just got up each day and did what he had to do. He sold ice cream for the Blue Bird ice cream company in South Carolina. Although he had a serious stutter, he was famous as the kind of salesman who could sell anything. People loved him.

FRANK WOLFE was a loveable rascal. He was a boozer and womanizer quite literally in his father’s footsteps. But [unless he wrote bad checks on your account] he didn’t hurt anybody with his behavior. Although he had a wife and children of his own, he would end up a sad wreck of a human being living in his mother’s boardinghouse because he had nowhere else to go. Wolfe hated him because Frank had taunted him for being a sissy when he was a child and he never forgave him. Frank resented his mother’s generosity toward young Tom. He was also bitter [and rightly so] about Look Homeward, Angel, where all his many faults were set forth for everybody to read about.

MABEL WOLFE was [as we southerners say] “good hearted.” She was the kind one would begin by saying, “bless her heart.” She had a pretentious streak, but she was genuine in her desire to better herself and move among the quality folks of Asheville. Appearances were important to her. She was also excitable in a way her Mama never was. Mabel was often out of control; Julia never was. But like the others, she was devoted to the family and rode the train across country to bring the dying Tom back to Baltimore. The day of the funeral, Mabel was hitting the sauce so heavily her Mama forbade her going to the funeral.

GEORGE MCCOY was the kind of small town newspaperman who always thought he had a dozen novels in his desk drawer, although even he knew he would never get around to actually writing them. A UNC classmate of Wolfe’s, he was devoted to him and admired [and maybe envied] his success beyond words.

MAX PERKINS was the greatest editor of the 20th Century. A typically reserved New Englander, he became personally involved with Wolfe in a way he did with none of his other writers—and they included Hemingway and Fitzgerald at the same time. The obvious reason was that Wolfe needed him more. Even as he tried to be the stern editor who knew it was necessary to take an axe to Wolfe’s out of control prose, he also appreciated this passionately romantic boy writer. Again, the reason is obvious: that kind of passion was something that would never be a part of his own life. And, even after Wolfe left him and Scribners for Ed Aswell and Harper’s, Perkins remained Wolfe’s friend and mentor. And as Wolfe lay dying, it was Perkins to whom he turned; and it was Perkins he entrusted with his literary estate.

Of course, one thing I’ve learned in my brief experience in the theater is that the actor must create a reality of his or her own on the stage. It doesn’t matter what the real character looked like or talked like; what is important is that the actor create a believable character for the moment on stage. I’m learning.

World premiere of Home Again, a new play about Thomas Wolfe by William Gregg and Perry Deane Young

HOME AGAIN

The Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre is proud to announce the world premiere of the play, Home Again, by SART director William Gregg and author Perry Deane Young. The new play premieres July 29-August 9 at the historic Owen Theater at Mars Hill College in Mars Hill, near Asheville, N.C. It tells the story of what happened when the author of You Can’t Go Home Again went home again. It is based not on Thomas Wolfe’s fiction but on the personal drama of his life.

In fact, the author Thomas Wolfe returned to his native Asheville, N.C., in September 1929 just days before his locally-explosive novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was published in New York. He would visit all those who later felt he had betrayed and ridiculed them in his widely praised novel. And then he went back to New York City and never returned to his beloved home town and the people there until eight years had passed. A wildly passionate man, Wolfe was caught in a web of loyalties that first involved his devotion to his art. Next was his love of the great stage designer, Aline Bernstein And always hovering in his memory was his devoted but needy family back in Asheville.

When the school teacher who had molded him as an intellectual and a writer read what Wolfe had written about her husband, she wrote him: “You have devastated your own family but you have crucified mine.” His sister was shunned by the literary club she was desperate to belong to. His older brother threatened to sue because Wolfe said he had a piece of “tough suet” where his heart ought to be.

But the publication of Look Homeward, Angel coincided almost to the day with the stock market crash in 1929 and Wolfe’s family like everybody else in Asheville was truly devastated. Ironically, the success of the hated novel enabled Wolfe to lend his family money when they needed it most.

When Wolfe actually came home again in 1937, he stopped off in his mother’s ancestral homeland of mountain-bound Yancey County. He got off the bus and walked into a gunfight among some distant cousins. But, his welcome home in nearby Asheville was tumultuous. All the bad feelings had been forgotten and he was greeted like a returning sports hero. The peace and quiet he sought in a little cabin out from Asheville evaded him as hordes of visitors invaded his privacy to tell him their stories and party with the famous author.

Wolfe fled back to the haven New York City had always offered him and plunged himself into his work, writing nearly 2 million words in less than a year. Leaving a mountainous manuscript with his publisher, he headed west on an extended vacation trip. From Seattle, Wolfe wired his family that he was hospitalized with a mysterious illness which was later diagnosed as tuberculosis of the brain. His family as always came to his aid, first his sister and then his brother and then his mother helped get him back to Baltimore for treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The famous author died there, surrounded by his devoted family. They brought him home to a celebrity’s farewell funeral. He was laid to rest in Riverside Cemetery among all those who once felt he betrayed them—and all their tombstones would eventually carry inscriptions from his writing. He was home again, home at last.
William Gregg and Perry Deane Young both grew up in Wolfe’s literary shadow in the Asheville suburb of Woodfin. This is their third play. SART previously produced their plays, Frankie, and Mountain of Hope. Prior to coming home to Mars Hill, Gregg served as director of the New American Theater in Illinois, the Theatre Virginia in Richmond, the New Raft Theatre Company in New York City and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. At the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, he worked as production stage manager and assistant director for artistic director Liviu Ciulei. In addition to the three plays, Young is the author of 10 books and one screenplay. A new edition of his Vietnam memoir, Two of the Missing, has just been published by Press 53. Millenium Films has announced that production of the film based on the book will begin in 2009.

Remembering Sean Flynn and Dana Stone

Copies of the splendid new edition of my book, Two of the Missing, are now available. You can order them directly from me by sending a check for $19.95 to Perry Deane Young, P.O. Box 1366, Chapel Hill, NC 27514. Or, by contacting the publisher www.Press53.com or through Amazon.com


PRE-ORDER SIGNED COPIES NOW
Contact: Kevin Watson (336) 414-5599/ kevin@press53.com
Press 53
P.O. Box 30314
Winston-Salem, NC 27130-0314
www.Press53.com

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SEAN FLYNN AND DANA STONE?
New Book updates ongoing search for Errol Flynn’s Son and colleague still missing in Cambodia
Winston-Salem, NC - April 6, 2009—Press 53 is proud to announce the publication of a new updated edition of Two of the Missing, Remembering Sean Flynn and Dana Stone. The new edition contains 18 pages of photographs by and of these two courageous photojournalists who drove bright red motorcycles into Communist-held territory in Cambodia on April 6, 1970—and were never seen again. Most of these photos have never been published before.
“Sean Flynn and Dana Stone were among the bravest and best of that daring young crew of photographers who covered the Vietnam War,” says author and friend Perry Deane Young. “Flynn was on assignment for Time magazine and Stone was a cameraman with CBS when they were last seen heading around a Communist roadblock near the Cambodian town of Chi Pou.” Director Ralph Hemecker has optioned the film rights to the book and is now in the process of casting. The screenplay was written by Young and Hemecker.
A native of Asheville who now lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., Young is the author of three plays and nine books, including the national bestseller, The David Kopay Story. A journalist with UPI during the Vietnam War, he remembers his close friends and colleagues as he examines their lives and wonders what led them to take this one final risk. Young also includes profiles of several other colleagues who took very different paths from Flynn and Stone. These include the legendary madcap English photographer Tim Page, who left part of his skull in Vietnam and continues to this day to search Cambodia for the remains of his beloved friends.
When first published in 1975, Two of the Missing was hailed by The Washington Post as “Magnificent…unforgettable…one of the best books yet prompted by the Vietnam War.” Truman Capote called it “a moving and engrossing chronicle of several fascinating young men drifting toward mysterious and desperate destinations.” Newsday described the book as “a tender book about war, about friendship and love, with more plain virility to it than all the gory epics put together.” Christopher Isherwood, author of Berlin Stories on which the musical Cabaret was based, said: “This is an extraordinary book, I cannot recommend it too highly.” The new edition by Press 53 has been hailed by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer David Kennerly as “A brilliant tale…One of the great books about photographers in war.” And by Joseph L. Galloway, co-author of We Were Soldiers One…and Young and We are Soldiers Still: “What great news that Two of the Missing is back in print.”
Two of the Missing is distributed by Ingram and Baker& Taylor, and is available from bookstores and online booksellers. It is also available at www.Press53.com.
Paperback: 296 pages, 6 x 9 inches
Publisher: Press 53
ISBN: 978-0-9816280-9-7 Price: $19.95

McCain's Choice insults us all, especially women

McCain’s choice insults us all, especially women

John McCain’s choice of the former Miss Wasilla, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is downright insulting to every American, but especially to women.
It is a calculated Karl Rovian move designed for one thing and one thing only: political expediency. The backroom boys sat around and apparently came to the conclusion that they needed a woman, any woman, to appeal to the disaffected supporters of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. It is tokenism at its most extreme. There are plenty of women who are fully qualified for the vice presidency, but Sarah Palin is not one of them.
The very idea that McCain—aged 72, with serious medical problems--would put a person so poorly qualified within a heartbeat of the presidency is just plain ludicrous. The woman has admitted she knows little or nothing about Iraq and there is no evidence that she has any better knowledge of the economy. It’s as if the political gods are plaing some kind of sick joke on us: McCain says he knows nothing about the economy; he’s chosen a running mate who knows nothing about the war in Iraq. At a time when the country faces a serious energy crisis, Palin has aligned herself with the interests of big oil.
Although baptized a Roman Catholic as a baby, she was re-baptized as an adult into an independent “Assembly of God” church, a sect on the outer fringes of fundamentalist extremism. She is vehemently anti-abortion, favors a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages and favors the teaching of “Creationism” in our public schools. She is precisely the kind of divisive candidate we do not need in these perilous times when all efforts should be focused on healing the near-fatal wounds both spiritual and economic inflicted upon our beloved country by eight years of Republic mis-rule.
Once again, McCain’s judgment is called into question and once again, he is just plain wrong. Let us hope the political pundits will have the courage to take their gloves off and call this for what it is. Let us hope that the hypocrisy of this decision will be exposed. I’m confident there’s more to her troubled past than the brother-in-law incident; I truly believe Sarah Palin herself will explain just how unqualified she is to be vice president…if she’s just given enough rope to hang herself.
McCain’s decision makes a mockery of his campaign’s efforts to brand Sen. Barack Obama as “inexperienced.” Palin is a journalism graduate of the university of Idaho; Obama is an honors graduate of the Harvard Law School. Palin was elected Miss Wassila; Obama worked to improve conditions in an impoverished South Chicago neighborhood; Palin was elected mayor of Wassilla, population 6,000; Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate; Palin is governor of Alaska; Obama is a U.S. Senator.
More important, Obama’s judgment has once again proven to be far superior to John McCain’s. It was Obama, not McCain, who said we need more troops in Afghanistan. It was Obama, not McCain, who said we need a timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Both of these decisions once vehemently opposed by the Republicans, are now public policy.

And, finally, it was Obama who chose as his running mate a person with vast foreign policy experience who could step in as president at any time. Miss Wassilla as president of the United States. Think about it.

Finally an accurate obit of an evil man

A friend in Key west relayed the Guardian's obit for Jesse Helms, which had been sent to him by a friend in Italy; shows you the worldwide concern about the evil that this one man did in his lifetime. You can access the guardian's words about Jesse at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/04/usa

Meanwhile, here's a little run-in I had with Jesse very early in my career:

Jesse and me

June 25th is a date that should live in infamy to all those who believe in academic freedom in North Carolina. It was on that date in 1963 that a renegade band of redneck legislators suspended the rules of the General Assembly and within minutes enacted the infamous Speaker Ban.

It was only a matter of minutes after that when Ol’ Jesse Helms, the man we then dismissed as a minor nuisance and major right wing crackpot at WRAL, tried to get me fired from my job as a reporter for United Press International. I was a very young 21 when I dropped out of my junior year at UNC to cover the 1963 General Assembly.

On the last day of the session, I was sitting alone in the press section, which was then right on the floor beside the legislators. My ears perked up as Reps. Phil Godwin and Ned Delamar asked for a suspension of the rules and submitted a bill. A bill had gone through the previous day to censor public television and now here was a bill to restrict speakers at state universities. It was, from the beginning, a clear slap at UNC President Bill Friday because he would not fire two professors involved in the civil rights movement. None of the Speaker Ban’s sponsors had attended UNC, two had never been to college.

Rep. Paul Story protested, “Gentlemen, this is clearly unconstitutional on its face,” but the House Speaker was in on the plan and it passed by voice vote. I was so incensed by this that I went to the back of the hall and ran with the bill’s sponsors onto the floor of the senate, where the Senate President Clarence Stone was waiting. Sen. Luther Hamilton, among others, was shouting to be recognized, but Stone would hear no dissent and hammed the bill into law on a voice vote. Hamilton was finally able to say in utter disgust: “Gentlemen, this is not worthy of the senate of North Carolina.”

A passionate believer in truth, justice and the American way, I rushed to the UPI teletype machine in the press room and punched out my story: “Reactionaries in the North Carolina General Assembly have ramrodded another censorship bill into law.” I knew that WRAL was UPI’s biggest client in the state; what I did not know was that Jesse Helms was apparently standing there reading the wire as my “reactionaries” story came across.

Jesse didn’t mess with the local bureau chief. He called the president of UPI in New York and demanded that I be fired on the spot. UPI immediately issued a “mandatory kill” on the story, the only one I ever saw in several years with the company in Raleigh, New York and Saigon.

It turned out that Jesse played a key role in the speaker ban. He had gotten hold of an Ohio speaker ban law and had praised it on the air the week before [June 21] and passed it along to friendly hands in the legislature. I learned a great deal from this experience. One inflammatory word had cost me the chance to describe the very dramatic debate I had witnessed that day. [No other reporters were on the floor when the bill passed.] None of the later stories reported the eloquent opposition to the ban.

More important, I will always remember walking into the UPI bureau across from the news room at the News and Observer and hearing my bureau chief still on the phone with his superiors in New York. This was Robert “Bo” McNeill, a proud UNC graduate, who was saying into the phone, “But they ARE reactionaries; he’s right.” He refused to fire me. He hung up the phone, grinned and said: “Well, you sure screwed up this time.” And the next day he wrote me a commendation for doing a fine job covering the legislature.

Jesse Helms, dead at last

The following letter to the editor was published in today's News and Observer.  The only problem was they left off the key lines in the quote from H.L. Mencken.  I also wrote a piece about the day Jesse tried to get me fired at UPI, which they were going to run, but I guess didn't because of the letter to the editor I'd already sent.  I'll post that story later today.  Laura Belle, and Jenny, glad to SOMEbody's reading my blog..........loveya. uncle p.Before the media elevate Jesse Helms to sainthood, we should remember all those who were denied their rights and harmed by his decades of  mean-spirited racism and sexism that did untold damage to the good name of North Carolina and the South.  There were the blacks he ridiculed in their efforts for equal rights,  there was the mother of an AIDS victim whom he told, “I’m sorry your son chose to play Russian roulette with his life.”   Ever since the man went into politics, we've heard these ultimate rationalizations for his bigotry:  "you knew where he stood;" and "at least he was sincere in his beliefs." Before the rhetoric gets too thick, it is well to recall what H.L. Mencken wrote on the death of an earlier demagogue, William Jennings Bryan:  "This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me.  If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum.  The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses.  He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity."

Here's the robotic response from Obama's church:

Thank you for your interest in Trinity United Church of Christ and for your consideration of our member, Sen. Barack Obama, in the Democratic primary election. Due to the high volume of emails and inquiries, we are unable to respond to each one personally. We were overwhelmed with "hits" after Senator Obama's historic victory in the Iowa democratic caucus. Barack Obama has been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ for nearly two decades. As a young community organizer, new to Chicago, Barack met with Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Trinity's Senior Pastor, seeking advice. He received good counsel about the complexities of life in Chicago and the challenges faced by residents in poor communities like South Chicago's Altgeld Gardens. The United Church of Christ (http://www.ucc.org), Trinity's denominational affiliation, is "a community of faith that seeks to respond to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in word and deed." It was founded in 1957 through the union of several different Christian traditions. Not only does Trinity not exclude anyone from membership or attendance based on race or ethnicity, but: The majority of UCC members are white; the conference minister of the Illinois Conference of the UCC (Rev. Jane Fisler Hoffman) and her husband (both white) are members of Trinity (You can watch a video of Rev. Hoffman speaking at Trinity about her positive experiences there.); Trinity has been instrumental in working with and lending financial and staff support to the development of new UCC churches in Gary, IN (with the Indiana-Kentucky Conference of the UCC, Milwaukee, WI (with the Wisconsin Conference of the UCC), and Benton Harbor, MI (with the Michigan Conference of the UCC). There is no anti-American sentiment in the theology or the practice of Trinity United Church of Christ. To be sure, there is prophetic preaching against oppression, racism and other evils that would deny the American ideal. Trinity is "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." Trinity was founded in 1961 and had 87 families when Dr. Wright started his tenure in 1972. Currently, as Dr. Wright anticipates a 2008 retirement, there are more than 8,000 members, 70 ministries, and three Sunday worship services. You and your family can watch these services online at 7:30am, 11:00am and 6:00pm CST. If you require additional information, please do not hesitate to contact Senator Obama's office: Devorah Adler at dadler@barackobama.com Joshua DuBois at jdubois@barackobama.com Yours in Christ!

E-mail sent to Trinity United Church of Christ which has just issued a press release comparing their pastor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Do you people have no shame? How dare you invoke the sacred named of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King was a man of peace, not of meanness and hate. Do you think for one second he would ever have uttered the idiotic hate-filled words of your pastor? How proud Dr. King would be of Barack Obama; how ashamed he would be of the hateful words of Jeremiah Wright that have cast such a cloud over Obama's chance for the presidency.


The really important question is why the UCC itself did nothing in all this time to denounce the language of Jeremiah Wright. Obama has had the courage to do that; where's the UCC?

Paul Krugman agrees with me on reporters

This is yet another case of great minds sharing the same thought. Paul Krugman's blog in the New York Times for Sept. 19 is incredibly similar to the thoughts expressed in my own blog for that date. Here it is:

What I Hate About Political Coverage
Warning: this is a bit (actually, more than a bit) of a rant.
One of my pet peeves about political reporting is the fact that some of my journalistic colleagues seem to want to be in another business – namely, theater criticism. Instead of telling us what candidates are actually saying – and whether it’s true or false, sensible or silly – they tell us how it went over, and how they think it affects the horse race. During the 2004 campaign I went through two months’ worth of TV news from the major broadcast and cable networks to see what voters had been told about the Bush and Kerry health care plans; what I found, and wrote about, were several stories on how the plans were playing, but not one story about what was actually in the plans.
There are two big problems with this kind of reporting. The important problem is that it fails to inform the public about what matters. In 2004, very few people had any idea about the very real differences between the candidates on domestic policy. It remains to be seen whether 2008 is any better.
The other problem, which has become very apparent lately, is that this sort of coverage often fails even on its own terms, because the way things look to inside-the-Beltway pundits can be very different from the way they look to real people.
Which brings me to the Petraeus hearing.
To a remarkable extent, punditry has taken a pass on whether Gen. Petraeus’s picture of the situation in Iraq is accurate. Instead, it was all about the theatrics – about how impressive he looked, how well or poorly his Congressional inquisitors performed. And the judgment you got if you were watching most of the talking heads was that it was a big win for the administration – especially because the famous MoveOn ad was supposed to have created a scandal, and a problem for the Democrats.
Even if all this had been true, it wouldn’t have mattered much: if the truth is that Iraq is a mess, the public would find out soon enough, and the backlash would be all the greater because of the sense that we had been deceived yet again.
But here’s the thing: new polls by CBS and Gallup show that the Petraeus testimony had basically no effect on public opinion: Americans continue to hate the war, and want out. The whole story about how the hearing had changed everything was a pure figment of the inside-the-Beltway imagination.
What I found striking about the whole thing was the contempt the pundit consensus showed for the public – it was, more or less, “Oh, people just can’t resist a man in uniform.” But it turns out that they can; it’s the punditocracy that can’t.