"A DIFFERENT WAY OF TELLING A STORY"

Donald Margulies talks to production dramaturg Katherine McGerr about his early encounters with theatre, his process as a storyteller, and his latest character - Louis De Rougemont, storyteller extraordinaire.

Shipwrecked! is a story about telling stories. As a storyteller yourself, what is it like to pass on your words for someone else to speak?

Shipwrecked was intended as a celebration of storytelling. I've taken a story from the past, and I have re-imagined it, just as Louis re-imagined his own life. Naturally, in theatre, you give to collaborators the raw material that they then translate into something onstage.

I think that this particular play, probably more than any of mine, can bend to the shape and particular genius of the people who produce it. I think it is not dependent, in other words, on a single means of storytelling. And creating a voice for Louis was a delightful experience for me.

How did you first encounter the story of Louis?

I was doing a very different project - I was researching a project about a Holocaust survivor-pretender - and during the course of that I came upon the story of Louis de Rougemont, who was a gentlemen who lived in Victorian England and became a minor celebrity because of the exploits he told in public readings - much the way Dickens would travel around England and the United States and read his work.

I suddenly saw Louis telling us his story. It was a really pleasurable moment. And I knew also that I wanted to be extremely theatrical and I wanted it to celebrate theatre and I wanted to invite everyone - people of all ages - to see it.

What direction did your research take you from there?

Louis' book is downloadable - it was amazing, I Googled Louis De Rougemont and there it was, there was this book that I'd only read about in a reference book.

There is also a book called The Most Amazing Story Man Ever Lived to Tell from an Australian publisher, which was basically an edited version of Louis' book, with a lot of the history around it.

Then, unbeknownst to me, a new book emerged in Australia, The Fabulist, which I learned about only because the author, Rod Howard, read about my production in California online - he was probably surfing Louis (as we all do every now and then!) and he contacted me. He sent me his book; I sent him my play. Clearly there is something in the zeitgeist that is drawing me, in Connecticut, and Rod, in Brisbane or Sydney, to the story of Louis.

Somehow the combination of celebrity and spectacle awakened interest in these two very different parts of the world at the same time. Who knows; maybe someone in Japan is writing about Louis.

The theatricality of Louis' story gives Shipwrecked! a different feel from your previous writing; your plays such as Dinner with Friends, Sight Unseen and Collected Stories are remembered, in part, for the naturalism with which human interaction and conversation is depicted.

Some people who have seen Shipwrecked! or read it have said, "this is such a departure from your writing" - it doesn't feel like it to me. Yes, I get to use language in a way that I rarely get to; I was able to use a more florid language than I would use in my quote-unquote naturalistic plays.

But there are themes in this play that are resonant with what's in Collected Stories, which is also about storytelling - about ownership of stories and experience versus fiction.

Sight Unseen deals with the role of the artist. Brooklyn Boy also does, in dealing with how you take experience and turn it into something else. So it doesn't seem that farfetched that I would be drawn to something like this. It's just a different way of telling a story.

Were you conscious of that difference from the beginning of your writing process?

Shipwrecked! began as a commission from South Coast Repertory's Theatre for Young Audiences series. So I was of a mindset to create something for young audiences. But as it began to come into focus for me, the themes and ambiguities of it became much more challenging.

Rather than pander to young audiences or change the way I was telling the story, I wanted to write a play that was accessible to all ages, and from which each generation would take something different.

Were you influenced by experiences you had with theatre as a child?

I don't know if you're as aware of this as I am, but sometimes when you talk about your childhood, you'll say "we always did this," or "we always did that" when in fact you may have done "it" once or twice. In my case it was going to the theatre.

I grew up in Brooklyn, and I think there were probably two weeks out of my childhood that my parents took me and my brother into Manhattan for school vacations - we'd get on the D train, stay in a cheap midtown hotel and see everything we could on Broadway.

That usually meant nine or ten things in a week. In those days there were Thursday matinees, and you could sit in the balcony for a reasonable amount of money, so a family of four could reasonably go to the theatre; it wasn't that much more than a movie.

The first play I ever saw was Herb Gardner's A Thousand Clowns, which had a tremendous impact on me. I was nine and I loved the experience of sitting in a theatre filled with laughter. I think that's where I probably caught that bug, although I didn't act on it until many, many years later.

Donald Margulies is the author of over 30 plays, including The Loman Family Picnic, Sight Unseen, Collected Stories, and Dinner with Friends (for which he received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama). A longtime New Haven resident, Margulies also teaches playwriting in the Yale University department of English.