A Note from the Playwright

Writing and storytelling have always been a major part of my life, even though my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Laspina, refused to tack any of my stories on the wall with the other kids’ work. My spelling was awful, my grammar hopeless and my penmanship illegible.  Still, she was forced to admit, my stories were the most creative in the class.

Where did I get this love of narrative?  At a very early age, I began watching old movies on television. My father loved romantic films, and together we shed a tear over Greer Garson and Ronald Colman in Random Harvest and Bette Davis in Now Voyager and Norma Shearer as Marie Antoinette. Like most kids, I also loved fairy tales. The Disney animated Sleeping Beauty was an early obsession of mine. The stories that so perplexed Mrs. Laspina tended to combine the Brothers Grimm with Warner Brothers. There was usually a gentle Princess who was kidnapped away from her enchanted castle and ended up a hard-boiled dame working in a whorehouse.

However, I think my greatest literary influence was my mother’s older sister, my Aunt Lillian. My nuclear family exploded when I was seven when my mother died and I went to live with my widowed Aunt Lillian in Manhattan. She was a true storyteller and I was her rapt audience. I could sit for hours listening to her lay out for me our family’s turbulent past. Her stories of my mother’s side of the family were beautiful, touching examples of self-sacrifice, tenderness and making the most out of poverty-stricken circumstances. It was all very Little Women. She would delve into my father’s side of the family, and these were cautionary tales of wealth squandered, selfishness, cruelty and greed. That was strictly The Little Foxes. Yes, her narratives were somewhat propagandistic and told to steer me to the side of the angels--her side--but I found them moving and thrilling.

Equally fascinating were her moral tales derived from the gossip columns. Although Aunt Lil had no connection whatsoever to show business, she could relate with great authority how Vivien Leigh never recovered from Laurence Olivier leaving her for another woman, and how brave Edie Adams was in paying back all of her late husband Ernie Kovacs’s gambling debts.  From my aunt’s improvisational monologues, I learned structure, exposition, characterization, pathos, suspense and the dastardly doings of my father’s Uncle Hy.

As I get older, it’s a challenge coming up with the next story. There are so many to tell, and which is the most worth spending a year or more on? I find myself sifting through old files and gleaning inspiration from fragments of forgotten projects. After two false starts, it’s often the third story that takes off. This current play began as a history of twentieth-century crime as seen through the eyes of a queen of the mob. Then I remembered a science-fiction play I began in the mid-90s about a frosty lady scientist who creates a clone. On the spot, I decided to meld those two plots together. I wondered who in 1949 would have written this gangster/sci-fi B movie, and I thought about the great women screenwriters of early Hollywood, such as Frances Marion, June Mathis and Anita Loos. Once the movies became an enormous money-making industry, these women were stripped of their power and often denied screen credit for their work. I added their story as a framework to my “movie” plot. Since I was dealing with the act of creating narrative, I also decided to invent a fairy tale that told the same story but with a child-like simplicity. 

All three stories carry the same thread of parents painfully having to push their children away to be independent. It truly is an exciting moment when you see your story’s greater theme appearing before your eyes like a photograph developing in a dark room. It’s even more fascinating when it dawns on you how personal and autobiographically revealing that theme is.

When I was just starting out as a playwright, I was confiding to my idol, the late, great playwright/director/actor Charles Ludlam, that I couldn’t settle on what to write next. I had too many ideas and felt creatively paralyzed. Ludlam replied, with a hint of a smile, ‘Eventually, you end up using them all.”

-Charles Busch