And Then There's This...Enter the Elephant Attendant

In spite of being terrified of speaking in public, I've always been drawn to acting and stage production, partly by the actual performances, of course, but mostly by the nuts and bolts involved in bringing a play to opening night. I'm kind of like the circus guy who can't bear the thought of quitting his job shoveling elephant dung because he loves being in show business. I've figuratively done the same, hanging around outside the spotlights of various drama groups, but close enough to smell the grease paint. It was that way for decades until 2016, when, at the age of 80, I wrote my first play and a year later had the supreme joy of seeing it produced.

How I got to that point was more convoluted than threading a cornfield maze. In college I studied play production and learned the technical language but was never able to put it to use. Later in school, I sat electrified as Sir John Gielgud stood alone center stage in a tuxedo and brought the house down with his “Ages of Man” speeches from Shakespeare. This experience made me realize that you didn't need scenery, set changes, costumes and a cast of dozens to create compelling drama. Then I listened to a recording of Dylan Thomas' absorbing “Under Milk Wood,” a play that re-created one night in a Welsh village via a row of actors seated on stools and speaking their parts.

When Hal Holbrook released it as an album in 1959, I became fixated with his one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight,” wherein he simulated Twain's gravelly voice, and, in the stage renderings, even costumed himself as a white-suited Twain. As Gielgud had done with Shakespeare, Holbrook cherry-picked passages from Twain's writings and stitched them together with his own in-character transitions to scorch the air with Twain's acerbic wit. In 1976, Julie Harris brought to PBS her tears and sunshine version of Emily Dickinson in William Luce's “The Belle of Amherst,” which seeded known biographical facts with segments of Dickinson's poetry to give her a singular voice.

My interest in the format mounted with each new one-actor play I encountered. I can't find the exact year, but I guess it was around 2014 or 2015, when my wife Norma was living in Kingston Springs and I in Nashville, that she invited me to go with her to a production of “Snow White” being staged at Harpeth High School. Norma, in turn, had been invited by her neighbor, Kat Sellin, who played the Wicked Queen. [“Gazette” founder Cate Burgan tells me it was her older sister, Emilie, who played Snow White.] As we were discussing the play afterward, Kat commented on the difficulty of finding good theatrical roles for older women. I thought, but did not say, “Then why don't you create your own roles?”

That's when I began to think seriously of writing a one-woman play. But which historical figure should I choose? It didn't bother me that I wasn't a woman. Neither was Luce when he imagined Dickinson. And hadn't Shakespeare created a suitably convincing Lady Macbeth? I soon enough settled on Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed for treason in 1953, along with her husband Julius.

Their long imprisonment and eventual execution occurred during a period in which Americans were being whipped into a hysteria over the supposed dangers of communism. Adding to this political drama was the fact that Ethel, who could have easily saved herself by cooperating with the government, chose instead to die with her husband and leave behind their two young sons for strangers to raise.

Using as primary source material hundreds of letters Ethel and Julius wrote to each other in prison — letters that revealed her humor, humanity and vulnerability — I completed the first draft of the play in the summer of 2016. I titled it “The Passion of Ethel Rosenberg” to conjure up both her passion for her husband and for her political cause. At first, I had no thought of getting it staged. My satisfaction lay in simply having written it. But as I continued to polish what was essentially a three-act monologue, I fancied that it might have some entertainment value after all.

Thinking this, I wrote to all the theater companies in Nashville to see if anyone would be willing to read the play and give me an opinion on its prospects. If any. The only one who responded was Carolyn German of Theater Craft. A gifted actor, singer and songwriter as well as a play director, Carolyn became a one-stop drama shop on my behalf. She pointed out weak spots in the script, arranged a public reading to test how it sounded on stage, auditioned actors for the Ethel role, designed the stage set, found the venue, created the advertising poster, supervised hours of rehearsal, handled ticket sales, directed the two “workshop” performances to which the public was invited and even had the performances videotaped for archival use.

I got to sit on the sidelines and drink it all in.

We picked Keri Pagetta — whose astounding range of emotions you can see on YouTube — to be our Ethel. The first open read through of the play occurred on July 28, 2016, and the two sold-out workshop performances were held May 20 and 21, 2017 at Atmalogy Cafe on Nashville's West End Avenue. The responses were uniformly positive with the “Tennessean's” Amy Stumpfl declaring Keri's portrayal “mesmerizing.”

Never intended to make a profit, the play certainly lived up to its expectations. While my record-keeping hovers somewhere between chaotic and mind-numbing, I estimate my first venture into live theater cost me around $11,000 all told. I gave my share of ticket sales for the last performance to Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

But “Ethel” was not dead yet. The next year, Grace Reinbold, a friend of mine from Music Row who was then living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, offered to oversee a production of the play there. She turned it over to Canadian actress Talia Pura who then directed and starred in it for nine performances. In March of the same year, actor Mara Kassin performed the final two acts of the play for the Untold Stories of Jewish Women Festival at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

In 2021, Keri and her husband Joe Pagetta adapted “The Passion of Ethel Rosenberg” into a podcast/radio play that included an introduction by former NPR reporter Natasha Senjanovic, who interviewed the three of us about the play's creation. Here's the link https://passionofethelrosenberg.podbean.com/

Since “Ethel,” I’ve written two plays — a two-character “dramedy” called “Tantalus Descending,” which is so painfully deficient I can hardly stand re-reading it, and a serious and, I think, solid, multi-character drama about trying to redeem one's shattered reputation called “King Buddy's Return.” I have no plans for staging either.  But you can read them online.

And I still follow the elephants.

(Please send your comments or questions to stormcoast@mindspring.com with “And Then There's This” in the subject line. And thanks for reading.)