Remembering Romulus Linney
Romulus Linney
Photos courtesy of the Romulus Linney Papers at Appalachian State University
The oeuvre of playwright Romulus Linney did not earn him drippy
gossip, but it did win him with respect.
He was the author of three novels, 13 plays and
22 one-acts that have been produced in the United States, Europe and Asia. His plays stand brave
and fragrant; the memories he left stand tall and faithful.
Susan Cole, the 30-year theater
director at Appalachian State University, was a friend of Linney’s.
On Aug. 28, she gave an
hour-long talk at the Watauga County Public Library about the late playwright, a prelude to the
two-day celebration of Linney’s life and work to be held at Appalachian State University on Sept. 20
and 21.
Linney adapted Henrik Ibsen’s play, “Peer Gynt,” to write “Gint.” He wrote
plays about Oscar Wilde, the poet Anna Akhmatova, the Nuremberg trials and the Vietnam War. Cole
elaborated on Linney’s six plays that espoused the Appalachian Mountains.
Born in
Philadelphia, Linney was raised in Madison, Tenn., and spent his summers in Boone.
“A
Southern childhood is a very primal thing,” Linney said in a 1987 interview. “I think Katherine Anne
Porter said that what happens to you after you’re 10 years old doesn’t matter very much, but the
things that happen before you were 10 matter a great deal.”
During his childhood is when,
Cole said, he fell in love with the mountains, their people, the 19th century and
folklore.
His loves only broadened as he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Oberlin College
and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Drama.
Shortly after, he published
his first book, “Heathen Valley,” based on the 1850s histories of the idealistic bishop who
established the Valley Crucis Episcopal Mission.
Published as a play in 1988, the story
carved the seal of Linney’s thoughtful style. Cole said, “A common theme in his Southern and
Appalachian plays is that the people are resilient and strong worthwhile individuals,” prudent,
though surrounded by stereotypes of mountain people as superstitious hillbillies.
Some of his
other Appalachia inspired plays are “Holy Ghost,” “Mountain Memory,” “Unchanging Love” and “True
Crimes.”
One play, “Tennessee,” based on 1870 folklore, is about a woman who will marry only
the suitor that takes her to Tennessee. One verbally accepts her condition, and arranges a “stark
wedding that led to a long, hard existence,” Cole said.
The new husband tricks the woman
by driving for hours before homesteading seven miles from her childhood home. After her husband’s
death, she decides to walk home from “Tennessee.” Grimy cowbell in hand, she stumbles onto her old
homestead, mournful and muttering “Why, that man. That damn man.”
But the skeletal
draftings of his 1970s and 1990s versions expose mute complexity. In one, a stranger encounters
the deception and leaves it; in another the stranger tells the wife, kisses her, and is then shot
dead by her husband. In yet another, a son of the couple gets bit by a snake and asks his father
to kill him. The father, devastated, obliges by slitting the boy’s throat, and is then plagued by
madness for the rest of his life.
“His plays gradually became more harsh,” Cole said.
“They weren’t melodramatic, because they showed humanity. They evolved by versions.”
In
1991, he was chosen to be the first spotlighted writer at the Signature Theater Company, a New
York company that devotes full seasons to presenting the work of a single playwright.
He
won two Obie awards, one for sustained excellence in playwriting; two National Critics Awards;
three Drama-Logue Awards; and many fellowships, including grants from the Guggenheim and
Rockefeller foundations. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which gave
him the Gold Medal for Drama, among others.
“When this is all over, my writing will
add up to the sum total of me,” he said in a 1989 interview. “The choices I make with my writing
have a lot to do with myself as an unfolding personality, so that in the end your writing is
really your destiny.”
Linney Celebration
The two-day celebration of Linney’s life will include master acting classes (including one with Linney’s daughter, award-winning actress Laura Linney), workshops, craft lectures and the dedication and opening of the Romulus Linney Papers and exhibit at the Carol Grotnes Belk Library and Information Commons.
The celebration also features a tribute, with readings from Linney’s works, at Valborg Theatre on campus, as well as a reception at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts.
For more information, including a complete schedule, visit http://collections.library.appstate.edu/collections/sc/linney.html.
);)
);)
