A different side of legendary Irish writer Oscar Wilde was recently on display at Walnut Street Theatre in a new play by Michael Whistler entitled Mickle Street.  The play revolves around a little known piece of literary history — the period in which the 27-year-old writer traveled to Camden, New Jersey to seek the advice of Walt Whitman.

In Mickle Street, we see Wilde’s wit evolve, but many of his words taste like young wine — a fledging writer struggling with his identity, convinced that he has already made it because of the many Americans who are attending his lectures, from New York and Philadelphia, all the way to Colorado — even though the press writes less than flattering reviews.

Being associated with famous people was as much en vogue in the late 1800s as it is today. David M. Friedman, author of Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity, provides evidence that “Wilde didn’t travel to Camden to learn how to be a famous writer. […] He went to learn how to be a famous person.”

Whistler features the encounter of the rising, if fairly inexperienced, Wilde with the seasoned and much discussed Whitman, then 62, at his house on Mickle Street in Camden, NJ, on January 31, 1882.

Right from the beginning, the play shows Wilde reflected through the eyes of Gilbert and Sullivan, the famous Victorian writers of comic operas that satirized the aesthetic movement of the 1870s and ‘80s and all that went with it: fads, vanity, and pretentiousness.

Mary, an Irish-Catholic widow, looks after Whitman.  When the tall and handsome Wilde arrives at Whitman’s humble and overcrowded home, he is all done up with his famous fur coat and pantaloons, looking like a Victorian male Madonna at a gala.  However, Mary doesn’t believe in externals.  “The crowd seemed more impressed with his appearance than his speech,” she says.

Whistler’s Mary has a fine eye for different layers of reality: “You know the paper says he lives ‘on beauty alone.’ All he asks for lunch is a glass of water for the posy he carries about.” Even when Whitman tries to explain to her the “L’art pour I’art” or “art for art’s sake” concept and Wilde’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood aestheticism, she doesn’t buy it.  “Suppose I were to make a pie for you, Mr. Whitman, and instead of cutting you a slice told you that ‘Oh no — this pie is not for the eating.  It is ‘complete in itself.’ I made it for the purpose of being a beautiful, aesthetic pie.’”

Mickle Street doesn’t fall into the trap of lionizing Wilde or Whitman. Mary makes it quite clear that “for all your fine words and flowers I know you for what you are, Mr. Walt Whitman: a trouble to man and woman both.” Whitman, unafraid of her, also has a few choice terms of endearment for her, “Mary, don’t be a stubborn old goat,” or “She’s a skittish trout when she’s of a mind.”  While she may not always understand the man whom she observes from her prim and proper perspective, she nevertheless serves as a balancing force throughout the play.

Audiences in Britain and the US at the time laughed at Wilde, the talented but attention-craving poet — the way Americans today make fun of the not so witty Paris Hilton and the Kardashians.  Unfazed, Wilde loves playing the role of the enfant terrible — dressed to the hilt, posy in his lapel.  In Whistler’s adaptation, Wilde even encourages the attention: “I want to shock.”

Whistler imagines a conversation between two writers: Whitman, with all his foibles, clearly has the upper hand, while Wilde’s verbal dancing doesn’t get him anywhere, except the awareness that, perhaps, there is more to life than theatrics and striking up “battles in this revolution for the Science of Beauty.”

Wilde, the dandy, throws out more than aesthetic pronouncements. There are moments when he touches on the untouchable: “We do not wear our sins as we wear our cloaks. Those we keep in a closet.”

Whistler’s Mickle Street presents some intense moments between those two men who were considered to be fluid in their sexuality, and were punished for their writing and their lifestyle—Whitman, by being denied a paid position at a hospital during the Civil War, and Wilde being sent to jail.

Friedman implies that both Whitman and Wilde were publicity hounds—with Whitman even writing enthusiastic, albeit anonymous, reviews about his controversial masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. These two writers were quite a match in their desire to reach as wide an audience as possible. “Cultivating newspaper coverage and meetings with American literary giants, the tour made Wilde the second best-known Brit in the country after Queen Victoria, despite having published almost nothing,” as Kevin C. Shelly points out.

Whitman, overwhelmed by Wilde’s many statements, mixed in with his compliments, blurts out, “You have thrown more ideas at me in an hour than fifteen other men I might know. You are smart, and you see something. But you have to stop staring all mooney eyed at ancient ruins. You no more live in an ancient temple than I do. You want to live in the world—live in the world.”

Whistler’s new play, based on historical facts and imagined conversations between two famous writers (the Walnut Street production was directed by Greg Wood and starred Daniel Fredrick as Oscar Wilde and Buck Schirner as Walt Whitman), opens new doors, shows an insecure young Wilde who seems to hide behind “aesthetics and art” while Whitman teaches Wilde more than he might have bargained for, advising him, “Go see America. Go see the world. Find out what creature you are. And for all the frippery—be honest. With us, and with yourself.”

Mickle Street ended its run at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre on March 8.  With any luck this tale, which involves one of New Jersey’s most famous artists, will see a production in the Garden State in the future.

** Note, this article contains material first published in phindie.com and the Philadelphia Gay News.  Henrik Eger, Editor at DramaAroundTheGlobe.com, interviews the playwright, Michael Whistler, in our April issue. **

"When Oscar Wilde Visited Walt Whitman in Camden" was published by New Jersey Stage on March 19, 2015

Henrik Eger: Last Chance has become very popular. How do you explain that success?

Jack Scott: We love to play and sing together, and our audiences know. After each show we make sure everyone was satisfied. We keep our music fresh and varied, growing and improving all the time.

Ingrid Rosenback: Many of our jobs arise from our audiences spreading the word. All our songs are different, interesting, and exciting.

Henrik: Ingrid, is it true that you became a musician from the moment you raised your hand when your fourth grade teacher asked who wanted to take violin lessons?—at least, that’s the charming story being passed around by musicians in Philadelphia.

Ingrid: True story, but I actually studied biology first and worked with rats and mice and bugs and earned a degree in pharmacy. I then studied violin at Temple and became a classical violin teacher. I played classical music in orchestras and chamber groups for quite some time. Eventually, I taught myself to improvise.

Henrik: Jack, how did you become a guitar and banjo player, a composer, and a lyricist?

Jack: I’ve been playing, singing, and writing songs since I was in high school. I loved folk music and rock, and the Beatles made popular music even more interesting. I listened to all the great songwriters and gradually developed my own style.

Henrik: You worked as a successful lawyer, and now you write lyrics and give concerts all over Philadelphia. Tell us about that transition.

Jack: Yes, I practiced law for over 37 years, but I never stopped playing and writing music whenever I could find the time. When I reached the point where I could move into music full time, I jumped at it. As for Law, I never looked back. Since last fall, I’ve been teaching a songwriting course at Temple’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Philadelphia.

Henrik: Wonderful. What a great transition. Ingrid, you are a successful classical violin teacher. Why did you decide to form Last Chance and perform fiddle tunes and new songs?

Ingrid: I’m totally dedicated to my students, but I love to play for the sheer enjoyment. In Last Chance we can create our own music, style, and arrangements, record, and perform for the love of it. We’re doing what no one else is doing. Our music is original and it has a contemporary feel. We craft the songs as we see fit, and we work as long as it takes to get the sound we want.

Henrik: Fascinating. Could you describe the first performance by Last Chance

Jack: We were a duo before we had the name “Last Chance.” I entered a singer-songwriter showcase at a local arts center. Ingrid agreed to join me with fiddle accompaniment. Before we went on stage, Ingrid asked me if I was nervous. I said, “Yeah, a little. Are you?” She said, “No.” From that moment forward, I’ve never been nervous to perform a show with Ingrid.

Ingrid: Ironically, I used to suffer from terrible stage fright. All through music school, I was so anxious while performing. It’s totally different now in Last Chance.

Henrik: How did you come up with the name Last Chance?

Ingrid: We wanted something catchy, simple, and memorable. We’ve both played lots of music before, and this is our “last chance” to play music exactly the way we want. However, when we play weddings, we call our group “Rambling Heart.”

Henrik: Have you had any memorable moments from your shows?

Ingrid: We’ve played for the WXPN Musicians on Call Program at the Philly VA, a home for veterans with very serious health conditions. When we play there, people barely conscious, come alive, start moving to the rhythm, even clapping, and moving around in wheelchairs. We’ve played for people who were at the very end of their lives.

Jack: We recently played a new coffeehouse for disabled people. We played a house concert and donated all the proceeds to Jubilee School in West Philadelphia.

Henrik: Last Chance is known not only for a special kind of music but also for its generosity, and capacity to connect with an audience.

Ingrid: Thank you. We played a house concert in Philly on the same bill with two young musicians who were on the road. We decided on the spot to donate our share of the evening’s fee to the musicians with whom we shared the bill.

Jack: Our most unusual event was for a celebration of a loving couple, diverse in every way. Ray Duvall and Ron Hunter were two gay men from the Philadelphia theater community—one was Jewish, the other was raised Christian. One was white and the other African American. Finally, one was alive, the other deceased. The event was a celebration of life and a posthumous marriage ceremony. We performed “Wouldn’t You Know” that evening, which Ingrid solos on with stunning beauty. She gets too emotional to sing that song now, and we’ve taken it out of our repertoire.

Henrik: I vividly recall those extraordinary moments at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre that night. Your music was so moving most people cried. At other concerts of yours, I have seen the audience snap their fingers and sway their bodies with an energy rarely seen elsewhere. Thank you, Ingrid and Jack!

Last Chance perform Thursday, March 26, 2015, at Lansdowne Folk Club [84 S. Lansdowne Ave, Lansdowne, PA]; folkclub.org/concert-schedule. Check out a full schedule of their shows and their albumWe Came to Play, on their website lastchance.co.vu.

Last Chance was featured on an Internet TV show, see this YouTube link. If you want to go directly to the songs, start at around 18:05. 
​
*This interview was originally published by Phindie. 

I have seen many performances of Donald Margulies’s shocking intergenerational encounter COLLECTED STORIES. I was in awe of the late Lynn Redgrave as Ruth Steiner and Karina Mackenzie as her protégée at the Grand Opera in Wilmington, DE in 2004. However, a few days ago, I witnessed an even more brutal performance with Renee Weisband as the aging professor and Kirsten Quinn as her enthusiastic graduate student at the Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5.

COLLECTED STORIES portrays Ruth Steiner, a renowned Jewish professor of literature devoted to her craft. In her drive to become a better writer and professor, she gave up any private life, except for a secret affair many decades ago with Delmore Schwartz, a famous and handsome poet and womanizer. This taboo subject in her life is one that she only talked about once—with her graduate assistant Lisa Morrison.

Steiner tells her eager student, “In my writing, I try to tell the truth. Telling the truth means being as unstintingly specific as possible, for in the specific lies the universal.” Little does she realize that the day would come when her protégée would take that advice and tell the truth—lifting the mothballed veils of secrecy Professor Steiner had draped over her torrid past when she was a young, inexperienced woman.

Playwright Margulies described that situation—the center of his 1996 play—as a universal phenomenon: “Most people have felt betrayed or committed betrayal, deliberately or unknowingly.” In the mid-1960s, Jerzy Grotowski, the great Polish theatre director, revealed that “Young artists wish for inspired moments. And you find them; you take them; eager artists are bandits. Theatrical moments arrive, and you grab. Good! You know it will draw attention to you. But you aim to be more than bandits, no?” (quoted by Keith Fowler, “Student Assistant to Jerzy Grotowski Reveals Secrets From Inside the Lab.”)

Margulies described the “incredibly complex and conflicted relationship [between Ruth and Lisa]. There is a surrogacy involved, and there is a kind of mutual narcissism that I think exists in the mentor / protégée relationship, where each sees the reflection of herself in the other. Those reverberations for me have always been of great interest.”

In COLLECTED STORIES, the worlds of Ruth Steiner, the writer and professor, and Lisa Morrison, her graduate student and aspiring writer, clash in numerous ways—generational differences, jealousies, artistic license, and betrayal. Both Weisband and Quinn see the reflection of themselves in the other, a riveting performance with a role reversal that hits the audience hard.

Since 2003, Weisband, founding director of ISIS Productions and actor in many a Jewish-themed play—including Broken Glass, which I reviewed—has gone all out to present some of the most thought-provoking plays in the Philadelphia area.  Her Professor Steiner feels existentially threatened; Weisband acts with the power of a lioness caught in a trap from which there is no escape. Her voice reaches a sharpness and hits a volume that pierced my ears and my soul with full force.

Kirsten Quinn plays Lisa Morrison with gushing enthusiasm at first, leading to a growing awareness of her own powers. Morrison has grown by leaps and bounds as a result of her studies and her work with her professor, and then does something that shatters her aging mentor.

                                                                         Literary scandal

Many years ago, I met poet and novelist Stephen Spender in London, and had a wonderful conversation with him about his time in Berlin, when the Nazis took over in 1933. I had forgotten this meeting with the sensitive and sophisticated author until I discovered his now-famous letter to the New York Times (Sept. 4, 1994), in which he accused American novelist, David Leavitt, of plagiarizing Stephen’s 1951 novel World Within World, especially its “literary structure, character development, dialogue and plot” in his 1993 novel, While England Sleeps.  

Margulies read about the literary Leavitt–Spender scandal and felt inspired to make the theme of betrayal and plagiarism the center of COLLECTED STORIES. As he sees himself as “a collagist in [his] work,” he created a riveting work, which shows a wide range of experiences, values, ambitions, by an up-and-coming young writer and an established professor of English who no longer is willing to push boundaries in her own life.

The pain of that sense of betrayal—which Spender felt acutely, and which led to a law case where Viking Penguin, the publishers, instead of paying millions of dollars, destroyed all copies still in the warehouse—became the impetus for a masterpiece that has been performed widely, not only in the English-speaking world, but around the globe. Margulies explained, “I think COLLECTED STORIES has traveled well because its themes cross cultures. Mentors and protégés exist everywhere.”

                                                    COLLECTED STORIES, waiting to be told

Shaken by the powerful performance of two Philadelphia actors in one of the most thought-provoking plays, I did not take the elevators, but walked all the way from the fifth floor of Studio 5 at the Walnut Street Theatre down the steep steps, through the lobby, into an ice-cold night, hit not only by the wind and the weather, but by many questions about the stories in my life that I have not published like Ruth Steiner, and the many stories that I know about people in my family, and among my friends—all waiting to be told.  [Walnut Street Theatre, Studio 5, 825 Walnut Street] March 5-29, 2015; isisperforms.com.

“Lifting the mothballed veils of secrecy: COLLECTED STORIES (Isis)"  was published by Phindie on March 23, 2015

By: Neilay Shah, March 20, 2015 

The temperature in Philadelphia had been hovering around 32°F all day, leaving the roads coated in a slick icy film. It felt as though it were simultaneously melting and freezing beneath my tires. Trying to see past my wipers as they flung slush from my windshield, I wondered if anyone else would be foolhardy enough to drive through this weather to see Henrik Eger’s docudrama METRONOME TICKING at the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church. As I walked into the chapel, clutching my scarf close to my neck, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in the company of a rather large group of people. We moved into the pews as a violinist played the theme from Schindler’s List and took our seats in the gilded glow of the stage.

METRONOME TICKING combines extracts from the memoirs of Lily Spitz, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, with selections from the personal letters written by Ernst-Alfred (“Alf”) Eger, a young and ambitious Third Reich propaganda officer, to tell a story of love and empathy in the time of the Holocaust.

The play features Henrik Eger and Bob Spitz, the sons of Alf and Lily respectively, alternately reading excerpts from the documents their parents left to posterity. Like Frank Dunlop’s Address Unknown (2001), a play based on Katherine Kressman Taylor’s novel (1938) chronicling a gentile and a Jew through their letters just before World War II—and performed recently by Seth Reichgott and Earnie Philips at Walnut Theater’s Studio 5—METRONOME TICKING is more a curated dramatized reading than a “play” in the traditional sense.

As the narrators read, images fill a huge TV screen behind them, and audio clips provide historical texture to the experience. At first, an invisible divide seems to partition the stage. Reading their lines in turn, Eger, wearing a Wehrmacht jacket, and Spitz, wearing a Star of David armband, sit at separate desks facing the audience rather than each other.

The two live through the War in dramatically different positions. Alf, for example, reminisces over his time with Gritt in a National Socialist labor camp fondly: “We walked through the swampy woods, we sang.” Lily, however, agonizes over her fiancé’s treatment in a German concentration camp: “The men had to work in all kinds of weather without gloves . . . he was allowed to receive money to supplement his food or for buying hand cream, so we sent some. He used all of it to sooth his swollen hands.”

As Fredl toils away in Dachau and then in Buchenwald, Alf leaves Gritt to fight, first in Belgium, then in France, where he is promoted to take charge of the French press in Normandy. Lily, meanwhile, works frantically to acquire the papers necessary to get Fredl out of the concentration camp. Upon his release, they decide to flee from Austria to Italy.

The war wears on everyone. Alf’s “sensibilities” begin to fade and his head throbs “like a hand grenade.” Lily feels drained of hope. Then, Henrik and Robert, the men we see on stage, are born into the story—nine days apart. In moments like these, Lily and Alf seem to experience the ups and downs of life quite similarly. Each rejoices in the prospect of becoming a parent; each struggles through the strains of childrearing and maintaining a marriage. Both pray for peace to return to the world.  It seems that Lily and Alf share these experiences simply by virtue of both being human.

However, their brief moments of joy are quickly followed by more hatred and despair. Alf becomes firmer in his prejudices, recounting in his letters his commitment to wiping the “red vermin” (Communists) and “gold kings” (his code phrase for Jews) from Europe. Lily, realizing her mother has been taken to a concentration camp, sinks deeper into depression. “When I read the card I started to shake. I had no control of my arms and legs and I could not speak coherently. Robbyle in Fredl’s arms started to cry and poor Fredl was desperate.”

Just as Lily seems to have reached her darkest moment and Alf his highest, the play takes a turn. In the dimmed light of the interval between Act 2 and Act 3, Eger and Spitz exchange roles, trading their desks and outfits.

Lily’s story begins to focus on the compassion she receives from Italians, Germans, and others while hiding with her husband and son Robby from the Nazis. An Italian Priest pretends to solicit German lessons from Fredl so that he may pay the Spitz family some charity. A German ignores clear evidence that Lily is Jewish and chooses to give her food and cookies for her child rather than report her to the Nazi authorities. Acts of mercy and tenderness, though often punctuated with tense, uncertain moments, fill Lily’s portion of Act 3.

Lily and Fredl are liberated with the arrival of the Allies in Italy, but must struggle through the destitution of Cinecittà, a refugee camp outside of Rome, before, years later, they can receive American immigration papers and start their lives anew. During that time, Lily gives birth to her second child, who dies in her arms of diphtheria.

Alf’s ideological commitment is itself a third character in METRONOME TICKING, and swings through Act 3 in a sweeping arch into a tragic denouement. Early in the play, Alf is convinced of the Nazi ideology and its accompanying prejudices. “Hucksters, hucksters. Jewish Hucksters! Yecch. Jewish!” Alf howls in disgust, “Leave it to those Jewish merchants to get confused and get lost in the holes they created while knitting their own stockings. We’ll sew up their Lord and laugh through this hole.” Though Alf does confess his “pity” for the Jews, “these typical victims who had believed that gold rules the world,” it is clear that he remains convinced of the Nazi ideology that justifies their imprisonment.

We are introduced to Alf as a young man, writing to his fiancée Gritt. Poised to begin his career as a journalist, he is ready to leave his impression upon the world: “Now the light falls onto my gold fountain pen, my gold fountain pen with which I will conquer my new profession,” he writes to Gritt, sure of his future. As Eger recites these lines with a befitting bravado, a handsome portrait of Alf fills the screen behind him.

The portrait introduces the audience to two Alfs: Alf the hopeful young man and Alf the hateful Nazi. We see him posing in his military uniform, his cap cocked to the side. His features are sharp, but his gentle expression betrays a cherubic warmth. Beneath this inviting visage, tucked into the corner of the photo, rests Alf’s swastika armband. Throughout the play, I struggled to reconcile this symbol of inhuman violence with the very human man that bore it.

Next, we hear from a young Lily living in Vienna, Austria, who is falling in love: “There was a charming, good looking man in his 30s who asked me often to dance with him, and we started to talk . . . I think I begin to fall in love with him. There was no doubt in my mind that he liked me also very much.” Spitz reads his mother’s lines in their German syntax and with an Austrian accent, filling them with a twinkling optimism. He sits beneath a faded, sepia-toned portrait of Fredl, Lily’s soon-to-be fiancé, as the first few bars of a Viennese waltz play from the speakers, inviting the audience to share their romantic moment.

Though two distinct characters, Alf and Lily’s narratives quickly entwine, crisscrossing over particular historical moments and mirroring each other’s themes, slowly eroding the barrier between their sons on stage. Love, marriage, forced separation, reunion, birth of a child, and loss of a loved one—we watch as Alf and Lily each experience these cornerstones of life. While World War II determines the chronology of the narrative, the drama of METRONOME TICKING emerges from their personal experiences.

As the war wages on, though, Alf begins to lose faith in its premise. “I look at the tanks in the streets below twice,” Alf confesses to Gritt, “once as a soldier who wants to destroy the enemy, the second time as a human being who accuses the warmongers.” He turns his criticism towards the whole project of modernity, lamenting, “the German caterpillar tanks destroyed seed and limbs. Oh ye miracle of technology, oh you outsmarted humanity, your pride, your work, your motorized destruction—how far have you progressed? Why doesn’t the caterpillar monstrosity pull a plow in order to feed all of you?”

Despite his grievances, Alf continues to support the war effort until he witnesses his own people commit a mass execution. We learn from the voice of a narrator that this experience shatters Alf’s worldview and leaves him shrinking into himself, “disturbed, afflicted, and lifeless,” until he disappears entirely, “missing in action” on the Russian front.

Lily’s guilt about not having saved her mother serves as METRONOME TICKING’S fourth character. It begins when she realizes she cannot afford a third ticket to Italy. With a heavy heart, Lily promises her mother that she and Fredl will return. After the young couple arrives in Milan, Italy, they learn that the War has broken out, the borders have been sealed to Jews, and “all of us foreigners” would be interned. “We must have come on the last train,” Lily realizes. Even decades later, she admits, “The guilt feeling that arose in me for betraying my mother has never left me.” Throughout her life, Lily would wear this guilt as a shroud.

METRONOME TICKING opens with both actors reciting an invocation, originally written by Alf, but equally fitting to Lily: “Read more than my letters. Read that which I did not write. Read that which could shatter my heart.” This docudrama puts it to the audience to do just that. To read Alf not simply as a Nazi, but as a loving husband, a proud father, a starry-eyed young man caught up in his own lust for success, who eventually realized what his hatred had done to others. To read Lily not simply as a victim but as a woman who fought the Gestapo and an oppressive concentration camp regime, and who found and gave love, even in the darkest moments of her life.

To let go of the caricatures we might have expected with a Holocaust drama; to read the humanity into each character we encounter with a generosity and empathy that could shatter my heart: these, I found, to be the most moving challenges of METRONOME TICKING. In an age when pundits toss around words like “Nazi” and “Holocaust” to end conversations before they even begin, METRONOME TICKING is a refreshing respite. 

[Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, 625 Montgomery Avenue, Bryn Mawr, PA] March 1, 2015; 
For more information, click this link: DramaAroundTheGlobe.com/metronome-ticking.html

"Human beings on both sides of the Holocaust" was published by Phindie on March 20, 2015.

Oscar Wilde was one of the wittiest gay playwrights, poets and writers of epigrams in the English-speaking world, and the author of the groundbreaking novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Wilde, the darling of British society, was sentenced to two years hard labor at Reading Gaol for “gross indecency” — even though there was no evidence

other than some love letters of his to Bosie, the young Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, son of the homophobic John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry. Eventually, Wilde was allowed pen and paper in prison, where he composed one of the most moving letters ever written by a man to his young lover — “De Profundis (From the Depths).”

To this day, people are traveling to the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to pay their respects to Wilde who, penniless and unknown, only 46, died of cerebral meningitis, in Room 16 at Hôtel d’Alsace — deserted by his lover, who did not want to be disinherited by his wealthy, albeit ruthless, father.

Not everyone, though, knows about the 27-year-old Wilde, who — wealthy, intelligent and with a tremendous desire to make a big name for himself — went on a tour through the United States, giving well-attended lectures on art and literature, determined to meet as many famous American writers, including Walt Whitman, so that he could not only bask in their glory, but also learn from them.

David M. Friedman, author of “Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity,” provides evidence that “Wilde didn’t travel to Camden to learn how to be a famous writer … He went to learn how to be a famous person.”

America’s oldest theater with the world’s largest subscriber base, the Walnut Street Theatre just premiered “Mickle Street” by Philadelphia playwright Michael Whistler, which features the encounter between the rising, if young, Wilde (Daniel Fredrick) from Britain and America’s seasoned and much-discussed Walt Whitman (Buck Schirner), then 62, at his house on Mickle Street in Camden, N.J., on Jan. 31, 1882.

Right from the beginning of the play, we see Wilde reflected through the eyes of Gilbert and Sullivan, the famous Victorian writers of operettas that had become big-box office successes both in the United States and Britain. Mary (Sabrina Profitt), the widow who looks after Whitman, sings this musical caricature of Wilde, the upper-class dandy from the popular Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “Patience:” “Conceive me if you can/A Bombty-bomp young man/So ultra poetical/so etty-quette-tetical/Out of the way young man.”

Shortly thereafter, the tall and handsome Wilde arrives at Whitman’s humble and overcrowded home, dressed to the hilt with his famous fur coat and pantaloons, looking like a Victorian male Madonna at a gala.

Unlike the American singer, Wilde plays the poetic wild card: “I come as a poet to call upon a poet,” he proclaims at his arrival — to the delight of audiences who experience a battle royale between the poor and aging American star among poets: the wild young Wilde, who made up his lack of experience with panache, and Mary, the simple Irish-American soul with great convictions that clash with both men and their lifestyles, at least the way she sees them.

She warns Wilde about Whitman’s predilection for working-class young men, including the famous Pete Doyle, a streetcar conductor whom she calls “the trolley man,” one of Whitman’s favorite companions:

“He rides the trolley all day to be near him and talk — day finishes they come here and drink. Pete doesn’t leave — there’s not a liberty Pete doesn’t take about this house. There is not a liberty that Mr. Whitman doesn’t take with Pete.”

Showing Wilde more photos of Whitman’s favorite young men, she exclaims, full of consternation:

“Sailors, peddlers, soldiers — ah! An 18-year-old boy he gave a ring to. I thought to put [these images] aside as company was coming. It appears I needn’t have bothered. T’isn’t natural. It’s an inversion. But the man is what he is, and my hiding a few photographs won’t change that. He’ll tell you it is all a part of his ‘cosmology,’ that it is a part of a ‘new country of comrades.’”

Seconds later, reflecting on Wilde’s effusive behavior toward Whitman, the old widow issues a warning: “So you be sure you know where you might end up when you start into flattering and flirting and all this ‘cosmology.’ When he’s got his rand up I can smell it on him like a perfume. With all your talk of jardinières and amarylli, yer a fancy boy yourself.”

When Whitman returns from the kitchen with a “working man’s treat — Milk punch!” (whiskey and milk), Mary stiffens her back and leaves the room, with Whitman buddying up to the young Wilde: “Well. We’ll continue, just us boys then. We two boys together clinging, one the other never leaving, up and down the roads going.”

Wilde plays along and brings up the controversial “Leaves of Grass” collection that he had read in London, quoting Whitman’s references to “manly attachment,” “adhesive love,” “love of comrades” and “the life that does not exhibit itself.” Some moving discussions ensue, including one nasty review that describes the content of the poetry collection as “a sin so vile that it is not spoken by Christians.” Little did Wilde know that he would be accused of a similar crime, end up in prison and, shortly thereafter, die way before his time.

Whistler’s new play, based on historical facts and imagined conversations between two famous writers (directed by Greg Wood), opens new doors, shows an insecure young Wilde who seems to hide behind “aesthetics and art” while Whitman teaches Wilde more than he might have bargained for, advising him, “Go see America. Go see the world. Find out what creature you are. And for all the frippery — be honest. With us, and with yourself.” 

"Wilde visits Whitman in world-premiere play" was published by Philadelphia Gay News on February 26, 2015.

Michael Hollinger is a much-produced Pennsylvania playwright and associate professor of theater at Villanova University, writer of three short films for PBS, and co-author of the feature-length Philadelphia Diary.

He has written eleven full-length dramas, eight of which saw their world premiere at the Arden Theatre. He has also written eleven plays for young audiences. His works have been performed in many different theaters, including five productions in Europe and Asia. He received numerous awards and fellowships all over the United States.

In the 1990s, he worked as a dramaturg at the Wilma Theater, Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, Arden Theatre Company, 1812 Productions, InterAct Theatre Company, Delaware Theatre Company/Roundhouse Theatre, and Philadelphia Young Playwrights/Philadelphia Theatre Company.

His latest world premiere, UNDER THE SKIN, got under the skin of quite a few audience members, perhaps because of the serious nature of the play—kidney donation within a dysfunctional family. (Read the Phindiereview.) Audiences were also concerned when the lead actor (Craig Spidle), who played the father who needed the transplant to survive, fell seriously ill and spent several days in the hospital before the world premiere. The Arden has since hired Douglas Rees as the permanent replacement for his role.

Henrik Eger: As a dramaturg in Philadelphia and other cities, you helped in the production of world premieres of well-known and respected authors like Chaim Potok, Joyce Carol Oates, and Bruce Graham. How did those experiences shape your own writing?

Michael Hollinger: Reading hundreds upon hundreds of play submissions, and watching scores upon scores of rehearsals and performances, helped me strengthen my dramatic “muscle” and increase my sensitivity to what works and doesn’t work in the theatre.  In my view, there are no hard-and-fast rules beyond “Don’t bore the audience,” but this period allowed me to absorb and test the basic principles of this art form.

Eger: You participated in a number of script development workshops with directors, actors, and fellow writers. How did they shape your own development as a playwright?

Hollinger: My early workshop experiences taught me to be as bold as possible when a script is in development, to try as many variations as I can in search of the right story, scene or moment.  Once a play reaches production, and audiences are in attendance, the scale of revision has to diminish, so I try to take advantage of the time when I can use the crowbar and saw rather than the sandpaper and varnish.

Eger: When you started as a young playwright submitting your scripts, how did you build and develop working relationships with theaters? What worked, and what advice do you have for the next generation of playwrights?

Hollinger: It was extremely advantageous that I was a literary manager, because my colleagues at various theatres around the country had to read the plays I sent them cover to cover, since they knew they might run into me at a conference or festival.  (This didn’t mean they had to like them; my plays still got turned down many more times than they were accepted, like most playwrights.)  But by submitting my plays very broadly early on, I came to distinguish between the theatres where my plays were near-misses from those where they were long shots, and continued to submit where I’d received the encouraging rejection letters, sensing that perhaps these organizations shared my own vision.  Over time I’ve developed a group of theatrical “familiars” around the country, places and people who I know will seriously consider my next play, even if they ultimately opt not to produce it.

Eger: You have won numerous awards all over the US. What impact did they have on you as a playwright and as an individual?

Hollinger: It’s certainly fun to win things, and an artist’s life is so inherently filled with doubt that an award (or several) can momentarily affirm that you’re on the right track.  But they don’t make the next play easier to write. I think most playwrights would say that the most exciting moments are when you think there are no solutions to the play at hand and suddenly one presents itself.

Eger: How do you explain your extraordinary relationship with the Arden Theatre Company where everything seemed to just click from the very beginning, leading to eight world premiere productions?

Hollinger: From his first encounter with my work (An Empty Plate in the Café du Grand Boeuf in 1994), Terry Nolen seemed to get precisely what I was going for—how I approached language, and character, and the use of space, and the balance of light and dark. His biggest aim, and the Theatre’s mission, is to tell Great Stories, and my main intention, with every play I write, is to take an audience on a really good ride. So our visions are very similar, and as a result, we’re confident that we’re both working towards the same ends.

Eger: What does a typical week as a playwright, associate professor of theater at Villanova University, and family man look like?

Hollinger: It’s very full! Since my wife, Megan Bellwoar, is a professional actor as well as a theatre teacher and director (at Abington Friends School), our shared Google Calendars are pretty packed. For me, this means that doing rewrites or marking up student work sometimes gets pushed to the “bookends” of the day, which can be tiring. But I also find that I’m happy to be with whoever’s in front of me at any given moment, so the sheer variety of activities packed into any given day helps keep me refreshed.

Eger: You described yourself as “this irreverent theater guy who’s been brought into the fold of a Catholic institution, and whose function may well be to poke it in the side every now and then and generate laughter.” Give some examples where you tested the limits at the respected Villanova University.

Hollinger: Villanova has traditionally given its Theatre a long leash, which has allowed my department to produce a wide array of work over the past half century, including some rather controversial plays. My own plays Incorruptible and Red Herring were produced there in recent years, and both goose the Church in different ways. But then, all big, well-heeled institutions—religious, political, and commercial—need to be goosed now and then.

Eger: Tell us about people you knew who were organ donors or recipients and how some of their experiences might have influenced UNDER THE SKIN.

Hollinger: Most of the donor/recipient stories I collected were between family members, and, unlike my play, were marked by a deep underlying generosity from the start. Perhaps my most striking encounter, however, was with Marie Manley, Transplant Assistant at Lankenau Hospital, who spoke about her journey as an organ donor. Some years ago, she had just moved to a new parish and saw a notice in her church bulletin that another parishioner needed a kidney. Marie decided on the spot that she wanted to donate to this unknown fellow human being. This example of blind, extravagant altruism helped develop the “counterweight” in my play to the main character’s resistance to donating to her own father.

Eger: Who do you consider “kidney-worthy”? If your wife, children, or Arden’s director Terry Nolen needed a kidney and you were a match, what would you do?

Hollinger: I don’t think I’ve evolved to the point where I’m ready to go on a donor website and pick out a stranger to receive my kidney, but I’d happily share one with any of these people, and others in my life, too.

Eger: In 2014, you described the stages of development of Incorruptible, as “requir[ing] many drafts, many readings, and two major workshops of the play in order to find its final form.” As a result, it became a popular play. What was different in the development and composition process for UNDER THE SKIN?

Hollinger: If only many drafts, readings and workshops always resulted in a popular play! (Unfortunately, one can work just as arduously on an unpopular play.) The development of Incorruptible took place at a variety of different institutions in many different cities, and I was a much greener playwright trying to crack the hardest dramatic form—a screwball or farcical comedy. You might say that writing and revising Incorruptible was my graduate degree in playwriting, as it gave me the opportunity (i.e., forced me) to solve the most fundamental problems of the form: How to compress time, space and personnel to allow the dramatic action to generate as much pressure as possible? How to create character as something dynamic (changing over time) rather than static? How to move characters in and out of scenes so as to continually refresh the audience’s eyes and ears, and keep the rhythms and dynamics of the play varied? And, of course, using a trial-and-error process to land as many laughs as possible.

UNDER THE SKIN was a much shorter process, and more focused, beginning with a first-draft reading at Theatre Exile in Philadelphia and continuing through four or five more readings at the Arden (some closed, some with an audience). Happily, the first draft of the play was closer to its finished form than Incorruptiblewas, either because I had 20 more years of experience behind me, or because the play is smaller in scale and not as complex. (Incorruptible includes many large scenes, with up to seven characters, while Under the Skin never goes above four, and smaller scenes have fewer character trajectories to manage.)

Eger: Could you describe the collaboration between you and director Nolen?

Hollinger: Terry and I have always seen my plays very similarly, and this latest process was particularly smooth in terms of our collaboration. He also knows that I am not at all precious about my work, and am eager to incorporate useful ideas from any source, whether that be from him, an assistant stage manager, or an audience comment at a public reading. I learn a great deal from hearing good actors read a new draft aloud, so we designed a development process that allowed me to hear my latest rewrite every few months, make a few changes on the fly, hear it again, then leave to work on the next draft armed with information and helpful questions from him, dramaturg Sally Ollove, and the cast.

Eger: UNDER THE SKIN shows an average family that could be considered dysfunctional. You open closets with quite a few hidden secrets that most people don’t dare to talk about. What experiences, whether personal or from literature, shaped your writing of Raina, the deeply troubled and angry daughter who bases her contempt for her father on false or incomplete information?

Hollinger: Both my own family and my wife’s have had significant estrangements between parents and children, and these experiences have been enhanced by observing the families of many of my friends over the years as well. (My uncle actually “divorced” his entire family with a formal letter to his father, mother, and sister, and remained out of contact for 25 years, including through the death of both parents. Finally, late in life, my mom began sending him a Valentine every February; after seven years, he replied, and they were in a relationship again for perhaps a decade until their deaths within two months of each other.) As I see it, Raina has displaced her grief for her mother into rage against her father, and she cannot reconcile the latter until she gets to the bottom of the former.

Eger: You described UNDER THE SKIN as a play where “the clock was ticking—if it’s not solved, a guy dies”—a potentially tragic situation. Yet, your play contains quite a few black comedy situations, making the audience laugh. For example, when the patient’s daughter was a little girl, he bid her goodnight with Brecht’s “Mack the Knife.” What did you do to keep this tragic-comedic play balanced and not make it a soap opera?

Hollinger: It’s one of life’s remarkable qualities that nothing retains the same tone or mood for very long. Any good news I receive was probably preceded (and will be succeeded) by something bad. Terrible things happen at weddings, and hysterical things happen at funerals. Since art is based on life, I believe this variety of tone is therefore essential—that a little levity helps balance out, and, indeed, accentuate the gravity and vice versa. Finding the proper balance of what I call “ha-ha-ouch” can be tricky, but rewarding once found.

Eger: A number of people consider UNDER THE SKIN a comedy. However, I saw it more as a comedy with strong tragic undertones. How does this dichotomy in Under the Skin relate to some of your other plays? Do you see a pattern evolving in your work?

Hollinger: All of my outright comedies have moments of real pain in them, and the dramas have moments where the audience is encouraged to laugh. Again, I think these contrasts refresh our nervous system, like the alternations in hot/cold, savory/sweet, crunch/smooth that one might find in the various courses of an elaborate meal. I always saw the structure and major plot twists in UNDER THE SKIN as comedic, though the deeper I got into the play, the more I felt obliged to plumb the depths of its characters’ suffering as well.

Eger: You present two main characters: the father, a problematic man (originated and played movingly by Craig Spidle), and Raina, a predominately unforgiving young woman who rides a roller-coaster of emotions, filled with disappointment, hate, and a few moments of conditional forgiveness (played with feverish energy by Juliana Zinkel). The surprise revelations near the end of the play give everyone the opportunity to reflect. Yet, Toby Zinman of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote of the ending, “For a play that seems to want to say something about the importance of family ties, all it can manage is a soapbox speech, directly addressed to the audience, arriving at the pronouncement that ‘blood is thicker than water’.” How did you come up with Raina’s unexpected speech to the audience at the end of the play, which appears abrupt and as a sudden about-face of her character?

Hollinger: I have not read the review you mention—I’ll read all of them with my graduate playwriting class in April, to allow my students to assess whether and where there may be consensus among critics, and where they contradict each other (a useful pedagogical tool for young artists)—though the quote above is mistakenly cited. Raina’s “thicker than water” reference takes place not to the audience but in the previous scene, to justify her decision to her father. The fact that she adopts a cliché as part of her justification is a clue that, despite her apparent certitude, she’s actually deeply mistaken about the facts of the situation, which will shortly be revealed.

The direct-address speech at the very end of the play is something quite different. Here Raina, who’s been so stuck in her head that she made a two-column plus/minus list to decide whether to give her father a kidney, moves below the neck and is able at last to act (and speak) with the heart. Human beings make “rational” decisions methodically, by accruing and weighing bits of information, pros and cons; but Raina’s ultimate decision is not “rational,” because she doesn’t make it with her brain—no more than Marie Manley rationally decided to give her kidney to a perfect stranger. One might say that the heart opens unreasonably.

Eger: Henrik Ibsen would have turned UNDER THE SKIN into a tragedy with Raina as a lovable, misunderstood, young woman. Brecht did the opposite. He tried many times to roughen up Mother Courage’s character to make her as unsympathetic as possible. What did you intend when creating Raina’s character?

Hollinger: I love both Ibsen and Brecht, and Raina, too. Both playwrights were fascinated by their characters’ flaws, by their blind spots and brokenness, though they treated them with different degrees of judgment and compassion. In UNDER THE SKIN, Raina says that her yoga teacher has described her as “a Young Soul,” and I find this touching. She knows that she’s short-sighted and emotionally messy, but also aspires to be a better person than she is at the moment. She’s on the same journey we’re all on, at all different stages.

Eger: UNDER THE SKIN was inspired by a letter written by a brother and sister to columnist Randy Cohen, asking for advice on who could donate a kidney to their father. Did you ever contact them about your play, and if so, what were their responses?

Hollinger: No, I was not interested in the particulars of their story, only the interesting nexus of forces at work. (The original title idea, Rock Paper Scissors—a phrase which came up in that article—suggested something to me of the timeless game of dominance and submission among three equal forces.)

Eger: Some of your plays made it into non-English speaking countries like France, Greece, Poland, Slovenia, and Japan. Were they performed in English or in foreign languages? What were the reactions of the directors, actors, audiences, and the press to your plays overseas?

Hollinger: These foreign productions have all been produced in translation, not in English. Alas, I haven’t been able to see any of them (yet), so I don’t know how they were received.

Eger: Thanks, Michael. Give my best to all the characters, especially Raina.

"UNDER THE SKIN Gets Under My Skin" was published by Phindie on February 13, 2015.

Quiz for bright guests on a late night TV show: “What comes to mind when you think of Oscar Wilde?” (A) Famous and wealthy Irish writer. (B) Author of witty plays and epigrams. (C) Dandy, darling of London society. (D) Famous Victorian writer to be condemned to two years hard labor for gross indecency. (E) Destitute and deserted by his lover, dead in Paris at 46.

Philadelphia playwright Michael Whistler’s latest play, MICKLE STREET shows a different Wilde: 27, searching for an identity, and seeking out advice from the famous Walt Whitman. We see Wilde’s wit evolve, but many of his words taste like young wine—a fledgling writer struggling with his identity, convinced that he already has made it because of the many Americans who are attending his lectures, from New York and Philadelphia, all the way to Colorado—even though the press writes less than flattering reviews.

Being associated with famous people was as muchen vogue in the late 1800s as it is today. David M. Friedman, author of Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity, provides evidence that”Wilde didn’t travel to Camden to learn how to be a famous writer. [. . .] He went to learn how to be a famous person.”

Whistler features the encounter of the rising, if fairly inexperienced, Wilde (played with indefatigable exuberance by Daniel Fredrick) with the seasoned and much discussed Whitman, then 62, at his house on Mickle Street in Camden, NJ, on January 31, 1882 (played by Buck Schirner with the frazzled maturity and knowledge of age).

Right from the beginning, we see Wilde reflected through the eyes of Gilbert and Sullivan, the famous Victorian writers of comic operas that satirized the aesthetic movement of the 1870s and ’80s and all that went with it: fads, vanity, and pretentiousness.

Mary, the Irish-Catholic widow who looks after Whitman (played by Sabrina Profitt with the conviction and charm of a housekeeper who has seen more than is good for her moral standards), opens the play. Before his arrival, full of impatience, she sings a song from the popular opera Patience, caricaturing Wilde:“Conceive me if you can/A Bombty-bomp young man/So ultra poetical/so etty-quette-tetical/Out of the way young man.”

Shortly thereafter, the tall and handsome Wilde arrives at Whitman’s humble and overcrowded home, all done up with his famous fur coat and pantaloons, looking like a Victorian male Madonna at a gala. However, Mary doesn’t believe in externals: “The crowd seemed more impressed with his appearance than his speech.”

Whistler’s Mary has a fine eye for different layers of reality: “You know the paper says he lives ‘on Beauty alone.’ All he asks for lunch is a glass of water for the posy he carries about.” Even when Whitman tries to explain to her the “L’art pour l’art” or “art for art’s sake” concept and Wilde’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood aestheticism, she doesn’t buy it: “Suppose I were to make a pie for you, Mr. Whitman, and instead of cutting you a slice told you that ‘Oh no—this pie is not for the eating. It is ‘complete in itself.’ I made it for the purpose of being a beautiful, aesthetic pie.’” No wonder the audience chuckled many times, especially in the first part of the play.

MICKLE STREET  doesn’t fall into the trap of lionizing Wilde or Whitman. Mary makes it quite clear that “for all your fine words and flowers I know you for what you are, Mr. Walt Whitman: a trouble to man and woman both.” Whitman, unafraid of her, also has a few choice terms of endearment for her, “Mary, don’t be a stubborn old goat,” or, “She’s a skittish trout when she’s of a mind.” While she may not always understand the man whom she observes from her prim and proper perspective, she nevertheless serves as a balancing force throughout the play.

Audiences in Britain and the US at the time laughed at Wilde, the talented but attention-craving poet—the way many Americans today make fun of the not so witty Paris Hilton and the Kardashians. Unfazed, Wilde loves playing the role of the enfant terrible— dressed to the hilt, posy in his lapel. In Whistler’s adaptation, Wilde even encourages the attention: “I want to shock.”

Whistler imagines a conversation between two writers: Whitman, with all his foibles, clearly has the upper hand, while Wilde’s verbal dancing doesn’t get him anywhere, except the awareness that, perhaps, there is more to life than theatrics and striking up “battles in this revolution for the Science of Beauty.”

Wilde, the dandy, throws out more than lava of aesthetic pronouncements. There are moments when he touches on the untouchable: “We do not wear our sins as we wear our cloaks. Those we keep in a closet.” Whistler’s MICKLE STREET  presents some intense moments between those two men who were considered to be fluid in their sexuality, and were punished for their writing and their lifestyle—Whitman, by being denied a paid position at a hospital during the Civil War, and Wilde being sent to jail.

Friedman implies that both Whitman and Wilde were publicity hounds—with Whitman even writing enthusiastic, albeit anonymous, reviews about his controversial masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. These two writers were quite a match in their desire to reach as wide an audience as possible. “Cultivating newspaper coverage and meetings with American literary giants, the tour made Wilde the second best-known Brit in the country after Queen Victoria, despite having published almost nothing,” as Kevin C. Shelly points out.

Whitman, overwhelmed by Wilde’s many statements, mixed in with his compliments, blurts out, “You have thrown more ideas at me in an hour than fifteen other men I might know. You are smart, and you see something. But you have to stop staring all mooney eyed at ancient ruins. You no more live in an ancient temple than I do. You want to live in the world—live in the world.” 

"MICKLE STREET: There is more to life than theatrics (Walnut)" was published by Phindie on March 1, 2015.