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Talk With Lois Ames

Interviews with the poet Anne Sexton are always revealing, because she had the wonderful habit of being honest even about things she did not fully understand. In 1967 she received the Pulitzer Prize. Seven years later she was dead. This interview with Lois Ames finds Anne working on her play Mercy Street, which would premiere two years later under the title 45 Mercy Street. Anne's vulnerability is on display here, as well as her great stubbornness. It sometimes feels as if there are endless ways to learn from her; at other times we are stifled by the frustration of not being able to explain her completely. 

LA: Why don't we start by talking about Mercy Street? What I have told people is that it really encompasses the great themes of the twentieth century American in the third part of the century: sex...

ANNE SEXTON: There's sex in it, of course.

And psychiatry, and religion, and money...

Once the director said, "It's a play about money."

And the evolution of American women...

I'm not sure about Daisy, the heroine, but she has a great-aunt, a Victorian woman who had a career, who worked on a newspaper. A very dominant female.

Really a "bluestocking" of her era.

Yes, but the heroine in the play looks for Christ and goes back through her life.

Don't you think Daisy is a freer, more open human being than the great-aunt?

Oh, yes, she's a woman of our generation. The play is staged in 1969 during a Mass and a psychiatrist-priest is the girl's central support.

How did the play evolve?

Four or five years ago I received a Ford Foundation grant to write for the theater. I was in residence with the Charles Playhouse in Boston, and I wrote a play which was then titled Tell Me Your Answer True, and the Charles Playhouse gave it a little bit of work, not very much. And then I put it away, thanked my agent, and nothing ever came of it. Later I said that I hated the theater, and that I was very sour. Sour because I had never been produced. Then this spring the American Place Theater in New York got interested in the play, and they agreed to give a "staged reading." They worked on it for two weeks. I did a lot of rewriting then, and changed the title to Mercy Street. When they decided to make the play their first production this fall, I worked all summer on it. Now we're in New York at rehearsals, rewriting and working it out.

But actually, the genesis of Mercy Street was not when you received the Ford Grant. The germ of the play had been with you years earlier.

Well, before that the Charles Playhouse had a writers' workshop kind of thing and different writers and actors would go in, oh, maybe fifteen people, to a loft on Berkeley Street over the Hotel Diplomat. It was once a church. They gave readings of people's scripts. At the end of the evening, they would pass the hat around and everyone would put some money in it. I went with a friend of mine who was writing a play.

Who was the friend?

Eleanor Boylan, who is director of the Young Newton Players and a puppeteer. I went with her, and was quite interested in what they were doing. And then I thought, "Gee, maybe I could write a play," so I started a few scenes, and I brought them in and they read them, and I put my money in the hat.

Was this after you published To Bedlam and Part Way Back in All My Pretty Ones?

Yes, I was in the middle of Live or Die.

For which you got the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. Tell me, what was the central theme of that first play?

Christ and madness. A girl who has committed suicide finds herself in death as a character in a circus sideshow looking for Christ. She is hounded by morality figures with names like Backbiter, Barker, Flesh, and Charity and when she turns from religion to psychiatry, she finds no Christ in that realm either.

The American Place Theater gave you a staged reading this spring. When you were on the Ford grant at the Charles Playhouse, did you ever have any kind of staging of this play, or any of its scenes?

About two scenes, but they were never staged. I learned a lot from it. I was working with the director, Ben Shaktman, and he was a great help to me, helped me rewrite one certain scene, going over it and over it, and helping me with it a lot.

Oh, you never actually saw your characters?

I only saw five minutes of the morality figures.

I see. And these are the people you have so transmuted at this point that they really are not recognizable from the original script?

No, none of what was at the Charles remains. What I worked on with Ben just by letter does remain, just one little scene.

I see. How long did you work on it before that - in the loft?

Oh, that was about two weeks.

I see; and then how long was it worked on at the Charles Playhouse?

I can't remember. I think that same year of the loft I was nominated for the Ford grant, and then you have to wait, you know, to see if you're going to get it. And I said, "One thing I'll do if you give me this grant is write a play," and actually, before I got the grant — I think I got it in September — I had written a version of the play. During July-June and July — I worked oh, constantly, I didn't sleep at all. And I didn't take care of my family or anything. I just worked on the play.

And then after you got the Ford grant did you work on it ...

I was still by myself. I was just going to the Charles Playhouse, and they were rehearsing things, other things ...

For consultation . . .

No, I was just going to watch how it took place.

I see. You were really being exposed to the theater, learning its tricks ...

I find now, in the theater, that I didn't learn enough.

And that went on for how many months?

During the whole season.

Then at the end of the season you hoped that the play might be produced somewhere, and it wasn't.

I sent it to my agent and nothing happened.

Now, this must have been about 1964, I would suspect?

I would say that's a pretty good guess.

By the time I met you, you had completely given up the idea of writing a play, and as late as last February you handed me a light blue folder, saying to me, "You've read my successes. Since you're my biographer, you'd better take a look at this, because this is one of my failures — I have failures, too." And I took it home and read it. I remember being so excited and calling you the next morning telling you it wasn't a failure, it just needed a lot of cutting and rewriting. It's such a different play now, in September, from what it was in February.

Yes, it certainly is.

And so many people have contributed to it, to the work on it, and yet all of it has come out of you.

First I have my ideas. Then the producer has ideas, the director has ideas ...

But it's all going through you, the poet-playwright, it's all shunted through you and you act almost as a vessel. I think you do thls with poetry, but it's more immediate now, watching you write a play. Do you remember the day we went to the Church of the Advent in Boston?

It was suggested by the producer, Wynn Handman that we set it at Mercy Street Episcopal church while Daisy is taking communion. And that was very much to my mind because the play has a great deal to do with Christ and yet it isn't essentially Roman Catholic. And you and I decided to go to church. You found the Church of Advent on Brimmer Street for us, and Father Collingwood, who said, "You'll see the greatest show ever... " We loved it. The music, the incense and all of it. It was very dramatic.

I think it's fair to say that you have disemboweled the Mass and loned it into your play chunk by chunk. Of course, theater began in the church. And the first version of your play used morality figures. Now Mercy Street is opening on October 11 at St. Clement's Church here in New York. Why don't we talk for a moment about your reaction the first time you saw your play on the stage? I saw your astonishment at seeing your words become three-dimensional, become people.

Oh, it was wonderful! I mean it was a thrill to hear other peopIe read it, instead of me alone in my study, reading aloud.

And you kept pushing everyone toward production ...

Well, I wasn't sure, I was hopeful. You know, one thing, I loathe the thought of audiences coming in. I think I want them just to do it for me.

Why?

I don't have any idea — you see, it'll be such an exposure of me. Though I'm known for that in my poetry, for some reason I feel more vulnerable in the play. Of course, I've read to audiences many times, but that's something I never enjoyed all the way, giving readings. But somehow the idea of an audience there — I don't know, maybe when they come in I'll love it. If they like it I'll be happy. I just have this horror that maybe they'll avert their eyes and say, "Oh, no."

Do you find it a cathartic experience?

I keep thinking it ought to make some great psychic change in me to watch these actors relive part of my life.

Do you think it has made any kind of psychic change?

I think it has. I think I'm stronger.

I think so, too.

But I'm not sure that's due to the play; maybe it's that I am finding I can handle myself in New York and I'm a little less of a country girl. I like to tell people I'm a country girl. But now I'm a little surer of myself. And there's a thrill working with those people, instead of the isolation of the poet. They're warm. They're intuitive. They're not boxed in.

You have so much talent and intelligence at your disposal. And there is a camaraderie in the group working on the production. Significant changes have been made in the play, even since the staged reading.

We keep making changes, and I come back to the hotel room and rewrite, and I am sure we'll continue to make changes.

What happens to you when you are writing a play that is different from writing a poem?

Depends on the poem. A lot of my poems are monologues, or even dialogues. Often, I become someone else in a poem. It was very much like writing a play, because I become that person. I wrote a poem once about Christ waking up in the tomb after he had been crucified.

"In the Deep Museum."

Yes. And I spent about two months thinking about Chris and how he would speak, and I got to the point where I even believed I was Christ, in order to write that — not with my rational mind, but with my emotional sensibility, I became Christ. Then I wrote a monologue.

With the play, I became each person — I love doing this. I think it's something I can do, too. I do it pretty well. I become someone else. I tell their story. I love to write in the first person, even when it isn't about me, and it's quite confusing to my readers, because they think everything I write — sometimes I am talking about myself and sometimes not.

In what way is writing a play different from writing poetry?

It's so much larger. There's a lot of Scotch tape and scissors. A play takes every minute of your time, every ounce of your energy. It's like balancing... or juggling ten balls and keeping them up. You have to be aware of every person you're writing about, every character, all at once.

What do you mean, aware of them?

Well, you are them.

You know, you're so happy these days. I've never seen you so happy.

I've got a cast. Once you stop writing the play and start getting the actors, that's the satisfying part, because it's collaboration. I like the interaction, the excitement of it, the bouncing ideas, the mounting of emotion that goes on. Writing poetry is a solitary act. Writing a play is a community program. Not in the initial writing, but the subsequent writing.

What are your plans for the future? How do you feel about the theater now?

I love it. I think when I am here that I could write another play.

Of course you will.

And I don't think I'll make as many mistakes the second time. But maybe I will. I understand the theater a bit better now.

What do you understand about the theater now?

Well, you can write a play like you're writing a movie. You don't have to worry about how people move around or how they get in and out or how it will work, because that's the director's problem. My problem is only in writing it, making speech. I think I'll be freer, maybe a little wilder, as I became with this play finally.

Have you ever considered doing a movie?

I don't know how, but probably it's the same thing.

One of the things that struck me this summer and fall is that you have become very tough. You've given up parts, some of the characters and some of the passages, some of the events in this play that you clung to for four years. It's been like watching some creature shed skin after skin.

Like a surgeon, right down to the bone. That's why I liked it. My method in writing a poem is to expand, expand, expand and then slice, and then expand, then slice, then expand, then slice, cut. And that's the way it always works. So playwriting is just done on a larger scale. I expand, then I cut. I don't mind cutting things. People have said about my poetry, "How could you cut those lines? They're good." But they're never really lost, they're on a worksheet. I might use them in other poems. And there are millions more. I mean the well never goes dry. I mean, you bubble up with ideas. And if you cut them off it's shaping, it's kind of like carving on a statue trying to get down to the bone. You just leave the bare essentials.

Anne, you've had many grants. What was your first grant?

I got a grant from the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, and it was the most exciting grant I ever got, because I had never gotten anything and I wasn't very respected by friends, or my acquaintances, or even my family, and most importantly my cleaning woman. They all thought that I was doing nothing but conning away at the typewriter and being very silly. When I got that recognition and that money, they started to give me a little privacy and respect for what I was trying to do.

You're staying in New York while this is being worked on and produced. You have a Guggenheim grant.

Yes, I'm on a Guggenheim, which has helped me afford to be able to be here, because life in New York, even my simple living, is quite expensive.

Tell me what your New York working day is like.

Well, you wake up about eight o'clock and you have breakfast, and then you go to the theater at ten. You break at one until two o'clock for lunch, then you work until six-thirty. Some days we work until ten at night. It's very grueling for me. I lead a very quiet life in Weston and a lot more energy is required of me here in New York.

Yet you recognize that it is essential to be here.

Yes, because I might be needed. You never know which second they are going to turn to you and say, "Now Anne, what do you mean by that?" Sometimes I read the cast poems to show them what something means, or I give them more background on a section of the play or tell them what a character of seventy felt as a child. And I've been rewriting whole scenes when they didn't go right. I've been doing an awful lot of cutting, changing.

There are times in life when one stands aside and watches oneself. It was fun listening to you as you sat at your desk in your yellow wrapper, beating your typewriter and saying, "Look at me, Lois, it's  too funny, just like the movies — steaming hot outside, we've just limped across Times Square, the air conditioner's set on high, and here I am, the playwright, back at the Algonquin, rewriting the play. It's just like the movies!"

It's fun. I love it.

Most of the actors knew your work well before they came into this play; some of them came to Mercy Street simply because they knew that you were the writer. They had never read the play. They took it on faith because it was Anne Sexton's play.

It's unbelievable to me that I am that well-known. I couldn't believe it. It always amazes me when strangers have read my poetry.

At one point Wynn Handman said to you, "The words will go beyond you, the play will become the actors' and director's, eventually the audience's play ... the words will become the world's." How do you feel about that?

I don't know. It scares me. At the rehearsals, I'm just the writer, I don't know everything. I feel like a carpenter who maybe was building a cathedral and had little to do with it. I don't even feel like the architect, just the carpenter. What I will do after it goes beyond me has nothing to do with me.
 

1967

An Obsessive Combination of Ontological Inscape, Trickery and Love

Busy, with an idea for a code, I write
signals hurrying from left to right,
or right to left, by obscure routes,
for my own reasons; taking a word like "writes"
down tiers of tries until its secret rites
make sense; or until, suddenly RATS
can amazingly and funnily become STAR
and right to left that small star
is mine, for my own liking, to stare
its five lucky pins inside out, to store
forever kindly, as if it were a star
I touched and a miracle I really wrote.

Anne Sexton

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