Program Note:
About The Coast of Illyria adaptation
Written by Jennifer Schlueter
This note ran in the program for the Ohio State Univeristy production in April 2016.
In high school, I read The Portable Dorothy Parker with a kind of self-conscious vanity that Parker herself would have seen through and skewered. I held that collection of her work in front of my face conspicuously on the city bus. Other girls could have their Cat’s Eye or Power of Myth. Dorothy Parker was the woman I wanted to be: brilliant and saucy and self-destructive and unforgivably, unapologetically messy.
So when I came across the script for The Coast of Illyria at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, a few years ago, I was gobsmacked. Dorothy Parker, my Dorothy, had written a play? (In truth: she had written several, but this fact had escaped my high school obsession with her. I clearly never read pages 333-335 in Marion Meade’s biography of her, even though I toted that book around conspicuously, too.) As I thumbed the pages of the script for Coast, my heart stopped: not only had Parker (in collaboration with Ross “I’d have been glad just to sharpen her pencils” Evans) written a play, but Margo Jones, a woman of moxie who had willed the American Regional Theatre movement into being, had directed it. Despite this alignment, Coast had a very short three-week run in Texas. How, I wondered, could anything by the delicious and prickly Parker—whose own theatre criticism was so unflinchingly on-point—never have made it to Broadway?
So when I came across the script for The Coast of Illyria at Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon, a few years ago, I was gobsmacked. Dorothy Parker, my Dorothy, had written a play? (In truth: she had written several, but this fact had escaped my high school obsession with her. I clearly never read pages 333-335 in Marion Meade’s biography of her, even though I toted that book around conspicuously, too.) As I thumbed the pages of the script for Coast, my heart stopped: not only had Parker (in collaboration with Ross “I’d have been glad just to sharpen her pencils” Evans) written a play, but Margo Jones, a woman of moxie who had willed the American Regional Theatre movement into being, had directed it. Despite this alignment, Coast had a very short three-week run in Texas. How, I wondered, could anything by the delicious and prickly Parker—whose own theatre criticism was so unflinchingly on-point—never have made it to Broadway?
The answer to that question is, I think: length and lassitude. Unlike Parker’s essays, which snap and crackle, the play in its 1947 version…meanders. At certain points, its dramaturgy positively creaks. (Forgive me, Dorothy. But I think the critic in you knows what I mean.) And yet, the Lambs’ story itself, as shaped by Parker, is rich and moving and exceedingly stageworthy. There was just a bit of pruning and compressing to do, and maybe a bit of rethreading and amplifying, too. With the permission of the NAACP (to whom Parker willed her estate and copyrights), I was honored to undertake this adaptation and get up close to Parker’s work. In doing so, I found myself learning about how Parker’s mind worked as I dug through her play, beat by beat, and tracked her choices. I’m proud of what the marvelous Cece Bellomy and I have produced in this new version staged here today, and I’m grateful to Shilarna Stokes and OSU’s Department of Theatre for bringing Parker’s play back to life—precisely the kind of experiment a university theatre should be undertaking.