Arlene Hutton
The Nibroc Trilogy
A nytheatre voices cyber-interview
Arlene Hutton is an award winning playwright whose work has been seen across the country and abroad. The Nibroc Trilogy began in 1999 with Last Train To Nibroc which was presented at 79th St. Lab. The other plays were written slowly over the years and now the entire trilogy will have its premiere back at 78th St. Lab.
Pictured: Arlene Hutton
I feel like the luckiest playwright in the world. To get to work on and see all three plays, in the theatre where it all began, is a homecoming and completion of a cycle of both work and life. The one-act version of Last Train To Nibroc was written for Alexandra Geis, over ten years ago and it’s so exciting to see her play the role of “May” in all three plays. My collaboration with 78th Street goes back to 1999, when we moved Nibroc there following a workshop at the New York International Fringe Festival. Not many playwrights are able to have such a long term relationship with a theatre and director and actors.
Last Train To Nibroc is the romantic story of two young people, May and Raleigh, who meet on a train heading east in 1940 and discover they are from neighboring towns in Kentucky.
See Rock City picks up on the couple after their delayed honeymoon and sees them through the end of World War II, introducing the characters of their two mothers-in-law. As the newlyweds begin their new life together living with May’s parents in Corbin, Kentucky, they struggle with newfound marital expectations and challenges on the home front during the ongoing war in Europe. When victory overseas brings unexpected consequences at home, the young couple is forced to face hidden truths and find uncommon solutions to the challenges of a new postwar America.
Gulf View Drive finds May and Raleigh ten years later in Florida. The saga continues with the aftermath of war and the breakup of the traditional family. May and Raleigh live in an island community off the gulf coast of Florida. Their dream house shrinks as relatives descend, further testing the couple’s love in this glimpse of life in the 1950s, as they make unconventional decisions in a changing world.
The three plays were written over a period of several years. What was the original impetus for writing Last Train To Nibroc and why did you feel there was more to say necessitating two more plays?
One day I was reading a biography of S. J. Perelman, whose brother-in-law was the writer Nathanael West. In the book there was a very small mention that after West died in a car crash in California in 1940 his body traveled by train across the U.S. Also on that train was the body of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I put “May” and “Raleigh,” two young people from Kentucky, on that train, basing them very loosely on my parents, who in real life had been falling in love at just about that time, 1940. So Last Train To Nibroc is a patchwork quilt of family lore and stories I heard as a child, all stitched together to tell the fictional tale of May and Raleigh. It was originally a one-act, but after presenting it in an evening of short works at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1996, it was clear that there was a bigger play there. Using the same actors and director (Judith Royer), we workshopped a draft of the play in 1997 and I self-produced it at the New York International Fringe Festival in 1998, directed by Michael Montel. The production, actors and director intact, moved to the 78th Street Theatre Lab in early 1999, a joint presentation with my own group, The Journey Company. Nibroc was optioned by commercial producers Leonard Soloway and Chase Mishkin for an Off-Broadway move to the Douglas Fairbanks Theatre, garnering a Drama League nomination for Best Play (Copenhagen was the winner that year). Publication by Dramatists Play Service followed and there have been over a hundred productions around the world, including a run at the New End Theatre in London.
I never set out to write a sequel, much less a trilogy, but in 2003, at the very last minute, I needed a play to work on at the Australian National Playwrights' Conference, so I proposed a continuation of Nibroc and wrote ten pages each morning I was there, getting to hear each new scene in the afternoons, a wonderful way to write a play. Working with Australian actors meant that I couldn’t take anything for granted. (“Kentucky? That’s in the desert, right?”) Two extra actresses were available to work in my appointed time slot and they became the mothers of May and Raleigh. See Rock City was chosen for full development at the 2004 New Harmony Project and, again, self- and co-produced at the 78th Street Theatre Lab. It received the Barbara Barondess Foundation “In the Spirit of America” Award and has since been published and produced at several regional theatres.
Once See Rock City was produced it was clear that the story wasn't finished; I proposed and wrote a first draft of Gulf View Drive at the New Harmony Project in 2005. It received a workshop at the 78th Street Theatre Lab, coming full circle with the actress who was the original “May.” Set ten years after See Rock City, it is set in small-town Florida, fictionally following the migration of my own family from Appalachia to the South. Gulf View Drive was named a winner at the 2006 Chattanooga Theatre Centre Festival of New Plays and received readings there before going into full development at the 2006 New Harmony Project.
The Actors’ Co-op in Hollywood, having had huge successes with my Shaker play As It Is In Heaven and a showcase-which-became-a-mainstage production of Last Train To Nibroc, heard about the sequels and offered to do the entire cycle of plays. I lived in LA during the rehearsal period and continued to do rewrites on Gulf View Drive, informed by watching rehearsals of the first two plays. The Nibroc Trilogy received unanimously positive reviews and was named Critics’ Choice by every major publication, including the LA Times. It received six LA Weekly Theatre Award nominations, including Best Playwriting.
You were born and raised in the south. How much of this has found its way into these three plays and how important is the actual setting to the plays and what the audience will get out of seeing them?
Plays reveal themselves to me and the stories I tell come from my subconscious. As I mentioned before, although the plots are fictional, the characters in all three plays are based in part on composites of actual family members. I think audiences recognize their own family members because of this. And the details are authentic, adding to the verisimilitude of the work. My mother really did want to be a missionary and attended Asbury College. She went out with an itinerant preacher. My uncle hid in the back seat of the car when my parents were on a date. And my father really did paint stripes on a mule so he could imagine what a zebra would look like. A reviewer once compared my work to Norman Rockwell paintings, and I like that comparison, feeling that I’m offering snapshots of life in a bygone era. “Don’t make no nevermind to me” is a phrase I heard my grandmother use, as well as “I reckon.” Her voice lives in my head. Although I was born in Louisiana, I go back seven generations in eastern Kentucky. There’s a lot of future material in my family history.
A one act you wrote is published in NYTE’s Plays and Playwrights 2001. You have written many other very successful one-acts plus successful full length plays. Which would you prefer to write, is there a different mindset for each, and which is possibly easier to get produced?
I love writing both! I cut my teeth on short pieces that I was writing for my friends and myself to perform. My first productions were evenings of one-acts. Even now I tend to think of full-lengths as a series of one-acts. Otherwise I’d be too intimidated by the number of pages required. I have a background in improvisational theatre, as an actress, so I begin a play or scene by putting two people in a room and see what they have to say to each other, just like performing improv.
Writing one-acts is instant gratification. I’ve actually dreamed a short play, awakened and written a ten-minute piece before noon. And I have been honored and privileged to be part of the Atrain Plays nearly a dozen times. A group of playwrights write a short play (or musical!) while riding the Atrain from 203rd Street to Far Rockaway. The plays are performed, fully produced, off book, the next evening.
In my experience, it’s easier to get one-acts produced. There are so many exciting young theatre companies in New York always hungry for new material to showcase their actors.
Eric Nightengale has directed several of your plays here in NYC. What is it he brings to your plays that makes you trust him with them and what do you look for in a director?
Eric is a graceful collaborator, willing to help a playwright find the story trying to be told. He is a stickler for detail and works harder than anyone I know. My writing process involves listening to the play and hearing the actors’ responses. Since I was an actor long before I became a playwright, I know that an actor wears a character, literally, physically, understanding the motivations in a way that I don’t, as the playwright. Really good actors are also smart and a lot can be learned by asking them questions: “what do you really want to say when you enter the scene?” or “does this monologue feel too long?” or “what details are missing for you?” or “does the scene really have an arc for you or do you have to artificially create one?” Eric is great at facilitating these sorts of conversations, so we are all looking at the play as a separate entity, something out there on the table rather than a barrier between the actors and the playwright, enabling us to leave the egos at the door. Eric is committed to process and helping the playwright do the best job possible. He knows when to give notes to actors—timing is everything—and understands that different actors work different ways. He’s patient and supportive and will stick with a playwright for years on a project he believes in. And the most important thing: there are always munchies at rehearsals!
What do I look for in a director? One who is trying to tell the same story I am.
What’s next for you?
As I write this, I’m on a plane heading to Tucson, Arizona, for the opening of Letters To Sala, which is based on the book Sala"s Gift by Ann Kirschner. Larry Sacharow brought this project to me and we worked on it together, presenting a short reading at the New York Public Library a year ago, starring Marian Seldes, for the opening of the exhibit of letters sent to and saved by Sala Garncarz during her years in Nazi labor camps. Larry, Ann and I were collaborating on the theatre piece at the time of Larry’s death last year. I probably would not have finished the play, except that we had promised it to the Invisible Theatre in Tucson. Ann was supportive of me finishing the piece and the theatre has been very patient in waiting for my drafts to come long distance. I’ll see two performances of the play and then begin the next stage of revisions. For me, playwriting is all about rewriting and I’ve been very blessed to work with great directors—Judith Royer and Marianne Savell in Los Angeles, Chris Jorie in Orlando, Suz Claassen in Tucson and Anne Kaufmann, Michael Montel, Eric Nightengale, and Larry Sacharow in New York.
Like I said before, I feel like the luckiest playwright in the world. I’m in residence this summer at Yaddo and will be spending the next academic year as the Tennessee Williams Fellow in Playwriting at Sewanee.
March 22, 2007
