editors:
laura berman
dan horus
contributing editor:
mary long
sunday
magazine
inside:
page four-books
page five--donald
bryant
page six-the week
in review
Number 16
Page Three
February 2, 1975
_______________________ ~FEATUF
DES
Poet
Fori
the p1
By LAURA BERMAN
THE PLAYWRIGHT is trying to
take the uproar in stride, his
shaggy head bent over a yellow
legal pad, scratching down notes
and shaking his head, "no, no, not
like that," every few minutes. The
cast is having trouble remember-
ing the lines, no one can decide
how or where to stand, and the
musical numbers are in a sham-
bles. "They are making this song
about oppressed workers sound like
a Michigan Football cheer," he
groans.
It is ten days before Donald
Hall's new play Bread and Roses
is to open. The play, which will
premiere Wednesday at the Power
Center, is a documentary about the
Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW) - "the Wob-
blies" - a left-wing, labor organi-
zation active in the early 1900's.
The dialogue is reconstructed from
letters, diaries and speeches; most
of the words are not Hall's own.
But Hall, English professor, poet
turned playwright, has used his ar-
tistic sensibility to give structure
and cohesiveness to the words.
It's Hall's second play-the first
was a documentary about Robert
Frost entitled An Evening's Frost
-but writing it wasn't exactly
his own idea. Since the Frost play
in 1965, he had mulled over the
thought of doing another and had
shelved three or four ideas in his
mind. But it wasn't until he met
Richard Meyer, the University's
director of theatre programs, at a
Christmas party a year ago, that
he began to put his ideas into ac-
tion. They settled on the Wobbly
theme and in July Meyer an-
nounced Hall would be writing a
play to be performed in February.
Hall had not yet written one word.
"It was a little frightening. The
ressure was terrible but of course
t forced me to write," Hall says.
And if I hadn't written Bread and
Roses, I would have missed this
terrific experience.
"IT'S VASTLY DIFFERENT from
the original script now. As
soon as we began rehearsing, peo-
ple began to say 'this is bad' and
'this has to go', and I began cut-
ting."
Since the play went into rehear-
sal in January, Hall has carved
Donald
70W
ay s
at
the
the script from four hours to two
hours, redistributed lines and r'e-
written entire stretiches of dia-
logue. His work schedule has been
murderous: He rises at 6 a.m.,
works on the books he is Writing
until noon or so, goes back to
work later in the afternoon. In the
evenings there are play rehearsals,
and after the play rehearsals, Hall
will often rewrite and revise until
two or three in the morning. In
between, he has time to see stu-
dents nine hours a week, teach
two classes, and read and comment
on some 40 student poems a week.
In his Hopwood Room office, there
is a blanket on top of the file cabi-
net. He takes naps in the after-
noons, on the floor.
But now, with the play coming
alive in front of him, he is all en-
ergy and concentration. Relaxed
and easy going in conversation,
Hall reacts to the rehearsals of his
play with intensity, listening to the
sound and feel of every line. A me-
ticulous writer of poetry, who often
spends two years on a single poem,
he now takes the same care with
his play. He constantly makes
changes, working closely with di-
rector Richard Meyer. They confer
in the empty Power Center seats,
and Hall occasionally moves to the
stage to give directions to the cast,
a short and round figure in a rag-
ged red sweater and blue jeans
waving his arms wildly.
"I LOVE THE THEATRE, there is
a tremendous feeling of power
in being able to manipulate the ac-
tors. You just say 'go' and they go."
But I also love the feeling of com-
munity in the theatre and I love
to watch this thing take share." He
likens it to a sculpture: "just a
solid block of marble at first but
now, after a few weeks of rehear-
sals, the features are beginning to
emerge - you can make out the
fingers and there is a sense of
form."
He is a poet, you see, who loves
to play with words as he speaks,
and poetry will always be his first
love. With that tangled red beard
and the mat of hair, he even looks
the poet. In his mellifluous voice,
he explains, "I first started writing
poetry to get attention, to be loved
by women."
At 16, he had his first poem puu-
Ha/k
teast,
thing
lished. It was largely imitatative
writing at first, he explains, and
none of it was good, but he kept
at it. He didn't have the Walt
Whitman heard then but he did
have romantic notions of Truth
and Beauty. He told his father he
hoped he would never be a bad
enough writer to be published in
the Saturday Evening Post.
The family was not overjoyed at
Hall's decision to become a poet
but his father, part owner of the
Brock-Hall Dairy in New Haven,
Connecticut, had never been hap-
py with business and was deter-
mined his son be allowed to make
his own decisions. "He loved to
read but he enjoyed historical nov-
els, romances, Book-of-the-Month
Club selections. He would tell me,
"Your poetry is nice, but your prose
is beautiful . . . He wanted me to
write novels."
SITTING IN his office, Hall re-
calls his family thought his
decision impractical, but they
needn't have worried. Some poets
spend years waiting for recogni-
tion; Hall never had to go the
starving artist route. He may not
have made a fortune writing poet-
ry, but his talent was recognized
almost immediately.
Hall, who now looks anything
but Ivy League, attended Exeter
and then Harvard, where he ad-
mits he was something of a
wunderkind. He received two pres-
tigious awards in his senior year at
Harvard - one for poetry, one for
Latin translation - then was
awarded a Henry Fellowship to Ox-
ford. In England, he won a Newdi-
gate Prize for poetry in 1952.
It was always the poetry that
mattered most; more than teach-
ing, which he says he truly enjoys;
more than the plays or the prose
works or the short fiction he has
written, although he enjoys those
things too.
After his first prose book was
published in 1961, a memoir entit-
led String Too Short To Be Saved,
he discovered prose too, had its
merits. "I decided I like the form
- not as much as poetry - but I
liked the form of prose. I like
paragraphs, I like varying the rhy-
thm of sentences, having long sen-
tences and short sentences and
complex sentences. I love to play
Daily Photo by STEVE KAGAN
For
Bread
and
ROSE'S
By ELLEN BRESLOW
THE PRODUCTION of Bread and Roses, Donald
Hall's dramatic treatment of the I.W.W., will
not exist in final form until February 5, its opening
night, or so thought Hall, two weeks prior to that
date. Considering the state of rehearsals at that
time, such suspicions seemed justified.
But the transformation of a brand new script,
almost a mere idea, into a visual, artistic show
contains some unknown but potent magic for the
production's progression resembled the slow, steady
construction of a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces
stand up and move themselves into their proper
position. Much of the credit belongs to the work
of Dick Meyer, the patient, distinguished-looking
director, and Hall, jovial poet turned playwright.
Take the rehearsal of January 23, for instance.
The night had been set aside for song rehearsal.
The entire cast gathered around a lone piano tuck-
ed into a corner of the stage and, clasping their
precious scripts as tightly as they did for the early
rehearsals, warbled through one of the many songs
in the show. Meyer appeared almost totally unin-
volved at this point, while Hall would periodically
add his two cents.
THE TWENTY minstrels struggled through the
more unfamiliar tunes a n d energetically
danced through favorites in a manner which most
likely would never be viewed by a paying audience.
Undirected shouts of "Okay, everybody, this is seri-
ous business" and "Make it up as you go along; find
it" filtered through the general pandemonium, but
See 'BREAD, Page 5
Ellen Breslow is a Michigan Daily staff writer.
with them, fool with them, get my
hands into them."
HE SPEAKS in a beautiful New
England voice, weaving his
words around the feeling, playing
with his voice as he does in his
writing. But when he speaks of his
poetry there is an even stronger
sense of the joy, and the pain, he
takes in his writing.
Asked to describe why he writes
poetry, he struggles to pin his
thoughts down; he begins and
pauses and begins, "It becomes a
way of life so that you can't ima-
gine life without it. It's like sex or
something you take fantastic joy
in, so you can't imagine life with-
out it. And when there comes a
time when you can't do it, you're
miserable and it's as if your whole
identity - were taken away from
you, as if you had lost it some-
where."
There was a time, ten years ago,
when the poems suddenly stopped
coming and Hall remembers that
time with obvious pain. For rea-
sons he still doesn't understand he
couldn't write poetry, couldn't
even force the poems out. "The
first year I whistled a lot and pre-
tended it was a vacation and then
that passed and one day I realized
with absolute clarity that I would
never write again. I used to go to
poetry readings and read my
poems, feeling that I was a phony
pretending to be a poet when I was
no longer a poet.
"I cried a lot," he says, his voice
muffled. "I was miserable, miser-
able."
QINCE THAT time, Hall has had
his ups and downs but he has
always kept writing. Except for a
brief period in October "when
poems began raining" on him, the
poetry has not been going well in
only comes in
spurts, he keeps
working. After finishing a portion
of the Dock Ellis book each day, he
will take a manila folder of poems
he has on his desk and go through
them, making changes on one or
another. He believes in revision,
and never relies solely on inspira-
tion; he works on a poem with his
head to make it right.
His ambition, he says, is to write
a good poem-as good a poem as
Hardy or Yeats could write. "I rea-
lize that's an arrogant ambition,"
he says, "but knowing that I want
to do that doesn't mean I know I
can do it, or that I think I will do
it." Tied up in writing that good
poem, he adds, is the idea that
someone will read it - "because I
have loved those poems of Hardy
and so on and I want to write
something like that. And that in-
cludes a reader."
"I used to assume there had to
be sometime when you would find
out if you were good - that there
would be a plateau and you would
know. You set yourself goals: You
say, if I get published, I will be a
poet. Then you get published and
you're the same person and you
still don't know if you're any good,
so you say, when I have a book, I'll
know. And that doesn't answer
the question either. Then, maybe
it's getting a prize or the critics'
opinions. But some people love you
and some people hate you and you
can't really trust them. I know I'm
a poet but I don't know if I am a
good poet or not."
Hall mentions he once did an in-
terview for The Paris Review with
T. S. Eliot and saved this question
for last. "There was this man who
was The Star, the greatest poet
who ever lived (of course he's not
but that's what everyone said
then) and T id 'Mr Eliot do you
matter. That doesn't mean I don't
care."
He does care. He loves attention
and flattery and good reviews. He
loves the standing ovations he gets
at poetry readings. He performs for
the classes he teaches, telling
stories about Dylan Thomas--(who
he met while at Harvard) in a
great Irish brogue, obviously en-
joying the power of having a cap-
tive audience.
He says he can't judge the qual-
ity of his play any better than he
can his poetry. "I know it's get-
ting better," is all he will say, "but
I don't know if it's any good."
But by the time the scenery
and the costumes have arrived,
with five rehearsals left before op-
ening night, his mood is consider-
ably more optimistic. "It's begin-
ning to hang together," he says.
"The people (in the cast) I was
worried about are really playing
their parts well."
flE HAD BEEN disappointed be-
cause Will Gear, the actor
who starred in An Evening's Frost
and who now stars in "The Wal-
tons", had agreed to do Bread and
Roses but later cancelled, dashing
hopes that the play would go to
New York as the first play had.
But now he is wranped up in the
excitement and energy of last min-
ute changes and says that, after
all, "the fun is in the doing."
On stage in front of him the ac-
tors are running through a labor
meeting scene; a Wobbly leader
delivering a propagandistic call to
organize. Meyer confers with the
cast, suggesting the crowd listen in
silence rather than react to the
speaker, and the scene is played
again. It works. There is a tension
and sense of excitement that
wasn't there before.
-..... ..