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. -..... ..