Kranes - David Kranes Selected Plays

Edited by
Jon Tuttle

Copyright 2011 Level 4 Press, Inc.
General Editor: William Roetzheim
www.level4press.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission in writing from the publisher.

NEVADA
Copyright 1977 David Kranes
All rights reserved

FUTURE TENSE
Copyright 1981 David Kranes
All rights reserved

SALMON RUN
Copyright 1984 David Kranes
All rights reserved

CANTRELL
Copyright 1988 David Kranes
All rights reserved

HOUSE, BRIDGE, FOUNTAIN, GATE
Copyright 2001 David Kranes
All rights reserved

To obtain amateur or stock production rights for any of these plays contact The Robert Freedman Dramatic Agency, Inc., 1501 Broadway, Suite 2310, New York, NY 10036. (212) 840-5760.

Mr. Kranes has no problem with a production updating specific references to contemporize that production should the Director choose to set the plays in contemporary times.

ISBN: 978-1-933769-53-0
Printed in the United States

Cover art by Michael Kranes

by Jon Tuttle

In his Foreword to The Library of Americas recent The American Stage, the actor John Lithgow adds his voice to the many who have celebrated the evanescence of the theatrical event, the I was there! thrill of the live performance destined and in fact created to be forgotten. And thats all fair and true. But here in my Foreword I say some things ought to stay. Hence this book of plays by David Kranes.

For most readers, Kranes reputation as a writer rests primarily on his prose. Among the most recent of his eight published novels are Making The Ghost Dance (2006) and The National Tree (2001), which was adapted as a teleplay and aired last year by the Hallmark Network. His Low Tide in the Desert (1996) received the Western Heritage Societys Wrangler Award for best short story collection, and his eighty-plus short fiction publications include the 1996 Puschart Prize-winning Cordials.

In theatre circles, however, Kranes is highly regarded as a dramaturg and artistic directora title he held for fourteen years at the Sundance Playwrights Laband as one of our best, most prolific playwrights. Almost all of the forty-plus plays hes written since 1964 have had their lightning-in-a-bottle moment on the boards. The five selected for this collection arguably comprise his Greatest Hits, partly because they were produced at major regional or off-Broadway theatres, featured prominent film and television actors, and occurred at different points in his career, from 1977 to 2008. But mostly because, in their ambition, intellection and music, they are breathtaking.

House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, for instance, attempts nothing less than to enact Wittgensteins observations about the fallibility of language and to embody Rilkes haunting Ninth Duino Elegy, from which it takes its title. Here, as in other Kranes plays, we find an absent father, Neil, trying to reconcile himself to the decisions that have comprised his life, to impart instruction and to measure his sons soulbut mostly to articulate Rilkes simple premise that to be here/means so very much.

When the various scenarios Neil concocts to pry open his son fail, he enacts one by donning the costume of an old west gunslinger, complete with black hat and mustache, and shooting out a lamp. Its a brilliant theatrical moment: a stupidly violent gesture performed by a well-intended father who can reveal who he is only by donning a mask, who can say what he wants only by abandoning words. Forgive me, he asks his son, of both this folly and all the failures of my life. All the words contained. All the words not said.

Its an apology common to Kranes men; we hear it in most of the plays gathered here and in many not, such as Anthem or White Sands, from fathers and sons who have lost one another. Loss is in fact the dominant theme here; these are all stories of absence or transience, of trying-to-return to a sense of home or belonging or self. Nevada, for instance, ask us What stays and what leaves? and The Salmon Run concludes with the question, so who can last: huh? The resolutions Kranes offers are never simple, because the emotions he traffics in, as Bentley said of Shaw, are not the ones youd expect. We find ourselves so mesmerized by Future Tenses T.R. Forester that we almost forget heswell, Andrew Undershaft. We share so much of Debra Lunds hollow ache that we enjoywe feel purged byher extremes of self-destruction. Oddly, we admire the reconstructed hit man in Cantrell who celebrates his new life by firing a final shot into his forty-seventh victim and wins a bar fight by cutting off his own finger.

Nor are Kranes plots linked by causation. They depend for their force on an accumulation of meaning, as in a photographic essay. They present to us a condition that then deepens and changes and colors, and along the way we realize we are changing as well. We are reminded of our many selvespublic, private, secretsometimes even of that self we cannot truly know. Our attention is drawn to the moment that has just passed, to the opportunity missed, to the person now missing and to the intimate life always in motion around us and within us.

And of course to the terrain. Each of these plays is set in the American west, which is perhaps surprising since Kranes grew up in Massachusetts and was educated at Bowdoin, Columbia, NYU and Yale. Or perhaps it isnt. Perhaps his eastern-ness explains the dislocation, the other-worldliness his characters feel in the west, since most of them are escaped Yankees too. Consider for instance Shellys awareness in Nevada of having crossed over to a magic place where all the myths are real. Or Charles recollection in Future Tense of Yellowstone as not at all like New Englandquite eerie, quite unearthly; half the landscape seems disturbed there. The west, already a repository for the myths that comprise our national identity, provides for Kranes a proving ground for characters exploring their own. Old saloons, rundown casinos, dying mining towns, ruins, rivers, deserts: in such places his fugitive kind can escape the burdens of history or behold the expanses of possibility; sometimes, they can see in the rugged landscape the very crystallization of all that is their hearts but for which they can find no words. Taken together, Kranes plays demonstrate novelist Ron Hansens observation that the American consciousness was formed in the nineteenth century by the two James families: William and Henry in the east, Frank and Jesse in the west.

There are other, very different plays I wish were included here, like Brain Impulse, about a man who has bits of his brain removed in order salvage his mind; or Beautiful Dreamer, a luxuriant, musical re-imagination of Stephen Fosters deterioration; or Horay, one of my favorite Kranes plays because I was there! in the early 80s when it was produced at the University of Utah, where David was my favorite professor and everyone elses too. These five, though, should provide a clear-enough sense of Kranes dramatic vision. They are plays that should have a permanent place in the library of American letters.

Hence this book, which exists because William Roetzheim at Level 4 believed in it, because Kimberly Turner, my Editorial Assistant, worked carefully and selflessly on it, and because others gave generously of their time to it. They are Kate Coltun, Susan Heldfond and Sarah Rowan, who helped track down production information, and Cheryl Tuttle, my wife, who did pretty much all of the above. Thanks to all of you.