Murdoch - New Light Shine

THE YALE DRAMA SERIES

David Charles Horn Foundation

The Yale Drama Series is funded by the generous support of the David Charles Horn Foundation, established in 2003 by Francine Horn to honor the memory of her husband, David. In keeping with David Horns lifetime commitment to the written word, the David Charles Horn Foundation commemorates his aspirations and achievements by supporting new initiatives in the literary and dramatic arts.

SHANNON MURDOCH

Foreword by John Guare

Copyright 2012 by Shannon Murdoch.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).

Set in ITC Galliard type by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Murdoch, Shannon.

New light shine / Shannon Murdoch ; foreword by John Guare.

p. cm.(Yale drama series)

ISBN 978-0-300-18485-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Brothers and sisters

Drama. 2. Family secretsDrama. 3. Violent crimesDrama.

I. Guare, John. II. Title.

PR9619.4.M845N49 2012

822.92dc23

2012012160

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All inquiries concerning stock and amateur rights should be addressed to Shannon Murdoch at shannon.e.murdoch@gmail.com . No stock or amateur performances of the play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of Shannon Murdoch, and paying the requisite fee.

For ACM and KDW, for everything

F rancine Horn had the very good idea to establish a prize in honor of her late husband whose greatest ambition was to become a writer. His subsequent disappointment was never being published. Close, but never. He went into another line of work in which he found financial success. But that loose tooth was always there.

After his death, Mrs. Horn, a very sprightly elfin powerhouse, took the advice of her lawyers and went to Yale University Press with the idea of founding a prize that would commemorate his memory by publishing new writers. John Kulka, a senior editor at the Press, told her that while fiction writers had many prizes open to them, playwrights were under-represented as well as being underpublished. She leapt at his point.

Was there a model to follow?

Yes, look at the renowned Yale Series of Younger Poets, which annually publishes the work of a previously unpublished poet under the age of forty. It is the oldest literary prize in America. That prize has always been awarded by a sole judge who must be a recognized poet. Over the years Archibald MacLeish, W.H. Auden, W.S. Merwin, and Louise Glck have taken on that distinguished role. Since its inception in 1919 it has introduced the work of young unknown poets like Adrienne Rich, James Agee, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, and John Hollander.

The David Charles Horn Foundation/Yale Drama Series Prize, mirroring the poetry prize, would honor an emerging playwright of the English-speaking world annually. Yale University Press would publish the chosen play; the playwright of choice would also receive a cash prize as well as a reading of the play in an established American theater with professional actors. Would it be only for playwrights under forty? No. There would be no ground rules involving age or gender or theme. The only qualification: the playwright who enters the contest cannot have been published or have had a major production of his or her work. The only qualification was the entrant had to be alive and unknown.

There would be one judge, a playwright.

Edward Albee was the obvious choice to go first, a position he held for two years; David Hare took on the task for another two years. They passed the baton on to me this past year.

My god! The 2011 contest received over eight hundred new plays from around the English-speaking world. They came from some small town in the American Midwest or Seattle or Brooklyn or a village in Ireland or Australia or Canada, the midlands of England or the center of London. And they read about this contest and they all wanted to emergeanother way of saying, How do I get noticed? In this cacophony of voices out there, how will my play aka mehow will I be heard?

Edward and David advised me to assemble a team of readers whose taste I trusted, whose theatrical acumen I respected, and whose sensibilities were not mirrors of mine.

I got my team. People like Thomas Keith, who edited new editions of Tennessee Williamss unpublished work for New Directions, to help me get through them. Jamie Phillips and Eric Louie, who read for the Public Theater. Young playwrights on the brink of emerging like Michael Mitnick, Kim Rosenstock, and Susan Stanton, who knew being readers made them not eligible.

Yale University Press sent us the entries, split up among the readers and myself. We dove in. How not to get lost?

I asked another of my readers, Mary Pat Walsh, who had worked as my assistant for eleven years, then ran Nora Ephrons production company, and now worked for Stephen Sondheim, how she proceeded in the task of reading these hundreds of scripts.

She answered: I read first and foremost for a voice. My second criteria is, Are they attempting to tackle a story or subject matter that is specific and challengingthis does not mean to me that it has to be complex but that they are writing from an original place and have a sense of how to tell a story. Some of the plays may not be fully realized but I leave them on my list because of the reasons I just mentioned. After Ive read all of my plays I go back and reread the ones that have made the cut and then it helps me make decisions based on the level of craft when considering them side by side and then the decisions are easier.

I sent this to my other readers as a guide.

The voice. An original voice unlike any other voice. Lets look for that first. Some of the voices were muted. Other voices were more troubling, brilliant ventriloquists writing plays that echoed a TV sitcom or mimicked with varying degrees of success Mamets or Pinters or Becketts inimitable voices. Some plays began beautifully. Yes! Is this the winner? Then the play would crumble. Turn sentimental. Become formulaic. Chicken out. Other plays lay on the page DOA. What were these peoples lives like? Had they ever seen a play? Where did they go to see theater? Why did they decide to write a play?

Six weeks later we convened to review what we had read so far and pass on to the others those plays we felt worthy of a second look.

Someone brought up a point. A few respected novelists whose names we knew had submitted first plays. Were they emerging? I thought of David Horn and his disappointment at never being published. I decided we must disqualify those entries.

But the question floated in the air: Who does qualify as an emerging playwright?

I had assumed in a snooty parochial way that the winner would be a recent graduate of one of the playwriting programs around the country: the Yale Drama School, the granddaddy of them all, which George Pierce Baker started at Harvard in the teens, attracting young aspirants such as Eugene ONeill and Philip Barry. When Harvard unaccountably dropped it, Yale happily gave it a home in 1924 with a spanking new theater.