30 Years Ago: Memories of MacDowell

I went to my local woods to witness the eclipse a couple of days ago vaguely hoping something magical would happen. Something most assuredly did, though nothing so crassly obvious as, say, all of the forest animals going to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, or moonbeams zapping enchanted orchids to life. Instead I found myself recalling one of my favorite pieces of music, which was top of mind on account of its having been used in the recent Steve Martin documentary. And when I put that song on to listen to, I recalled the time when I first bonded intensely with it. On that occasion I had been alone in the woods as well, and it was almost exactly 30 years ago, at a place formerly known as The MacDowell Colony.

Just as my home state is no longer The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, The MacDowell Colony is now simply MacDowell, the word “colony” obviously containing unpleasant associations for many people. We’ll set aside that there have always been both plantations and colonies that have absolutely nothing to do with either slavery or colonialism. And that a plantation is simply a place where things are planted. And that one of the definitions of “colony” is simply “a group of individuals or things with common characteristics or interests living in close association” — for example, a gathering of artists. If we are going to eliminate every word that has unpleasant historical associations, pretty soon we are going to eliminate every word, period, and I bet that’s what Robert MacNeil would have said when he was Chairman of MacDowell’s board. But that’s neither here nor there.

The institution formerly known as The MacDowell Colony is an artist’s retreat outside of Peterborough, New Hampshire, founded in 1907 by the largely forgotten American composer Edward MacDowell. (It is not to be confused with the McDowell Colony, founded by largely forgotten American composer Mississippi Fred McDowell.) Anyway, it’s a heavenly place, with a lovely old main house, dorm-like residences for sleeping, and individual studios for working. Mine was a stone cottage the previous occupants of which had included the poet E.A. Robinson (a friend of Teddy Roosevelt’s) and Thornton Wilder, who had written Our Town there. Can you imagine? I had this magical haunted lodge, deep in the middle of the New England woods all to myself for two months. That’s it, in the photo above.

I’m not sure how I heard about it, or came to apply. I was fairly flabbergasted to have been accepted. I had very few professional credits at the time. In all likelihood the acceptance committee simply liked my work sample (a Ridiculous style play about Christopher Columbus. Ha! did someone say “colonialism”?). The committee must also have approved of what I proposed to write, which was a pair of full length plays based on A Comedy of Errors, each containing double the number of twins of the original. One was set in Berlin at the time the Berlin Wall fell down, the other was set in the U.S. Civil War. Both plays were musicals. I had a baby grand piano in the studio to work on! (Full disclosure: I can bang out chords and form melodies sufficient for composing. I’m no piano player). For inspiration my two big records of the moment were the recently released tracks of Brian Wilson’s Smile off of a Beach Boys boxed set, and the cast album of the 1954 Broadway production of Threepenny Opera.

Not long after I arrived, the place got buried by a couple of snow storms, followed by an ice storm. So for two months, I had this wonderful experience of walking daily to and from mealtimes through this snow-blanketed forest, alone, with all of this tinkly, glistening ice in the trees. And let me tell you, walking alone in a forest at night is incredible. Incredibly scary, but incredible.

Writers love their solitude — require it, actually. But artists are also human and do get lonely. It’s one of the principal drawbacks of the profession. So the beauty of a place like this is that after working all day on your own, you take meals together with the other artists, and socialize in the evenings. For me, that kind of living situation is the best of all possible worlds. I’d live that way permanently if the right situation ever came along. (Actually, I sort of do right now, only it’s with just one artist. But we both have often said it would be cool to cohabit with a bunch of others).

Anyway, this is a blog of stars, so I feel I ought to tell you about some of the incredible people I got to spend a lot of quality time with and know pretty well, in a short, concentrated period of time. During my stay I was up there with, for starters, playwright Paula Vogel (whose Hot ‘n’ Throbbing I was in the first reading of), the sui generis performance art giant Meredith Monk, and Village Voicecritic Alisa Solomon, the most terrifyingly quick intellect I have ever met. Alisa actually set the bar for me. Her mind was that encyclopedic, and she accessed what was in her memory so effortlessly. She did me more than one kindness in the years afterward (she introduced me, for example, to Sarah Shulman, and is surely one of the folks who got me in at the Voice.) Alisa went on to write several brilliant books exploring the intersections of theatre, performance, and identity politics (Judaism, queerness, and feminism) though her most widely known one is surely Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. Also there, towards the end of my stay was composer Stewart Wallace. Stewart’s Harvey Milk opera came out right after that (1995), so I assume that that he was working on at the time.

I have always been particularly drawn to visual artists. I only ever dabbled in it myself but my dad was one (though a frustrated one), and my best friend in high school was one, and I love to be around it. It occurred to me recently that not only is my wife one, but of my two previous relationships, one was a painter, the other a daughter of one.

One of my closest friends at MacDowell was a goofy and sweet painter named Louise Eastman, whose passion at the time was de Kooning. Louise wasn’t well-known and was so humble and down-to-earth that I had no idea at all (and maybe I didn’t want to know, as it would have paralyzed me with terror) that she was one of those Eastmans, daughter of John and granddaughter of Lee, managers, lawyers, and in-laws of Sir Paul McCartney, making her Linda’s niece. She has the same honey blonde hair, pale blue eyes, and gentle manner as her aunt, so I half suspected as much, but you do see how knowing that might have spoiled what was a fairly effortless and natural connection? I mean, it turns out she was into de Kooning because she knew him! Her father collected him, he was a family friend! Anyway, I met up with Louise a couple of times afterward in New York, but, ya know. It’s like being summer camp friends. Out in the real world things are different. When you’re in close quarters 24/7, just hanging out is enough. When you get together for an hour in a coffee shop, it’s fraught somehow. It feels like “business.”

I was also pretty tight with the amazing Andrew Castrucci, the artist/activist who runs an East Village squat called Bullet Space. Now, his work I REALLY love. If I had dough I would buy a bunch of his work just to LOOK at. He’s one of the most unaffected guys I ever met in the world of the arts. His studio was nearest mine, so I would pop over from time to time. He’s not a talker, but he would show me what he was working on. In the late ’90s, when I was performing a lot in the East Village, I performed my solo piece Nihils at Bullet Space and was grateful when folks came to check it out because Alphabet City was still the urban frontier back then. Andrew finally got Bullet Space legalized in 2009. There is a great recent piece on him in BOMB.

By rights, I should have gotten close to Richard Caliban, whose Cucaracha Theatre my previous wife and I patronized almost weekly, for we lived just down the street (in Tribeca, just north of the World Trade Center). Man I loved that place, and would have been thrilled to work there like my old friend Kevin Draine the Bitter Poet. But Caliban was a dark, solitary, and unknowable cat, and frankly I found him a bit mean. Compared with some of the other folks there who were so generous and supportive of an emerging artist like me, he was all “exclusive”. He creates amazing theatre, though.

He was friends with the journalist Cynthia Fox, though and I did manage to become friendly with her. Bespectacled and always disheveled, she nonetheless lived up to her surname! She reminded me a lot of Barbara Hershey . She became an important medical/science writer and editor. Her best known work is Cell of Cells: The Global to Capture and Control the Stem Cell (2007).

Another of my good friends there, and we kept in touch for a couple of years afterward, was the photographer Carla Shapiro. There are only a couple of photos of me up there at MacDowell. One of them is an art shot by her, and I’ve always loved it:

My tightest friends of all though were the novelist Susan Segal and performance artist and arts administrator Gary Schiro. I don’t know why the three of us hit it off, but we ended up forming a kind of Mod Squad. We sat together at meals, kidded around, gossiped. Susan was an Angelino, I think her father had some kind of connection to the movie business (she knew Louis Nye somehow!) The Northridge Earthquake happened when we were up there and boy was that tough for her to watch from afar. I’m very happy to be in periodic touch with both of them. Gary used to run the Hudson Opera House (now known as Hudson Hall). I was speaking up there in 2011 when we got the horrible news that my friend Aaron died. As it happens, Aaron was in the cast of my play Kitsch (which was written at MacDowell) when it was finally produced at Theater for the New City in 2009. Things do come full circle.

To my wife’s bewilderment I wept the entire car ride home when it was over. It was like detoxing from heroin.

Recently friends have gone up there for residencies: Leela Corman, whose most recent graphic novel Victory Paradejust came out. Friend and former editor of my words David Cote was there in 2009. My own stay is memorialized here. I’ve always wanted to go back. I just might have to apply again, see what happens!