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Also this issue: Turn the Beat Around Lend Us A Tenor Critic's Calendar
Theater Your E-Z Fill-in-the-Blanks College Admissions Essay! |
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January 9-15, 2003
cover story
 TOM AND TERRY: (l-r) Childhood pals Terry Nolen and Tom Donaghy team up at the Arden for Northeast Local. |
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The local stop for Tom Donaghy's Northeast Local reunites boyhood friends.
"We were funny little kids," playwright Tom Donaghy says about growing up in Drexel Hill with the Arden Theatre Co.'s director, Terry Nolen. Pals since kindergarten, the pair would make up plays and then bring their homemade productions to school. And now they're doing it again: Donaghy's Northeast Local begins performances at the Arden on Jan. 30, with Nolen directing.
This is Donaghy and Nolen's first professional collaboration, though they've stayed in touch through the years since their days at the playground, when they became best friends. Nolen says, "We knew that doing theater was what we were going to do by the time we hit seventh or eighth grade." When Nolen directed his first show, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in ninth grade at Upper Darby Summer Stage, Donaghy played Dopey.
Northeast Local, Donaghy tells City Paper in a phone interview, is both autobiographical and a "collage of many people's lives." When he calls the play "a lament for the people who traveled through that time and were unprepared for the way the world was changing," you can hear echoes of The Glass Menagerie, and, in fact, Donaghy is the grown-up son through whose eyes we see the events taking place over 30 years of a blue-collar family's life. They react to the social issues of the era: the economy ("the collapse of the steel industry as a vibrant shorthand for the fate of the manual laborer, the people who created the infrastructure of the country"), race relations and homosexuality. The characters are constantly struggling to adjust to what Nolen calls "the velocity of change in the second half of the 20th century."
The title of Northeast Local, Donaghy's first play, which premiered in New York in 1995, has special resonance in Philly: We really know what "The Northeast" means, and the title refers specifically to the train to Upper Darby. Local connections are often the stuff of Donaghy's work, and audiences here may remember his Minutes From the Blue Route. His plays have had top-notch productions in New York (at Lincoln Center, Northeast Local starred Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Anthony LaPaglia, and Mamet's Atlantic Theater first produced Blue Route). There is a monologue in the first act of Northeast Local in which the mother, Gi, explains why she prefers the local train to the express, and Donaghy points out that this is the way the play's structure functions -- an impressionistic chronology, stopping now and then to create a scene as time goes by.
This way of evoking time and place is much of what drew Nolen to the script; he says that he was working on the Arden's production of James Joyce's The Dead and was intrigued by how that play makes its emotional connections with the audience through specificity. He usually researches a play's world so that when he begins to imagine it and start the design process, he has specific images to draw on. Reading Northeast Local, he says he thought, "I know this world, I know these characters," and then discovered that his best resource was his own photo album. "The key occasions that punctuate the play were all in the photos. There was even a photo of Tom in his Halloween costume."
When asked if directing this play had made him nostalgic, Nolen says that nostalgia had really started the whole project. He had been to a funeral in Drexel Hill and drove by his and Donaghy's childhood homes -- they could see each other's houses from their windows. Nolen thought, "I have to do one of Tom's plays."
It is the language of the play that is crucial to Donaghy: "I write in the cadences of suburban Philadelphia." Nolen adds, "We are both engaged by language in the theater -- by its breadth, and its inadequacy." During auditions for the role of the Irish grandmother, the first two actors "just didn't get it," Nolen says. Then, when Babs Pinto (who will play the role in the upcoming production) auditioned, Nolen felt -- really heard -- that she was "perfect" -- since she's from the area, she got the truth of the character in the rhythms of speech.
Donaghy, born in 1963, has created a history of a family through the 30 years since he was born. "You can't help but be affected by the times you grew up in," he says. "Philly is filled with ghosts and history, but this is about people, not history -- families are my theme." When his parents saw Northeast Local, they could see themselves and their friends. It's his mother's favorite play ("so far"). You can hear Donaghy smile through the phone: "This local production is bringing out the old neighborhood -- my old babysitter is coming! It's great to see these people again -- better than at weddings and funerals."
Northeast Local, Jan. 30-March 23, Arden Theatre, 40 N. Second St., 215-922-1122.
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