INTRODUCTION: FOUR POEMS AND A PLAY

In the summer of 1969, I visited London for the first time and saw the musical, Hair. I was a long-haired eighteen-year-old watching actors who were supposedly speaking for my generation, but I thought that the musical’s Summer of Love plot and faux rock songs were already past their sell date. Naked hippies dancing on stage were just an amusement for old people. But a few days later I took the tube to Sloane Square and watched a play that changed my view of what could be dramatized on the stage.

Saved by Edward Bond, was set in the shabby council estates of outer London. It was originally performed for private audiences after the Lord Chamberlain refused to give the play a performance license. London theater censorship was abolished in 1968 and I saw the play’s first public run at the Royal Court Theatre.

Saved is notorious for the scene in which a group of young men kill a baby in a perambulator. But that shocking death wasn’t as important to me as the feeling that I was seeing an intensification of reality on stage. I realized that theatrical didn’t have to mean false or mannered. A playwright could create a world that could show both love – and rage.

In my senior year of high school I met a college admissions officer that decided to play God and offered me a full scholarship to Yale University. Sitting at seminar tables in oak-paneled rooms, I felt a painful awareness of my own ignorance, but I read constantly and began to attend the plays produced by the drama school and Yale Repertory Theatre. If I walked two miles down empty streets and under a freeway, I could buy discount tickets at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre.

The Long Wharf was where I saw the American premiere of The Changing Room by British playwright David Storey. The play was set in the locker room of a North England rugby team. During the play, you watched the team assemble before the game, gather their courage during halftime and celebrate a victory afterwards. The Changing Room didn’t have a conventional plot and character development, but the playwright made you care about the weary athletes that fought for victory on a frozen battlefield.

I was inspired and entertained by the theater, but the idea of becoming a playwright never occurred to me. During my final year at Yale, I become friends with the author Robert Penn Warren. I wanted to be like my mentor: a poet who also wrote popular novels. Working as a night time security guard, I read the Oxford Anthology of English Literature multiple times. My first published poem in The Atlantic Monthly had a fictional character and story, and was written in a traditional form.

JIMMY BIGNELL’S SONNET

The basket of my cuts creaks down the stairs

These caulking days, don’t require much these days

My stomach, lungs, all sold to some squeak doctor to obey

The rest propped like a kewpie on this chair

I swear to Christ I once had teeth to tear

The salt meat, nibble on the breasts along the way

Lost, all lost, for some slow reason, until my death plays

Like a cat beside the door; guess I should care

Where the next shipping’s going to be

And pray to find a captain who’s a gentleman

Like sailor’s wives who blubber hymns for waveless seas

Remember riding Baja when a downward Santa Ana ran

And squeezed us in her arms until the winch rope snapped on free

I grabbed it, felt the singing in my hands

Moving down to New York City after graduation, I went to almost every production of Joe Papp’ s Public Theater, including David Rabe’ s electrifying trilogy of plays inspired by the Vietnam War. I was working as taxi driver and could barely pay my rent so I would sneak into Broadway plays during the intermission and watch the second act. Although I admired plays and playwrights, I was still exploring the traditional forms of poetry. The Times Literary Supplement published one of my poems that was influenced by Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

MAY DEATH NOT BE THE FALL

May death not be the fall that takes you in

That lures you from the midway to his tent

All Holly Molly for a squeeze

Of majesty of end of everything and known

The slither feather of his name

May death not kiss you to the darkness and the freaks

Avoiding all the hot exhaustion of the room

The breath and bootlegs prismed by the light

That blue calf slippering the womb

Below the pig gun, ripper knife and tongue

May death fail to amuse you with his show

That naked dancer with her lips upon the snake

Forgetting grace, the morning by the sun

When down I touched the stomach of a dead

And held it there

And it was cold and concave, smooth and whole

So how does a writer create a distinctive voice? While living in New York, I came up with the idea of writing a long poem about the last voyage of Henry Hudson. After wintering on the shore of Hudson Bay, the English sea captain continued his search for the Northwest Passage, but his crew mutinied and left him in a rowboat with his son. Inspired by the story, I visited Hudson Bay at the beginning of winter, paid two Crees to take me across the bay, and then ran out of food exploring the cold landscape. The poem that was published in The Sewanee Review was a theatrical monologue in a poetical form. I tried to imagine was Hudson was thinking as he remembered his past three voyages and contemplated his own death.

HUDSON BAY 1611

On the two and twentieth of June

Four days from our wintering

On fish and scurvy grass beside a frozen sea,

William Wilson – the boatswain –

Bennett and the others,

Bound my arms and forced me

With my son and seven of the sick

Into the open shallop –

Cut us from the stern alone

Upon black water.

Remembering The Desolations:

Whales rolled and steamed beside us,

Shuddering beneath the hull,

Its wet wood, pitch, and man smell,

Cold grey bottom clay that dripped

Onto the deck from hand on hand of fathom rope.

The wheel set north-northwest,

A snow land glowing ghost at night

I gave the name: Desire Provokes.

I cannot find that way again.

All sightings lost, as if each island

Cut its anchor, perished in the fog.

The stars are blind,

The mountains pressed away,

Our small boat bumping ice to ice

With two oars cracked and spray

On the three sick shivering the bow.

I cat the bandage,

Scratched my knife upon my son’s white hand.

I fixed my senses on the wind,

And thought of voyages past:

A summer river and the savages

With black paste slashed across their cheeks,

Their women naked to our eyes

As we gave wine for otter skins

And watched the young men dance upon the deck.

Then there were knifes and treachery,

A brown hand hammered on the mast,

And blood that spread its dark smoke through the water.

Death knelt down quietly

And cupped his leech upon the carpenter

Until his legs drained cold;

His loins, my hand upon his stomach cold,

And knew his end

And stripped him for his clothes

To cast him naked in the sea.

I prayed, then rowed against the wind

With two men pulling on each oar;

In time we could not find him there.

In memory we traveled North from Gravesend,

Ran the wind past Blackwall where

The water transformed green and dark and then was clear,

Splattered with the roll and plunging of our fall.

Then cold came hard,

And ice chewed hungry at the sleep

That sealed me in my parents’ bed.

All warm and waking to an old man’s bones –

The slap of wave and lamp swing in a little room.

I am a prisoner upon this water;

Captive to the fog grown in its government of white,

The rush and wood creak of the ice released

With birds like women keening for a lost son

And the failure of the wind.

Failure of the man who lay down on the bottom of a boat,

And felt the darkness cover him.

The moon destroyed, the stars consumed in night.

For I was falling sightless on a constant edge of wave,

Until the sun burned through the clouds and from the water rose Cathay.

I immediately proceeded with my proper command:

Obtained the tea and clove, the beggar’s root still wet with clay.

The turmeric and gold, a black stone born of alchemy.

We saw the worship of strange gods,

And women moving gracefully beside the Royal Gates.

The soft and yellow of their faces beckoning

That endless slide down dark green valleys,

Endless climb up mountains of the sea.

God’s Mercy for Temptation,

Pride born Pride,

This Vanity of Days,

The night sky torn

To strips of fire twisted north.

Our way is clear,

Our sail a white curve to the wind.

I touch the coldness,

Lift the skim of water to my lips.

I hold the tiller

North.

After a stint teaching at shabby private school, I moved to Paris where I worked at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore and slept in the bookstore attic every night. A few years later I returned to California where I roofed houses and wrote unproduced film scripts. It was clear that my life – and career as a writer – was going nowhere. But there were occasional moments of clarity among the confusion. Watching a scratchy home movie in a friend’s bedroom inspired a poem published in the Vanderbilt Poetry Review.

ALBERT EINSTEIN IN CALIFORNIA

With a crack running down through his nose

And a coat hook set in his knees,

Albert Einstein appears on the wall

Of a kitchenette on Cortez Street.

Home movies. Fragile heirlooms

Of a cousin’s lover’s Great Aunt’s friend,

Who drove the Great Man to the beach

And led him, like a child, to the sand.

He walks. He talks. (though we can’t hear him)

The wind explores his famous tufts of hair.

In saggy pants he stands upon the limit of the west

And stares and shields his eyes and stares.

His head is split apart

And light appears as brilliant as the sun.

The broken film slaps time until

The plug is pulled and darkness comes.

In the early 1980’s I became a foreign correspondent in East Africa and, for a time, was the only western journalist living in Uganda during a genocidal civil war. After the Ugandan government kicked me out of the country, I returned to the United States, got married and moved to Sacramento where my wife had a job with the phone company. I had left the war zone, but for several years I dealt with the symptoms of combat stress disorder. In restaurants, I had to sit facing the door with my back against the wall and I couldn’t fall asleep without placing a knife under my pillow.

I stopped writing poetry. The compression of poetical language didn’t allow me to fully express the chaos and destruction I had witnessed in Uganda. I struggled to write a novel set in Africa, but that didn’t seem to go anywhere. I had survived soldiers shooting at me, but I couldn’t express these experiences in fiction.

One night my wife and I attended a local production of Buried Child, Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize winning play. Years later, I realized that Buried Child is a difficult work to direct and perform. But that amateur production made the play seem like a meandering collection of unconnected scenes.

On the way back to our apartment I turned to my wife and announced I could write something better than that.

She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. So why don’t you.

CALIFORNIA DOG FIGHT

The next morning I sat for several hours with a pad of paper on my lap. I had once written a North American Review article about illegal dog fighting and knew that it was a violent and highly dramatic world. So I scrawled California Dog Fight at the top of the page and wrote the following stage directions:

Darkness. Skip, a young man wearing cowboy boots, jeans and a leather jacket, walks out onto a bare stage. He reaches beneath his jacket, pulls out a revolver and fires it point blank at the audience. Lights up.

These words written for a play set me free. I realized that I didn’t have to write directly about my past. These painful experiences could power my fiction. An illegal dog fight at an abandoned farm reflected the violence I witnessed in Africa.

The world of California Dog Fight was also shaped by people I had met living in Sacramento. I’d become friends with two brothers who raised a small herd of cattle and supported their families cutting down timber. I branded and castrated yearling cattle with these ranchers and even went logging with them on several occasions. The tension between the tough-edged morality of these real-life cowboys and the compromises and corruption of the world that surrounded them was expressed in their attitudes toward animals - and women. It’s no coincidence that two crucial scenes in the play involve the death of a dog and a man manipulated into wearing a woman’s high-heel shoes.

When I finished writing the play my wife informed me that she was pregnant and that she wanted to quit her job. With a few thousand dollars in our bank account, we tossed our furniture into a rental truck, drove south to Los Angeles and moved into a shabby apartment on Hollywood Boulevard.

While hustling for work as a screenwriter, I sent California Dog Fight to a film director I knew named Lamont Johnson. After showing the play to a few actor friends, Lamont offered to direct a workshop production of the play if I rented a small theater and found two pit bulls. By now, my wife was six months pregnant. We only owned one car so I brought her along when we met a teenage pit bull owner who also owned pet rattlesnakes. A few days later, I negotiated with a Latino gang leader whose friend covered us with a shotgun while we inspected his kennel of fighting dogs.

Charles Durning, the great theater and film actor, had agreed to play Vern and suddenly our workshop production in the San Fernando Valley became the hottest theater ticket in town. Using highly aggressive pit bulls in a 99-seat theater was mesmerizing. When both dogs appeared on stage it was obvious that they wanted to attack each other.

While all this was going on, Gilbert Parker, the legendary theater agent, and read my play. Gilbert called me up from New York City and asked me one crucial question:

What do you think about rewrites?

I love them if they improve the play.

Good. I’d like to be your agent.

Gilbert sent the play to Lynne Meadow, the Artistic Director of the Manhattan Theatre Club, who decided to premiere it on the main stage of her theater. She forwarded the play to Bill Bryden, a British theater director who had recently had a hit at the Royal National Theatre. Bryden decided that California Dog Fight would be the first play he directed in the United States.

Up until this point, I had simply tried to write a good play. But now I began to receive a series of real-life lessons on what it means to be a playwright.

As California Dog Fight moved toward its New York City premiere, I was hired to write a feature film for a Hollywood studio. A screenwriter is usually a hired employee writing a script for a production company or a studio that is listed at the legal author. In contrast, a playwright owns the copyright to his work and the play’s director and cast can’t change lines without the author’s permission.

The copyright issue shaped my daily experiences as a writer. Both Bill Bryden and the theater’s literary manager were respectful and supportive when they gave their suggestions about the play. Meanwhile the studio executive in charge of developing my project yelled at me during meetings and once told me that my script needed to be twenty percent funnier.

When I flew to New York to cast the play and meet the brilliant set designer Santo Loquasto, I realized that every theatrical production is a group effort. When writing a novel, you create a fictional world on the page. When you write a play, you create a fictional world that’s expressed by human beings performing in a theatrical reality. At the Manhattan Theater Club, tons of real dirt and a rusty pick-up truck were being placed on stage.

Lynne Meadow, the MTC’s Artistic Director, was pregnant during this time and rarely appeared at rehearsals. I missed her support. As a first-time playwright, I didn’t feel confident about challenging Bill Bryden’s decisions. Growing up in Scotland, the director had fallen in love with Hollywood movies and he had decided that my play was a Western - with pit bulls. Now that he was in New York for his first American play, he wanted everyone in the cast to be a movie star, including some actors who had never appeared in a play.

As we stumbled through rehearsals with an odd cast of semi-famous film actors, it was clear that several people involved with the play had addiction problems. The 1980’s were the cocaine era in New York City and this malevolent drug seemed to poison the entire production.

A MTC employee who had seen me sitting in the lobby during a preview said that I looked sad and dazed - like someone who had just been in a car accident. When the play opened, the reviews were savage and all the blame was placed on my shoulders. One of the first lessons I learned about the theater was that writing a play could cause pain and public humiliation.

But sometimes the same play with the same characters offers you pleasure and a feeling of triumph. I was just about to experience this dramatic reversal.

A few weeks after the MTC production of California Dog Fight closed, I got a phone call from Simon Stokes, a director connected to the Bush Theatre in London. Simon had read my play and wanted to put it on stage.

I swallowed hard and decided to be honest. Have you read the New York reviews?

A few of them. Simon laughed. I’m not worried about that. Everything is going to be different...except for your play.

I flew to London a few months later where it immediately became clear that Simon was right: everything would be different. The theater’s artistic manager Jenny Topper and its literary manager Sebastian Born worked in a basement office a short distance away from the theater.

They believed in the play and knew about every element of the production. The London theater world is dominated by personal connections. Jenny told agents about the play and we quickly signed a cast of highly talented actors that included John Shrapnel, Stuart Wilson and Deborah Norton. At the time, there weren’t many pit bulls in London so we used Staffordshire Terriers.

Because of the influence of method acting, most American actors approach their roles from the inside to the outside. The actors involved in the New York production of my play asked detailed questions about their character’s personal history A few of them even created journals where they wrote complex descriptions of their character’s emotions and motivations.

But the British actors I met during rehearsal approached their roles from the outside to the inside. When John Shrapnel accidentally stumbled and dropped a dog carrier, he smiled and said: First rule of acting... don’t lose your prop. John and the rest of the play’s cast were focused on getting the right accent and wearing clothes appropriate for their character. They learned their lines early, but easily adjusted to changes. Once the mechanics of the performance were right, they filled out their characters and brought them to life.

California Dog Fight received positive reviews from the London critics and had sold-out audiences throughout its run. I had survived a painful - and exhilarating - introduction to the theater. Now I was ready to write another play.

***

CALIFORNIA DOG FIGHT was given its London premiere by the Bush Theatre (Jenny Topper, Artistic Director) on July 15, 1985. It was directed Simon Stokes. The set design was by Grant Hicks. The cast was as follows:

Skip......Jimmy Chisholm

Peter......Daniel Webb

Sarah......Lizzy Mclnnerny

Vern..... .John Shrapnel

Rawley......Stuart Wilson

Lillian.....Deborah Norton

CALIFORNIA DOG FIGHT won the Best New Play of the Year award given by the London Tribune.

CALIFORNIA DOG FIGHT

A Play

by

Mark Lee

CALIFORNIA DOG FIGHT

The top of a low hill at an abandoned pear orchard on the Sacramento delta. It’s about one o’clock in the afternoon and very hot. Anyone looking down the hill can see a line of parked cars, a growing crowd of spectators, and the sixteen square foot pit where the dogs will fight.

The stage is bare except for a few old fruit crates. Some rusty farm equipment could be placed in the background. The set should help concentrate the play’s energy rather than dissipating it with an unlimited panorama.

When lights come up we see Skip pacing at the edge of the stage. Skip is in his twenties. He wears a jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots.

A Beat. Skip stops and tries to make a confident smile, then gives up and resumes pacing. He stops again, bounces on his toes like a boxer, and throws a few quick punches at the air. He takes a deep breath, smoothes down his jacket, and then tries to pick up an imaginary girl.

SKIP

How you doing, baby? Nice dress you go on. Very nice. You...you got nice hair, too. Like your hair that way... long...very nice.

(pretends to listen)

Me? My name’s Skip. Like the stone.

(pantomimes throwing a stone)

You know...skip...the stone.

(losing confidence)

Like your dress. Like your shoes.

Like your eyes. Like your...shit!

He paces back and forth, then composes his face and tries to speak with a deep voice.

SKIP

How you doing? The name’s Skip. You come around here much? A little?

He jerks his head towards something behind him.

SKIP

That’s my car out there. It’s a Trans Am. Five liter engine. Four barrel carb. Dual exhaust. It’s mine.

(pretends to listen)

What do I do? I’m a professional gambler and I ahhh I repair televisions on the side as a...kind...of...hobby. Damn!

He sits down on one of the fruit crates A Beat, then stands up and tries one last time.

SKIP

My name’s Skip. Skip! What’s it to you? Want to get in my car? Want to go home with me? No?

(A Beat)

No?

He reaches beneath his jacket, pulls a .38 revolver out of a shoulder holster, and fires it. A Beat, then he fires two more times as Pete and Sarah walk onstage.

PETE

Hey, what’s going on? What are you doing up here?

Pete is in his late twenties. He’s wearing jeans and is carrying a black medical bag. Sarah is twenty-one years old. She wears white painter’s pants and carries a large shoulder bag. Pete looks annoyed as Skip lowers the gun and turns around.

PETE

Christ, I should have figured it was you who was shooting.

SKIP

Yeah.

PETE

What the hell for?

SKIP

Practice.

Skip stuffs the gun back in his shoulder holster as Pete looks down the hill.

SKIP

Where’s your belt, Pete? You’re not wearing that belt today.

PETE

There are about a hundred people down there.

SKIP

I liked that belt. I really did. I thought it was cute.

PETE

Skip, that joke was funny a year ago. Don’t you ever think of new ones?

SKIP

I’m just asking about the belt. I just wanted to know.

PETE

Why are