On Writing What You Know
Let me tell you about how I came to write a play called Edward, the Owl, and The Calico Cat, which has received a happy modicum of success, including a B. Iden Payne award for Outstanding Original Play, and my first publication, with Dramatic Publishing. All this, and I've never even been a boy, an owl, a cat, nor to England or India. Of course it's easier to see in retrospect, so I will try to keep the story a little more cohesive than as experienced: but it is a rather hodge-podge and nimby tale, and jumps around a bit.When Director Judy Matetzschk, Ph.D. announced that she was starting a new company, The Pollyanna Theatre, that she wanted me to write its premiere play, and I could write whatever I wanted, I was delighted. I started digging for some kernel of an idea that I thought would be appropriately big enough for such an honor. Edward Lear's poem "The Owl and The Pussycat" has played in my head since childhood. It was a favorite of my father's, a college professor turned entrepreneur, who would on occasion wax poetic and sing the poem, in its entirety, in a booming, haunting stage voice, to my somewhat bemused but mostly impatient mother. It was, I interpreted, an honest expression of his deepest love for her. I can still hear his voice, like an old recording of Under Milk Wood with members of the National Theatre of Great Britain. He greatly identified with the wise old owl, and my mother did have something of a cat in her: in the late 1960's, she wore those fabulous eyeglasses with the upturned edges, and throughout her life, kept as many as four cats at a time.So, it seemed natural that for my first talent show, I selected this poem to memorize and recite in front of the Central Elementary School gymnasium. My father was a great collector of odd things, and had a number of small terra cotta figurines from far off places, including an owl, a cat, a pig, and some kind of bird that might have been a turkey. (Even then, the actress in me knew the value of a good prop.) I dressed up in my finest and stepped up to the stage, the little figurines tied to my fingers with ribbon, and began to make my way through the poem. I had never felt stage fright before, and indeed, had never been the center of the spotlight, but somehow, I made it through, dangling the characters on cue like little marionettes. And as I repeated the famous refrain, I hardly even noticed a few fifth graders out there, giggling.But afterwards, one of them, a boy who lived on the street behind me, felt compelled to enlighten me: the p-word also was something used to describe a girl's private parts. Suddenly, the whole episode took on new meaning. I felt mortally ashamed for having spoken this word in front of everyone, and angry that nobody had enlightened me before. I began to identify with my mother's dismissal of my father's performances, and in fact, the next time he began to speak it, I told him that he shouldn't be saying dirty words. And that was the end of that poem in my family. (Though he continued to read Beowulf in old English from time to time.) And a marker of doubt was left on my first solo stage performance, the kind of thing that begs to someday be resolved.Now, back to the project. I knew I wanted to tackle this poem as the center of the piece, but I also wanted something else to offset it, round it out. I have a well-worn anthology of poems that included Lear's "Calico Pie." My mother had a calico cat named Kali before I was born. She always missed her and was so angry at the vet who lost her that she wouldn't even drive down his street. So "Calico Pie" seemed like a well-charged choice.I had once captured a monarch butterfly, the color of calico cats. I kept it for a day or two, playing with it, being very careful not to touch, until my father convinced me release it in the big pine tree out front of our cape cod style house. I cried myself to sleep that night, trying to understand how it really was the right thing to do.Ah, yes, the project. So. First I had to make sure Edward Lear was in the public domain, which having written in the mid 1800's, he was. And Judy, being as fine a dramaturg as she is a director, began to compile biographical information on the man. We found that Lear, besides being the renown father of nonsense poetry, was rather a sad fellow. He had a dreadful childhood: his mother had literally rejected him and sent him away to be raised by others. He was barely compensated for his wildly popular writing and drawings, and ended up living alone, in a kind of personal exile, by the sea.In the 70's my father purchased a condominium in the Virgin Islands, where we would stay for a month or two out of the year. My bedroom looked down on the ocean, perched at the edge of a cliff. There was a path down to the water, where there was an inlet of an underwater national park. There were all kind of strange sea creatures in there, yellow clown fish, and spiky sea anemone, and jellyfish: I was stung once, it was horrible. I got a fever. Sadly, most of the time we spent there, my parents would fight.The project. So here I was, in Austin, Texas, with this image of young lonely Edward, speaking to me in limericks. The faculty of the graduate program where I once studied was quite good, but the one thing that they never seemed to care for was poetic drama. But despite the nagging memory of their Cassandra warnings about verse, I had to write it that way, I had no other choice: I have rarely had a character speak to me as loudly and as firmly as young Edward in this play. I confessed to Judy: "I think it's going to be in rhyme - is that okay?" And once again, Judy's confident support allowed me to fly.When I was in high school, my mother asked my father for a divorce. He was older, and had been her teacher. It was about control, she said. She felt like he had bullied her throughout their marriage, that he had sheltered her, to make her stay. At least that's part of it. At the time they divorced, I thought I wanted it to happen: they were so very unhappy that anything seemed better than staying together. The Cat had fallen out of love.Project. I did some research on early childhood, as the only "rule" Judy placed on me was for the play to be for "itty-bitties," i.e., three to five year olds. I found that issues of control, ownership and identity were key features of the development of that range. So my young Edward was going to have to learn that hard lesson that I never quite seemed to learn with the calico monarch: why can letting go of something you love really be the right thing to do?As I was drafting the play, my now elderly father was passing from the mid to late stages of dementia. My husband Ron and I had recently moved him down to Texas. I had become his primary caretaker. He was always very stubborn about his independence, and I was determined to let him live alone for as long as it was feasibly possible. He had his own apartment, his "high-place," overlooking a beautiful river. It had been many years since my father and I had lived close to each other, and he had never seen any of my work as a playwright. When I told him the subject of the new play I was writing, there was a glimmer of recognition in his eye: "Oh, that's a good one." He used to have a photographic memory. But then, I don't think he could have recalled a single word.There is something that I think is common in children of divorced parents, the desire for your parents to get back together again. And it was funny, because for me that desire got stronger as I grew older, even as the reality of its possibility slipped away. We had lost my mother to cancer a few years earlier: something that I was never sure my father truly understood. Indeed, I think often, that he believed me to be her, and that in his mind they were somehow reunited. Our walks along the river watching the sun dance on the water was like the Owl and the Pussycat, dancing by the light of the moon.I think of Edward Lear, in his final home by the ocean, and how he must have wished so much for some family to be near. I think that his characters must have given him much pleasure, and in some way, became the source of love the world never gave him: except indirectly the great popularity and appreciation for his work. I don't know if it's a trade off any of us would knowingly choose, but we as a culture are the richer for Lear's playful imagination. And I hope somehow, he is reaping some residual joy from our communal celebration of his work.The premiere production of Edward, The Owl and The Calico Cat with the Pollyanna Theatre Company will always remain one of the highlights of my career: to see the way the audience of very young children were captured by the rhyme, and how they so identified with Edward's journey that they reached out to touch him for comfort; to see how the adults got the silly word plays that the children didn't; and how the actors confidently reclaimed the p-word to mean cat in all it's glory; that people of all ages were entertained and swept along by this joyous journey that ended, with both a togetherness, and a letting go. That it has won critical attention and can be shared with others through publication is thrilling, but for me, nothing can match the sound of my father's voice, saying in a less verbose but still singing tone, "That's about the best play I've ever seen."They say, write what you know. I certainly didn't know what direction this play was going to take me in when I started: but I know that the emotions that Edward and Grace and Tex feel are as real to me as those generated by my life story. The desire for true love comes from a genuine place, even if its expression is fictional in nature, synthesized from snipits of both research and lived experience. And to me, that re-created, syllabub truth is what makes drama work.© 2004, Emily Cicchini