Sherry KRAMER4

NOTEPAD:from the desk of the DIRECTOR

The Bay of Fundy is a timely play about money and the choices we

make, about having and losing and casting aside. It explores the

ways we imbue objects with meaning and value, and the ways we

define ourselves by what we own. From an elemental tale grows

a modern myth about possession and our power to transform

even when change seems impossible. Rich with poetic imagery

and sharp dialogue, The Bay of Fundy tells the story of two

couples and a table, and what happens when the tides change.

HAYLEY FINNResident Director & Lab ProducerThe Playwrights’ Center

RUTHEASTONNEW PLAY

SERIES

THE BAY OF FUNDYBY SHERRY KRAMERMONDAY, JAN. 11 • 7 P.M. • at the PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER

A troubled marriage, a mysterious malaise, and where is all that water coming from? May has an antique early American table that is perhaps the most valuable table in the world, a husband who’s having a mid-life crisis, and a problem. A play about the myth of money in the new America.

Tickets are free: 612.332.7481 • INFO@PWCENTER.ORG

WATCH THE VIDEO TRAILER ONLINE ATPWCENTER.ORG.

IN YOuR OWN WORDS, WHAT IS The Bay of fundy ABOuT?

It’s about the American idea of money, and my hope that it will change.

American money, for a couple hundred years, was kind of fabulous because anyone

could have it, anyone could make it, and once you made it, it made you. The American

Dream, which is one of our major myths, was that you could make your way up the

ladder in America—all the way up—with just money. So that part of the American

myth of money was kind of great, because money in America was different than it was,

say, in Europe. American money was a little more magical.

But now, after going through the ’80s and the ’90s, money has colonized a lot of things

that had sort of been—I don’t know if they were sacred, but things that had been left

alone, that had value outside of the sphere of money, were all sort of swept up and

either devalued completely or given a dollar value—in terms of what your life was

about, in terms of how you decided if you were a success.

One of the things that the play is about is this middle-class Midwesterner who falls into

a pile of money. She marries money and loses her soul. She doesn’t understand this

other money that she’s come into, and she lets it corrupt her, whereas middle-class

money was sort of safe and kind. It didn’t make anybody into monsters.

I grew up in a time and a place where people who were multi-millionaires lived in

houses next to people who were just comfortable. And everybody dressed the

same and everybody—on my side of town; there was another side, which I did know

existed, but on the south side of town—you might own an airline (Ozark Airline! Krazo

backwards!) or a huge truck line or work at the Piggly Wiggly. Your life looked essentially

the same. It wasn’t about your money, but who you were.

WE SPOKE WITH PLAYWRIGHT SHERRY KRAMER IN ADVANCE OF HER january 11th READING AT THE PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER.

WHEN DID YOu START WRITINg THIS PLAY?

The play came to me after Katrina. I was in the process of getting my parents’ house

ready to go on the market when Katrina hit. I’m surrounded by things, room after

room full of things I have to keep or sell or give away—and by the images of all these

people in New Orleans who one minute had all these things too, and the next minute

had nothing. I sent two truckloads to the six apartments a local university was setting

up for refugees—and it still didn’t make a dent in the things that were left. I was still

surrounded by them.

I don’t know if this happens to other playwrights—plays just sort of arrive and you say

to yourself, “Oh, this is what I’m writing about.” I had for a long time wanted to write a

play about money. It had long been a dream, an “American Dream” of mine, to write a

play about money.

WHY MONEY, SPECIFICALLY?

Because money is incredibly fascinating. I had done some research on the origins of

money, and I had also been fascinated by the idea of philanthropy, completely obsessed

by what that means and what money and power used to mean in our society. There

are those who say that the phrase in the Declaration of Independence, the “pursuit of

happiness,” has nothing to do with individual happiness, that that was not at all what the

Framers meant, suggesting that what they meant was that we were all free to pursue

the common good. In the last 30 or 40 years, money has become separated from that

sense of its responsibility.

IN THE LAST 30 OR 40 YEARS, MONEY HAS BECOME SEPARATED FROM [THE] SENSE OF ITS RESPONSIBILITY.

—SHERRY KRAMER

We talk about money being the root of all evil. We have all these old sayings about how

bad money is. But money doesn’t have to be bad. If you understand that each dollar that

you earn is connected to your community in some fashion, and to your responsibility to

the common good and not just your own good, then money is something completely

different. But it’s gotten really separated from that. After Katrina, and packing up those

things to send to the apartments, I realized that the play about money I wanted to write

was a play about reconnecting money to this part of itself. And of course, that’s where

all the water in the play came from.

YOu DESCRIBE YOuR PLAY AS “AN ADAPTATION OF ONE LINE FROM The

Mayor of CasTerBridge.” HOW DID THAT COME TO BE INVOLVED?

In the first chapter of The Mayor of Casterbridge, which is a novel by Thomas Hardy, a

man who’s down on his luck and very drunk goes into a bar and sells his wife for five

pounds. The next day he is beyond horrified at what he’s done. So he stops drinking and

becomes a different man—the Mayor of Casterbridge, right? And he searches for his wife

and daughter desperately but can never find them.

So it starts off with the issue of value. It starts off by equating five pounds and a person.

And all those relationships, father-daughter and wife-husband, are also being bartered

for that five pounds. Then what happens is the daughter comes back into his life just as

he’s about to get married to a very upmarket kind of woman. And the daughter, who’s

never had, as we used to say, a pot to piss in—again, what an interesting way to think

about money: a pot to piss in—is now living in the lap of luxury. And there’s this line in

the novel, and this line blew me away: “She had discovered that take, have, and keep were

pleasant words.”

All of a sudden she understands what it means to be able to have something, to take it

and keep it. And so she becomes, basically, corrupted by this money. She falls in love with

money. And my character falls in love with a table.

SPEAKINg OF THE TABLE, YOu ONCE REFERRED TO ITALO CALVINO’S IDEA

THAT EVERY OBjECT IN A NARRATIVE IS A MAgICAL OBjECT …

Isn’t that wild?

IN The Bay of fundy, YOu’VE gIVEN SOME OF THE MATERIAL OBjECTS IN

THE PLAY LITERALLY MAgICAL quALITIES. SOME ARE HugE, SOME MELT,

ETC. COuLD YOu ExPOuND ON THAT RELATIONSHIP?

It has come as a surprise to me that I have been writing object theater plays almost my

entire life—that I have been obsessed with the way we live in the world with people

and the objects that live with us. I wrote a play about glassmaking. I wrote a play about

book conservators. I very much want to understand what happens when you spend all

day making something. What happens to you? What happens to the thing? It’s a cliché

that we put our soul into objects we make, but isn’t it a cliché because it’s kind of true?

Then, with my play When Something Wonderful Ends, I noticed that part of our heart

resides inside relics of our childhood. I mean, one of the greatest movies of all time is

Citizen Kane. We’re all pretty clear about Rosebud. And then of course there’s jewelry,

there’s rings and silver and precious things. We take one and decide that this will be the

container of my love, or this will be the container of my hope, or the container of my

belief. We make a vessel—we turn these things into vessels of belief and love and faith

and hope and memory.

So the magical properties of the objects in the play are necessary because objects in

our lives are magical every day—they’re just more dramatically so because it’s a play.

YOuR STAgE DIRECTIONS ARE VERY CONVERSATIONAL. IS THAT A STYLISTIC

CHOICE OR A PRACTICAL ONE?

A script is an invitation to the reader to enter the world of the play. So I would like to

invite the reader into the party as fully as possible. I like to make the stage directions

candy. They should enjoy them. Having said that, there is a danger in putting in the stage

directions what should be in the text. But it’s about the invitational nature of the work.

WHAT DO YOu LIKE OR DISLIKE IN A PLAY?

What I dislike is a play that doesn’t make me put things together. I like a play that

makes me really active. And I like a play that makes me hope. I like when it makes me

see the world in a different way, when it connects me to the world in a way that I had

not seen or understood before.

THEN WAVESBY KEVIN ANTHONY KAuTZMANMONDAY, FEB. 1 • 7 P.M. • at the PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER

A discharged American soldier returns from war to do violence upon his estranged son, who may not be his son at all. Set in the American Midwest, Then Waves explores the issues of violence’s echo, the cost of war, and the impulses toward destruction that ravage families and destroy the future.

Tickets are free: 612.332.7481 • INFO@PWCENTER.ORG

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uPCOMINg EVENTSTHE RUTH EASTON NEW PLAY SERIES

KEVIN ANTHONY KAuTZMAN is an American playwright born in North Dakota and a 2009-10 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center. He is an alumnus of the University of Minnesota, where he studied history and philosophy. Kevin has studied drama in Minneapolis and London at the Workhouse

Theatre Company, the Central School of Speech and Drama, and the Royal Court and Soho theatres. His work has been performed in New York by the American Story Project, the Living Theatre, and PoliglotTheater ; and in London at the Dogstar, the Soho Studio Theatre, and the Tristan Bates Theatre. Then Waves was a finalist for the 2009 Yale Drama Series and the Seven Devils and Great Plains Theatre conferences. He currently lives in St. Paul. www.kevinkautzman.com.