Free Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal Page B

the timid Tennessee should have relied on his tricks less and on his own instinct more.
    With an Italian playwright, Franco Brusati, I went to Philadelphia to see the tryout of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. In the first scene, Tennessee had written, as a stage direction, that the tension at a gathering of Big Daddy’s family, after his recent brush with death at the Ochsner Clinic, is so charged that it is like “a summer storm.” As a result of this one note, Gadge had the family arriving during a deafening summer storm with thunder and lightning. Tennessee only sighed. “I have tried to explain to Gadge the nature of metaphor. And failed.” Tennessee was always willing to sacrifice aspects of his art to success as represented by Kazan’s bold kinetic energy.
    During our stay in Philadelphia, Tennessee was persuaded to write an unfunny joke for Big Daddy, played by folksinger Burl Ives. The joke had something to do with an elephant whose genital member was allegedly like that of Big Daddy or was it vice versa? I’ve forgotten whether or not this “surefire” audience-pleaser stayed in the play but the intended result—a hit—was duly achieved later on Broadway.
    Currently, Tennessee and the theater are on my mind because I have, finally, after fifty years, got ready a play called
On the March to the Sea
which was given a “dramatic reading” at Hartford, Connecticut, and then recently at Duke University where we played fourteen performances with a first-rate New York cast. What is a dramatic reading and how does it differ from—well, an undramatic reading? There are no sets, no costumes. The actors (we had nine) sit in a row upstage center. Downstage there are five lecterns. When an actor hears his cue he goes to a previously assigned lectern and opens his script and pretends to read. Actually the play has been learned and rehearsed for a week or so before the “reading.” The model for all this was a famous Dramatic Reading years ago of Shaw’s
Don Juan in Hell
, with Charles Boyer and Charles Laughton. Mailer revived this staging for himself, Sontag and me, with, admittedly, somewhat different results from the Boyer-Laughton version.

    Norman Mailer and me with Susan Sontag and Gay Talese in
Don Juan in Hell
to raise money for the Actors Studio.
    At Duke our director, Warner Shook, also appropriated the form which works particularly well with a play that depends entirely on its language. Also, since there are no sets or costumes, this saves the producers a million or so dollars while making the company easy to tour. Since things went well at Duke the producer expects to keep the “reading” on the move with, one hopes, as many of the original actors as possible, hard to do since they tend to be in demand elsewhere. After certain performances at Duke, my contract called for me to chat back and forth with the audience on whatever happens to occur to us. I find this, as always, enjoyable and the public seems not to mind. As we are in North Carolina, language is a great local skill as it is in most of the South where the play is set in a small town during the Civil War. A half-mad and so half-sane Yankee colonel occupies the town and moves into the house of its leading magnate. Chris Noth played Colonel Thayer and he and the house owner, Harris Yulin, duel with each other as the narrative gets more and more surreal. Are they all dreaming? Or dead? The ending surprises and, I think, satisfies. I found it liberating to be writing Southern or “Southron” as the play has it. I evoke the cadences and language of my grandparents. Tennessee, a fair poet himself, was drawn to Southron locations because he found the naturalistic American speech of our day ill suited as a basis for poetry of the sort that he liked to evoke in dialogue. And so, deliberately, he mined the speech of his youth, of his Episcopal minister grandfather, of his garrulous metaphor-inclined mother, and of those crippled heroines often based on his