I AND YOU Context Guide by Olney Theatre Center

I celebrate myself, And what assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to m as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I Audience Context Guide for lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. A National New Play Network Rolling every World Premiere My tongue, atom of by Lauren Gunderson my blood, formâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d from this soil,,this air,Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begi Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never

I and You

TContents able of Introduction Walt Whitman: A Timeline Leaves of Grass

2 2 3

Whitman’s Influence Caroline’s World Rehearsal Photos

The Playwright

National New Play Network

The Director

The Actors

Further Reading

To say that Leaves of Grass is a journey is something of an understatement. Walt Whitman takes his readers on a journey, not only across the epic landscape of nineteenth century America, but across the poet’s life and philosophy as well. In Lauren Gunderson’s new play, I and You, Caroline and Anthony travel with Whitman as they forge their own personal connection. His words lead them through the mysteries of life and death, and their story becomes a journey that reaches far beyond the four walls of Caroline’s bedroom. Hopefully, this context guide will help you on your own journey through this new play. These pages are your introduction to two main aspects of Gunderson’s story: Caroline and Anthony’s journey through Song of Myself; and the Olney Theatre Center artists’ journey through the language of the play. Follow along and explore the resounding cultural impact of “Song of Myself” (page 6), the emotional burden of chronic illness (page 8), the artistic vision of the production team (pages 12 through 19), and much more. For even more insight into the world of this play, including videos, images, and sound clips, visit us online at www.olneyiandyou.wordpress.com. You can also visit Lauren Gunderson’s blog at www.iandyou.tumblr. com, or message us at education@olneytheatre.org.

tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!) ....Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. It is not far, it is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know, Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Leaves of Grass

Excerpted from Robert Hass’ introduction and at a particular moment something alive, to Song of Myself: And Other Poems by generous, and hopeful in the developing Walt Whitman: culture of the United States, and it escaped, almost immediately, the bonds of its fervent nationalism: it became a way forward in the he first edition of Leaves of Grass twentieth century for poets all over the world was published in Manhattan under the —in Latin America and Russia and Portugal imprint of Fotwler and Wells in July and China and India and North Africa. For 1855, in an edition of 800 copies paid all its fame, the poem and the years during for by the author. Fowler and Wells which it came into being are something of was the successful publisher of what a mystery—one that has been studied by might be thought of as New Age books Whitman’s many biographers. and pamphlets on subjects ranging Read more of Hass’ introduction on Page 4 from physiology to phrenology to the salubrious effects of ocean bathing. Walt Whitman designed the book himself and had a hand in the typesetting. It was bound in green ribbed morocco cloth with the title embossed in gold. The title page did not identify the author, but the now-famous frontispiece engraving of a bearded man in an open-collared shirt and a jauntily cocked hat did. The book contained a prose introduction and 12 poems. The first poem was long—1336 lines—and untitled. Leaves of Grass went through eight editions in Whitman’s lifetime. In the second edition of 1856 the opening poem acquired a title. It was called “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American.” In 1860, it became “Walt Whitman,” and that title remained until he renamed it once again. It became “Song of Myself” in the 1881 edition....It was then and is now an astonishment, perhaps the most unprecedented poem in the English language.

It is also an important document in the history of American culture. “Song of Myself “ captures in a particular voice

1878 portrait of Whitman, photographed by Napoleon Sarony.

Whitman: A Timeline 1819: Born May 31 on a farm near Huntington, Long Island

1823-30: Family moves to the village of Brooklyn, New York; attends public and Sunday schools

1830: Works as an office boy in lawyer’s office; then a doctor’s; then a printer’s

1836-41: Teaches school in Long Island

1841-47: Works as a reporter and editor for several newspapers

1848-54: Travels the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes; works as a carpenter and house builder

Son of an alcoholic carpenter with a large and troubled family, the young Walt Whitman had only a few years of formal education. He was an office boy at 11, a journeyman printer at 14, a school master in the farm country of Long Island at 17, and a journalist for hire at 22 in the booming suburb of Brooklyn, where he also became a flaneur, an appreciative stroller, of Manhattan across the river, the new urban world of the crowded and bustling nineteenth century. He churned out newspaper articles and book reviews and theater and art reviews and editorials. He wrote a very mediocre and melodramatic novella on the evils of drink. He was during

The famous fronstpiece from Leaves of Grass, picturing the poet at age 37.

1855: Publishes first edition of Leaves of Grass

1856: Publishes second edition of Leaves of Grass, with an additional 20 poems

those years—as he described it—“simmering, simmering.” In 1855, from his reading— English romantic poetry, American poetry and philosophy, German philosophy, history, science—his daydreams, a brief stint in New Orleans as an editor and the glimpses of the country he got in his travel there and back, from his mother’s Quaker heritage and his father’s workingman’s democratic rationalism, from the air he breathed in the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, their commerce and idioms, and from the flood of life he had made it his profession to observe, came this altogether unexpected poem. Structure The most unexpected thing about the poem was its basic technique. It is one of the first extended experiments in free verse in the English language. Whitman had to figure out how to create and sustain a new kind of formal structure for poetry. He wanted music—Galway Kinnell has remarked that Whitman’s poems are so rich in vowel music it is as if they were written in Hawaiian— and he wanted something like the feel and realistic detail that was characteristic of journalism and the novel in his day, which was for him the idiom of the vivid present. He thought the poetry of a new democratic order had to have both these qualities if it was to embody new thoughts and have in it the feel of common life in cities. And then there is the question of what sort of poem it is. No artist proceeds without some models of what she or he is either doing or trying not to do. Probably the rough models for “Song of Myself” are the remarkable set of odes written by English poets early in the century. Like his poem, they are about imagination and nature, about the human relation to these powers, and like his poem they are meditative, tend to make an argument and to take surprising

1860: Publishes third edition of Leaves of Grass by invitation of Thayer and Eldridge, young aboluitionist publishers; Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln is elected president; South Carolina secedes from the Union

turns, and to dramatize the individual’s relation to the imagination as a source of creative power. So it seems very likely that he had them in mind—or that they had become part of his own imagination of what serious poetry was about. But most of the odes are only 100 or 200 lines in length, and “Song of Myself “ is a poem of 1,300 lines; it is as long as ten odes. It’s interesting that the one significant revision Whitman made to the 1855 “Song” was to rid it of its ellipses, which gave the poem its tumultuous and cascading effect. He also slowed the poem down by dividing it into numbered sections, as the English poets had done. In the classical prehistory of the ode, separate sections marked changes in the music that accompanied recitation, and there is something of that in Whitman’s making of the shifts in tone and attack in his poem. The movement from section to section really does give the poem the feel of a suite in the ode form as it swings back and forth from aria to teeming catalogue. Criticism ...The argument that “Song of Myself“ makes—that we have more in common than separates us, that that common thing is the nature that courses through us, that we and the nature of which we are a part are carried by a profoundly sexual rhythm— “Urge and urge and urge,” he would write, “always the procreant urge of the world” —that the principle of nature is abundance and variety, that death is as much a part of its rhythm as birth and sexual desire are, that love—which he calls the “kelson of creation”—and sympathy—“I am attesting sympathy,” he writes—“Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?”—are among the deepest ways that the human imagination connects people to one another and to that larger rhythm, that the body is as important as the soul, that the teeming life of Manhattan and

1861: Outbreak of the Civil War

1862: Travels to Virginia to locate his wounded brother

F rom his reading...his

daydreams...from the air he breathed in the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, their commerce and idioms, and from the flood of life he had made it his profession to observe, came this altogether unexpected poem. its working people and the immensity and diversity of the American continent embody this nature, and that it is a great leveler and hence a democratic power, and it is a power bound to supersede all previous notions of divinity, and that all this is as common as the grass—this argument is made in the ideas of the poem, in its dazzling and superabundant lists, and in its seriousness and humor and tenderness and moments of melodrama and flashes of tragedy, but also in the sheer range of its language. Whitman draws his diction from every level of written and spoken language available to him—the speech of the streets —“the blab of the pave,” he calls it, the speech of the crafts, the languages of the professions, the vocabularies of science and technology and law and the pulpit. This poem about democracy and imagination, and what to make of life and death, and about a person’s own wondering experience of his own existence makes its case for our common human imagination by deploying the abundance, variety and hilarity of the languages in which human beings have both described and invented the world in which they find themselves living.

Robert Hass’ introduction, continued from Page 3 The Poet

1863: Moves to Washington, D.C. as self-appointed nurse in war hospitals; remains in Washington for ten years

1865: Publishes Drum Taps, collection of 53 poems; adds a sequel with 18 more poems later that year

Whitiman’s Influence

Immediate responses to Whitman’s epic work were mixed; although some critics recognized the magnitude in his language and narrative, most of his contemporaries were distracted by the poem’s less overt implications—most notably, the passages alluding to sexuality and eroticism, arguing that Whitman’s philosophy was in flagrant opposition with moral and social decorum. Other than Ralph Waldo Emerson and a few adulatory critics, Whitman had to supplement these unfavorable responses with his own: always his strongest proponent, he published anonymous self reviews in order to increase readership.

It was not until the early twentieth century that Whitman’s reputation evolved into that of a literary icon. In 1902, his poems were printed in a handsome ten-volume collection by a major New York publisher, and in 1923, English writer D.H. Lawrence lauded Whitman as “the great poet.” Since then, he has become a central figure in the American literary canon, influencing countless writers and inspiring dozens of famous artistic responses. The quotes on this page are some of the most famous commentaries on Whitman’s work, a small example of the resounding impact his poetry has had on literature, America, and the world.

Despite numerous amendments and reviews and his desire to be a poet of the people, readership remained sparse throughout the nineteenth century. Criticism

even turned hostile in 1882 when a Boston attorny threatened legal action against Whitman for violating obscenity laws.

f you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville’s Moby-Dick, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Emerson’s two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. None of those, not even Emerson’s, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass. —Harold Bloom

In stature, pride, stride, and scope of personality, he is a challenger. He warns us to come with good teeth if we are to join his menu—to bring along our rough weather clothes. He is likely any time to tip us out of the boat to see whether we sink or swim. —Carl Sandburg

WhitmanThe knew what life was. He and was not praising its beauty from an 1950s ‘60s

armchair. He had been through all that makes it hideous to most men—poverty, the battlefield, the hospitals—and yet could believe that life, whether as a whole or in detail, was perfect, that beauty is manifest wherever life is manifested. —E.M. Forster

e permitted love. That was the H ere we have a book which H primary thing I noticed. The degree fairly staggers us. It sets all the ordinary rules of criticism at defiance. It is one of the strangest compounds of transcendentalism, bombast, philosophy, folly, wisdom, wit and dullness which it ever entered into the heart of man to conceive. Its author is Walter Whitman, and the book is a reproduction of the author. —Anonymous, 1855

H e is America. His crudity

and quantity and variety of love in Whitman are simply astonishing... each manifestation was delicately, systematically supporting all the others, like the network of filiations Whitman would later describe as spinning from the poet-spider’s essence. Affection for one’s own body... the love of the world, the spectacle of other people, but also the love of what Whitman named the soul.—Alicia Ostriker

is an exceeding great stench, but it is America. He is the hollow place in the rock that echoes with the time. He does “chant the crucial stage” and he is the “voice triumphant.” He is disgusting. He is an exceedingly nauseating pill, but he accomplishes his mission. —Ezra Pound Seven of the eight editions of Leaves of Grass published during Whitman’s lifetime, from 1855 through 1892.

1865: President Lincoln is assassinated days before the end of the Civil War, succeeded by Andrew Johnson; slavery is abolished by the thirteenth amendment

1867: Publishes fourth edition of Leaves of Grass; John Burroughs publishes first biography of Whitman; Reconstruction begins

1871: Publishes fifth edition of Leaves of Grass; also publishes prose pamphlet, Democratic Vistas

1873: Suffers a stroke in Washington and travels to Camden, New Jersey

1876: Selfpubllishes author’s edition of Leaves of Grass

1881: Publishes final edition of Leaves of Grass

1892: Publishes “deathbed” edition of Leaves of Grass in Philadelphia; dies at home May 16, 1892; buried at Harleigh Cemetery, Camden

The liver is the second largest organ in the human body and is located under the rib cage on the right side. It weighs about three pounds and is shaped like a football that is flat on one side. Among its many jobs, the liver processes food and liquid into energy and nutrients and removes harmful substances from the bloodstream. Some of the most common reasons for a liver transplant include chronic hepatits B and chronic hepatits C, bile duct diseases, liver cancer, and fatty liver disease. Caroline, like thousands of American children and teens, is on the waiting list for a liver transplant. The following statistics about pediatric liver disease are from the American Liver Foundation. For more information about liver disease and organ transplants, visit www.liverfoundation.org. •Approximately 15,000 children are hospitalized for liver disease each year in the U.S. •In 2010, 560 children had a liver transplant in the U.S. •About 16,000 people in the U.S. were on the waiting list for a liver transplant in 2008, and 6,318 liver transplants were performed. •In order to decrease the chance of a viral infection, intense preparation is often required while on the transplant waiting list. This might include immune globulin or antiviral medicines, which Caroline is seen taking at the top of I and You. •Because not enough donated livers are available, many people on the waiting list must wait a long time to receive a liver, and up to one out of ten die while on the waiting list. •Liver transplant surgery takes about six to 12 hours, after which patients spend one to two weeks in the hospital. •About 80 to 85 percent of transplanted livers are functioning after one year.

In 2012, 17-year-old Rachel Stratton was diagnosed with brain-stem cancer. To help deal with the emotional turmoil, she started a blog: PrayersForRachel.com. Although Rachel and Caroline suffer from different illnesses, they both grapple with enormous questions of mortality and suffering—questions which most people twice their age have not even begun to fathom. The following passage is from Rachel’s blog, dated January 25, 2014:

The truth is, I still have a life and all the drama and disappointments that come along with it. I just have cancer as my cherry on top, and that really puts a delay on life sometimes. I have as many dreams and aspirations as the next person, but I also have been told that I’m not going to make it. There’s a semi big frustration, on par with hitting McDonalds at 10:31 AM, one minute after breakfast closes, and being told there’s nothing you can do to get your sausage McMuffin and hash brown. This last week, all of my finger tips went numb on my left hand, and my face is still just as numb. I feel so frustrated and helpless. When I was little I always thought parents, family, bishop, and doctors could solve all of my problems. It’s scary to have a problem that nobody can solve, and that not even mommy can kiss better. Here’s another annoying frustration (besides the fact that now I am much slower at typing, due to the numbness in my left hand). When people are insensitive. Nothing frustrates me more than a rude, careless, and most likely insecure person. This last week I was hanging out with my friends at a nearby place and friends had been bailing on me all day long (really not trying to sound like a drama queen, but it’s definitely coming across that way). Nothing to me had seemed to be going right. (So Jr. High, right?). Anyways I was frustrated to the point where I left on foot and walked next door to the bowling alley where my brother and his friend happened to be. Also there, was my cousin because it was his birthday, and his friends. So I went and jumped on my cousin to be annoying and joke around like I always do. One of the people from his

Like Caroline, 19-year-old Owen B. Jennings faced a terrifying prognosis in 2009: his liver had failed, and he was in dire need of a transplant. The following passage is from an article he wrote for The New York Times after his surgery: My liver had failed. White coats danced like ghosts in front of my jaundiced eyes: doctors and nurses scrambled to dilute my toxic blood. I was sick. And I still am.

friend group, that I later found out was just a tag along, started a conversation with me and was being a little vicious. I don’t know exactly how it got out of control, but it did. So I told him “Hey, you can’t talk to me like that!” And what was his response? “Why not?” I told him “Because you shouldn’t be talking to me like that.” and he said “Why not?” (Obviously this is where I pull the cancer card and say....) “Because I have cancer!” This is where the situation gets almost disturbing, when he replies “Well you’re half dead anyways cause you have cancer so it shouldn’t matter to you anyways.” I’M HALF DEAD ANYWAYS? What kind of dreadfully awful individual would ever say a thing like that? I definitely didn’t sit there and take it politely, quite contrary actually. But people from my blog seem to think I’m some kind of hero, and I’d like to try and maintain that image. He has a cancerous attitude and personality, and I felt sorry for myself while in my bed for about the next 24 hours. But I realized, I should feel more sorry for him. I’m more alive than he might ever be. Yeah I have my quirks with people, but I also know how to appreciate someone, and that’s more than he’s ever learned in his 30+ years of overeating and bullying. (Uncalled for I know). Here’s the moral to my story. You might not have cancer, but it’s easier than you think to catch a cancerous attitude. Learn to appreciate people while you have them, and despite their troubles, trials and worries. You’ll never see exactly the same as somebody else, take it from an identical twin. But you can learn to see beauty in the way that others see things, and live their lives, and that’s why we’re here.

But the only thing worse than being sick is having everyone know you are sick. The only thing worse than almost dying is having everyone know you almost died. My tug of war with mortality did not make me some sort of expert on the fragility of life. I don’t have any shrewd insight to offer; no profound advice. What my disease has taught me is straightforward and practical: being sick does not mean surrendering to all the connotations and denotations that come with being a “sick person.” At the hospital, when my parents would tell me—late at night—“We’re going to stay over,” I would refuse. When friends and teachers and co-workers would ask how I was feeling, I would tell them I was fine. When my girlfriend, Kate, would kiss me on the forehead and ask if I had enough energy to watch a movie, the answer was always “yes.” I’m not naïve. I know that my liver will never be completely healthy. I know that I will always wake up to a sea of clownfishcolored prescription bottles. And I know that I will always wear a medical tag that reads “OWEN BRITTON JENNINGS / TYPE II AUTOIMMUNE LIVER DISEASE.” But that doesn’t mean I’m an invalid. What scares me most—more than the actual, physical symptoms of my disease—is the prospect of letting it infiltrate my identity. Blood transfusions don’t alarm me anymore. I no longer shrink from the mammoth doses of steroids or the pencil-size needles that the doctors use to biopsy my liver. What frightens me—what downright petrifies me—is the notion that my disease might yet win out. So even if I don’t feel fine, even if I am tired, and even if I can’t find the silver lining, I refuse to let this major disease have a major impact on my life. I’m still a 19-year-old boy. Still a college student. Still a soccer player. And I still want to dictate what happens in my life, not some disease.

Liver Disease

Caroline’s World

Pediatric

Rehearsal Photos

Clockwise from top left: Caroline tries to comfort Anthony; Anthony joins Caroline’s air piano solo; Anthony’s “terrible dance”; the Walt Whitman trifold gets a much-needed makeover; Caroline teaches Anthony about her illness; Caroline makes an exchange: oatmeal cookies for waffle fries; Thaddeus takes notes during rehearsal; Director Eleanor Holdridge demonstrates a note on the set model with stage manager Becky Reed

The Playwright

between you and these characters? LG: That’s a good question! I think there’s probably more similarity between Caroline and me than I would like. But that’s what’s fun about writing, when you think about trying to write about really real characters, is you steal from yourself, you steal from your family and friends, you steal little details about life, and I think it’s those details that make it actually feel more universal. So Caroline likes cats a lot, she likes Jerry Lee Lewis, she likes Elvis, she has a very snarky attitude about things, but she’s very plugged in to herself. But in many ways I’m very like the other character, Anthony, too. I love jazz, he loves jazz. He kind of has a nerdy relationship to things that he’s passionate about, which I might relate to. But it’s really about really curious, smart, funny kids, and I think all of us hope that that part of ourselves is still alive and well no matter how old we get.

Sonie Matthews, Marketing Associate: What is this play about? Lauren Gunderson: This play is really about connection and the surprises we find when we really get to know people. In many ways it’s a Hero’s Journey but in miniature, so the heroes that we wouldn’t expect are two teenagers doing a project on Walt Whitman, but through a kind of, what might seem like a kind of vanilla assignment, blossoms this understanding and healing and a kind of transcendent communion that happens between these two unlikely heroes. So through that we found out about how we’re all connected to each other and life and death and meaning. SM: What does this play mean to you? LG: This is a very special play for me because it reminds us that we’re all heroes and we’re all the main characters of our own stories even though we may seem not that in the privacy of our own homes, in this case, in Caroline’s teenage girl room. But from these really beautiful, profound, and private moments can come great stories, universal tales, about connection and

meaning. That’s really where it stems from. I think that teenagers can teach us a lot, as much as we can teach them, so I hope that this is a play that finds some of its power in that teenagers can bring their parents and parents can bring their teens and everyone can come around this play and feel like it’s speaking to them and about them. SM: What was your inspiration behind all this? LG: Well I’ve always loved Walt Whitman— who doesn’t?—so it starts there. And I was really fascinated about how people find each other and how we impact each other in ways we don’t even know when we first meet. So that, spinning it all together with a bunch of surprises, a bunch of profound, funny moments, and really meaningful, deeper stuff, all weaving up into a play that’s about what we mean to each other. So in that way it’s a play I’ve been wanting to write for a long time, and through writing it, I’ve kind of changed how I know playwriting, how I tell a story, what a story is really about and what we want a story. so it’s changed me a lot through writing it, as much as I hope it’s changed people through seeing it. SM:

Are

there

any

similarities

that’s over 150 years old and you find that it’s still relevant, I think it’s a metaphor for theatre as a whole. It’s an art form that’s so old and so basic, in a real fundamental way, still matters to us now, and can pull it together in one room and have on great cathartic experience together. I think that’s theatre at its best, and I hopefully this play is part of that tradition. Maegan Clearwood, Dramaturg: Can you talk about what it’s like to be in the rehearsal room? LG: Well every playwright is in the rehearsal room in a different way. I’m very active and a little bit perfectionist. So we’ll go over a scene a number of times, just yesterday we were talking with the actors about one moment, and adding little extra lines, just a syllable more of dialogue can help the rhythm of a scene really hit. And that stuff you don’t know at your computer you have to have the actors in the room to do that. Really asking questions, when you have smart people in the room— smart actors, smart dramaturg, and our great director and design team—there’s a lot of brilliance in that room and people coming at it in different ways. So I try to listen to the other smart people in the room to find those moments that could be better, clearer, more interesting if a different choice were made. And often those decisions don’t come from me, they come from conversations in the room or something that happens. Even great designers can say, “well if she’s wearing this in this scene and that in that scene, then maybe there’s something in between,” and that’s where a costume designer’s brilliance would come in. So I’m very active, I bring in pages every day, we’re tighter now, it’s the second production, but I’m very much plugged into everyone else’s progress.

t reminds us that we’re all heroes and we’re all main characters of our own stories...fom these really beautiful, profound, and private moments can come great stories, universal tales, about connection and meaning.

SM: What do you hope Olney audiences will get from this kind of play? LG: I would love this community to get a sense that we’re all in one story together. Even though we might not think a 16-year-old has much to tell as 60-yearold or a 50-year-old or a 40-year-old, of course they do, because we’re all human beings and we’re all looking for meaning, and we’re all looking to live a life that matters, a life of love and compassion and being understood. And those things don’t ever change, whether you’re six or 60. So I think that’s the biggest gift. It’s also an interesting thing to resuscitate Walt Whitman, not that he has any press problems, but when you look at a poem

MC: How do you know when a play is done?

are now five or six years old that I would still go and tweak a little bit if I could, and sometimes do. But I mean, I think it’s done when you feel like you can trust anyone in the world to pick it up and understand it. Perhaps not pick it up and produce it to its shiniest intent, but to understand what you’re going for. And when the intention is clear, or clear enough, it’s time to say, “okay, it’s time to let this one fly on its own now.”

The Director

Business Etiquette: Women

LG: I don’t know. When they take it away from you, as Oscar Wilde or someone fancy once said. I now know, as I said earlier, that it takes two solid productions. And that’s actually two solid rehearsal times. And a rehearsal is a couple of weeks, and that’s not enough time, so two chunks of rehearsal allow me the kind of understanding and the space to really get it as close to done as possible. But there are plays of mine that

Lauren Gunderson and the National New Play Network

Originally commissioned by South Coast Repertory, one of the nation’s top new play incubators, Lauren Gunderson’s early drafts of I and You—then a scant 60 pages—went through an intensive workshop and reading process. “Through all of these conversations it’s grown and grown, and that’s what new play development is,” Lauren said. “It’s having people who trust me as the writer, who trust the play, who trust this community of people to say, ‘Something in this play is hitting and it matters, and how can we encourage and grow it?’” Once the story found its voice, Lauren was approached by Marin Theatre about producing the play through the National New Play Network. The NNPN, now in its 16th year, “champions the development, production and continued life of new plays” and strives “to pioneer, implement and disseminate ideas and programs that revolutionize the way theaters collaborate to support new plays and playwrights.” It has supported more than 100 productions through its Continued Life of New Play Fund, which creates Rolling World Premieres of new plays.“What that does is this wonderful and uniquely powerful thing in American theater, which is to say, ‘We want to premiere this play, but we want to make sure that it is buffered from the kind of growing pains that a new play can go through,’” Lauren said. As a Rolling World Premiere, three theater companies agreed to produce I and You before the first production even began rehearsals. Lauren, whose plays take at least two complete rehearsal processes to reach their full potential, said the New Play Fund gives her work the opportunity to outlast reviews and blossom into its own. The Olney script of I and You is “in many ways very similar, but in many ways very different” from the script that was at Marin Theatre in the fall of 2013. “The first act of this particular play is one that I’ve been working on over and over. So this NNPN rolling world premiere has given me the chance to look at those problem spots, look at those spots and say ‘Can we do more? Can we go deeper? Can we go bigger? What else can our characters give us and show us, and in that way what else can we give and show our audience?’

“That doesn’t happen if you have one production and it’s done. That happens with this kind of long-term support, which is amazing. It’s a really privilege and honor to be here because it feels that I can do my real work. And that’s what a rolling premiere is. It lets me do my real work and it let’s a play be its best self, and that’s an incredible gift not just to me but to new play development as a whole.”

Maegan Clearwood, Dramaturg: What attracted you to 'I and You'? Eleanor Holdridge, Director: The language. In contemporary plays, it is rare that realism, contemporary idiom and heightened language intersect so beautifully. Lauren Gunderson takes teenspeak, adds a little Walt Whiman and ends up with a beautiful and simple story told with deftly handled language. Seemingly realistic at first, she really gets the quirky idiomatic vocabulary of the young and lets it express their deepest longings, terrors and hopes. MC: What are the challenges and attractions of directing a two-person play? EH: It’s a very intense process. And a lot of time with only two actors. So they better be cracker-jack collaborators who have chemistry, get along with each other and can really bounce of the text. Everything comes down to the dialectic between the two and it’s important to hone the action down to absolute specifics. MC: What has surprised you most during the rehearsal process?

EH: The incredible humor and vivacity of the Rachael Tice and Thaddeus Fitzpatrick in the rehearsal room. With a huge appetite for exploration, they bring a dynamism and passion for the text, an incredible work ethic and real life to an already lively text. MC: Caroline and Anthony forge a special connection with Whitman’s verse in ‘I and You.’ How would you describe ‘Leaves of Grass’ and its connection with the play? Do you have a personal relationship with Whitman’s poetry? EH: For some reason, I have never really encountered Whitman’s poetry. Not in middle or upper schools, in college or in graduate school. Perhaps it was my intense and almost myopic fascination with the English romantic poets and schools that let me pick my own electives. But where was I? It is so great to be finally invited to the party. And so, discovering Whitman for the first time through this play, at this late date has been one of the highlights of the work. I feel like the character of Caroline, who suddenly has her world opened up with the words and thoughts and sheer

MC: What is it like being part of a Rolling World Premiere for a new play? Can you talk a bit about the importance of new play development? EH: Absolutely. It gives plays a real chance to develop and the playwright to see how different audiences (as in this case across the country) engage with the material. It gives them a chance to keep honing it and testing it out before it is set in stone. For me as a director working within the format, I could see the previous incarnation of the play, find out how Lauren wanted to move forward with it, and help the Artistic Director provide a generative environment in which that could happen. It is a truly exciting process, and I feel like I’m part of something so much larger than the one production. Thrilling. MC: What was it like having the playwright in the rehearsal room for the first week? EH: Amazing. She can give the actors and me insights into the character motivations and personal inspirations for each moment of the play. We can provide her with a testing ground for new material. And Lauren particularly is filled with a sense of humor and joy in the process, which, I find, actually enriches the creative process and paradoxically deepens the more poignant and profound aspects of the play. MC: How would you describe your directing approach? EH: Collaborative and generative. Going from the broad to the specific. Honoring the punctuation. Looking for humor

I n contemporary

plays, it is rare that realism, contemporary idiom and heightened language intersect so beautifully. Lauren Gunderson takes teenspeak, adds a little Walt Whiman and ends up with a beautiful and simple story told with deftly handled language. in within the tragedy and poignancy within the comedy. Going deep. Finding rhythm. Letting the play do the work. Honing action and intention to the bone. Not that different, I hope, from what I teach. MC: What is it like working on a play about teenagers? Do you find yourself connecting with Caroline or Anthony in any way? EH: Yup. I remember being a teenager and, no matter how old I get, I think a vestige of that teenager will remain. I remember what it’s like to grapple with a world that’s too large to understand. I have the tools to pretend that I now understand it, that I can operate within it with agency and force. But really? It’s still too large to understand. MC: What would you like Olney audiences to come away with? EH: A little bit of sense of the mystery about which Whitman and Gunderson write. A memory of what it was like to be a teenager, on the brink of self-discovery. And maybe even a promise to look a little deeper into the ephemera of the world. MC: In one sentence, what would you say that ‘I and You’ is about? EH: The Mystery.

transcendentalism of the character. In Leaves of Grass, Whitman celebrates the ephemeral connectedness between the mind and the body and nature and the ineffable. In the quote that starts the play, “I and this mystery here we stand,” it is something that is neither death nor life he explores, but something that encompasses both. I suspect that part of our identity as an American culture springs from Whitman. But it seems like we need him again to inspire us. How wonderful that Lauren’s given us the opportunity.

The Actors

Maegan Clearwood, Dramaturg: What excites you most about this play?

to-moment has to be spot on. The ball can never drop, because then you let your partner down.

Rachael Tice, Caroline: I think what excites me about this play is about how it really does truly focus on the small stuff, and how an intimate relationship doesn’t have to grow off of something extremely major. I personally like the fact that we connect over a school project, not the loss of a parent or something big like that. Yes she has a disease, but Anthony’s focus is on her as a person. It’s about the project, which unbeknown to her has a bigger purpose.

MC: What was it like working with the playwright?

Thaddeus Fitzpatrick, Anthony: I totally get what you’re saying. I think my favorite thing is about how universal this play is. Whether you’re someone grappling with loss and how to deal with it, or you’re dealing with deterioration of your own health, or something of the like, it doesn’t matter. It’s for people younger and older. I’ve heard people who read it saying, “Oh, it broke my heart.” When we read it we cried. RT: We’ve been crying for months. TF: It’s how wide the range is of people it affects, which is a testament of how good the writing is and how subtle it is, and how that subtly can affect people. Small stuff. RT: Yeah, small stuff. Also, being selfish, I’m really excited to have Thad as my Anthony. Our audition process was really special and we were rooting for each other the whole time. I couldn’t do this with anybody else. TF: True, true, out of all the girls I auditioned with I couldn’t imagine being with anybody else. MC: Have you ever been in two person play before? RT: No. Tf: No. This is the first two person play I’ve ever done. It’s challenging but also very rewarding, because the diffusion of responsibility is one person away. There’s two people, I’m one of them, and you have to take responsibility of each part. R: You need laser focus, and the moment-

TF: That was so great, because any questions we had—“I don’t understand this” or “I don’t think this person would say that”—she was very welcoming to any and all ideas. RT: What’s great about her is she knows that her work is never finished, so she’s constantly adding, taking things away, truly taking things into consideration, how things are phrased. She’s very inspired by how Thad and I interact. We joke a lot and get along, so she felt really comfortable really increasing the level of humor, which is necessary with how devastating Caroline’s disease is. TF: As a playwright, she’s very great at picking up on things, and she’s a phenomenal listener. RT: She’s also funny as all hell. I love Lauren, she’s fantastic. MC: Do you connect with your characters in any special way? TF: Oh goodness yes. When I first read the script, this is the most in unison I’ve ever felt with a character, not because of a major loss or that I’m struggling with an illness, just the way he thinks, his view on life, his interests. It was almost as if I was reading a biography on me: his love of jazz, he plays basketball, his love of poetry. It really struck a nerve with me. And how he goes about his relationships with people, how outgoing he is, I really felt like we were one in the same. People see a happy Thad and don’t delve past that sometimes, and I feel that sometimes people don’t really know me. RT: My acting coach told me that I shouldn’t show up drunk and I should book this part, because we have a similar sardonic, sarcastic wit. I connect with her on that level. On a deeper level, I have a very sick father, so I’ve been exposed to some very traumatic medical issues.

MC: Were you familiar with Walt Whitman before this play? TF: No I was not, even though I did poetry in college and was on the speech team. RT: I knew of Whitman, but nothing really inspired me to read him, which sounds totally ignorant. But I never really studied it. To do some research, while reading it, he’s pretty epic. I should have picked up his book sooner. MC: Do you have any special connections to Whitman now?

RT: Eleanor! If I can say anything about Eleanor it’s that she is so much the best friend that you wish you had. She’s got your back but she’s also not afraid to give you a little bit of sass and put you in your place. In all the directors I’ve worked with in my life, she’s one of the best. TF: She recognized that we’re dealing with pretty heavy matter, and it’s just the two of us, and she took that a ran with it and made sure to keep the rehearsal process light. Understanding that we had to take on such responsibility emotionally and physically and mentally. And I respect her for that. RT: Basically, everyone who’s been in the room with us has been really good to us.

In terms of her condition, I have tremendous compassion for her, and living in it as her I’m developing a deeper compassion for my own father’s experience. So it’s rewarding to play her but also rewarding learning from her.

TF: To me, while I was reading it, because Leaves of Grass spans so many different things, the value of life and how to live it. To me, I always approach life with trepidation. But Leaves of Grass and this show as a whole taught me to put down the trepidation and just live it. RT: There’s one line of Whitman that Anthony quotes that really hits home: “I know I am deathless.” There’s something about that that almost reassures me that there’s a differentiation between the body and the soul. There was someone who was such a provocative thinker and believes that is the case, that something greater than the body can live on, and that provides comfort.

Interactive reading guide for “Song of Myself”: http://rocket.csusb.edu/~tmoody/SS07%20 HUM344%20songofmyselfweb.html Lauren Gunderson’s I and You blog, with additional images, quotes, song clips, articles, and more: http://iandyouplay.tumblr.com/ National New Play Network: http://www.nnpn.org/ PBS American Experience on Walt Whitman: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/whitman/ program/ PBS Biography on John Coltrane: http://www.pbs.org/jazz/biography/artist_id_coltrane_ john.htm “Revising Himself: Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass,” Library of Congress: http://www.loc. gov/exhibits/whitman/leavesofgrass.html#0018 The Walt Whitman Archive, with manuscripts, periodicals, commentary, pictures, sound, and more: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/ United Network for Organ Sharing: http://www.unos.org/

P rint

Greenspan, Ezra, ed. Cambridge Companion to Whitman (1995). A compilation of essays on a variety of current critical preoccupations. Hollis, C. Carrol. Language and Style in Leaves of Grass (1983). A literary critical reading of Whitman’s art that emphasizes its roots in oratory and journalism. Kummings, Donald D. Walt Whitman, 1940-1975: A Reference Guide (1982). A useful annotated second bibliography of cricitism about Whitman. Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). A powerful appreciation of one remarkably original writer by another. LeMaster, J.R. and Donald D. Kummings, eds. Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (1998). A handy reference work with entries on virtually every conceivable aspect of Whitman and Whitman-related subjects. Loving, Jerone. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. (1998). A well-documented biography. Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: A Mosaic of Interpretations (1989). A line-by-line exegesis of the 1855 text stitched together from critics.

RT: —That’s what always makes me cry in the play—

Myerson, Joel, ed. Whitman in His own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life (1991). A collection of contemporary reviews and notices of Whitman by audiences.

TF: —that line in particular conveys that your relationships will continue on, you’re not just over when you die.

W eb

American Liver Foundation: http://www.liverfoundation.org/

Burroghs, John. Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person. (1867, New York). Noteworthy not only as first book on Whitman but also because partially ghost-written by Whitman.

TF: I do love that about it. Day to day, my fear is, if I died, what did I leave behind? Did I leave anything, did I affect people? And “I know I am deathless,” that particular line—

MC: Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?