Talking About Her Love of McCullers by Alan Light

Talking About Her Love of McCullers  by Alan Light

WHEN she was a teenager, Suzanne Vega spotted a biography of the writer Carson McCullers in a library. She didn’t actually read the book, but the image on the cover left a deep impression.

“I just felt some connection with the face,” said Ms. Vega, the singer-songwriter who has received seven Grammy nominations and has sold more than seven million records. “Her face looked like photographs of myself as a young girl.”

As a student at Barnard, Ms. Vega repeatedly returned to the subject of McCullers, a pioneer of the Southern Gothic style best known for her novels “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” and “The Member of the Wedding.” When Ms. Vega was required to dress as someone in the arts and answer questions in that person’s voice for a theater class, she picked McCullers.

For her undergraduate thesis she adapted some of McCullers’s short stories into songs, which she developed into a one-act play. “I wasn’t really happy with it, though,” Ms. Vega said. “It set her on her rocking porch, and it was very cozy and homey, and she’s not really like that.”

Thirty years and countless rewrites later, “Carson McCullers Talks About Love” opens on Thursday at the Rattlestick Playwrigts Theater,  where it’s scheduled to run through June 4. The 90-minute play features Ms. Vega alternating between monologue and songs, backed by two musicians, recounting McCullers’s complex life. McCullers, who died in 1967 at 50, broke ground with her depictions of solitude, unrequited love, physical disability and repressed homosexuality. She also faced frequent illness and the suicide of her husband.

At a recent rehearsal at the Rattlestick, Ms. Vega seemed confident singing into an old-fashioned boxy microphone, but was still finding her feet with the spoken sections and admitted that memorizing the script was the hardest part. She collapsed into giggles when wrestling to pull a robe over her shoulders while speaking, and improvised a subtle way to call the pianist, Joe Iconis, over to help her put it on.

“It’s exhausting,” she said of venturing onto the theatrical stage after 25 years of doing concerts. “It takes a lot more energy than I had expected. I sort of think of it as a bipolar thing. There’s moments where Carson is manically up and others where she’s super-depressed, so it’s a roller coaster to play and I’m so tired by the end of the day.”

During a break in rehearsal Ms. Vega said she felt now was the right time to tell McCullers’s story. “I think people understand her more than they might have 30 years ago because of the alternative sensibility, people who tattoo or pierce themselves,” she explained over lunch a few blocks from the Rattlestick in the West Village. McCullers “was sort of an alternative personality before that phrase was coined,” she said. “She had this global vision of human rights for all kinds of people, and we have more of that global consciousness now.

“In one part of ‘Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’ she imagines a tiny radio that could sit in your ear, and I thought, ‘She’s describing an MP3 player!’ So a lot of this world that she kind of intuited has come to pass.”

Ms. Vega had presented excerpts from the play over the years, but the idea was brought back to life when she met the theater director Kay Matschullat in 2008. “Suzanne mentioned this piece about Carson McCullers,” Ms. Matschullat wrote in an e-mail. “I had recently reread ‘The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,’ so my ears perked up immediately. And from the picture of Carson on the cover, I also knew they had an uncanny resemblance.”

By the time they met to discuss the project, Ms. Matschullat, who has directed premieres for playwrights including Derek Walcott and Vaclay Havel,  had already contacted the McCullers estate and received approval to proceed. As Ms. Vega looked at the script, she said she grew increasingly dissatisfied; she felt she was portraying McCullers as “cute and eccentric,” and was now more sympathetic to her pain and her humanism.

“We decided to shred it and start over again from scratch, keeping the songs,” Ms. Vega said. “We have slashed and burned this script over and over again.”

Though the songs Ms. Vega is best known for are razor sharp, character-based narratives — like her two Top 10 hits from the 1980s, “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner” — she struggled to create a cohesive, full-length work. From the play’s earliest days at Barnard she was determined that, as much as possible, the song lyrics would be taken verbatim from McCullers’s writings.

As she added new songs, Ms. Vega said, she also decided to bring in “a more musical writer than I am myself,” and turned to Duncan Sheik, who made the transition from singer-songwriter to theatrical composer with “Spring Awakening.”

“I think she felt a little at sea in terms of writing new songs in a theatrical context,” Mr. Sheik said in a telephone interview. “I’m pretty prolific writing music. Lyrics are the hard thing for me, and with her it might be a little bit the opposite.”

At various out-of-town workshops the shape of “Carson McCullers Talks About Love” continued to evolve. “At first I was approaching this play like a revue,” Ms. Vega said. “Comedy and stories and songs, and if you make the audience laugh, great. But after one workshop my husband said, ‘If I’d known there were going to be attempted suicides and remarriages and stuff, I would have paid more attention.’ So I thought, maybe I need to structure this into more of a real story.” She turned to “The Belle of Amherst,” a one-woman play written by William Luce based on the life of Emily Dickinson, as a template.

Ms. Matschullat noted that working with a musician was very different from directing a professional actor. “The process is free from a lot of the psychological issues that might come up with actors,” she said. “Suzanne is willing to take very specific directions about timing and placement. Sometimes actors chafe at specificity in fear it will inhibit the organic or truthful quality they strive for.”

True validation for Ms. Vega came in February, when she presented a reading of the show at a Carson McCullers symposium in Columbus, Ga., McCullers’s birthplace. “There were all these hard-core fanatics there, and I was terrified, and we got a standing ovation.” she said. “I thought, ‘If we can win this crowd over, then nobody in New York can say anything to me.’ ”

Ms. Vega said the shift to a new medium was welcome. Since being dropped by her last record label, she has been releasing, on her own, a series of rerecordings of her catalog organized by theme. (The third volume, “States of Being,” is due out in July.)

She laughed while recounting a story of a father pointing her out to his daughter and saying “She’s from the ’80s,” and said that if “Carson McCullers Talks About Love” succeeds, she has several other theater pieces based on “the ideology of women” (she mentions Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson as examples) that she hopes to explore.

“I’ve been sort of decompressing since 1987,” Ms. Vega said. “I had that big moment. And then as each decade has gone by, it wasn’t exactly a crash back to earth, but it has been adjusting and readjusting. And that’s fine.

“It’s great to feel at this moment in time that I’m beginning something. It’s kind of a miracle at the age of 52 to start over, in some other realm.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/theater/suzanne-vegas-carson-mccullers-talks-about-love.html?recp=6&src=rec&pagewanted=print