Lanford Wilson: America’s Lyrical Realist
By Carrie Hughes

“Lanford Wilson has his ear cocked to the voice of the American people,” wrote journalist and critic Don Shewey in Rolling Stone in 1982. The same year, New York Times theater critic Frank Rich called him “one of the few artists of our theater who can truly make America sing.”  Talley’s Folly, Wilson’s 1979 love story about a free-thinking small-town Missouri girl and an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, is set in the Ozark town of Lebanon, Missouri, where Wilson was born in 1937. The play captures an American story in Wilson’s unique lyrical voice, challenging and reflecting the quintessentially American community in which Wilson was raised.

Wilson’s parents divorced when he was five, and he moved with his mother to Springfield, Missouri, where she was employed in a garment factory. As a teenager in nearby Ozark, he was captivated by plays like Death of Salesman on field trips to nearby Southwest Missouri State College. After some college in Missouri and San Diego, and a stint in Chicago working in advertising and writing short stories, Wilson turned to playwriting. An adult-education course in playwriting at the University of Chicago in 1959 was his formal theatrical education, and his playwriting career began.

In 1962, Wilson made his way to New York, and by 1963 his short plays So Long at the Fair and Home Free were produced at the Caffe Cino, the downtown coffee house and performance space. At Caffe Cino, Wilson also met the director Marshall Mason, who would be his artistic collaborator for years to come and who directs this production of Talley’s Folly. Fascinated by the characters that surrounded him in New York, Wilson wrote Balm in Gilead, his first full-length play, a 32-actor-extravaganza in which he depicted the late-night Upper West Side of New York in the 1960s. Directed by Mason at La Mama in 1965, it was a huge success.

Balm in Gilead also planted the seed of the idea for an institution that would become important to both Wilson’s career and the shape of off-Broadway theater in the latter part of the twentieth century. “When we did Balm in Gilead, which has a huge cast, Lanford was just so thrilled with the production, while the production was still running he said to me, we really ought to keep these people together and start a theater company,” explains Mason. “So, in fact, the idea of creating a theater really does go back to Lanford.” While it didn’t happen right away, in 1969, Mason and Wilson, along with actress Tanya Berezin and director Rob Thirkield, established the off-Broadway Circle Repertory Company, which would produce and develop Wilson’s work, including productions of The Great Nebula in Orion (1972); The HOT L BALTIMORE (1973, with a record breaking off-Broadway transfer that ran for over three years); The Mound Builders (1975); Serenading Louie (1976); and Burn This (1987), until it closed in 1996.

After Balm, Wilson realized he wanted to work with the rhythms of the language he grew up with, very different from the frenetic energy of New York speech. As he explained to Shewey: “After a while I thought, here I am, this hillbilly person writing all these New York plays. What am I doing? The sound of Missouri—I know that better than I know anything.” His plays This is the Rill Speaking (1965) and The Rimers of Eldritch (1966) were set in the Missouri of his youth and reflect this language.

But it was his 1978 play Fifth of July that put Wilson’s Lebanon on the theatrical map. Wilson set out to write a play in response to his frustration and distress about the state of America at the end of the Vietnam era. At first, he thought he would set it on Long Island, where he was renovating a house himself. But he changed his mind. “The play would be one of restoration and commitment. Something the country sorely needed. I was almost surprised when I realized that the play had to be set in my hometown of Lebanon, Missouri. This had to be about the heartland,” writes Wilson in his introduction. 

Fifth of July, the play that inspired Talley’s Folly, is set on the Fourth of July, 1977. Sally, now a widow of 64, carries around a candy box filled with the ashes of her husband, the late Matt Friedman. The actress Helen Stenborg, who was playing Sally in the premiere, demanded that Wilson help her find a model for Matt, to help her imagine who this man had been. Wilson first suggested Stenborg’s husband, but this idea was promptly rejected. His next suggestion, the actor Judd Hirsch, who had appeared with Stenborg in HOT L BALTIMORE, clicked. As Mason explains, that conversation was also an inspiration: “Lanford was intrigued, because a lot about Matt and Sally’s first meeting is talked about in Fifth of July—she talks about their first night together…the events that happen at the boathouse, but from a very different point of view.” Wilson conceived a second play, about the younger Sally and Matt, that became Talley’s Folly. In his introduction to the published version of Talley’s Folly , Wilson writes: “That was the genesis of Talley’s Folly. Imagining Matt and Sally on a date—this big, sexy, clumsy Jew coming from St. Louis down to Lebanon, Missouri where nobody had ever seen a Jew before—was very exciting. I knew immediately that I wanted this to be unlike anything I had written. It would be much lighter, with a gloriously happy ending.” Talley’s Folly won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and transferred to Broadway where it was nominated for five Tony awards. Although Wilson played with the idea of writing a larger series of plays, each representing a war that had touched the family in the style of the period, in 1981 he finished the Talley Trilogy with A Tale Told (later revised and renamed Talley & Son), the story of the rest of the Talley family on July 4, 1944, the night Wilson describes as “the night America started locking her doors. And on the night Sally made her getaway with Matt.”

Wilson has been compared to Anton Chekhov (whom he has translated) and another Missouri playwright, Tennessee Williams. Wilson’s unique style—a combination of realism and slightly elevated language, often called lyrical realism—is best explained by Mason: “Lanford writes everyday speech and yet it has the rhythm and elevation of poetry, without being ‘poetic.’ It’s lyrical, just raised somehow from reality, and yet very, very believable. People really do talk the way Lanford writes, or at least you have the illusion that they do.”