Marshall Mason on Lanford Wilson and Talley’s Folly

“What draws me to plays is the depth and dimensions of characters.  Lanford Wilson is a master at that,” Talley’s Folly director and longtime Wilson collaborator Marshall Mason explained in a recent interview.  “Talley’s Folly is a perfect example of complex characters who have interesting, complex, three-dimensional lives.  We grow to know them slowly, and once you know them you’ll never forget them.”

The way Marshall Mason tells it, his first meeting with playwright Lanford Wilson sounds a little awkward.  A one-act play of Wilson’s was being produced after a significant revision, and Wilson, intrigued that Mason was already familiar with his work, was eager to know what he thought. Mason told Wilson that by revising he’d ruined the play.  That was in 1964, and the conversation launched a collaboration that would continue for over forty years. “Lanford learned right upfront that I was going to be very honest with him,” Mason notes.

When Wilson first brought the script of Talley’s Folly to his colleagues at Circle Rep for the group’s usual Friday new play readings they were enchanted—except for Mason, who objected to a major storytelling point. “Lanford was really annoyed at me,” Mason admits, “because he felt he’d written a perfect play and now I was saying there was something wrong with it.”  

SPOILER ALERT! Click here to read how the play changed.

In his published introduction Wilson concedes that “Marshall must have been very convincing because the chip fell of my shoulder and very soon I was taking notes.”  As Mason remembers it, “Lanford begrudgingly went back to work on it…and since that revision he hasn’t touched it.  Normally when we go in to rehearsal, there are rewrites that come about as actors ask questions and he’ll change a line or whatever.  To the best of my memory after he rewrote Talley’s Folly to provide the structure that was missing in the first draft, not a word was changed.  We felt we had a little perfect play in which it all works out exactly on time, just like clockwork. It’s delightful when you get to the end of the play and Matt looks at his watch and says, ah, right on the button.”

Talley’s Folly premiered in 1979, starring Judd Hirsch and Trish Hawkins.  Productions followed quickly — Los Angeles, a Broadway transfer, Chicago, London—and the play has firmly established itself in repertoire of the American theater. Mason himself has directed six productions (McCarter will be his seventh). Each production, of course, is unique, but for Mason the timing of McCarter’s production makes it particularly resonant:

“I think it’s a good time to be doing Talley’s Folly because in 1944 the Second World War was winding down, but our boys were still in danger. The third play of the Talley trilogy, Talley & Son takes place the same night as Talley’s Folly, and in that play, Sally’s brother Timmy is killed. Although we don’t learn about it in Talley’s Folly, that makes the play to me, very, very current.  Here we are again at war, and we’re being, as Matt says, led by the nose.  And so the play offers a human viewpoint of war and what it does to people and what our obligations are on the home front during a time of war.  It’s a beautiful love story, but it has wonderful social implications. It reverberates beautifully in terms of today.”