McCarter Literary Manager Carrie Hughes recently conducted an interview with Tom Cone, bookwriter for Herringbone. They discussed the origins of the story, the development of the musical, and some of Tom’s insights into the project. Here are some excerpts of their conversation:

CH: The idea for Herringbone is such an original story. Can you talk a little bit about how you got the idea?

TC: I’m embarrassed to say it was simply I was sitting in my bathtub and I thought of the first line of the play and that was it.

CH: And from there it just flowed?

I wrote the play in about a week. It then had a history before it evolved into what you’re producing at McCarter. It premiered as a one-act play in 1975 in Vancouver, BC and went on to represent British Columbia at the cultural Olympics in Montreal, even though it was a play about America. It had had a television special with the CBC TV; it went on a national tour as a one-act play and it ended up at the Olympics. When it was there I realized that I didn’t want a one-man play, I really felt I could get more out of what I was trying to say.

I really wanted to write a play as a kind of a gift to the United States from my vantage point, having been a draft dodger and having lived here [in Canada] for the first eight years before amnesty. The vantage point of being here gave me the feel of a terrible compromise, almost like a tragic compromise that I think that we all have to deal with either personally or politically. So I wrote this tragedy for this kid. I have my own background: I was a child actor in Miami, Florida, going to theater school and being in plays for about 12 years and really being under the thumb of some demonic directors.

I really felt that it was best to write it as one person performing 10 roles. Then when I decided, after it had had this tour and been performed at the Olympics, to make it into a full length piece, I wanted it through composed as opposed to just inserting anecdotal music of some period. Some people like to couch the play in a kind of vaudeville context, but I disagree with that. I think that even though its history is attached to vaudeville, you would never see the kind of act [that Herringbone is performing] in vaudeville. Ironically, the closest thing [to our play] that occurred I didn’t know about until, I think, the production at Playwrights Horizon. The actor David Rounds was doing research and found—it was so bizarre—a little article on Ethel Barrymore having performed multiple roles on vaudeville circuits as a nine year old. So she was performing little 10 and 15 minute plays and that seemed to work for me historically. But the idea that Herringbone was just cheap jokes and it was based on certain rhythms or physical comedy, I wasn’t interested in that, so I played against the genre.

The original producer was the great actress Colleen Dewhurst, and she and her partner Ken Marsolais brought me to New York and suggested that I meet Skip Kennon and Ellen Fitzhugh, with my idea that I wanted to have it through composed and taken to another level, and drive the actor even more crazy. So we slowly worked very carefully to transform the play.

I was blessed by Ellen Fitzhugh and Skip Kennon. We had this idea right from the beginning that we wanted to do this as if it was written by one person. We wanted to have a kind of seamless quality and we didn’t want to do stop-go. We wanted the music to push the narrative as well as the book pushing the narrative. And we had our issues, because I had never written a book before. All the compromises that you have to make are extremely difficult, but Ellen Fitzhugh translated scenes that I had created, and maybe either finished or started, or I was the bookends of the scene, and she was the middle, but it seemed like we were of the same voice. We both were Southerners—she’s from Arkansas and I’m from Miami, FL, and my family is from Nashville, TN, and we really click like mad, and that was really helpful to me.

CH: How did audiences respond to the piece?

TC: [The early production in] Chicago was the most wild draft that we had and they were ecstatic. One night we had 200 psychiatrists in—you can well imagine what the talkback was like.

I really wanted to write a different type of a musical. I wanted to put it within the scope of the psychology of a character and have him have to deal with all of those issues. From my point of view, the drama that takes place is really in the narrator’s hands. The other thing was that—and I don’t care if anyone does this, this is just me—I felt that [the narrator] had to do this every night, he has to tell that nightmare otherwise he’d be a dead person. He has to do that to stay above water. And I think we all have issues [like that], whatever they are.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Playwright's Pen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.