Photo credit: Paulius Musteikis Photography
Milwaukee playwright Marie Kohler
Milwaukee playwright Marie Kohler’s Boswell will have a three-week run, with six shows a week, at the world-famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August. Founded in 1947, the month-long festival in Scotland’s capital is the world’s largest arts festival and the grandmother of all Fringe Festivals, including Milwaukee’s.
Thousands of shows compete for attention there each summer, but Boswell’s long run and its cast and crew of seasoned professionals alongside UW-Parkside faculty and students is unusual and noteworthy. The script, tightened to Edinburgh’s 70-minute time limit, is a revision of Kohler’s Boswell’s Dream, staged in 2005 by Renaissance Theaterworks where Kohler is co-founder and former co-artistic director. Her busy past year has also included new productions of her plays Midnight and Moll Flanders at UW-Parkside and The Dig at Third Avenue Playhouse in Sturgeon Bay.
How did your playwriting start?
Jane Mandel of Next Generation Theatre commissioned me to write Jingle Bear’s Christmas for her company. Not my favorite accomplishment, but it was a start. Then, she commissioned me to adapt a 1909 children’s classic, A Girl of the Limberlost, but the company dissolved before it could be produced. So, it was produced by Children’s Theatre of Madison and I just went back in and freshened it up, and it was published last year. So now, it’s on the market.
Have you ever been to the Edinburgh festival?
I lived in Edinburgh for half a year in 1976 with [ex-husband] Colin Cabot when he was working for Gian Carlo Menotti, the opera composer. I applied to graduate school in English there and got in, but Colin was called back here to replace Clair Richardson at Skylight, so I left. I’ve always had a kind of unfinished dream with Edinburgh. Last summer, I went to the Festival because I wanted to scout out venues. And on the second day I was there, I fell and broke my shoulder very badly in three places and had to come home. But I found a wonderful guy there to help with logistics, named Frodo McDaniel. He’s hooked us up with a great venue called Riddle’s Court, a merchant’s home from the 1590s, so it has a lot of history which is right for this play. It’s partly set in James Boswell’s and Samuel Johnson’s time, the 1750s and ’60s when they took this trip to Scotland, to the Hebrides Islands.
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Why Boswell?
I fell in love with his journals when I was kid. My parents had the published volumes in their library at home. All these journals had been under wraps because the families were ashamed of them because they were very honest. It was gritty, granular descriptions of life. So, I wrote Boswell’s Dreams and it went over very well at Renaissance. And I thought, ‘if it goes over well here where no one knows who Boswell is, maybe it will go over even better in Scotland.’
How is it to be a woman playwright?
Renaissance really did pave the way for a lot of professional women and it continues to. Certainly, they gave me a foot in the door. As a woman playwright, I write about what fascinates me, and sometimes it’s a male character. I reserve the right to do that. I think that art is about the imaginative exploration of people’s lives and spirits. How that takes shape shouldn’t be prescribed. I do think that women have been on the short end of the stick in the theater world. And what’s always so curious is that 75% of American theater audiences are women. Up until recently, that was not reflected in the material or the voices shaping the material.
In Boswell, I’ve actually written two female characters that almost eclipse Boswell and Johnson. I did that because a play needs some way of connecting with its subject. So, I created a young Jewish woman named Joan who is trying to make her way in academia in the 1950s and having a hard time of it. She’s gone to Britain to research Samuel Johnson and she discovers in the attic of a noblewoman’s house these caches of Boswell material that have never seen the light of day. So, she shifts her interest from the more traditional Enlightenment figure of Johnson to this scalawag that Boswell is. And the woman of the house is trying to get her to do that, so it’s also about the friendship between this lady and Joan. It’s a parallel story to Johnson and Boswell.
Attend a free send-off performance on Saturday, July 27, at 4:30 p.m. at UW-Parkside’s Rita Talent Hall. A reception and talk-back with Kohler and the cast will follow.
