Other Voices, Other Lives

Perspectives: Research and Creative Activities at SIUC, Fall 2007

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OTHER VOICES, OTHER LIVES

A playwright's gift is creating new worlds

David Rush is comfortable with characters crowding his mind. Figures from the past and figures from the present, everyday folks and strange ducks, even characters—like Lewis Carroll's Jabberwock—who aren't human at all: he's put quite a throng on paper over the years.

When he recently suffered a case of writer's block, one imagines he felt abandoned. But he was overdue for a breather.

Rush has written nearly 20 full-length plays and musicals. In just the past few years, he finished three dramas that won national new-play contests in 2005 and 2006, plus a fourth that received a staged reading at the 2006 Orlando Shakespeare Festival. He wrote the book and lyrics for a musical called Feathers in the Wind, based on Eastern European Jewish folk tales, and has been writing lyrics for another, Whirlybirds, about two parents serving in the Iraq war. And he published a textbook—A Student Guide to Play Analysis (SIU Press, 2005).

"I think I needed to fill up the well again," he says of those scary months when inspiration wasn't striking.

Rush is professor and head of the playwriting program in SIUC's well-respected theater department. His M.F.A. students just closed out a banner year, winning several honors at the 2007 regional Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival in Milwaukee. But Rush credits the entire theater faculty for their success.

"We give a lot of production time to the students, which is somewhat unusual among playwriting programs," he says. "Everyone here agrees that the only way to learn is to get experience, experience, experience."

Students can write prolifically in the privacy of their room. But until they face a director who explains why a scene is unstageable, or an actor who repeatedly muffs a bit of clunky dialogue, or an audience that sits stone-cold-silent when they should be laughing (or vice versa)—until students go through such trials and learn how to make their material work as they intended, they won't be successful playwrights.

Rush, who grew up in Chicago and earned his doctorate in theater from the University of Illinois, has had plenty of such experience. His plays have been produced in venues around the country for more than 25 years. He's affiliated with Chicago Dramatists, a new-play development group, and with Chicago's Stage Left, whose mission is to produce plays that "raise the level of political debate."

For Rush, inspiration often comes from political topics and the daily headlines. His current work-in-progress, which is in the research stage, deals with elder abuse. Police Deaf Near Far, based on a real event, involves a fatal misunderstanding between a deaf activist and a cop. And in One Fine Day, a professor moves beyond the boundaries of political correctness and is accused by a student of anti-Semitism. (Rush recently sold an option on the play to Trendline Films.)

Headlines from the past have inspired him, too. For instance, The Prophet of Bishop Hill looks at what led to the 1850 murder of Eric Jansson, a messianic figure who founded a collectivist religious community in northwestern Illinois. Leander Stillwell was based in part on the memoirs of a Union soldier in the Civil War.

Other plays of Rush's are more personal, and they often grow out of his Jewish background. Take the award-winning Estelle Singerman, in which a friendless Jewish widow seeks someone to say kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, for her after she dies. She finds an unlikely candidate named Warren, a widower who's renounced Judaism, tucking into a cheeseburger and fries at a local McDonald's.

Estelle escorts Warren on a surreal journey through Chicago at night, during which they consult an irascible tarot-card reader, seek information from a judgmental talking giraffe at Lincoln Park Zoo, and finally meet Death himself, who turns out to be not the Grim Reaper but a white unicorn. But the essence of the play—Estelle's commitment to her faith and her ability to rekindle Warren's—is a down-to-earth matter of heart and soul.

Rush's identity as a gay man also drives some of his work, such as his latest drama, Tying the Knot, whose theme is same-sex marriage. Rush was a tenured faculty member at Southwest Texas State University in the late 1970s when he came out, got divorced (he remains close to his ex-wife and two children), and ultimately quit his job, having grown convinced that teaching and playwriting were incompatible. (This painful period in his life was reflected in a one-act play written several years later.) He moved back to Chicago, where he and a friend launched a new musical he'd written. They figured they'd become producers, he says.

The show closed the day after it opened. The experience devastated him, emotionally and financially. "It was a long time before I got back into playwriting," Rush says. "It took a couple of years to get my writing legs back."

To support himself and his family, he forged a freelance career. For 17 years he wrote commercial scripts for industrial shows, sales training, new-product launches, and so forth—and it made him a better dramatist.

"I had to learn to write tight, fast, compressed," he says. "I learned a lot about life, self-discipline, negotiations with people. All of that fed into my [playwriting]."

During those freelance years, Rush eventually began writing plays again. He also occasionally taught playwriting and screenwriting classes at various institutions, including Northwestern University and Columbia College.

"Once I began to realize I could be both a teacher and a playwright, I began to miss the teaching part of my life," he says. The first thing he did when he got Internet access in 1995 was to search for academic positions, and the first job that popped up was at SIUC. He joined the University in 1996.

During his angst-ridden few months of writer's block, Rush didn't just sit around and fret. Instead, he wrote another textbook, The Second Draft: What to Do When Your Play Doesn't Work, which he's now submitting to publishers. "There are plenty of playwriting texts, but they don't tell you how to fix problems," he explains.

Rush has inaugurated a couple of summer programs to give theater students more experience in new-play development. In an intensive one-week workshop, M.F.A. students are paired with professional directors who help them revise scripts they've written for full-length plays. A longer workshop involves shepherding a small group of students through the process of creating and performing a 30-minute ensemble play.

He's also launched a popular September event called "The One-Day Play," in which student teams made up of a writer, director, and actors have 24 hours to write and rehearse a 10-minute play. At the end of the 24 hours, all of the plays are performed on campus in an evening of theater.

In 2002 Rush was named Playwriting Teacher of the Year by the Association for Theater in Higher Education, in only the second year the award was given. Yet he refuses to take much credit for his students' considerable achievements.

"I can teach technique and theory," he says, "but I can't put thoughts into their heads. I think what they learn from me is to have fun [writing], to be disciplined, to follow their own vision, and to bring their life into their work."

Rush's favorite playwrights, those who have influenced him the most, include Chekhov, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Lanford Wilson (Balm in Gilead; Hot L Baltimore). These are "writers of poetic realism" who explore "the geography of the human heart," he says.

"You must write [from] your pain," he adds. "You have to be prepared to go into the dark jungle. For example, O'Neill and Williams were both writers who brought their pain to the stage. Their plays are about people who are tormented by their inner demons."

Rush's own characters, he says, generally are "people whose lives are in chaos because of the world they find themselves in."

Rush's plays tend to be dark, but also darkly funny. "Because I'm Jewish, I have this mordant sense of humor," Rush says. Thus Estelle Singerman, which is about life, death, God— the whole serious shebang—is shot through with comic elements and one-liners. "I like to describe my style as Eugene O'Neill Simon," Rush quips.

Writing a play is a leap into the unknown, and that's what makes it fun, he says: "I know generally where I'm going, but I don't know how I'm going to get there." It's a long process, and the ending can be quite different from what he'd envisioned when he started.

Rush began writing plays at age 10. But not until the advanced age of 16 was his future set in his own mind.

"The play that made me a playwright was Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth," he says. "I skipped school to see a matinee of a touring production in Chicago. There's a bit of stage magic in the third act, where the hours are represented by philosophers' voices. Something about the lighting, the set, the words, the mood was poetical and entrancing.

"I said, 'This is what I want to do with my life. I want to create that kind of magic.'"

He's been striving to do that ever since. And when he contrives a bit of magic, or when, in the heat of writing, he discovers something unexpected about one of his characters—well, he says, "Those are the moments that we live for, aren't they?"

—by Marilyn Davis