Penumbra

By Stephanie Lein Walseth, August Wilson Fellow

Lein Walseth: How did you, and this play in particular, come to be connected to Penumbra?

Yeaton: The connection to Penumbra came not only because both Blake [Robison, the Producing Artistic Director of Round House Theatre] and I knew Lou, and knew Penumbra’s reputation as not just one of our oldest African American theatre companies in the country, but definitely as one of the most respected. We knew that we needed this piece to be directed by an African American. I wouldn’t say that it could never be a good, intelligent, heart-felt production directed by somebody else, but certainly coming out of the gun we knew we’d benefit greatly.

Lein Walseth: What was absolutely critical about having an African American director?

Yeaton: More than half the cast is African American. I guess some of it comes from my lack of confidence being a Vermonter and having very little relationship with the African American experience except through the media, except through what I’ve read and what I’ve seen. Before that residency at a Tennessee university, before I went down and worked with these athletes, I knew I couldn’t possibly write this play. It came not just from interviewing the players, but spending time in their presence, observing them and then getting substantial access by working with them as a tutor. I was the oldest, most northern tutor there, but I ended up proposing a writing project with all of the freshmen. So, all 22 of the freshmen ended up getting interviewed by me. I came back with a transcript of what they’d said, and we edited it together. What they knew of it was that it was a project helping them with their writing, but that the end result was going to be a play that they did for local high school football players. That happened to be in Knoxville in two predominantly African American high schools who had great football teams and a great football rivalry. And of course, those players would idealize the university players. So, it was a great theatrical opportunity for them because those college students, those new recruits, had been superstars in their towns. They know those high school students in a way. They were those high school students in a way. And now, despite the fact that they’re low man on the totem pole in college, they’re gods to these local students. They get to speak truth to people who really want to hear what they have to say, about a topic that they couldn’t be more interested in. Some of the topics were very practical, but others were about things like what it’s like being away from home. Some of the more confident, tougher players had no trouble sharing that they were really homesick and they’d talk to their mothers every night. When I was hearing that stuff I was thinking, “This is paydirt. This is what these high school students need to hear.” It’s not all bravado, it’s not all what ESPN would like to present. There’s a human side to this, and you get to be this guy, you get to be you. You get a 300 pound guy who can say “I’m a momma’s boy,” and nobody’s going to challenge him about whether or not that’s a bad thing.

Lein Walseth: How much of this is the players’ voice, and how much of it is your voice? What’s that intersection?

Yeaton: I’m hoping that you never hear my voice in this play. That’s one of the things I love about playwriting -- the words you are hearing are supposed to be filtered through somebody else’s consciousness. I think voice gets used in a number of ways. So, where my voice does come out in here is in my fascination with these college athletes and the ways in which I admire them and sympathize with them.

Lein Walseth: How did the performance go when the players presented it?

Yeaton: They performed it for high school students, and we only had one rehearsal so to speak in a theatre. I kind of love the fact that “Okay football players, we’ll meet at the theatre this Monday night.” The rehearsal was god-awful, predominantly because of one player who could just turn a room. Whatever his mood was, that was the mood of the room, and I don’t know what was going on, but he single-handedly kept the rehearsal from happening. But this was happening in a theatre in which Blake Robison, the Artistic Director, gave them a little locker room speech, but I guess it was a green room speech. He said “You know you guys, if you go out on stage and do what you just did, these guys are going to see you as a bunch of losers.” And I think that word ‘losers’ triggered something. Because they wouldn’t mind being idiots, and they wouldn’t mind being jerks, and they wouldn’t mind being a lot of things, but these guys don’t ever want to be seen as losers. So they went up and completely nailed the performance, they really came to life because they had an audience. It was their voice saying something truthful to them to people who they knew were really interested.

Lein Walseth: How did you approach them?

Yeaton: I was scared. I don’t put myself in those kind of situations. I was talking to people for whom I have no status. I was in a world where there was absolutely nothing they wanted or needed from me. So, I wasn’t in my professor role, and I wasn’t in my writer role, I wasn’t even in my dad role or husband role. It was gut-check time for me because if I had done the comfortable thing down there I would have sat in my apartment and done my teaching and maybe scheduled an interview with a few coaches and tried to talk to a few students. But it was clear to me that I was only going to get somewhere if I put myself out over and over again. So, my typical introduction would be to say “Hey, I’m a writer, and I’m going write a play about football, and I don’t know if you know this, but there are no plays about football that I’ve found. And my goal is to get a review of the play in Sports Illustrated.” So, they’re thinking, “Okay, this guy’s got a goal in a publication that I actually do look at.” And I meant it. I mean it.

What interests me about this project is that it is about two worlds that don’t really have a lot to do with each other. I mean I worked in a theatre program, and classes in theatre often go over into the forbidden zone that conflicts with sports. On the assumption that nobody would be doing both, which I’ve always objected to because I was a bit of a jock. Never at football, though.

Lein Walseth: Talk a little about your background. What was your impetus or catalyst for creating this piece?

Yeaton: In this case I had a warning, from a good friend’s wife, who said “Don’t write a play about football. Women choose whether or not to go to a play, and they’re not going to want to go watch a football play.” So, I took it as a challenge. In a way, I thought of it as a red state/blue state issue, the way in which people think of themselves. I think most people think of themselves as either arts people or sports people. And I wanted to look at the ways in which performers are performers regardless of where they’re performing.

That writer I mentioned, Dorothy Allison, made a point the other day. She said, “Most everything we write is our way of trying to get people to pay attention to some people we don’t think they pay enough attention to, to appreciate them [sic].” It’s sort of our bag to get some love for people who may not have it. In this case, I think it’s easy to look at an athlete and dismiss them as only an athlete. I think it’s a fascinating, awful thing we do to young people, works out great for some and terrible for others, that to be a professional athlete in some sports means that you’ve got to go to college.

I had no interest whatsoever in exposing what everyone already knows, which is that college athletes are under enormous pressure, and one of those pressures is academics. From the start I knew I wanted to look at these guys – they are the winners. They’re the ones who didn’t get the career ending injury, didn’t run into the academic problem, who managed, through a combination of luck and skill and intelligence and talent, to land themselves at the highest level. And they’re 18. They come with all these skills and nowhere near enough skills. And then, they find themselves among a bunch of people just like them. Now the competition has risen to the highest level. So that’s a higher dramatic situation. And I tend to be interested in dramatic situations where we get to watch people we don’t normally get to watch. In the past that used to be kings and queens, but now we have People magazine, and we have popular culture to show us the lives of the rich and famous. But we don’t get to look at the not-yet famous.

When we first see these guys, they’re in their uniforms with their helmets, and that also means their masks, their facemasks. Then they take their helmets off and the show happens. In an original draft three of the four players, the last time we see them, put their helmets back on again. And the protagonist does not, which makes sense in the context of the play. What I would like about this image, if it is the final moment, is that it would directly or subliminally, unmask these anonymous athletes for us to look at, and then make them anonymous one more time. That will be something of a reminder that behind these masks are these kind of people, and not even these kind of people, they are these people, and then they’re all the ones that aren’t going to play. That’s a little like any group that we’re tempted to think we know based on their uniform and based on their mask. And there’s dramatic theory that talks in terms of a mask, about the premise of a story being that we meet a character who’s wearing a mask. Halfway through we start seeing behind it, seeing the cracks, and the climax is the tearing off of the mask, and that person confronting his or her unmasked self in all their horror and majesty. And then the ending is, well now what? Does it go back on? Does it stay off? Does it become displaced?

Does the world need this play right now? I guess what I mean by that is, is there something politically or socially timely about it? Obviously I think so, and if I were to make my case for it, it would go back to what I was just saying. We seem to be very willing to categorize and assume we know things about people based on surfaces.

What I realize as I sit in rehearsal, just two days in, is this play, well it’s probably true of any play, works on the theory of putting every character in a maximum amount of pressure, maximum amount of conflict. The more impenetrable, the more both sides of whatever dilemma they’re feeling are powerful, then the more I’m building a kind of implausible situation in which we’re going through this decision with them. It is not as clear as “Here is an ethical decision and we know what that decision is going to be,” because that’s not an ethical situation. That’s not how we experience it.

Here’s a guy who’s really trying hard, and someone has information about him that could ruin everything for him. But it’s the truth and he did it. Here’s a guy who serves two masters at a moment when both of them are pulling in very distinct directions. Here’s another guy who really cares about this person, but he’s going to lose his job if he cares too much for that character right now. So, that’s what the play is built on, and I just noticed it in our rehearsal yesterday. I wouldn’t want to be any of these people and I kind of want to be all of them.

Lein Walseth: In the script your characters represent at least three viewpoints, which are often at odds with and entangled with one another. Do you expect your audience to follow with or side with any of these individuals or groups? Do you hope they will see all sides?

Yeaton: My prediction, based on the audiences who come to readings, is that yes, they will take sides. So much of what the production will amount to is trying to thwart any easy associations with a character and to keep complicating matters. It’s just going to be much more interesting if you side with somebody and three minutes later you question that, and you side against that character. So, the more times you can get somebody to hop across the frontier, I think the better. My ideal audience member would get to those final moments and still be torn about what should happen to this character, about what this character should do. And they would realize, despite the fact that some characters have played the antagonist, that they’re characters they like despite that by the end. I would hope that they can see the full complexity of that character, of the antagonist, that this person, at a minimum, had reason to do what he or she did.

Lein Walseth: While researching for this play, what surprised you the most?

Yeaton: To tell you the truth, one of the things that surprised me was the way in which the university did not fit my preexisting idea. They are trying very hard, it seems to me, to clean up a really difficult situation, a big mess. So many places, and I think University of Minnesota is very likely one of them from the little I’ve heard since I got to town, have had to deal with this. There’s no place that hasn’t had to deal with this. If you have scholarships, even if you’re Division III but certainly if you’re Division I, you’re in a kind of un-winnable fight, and the economic forces, and even the forces that are trying to get you to help somebody, are opposed by other forces that are also trying to do something, and those things cannot co-exist. They are working really hard to make these students be better students, to get them to buy into the idea that their future is probably more in academics than in sports. Now this becomes a bit of a mantra. They hear time and time again, “Only a few of you will make it outside of the classroom.” And most of these guys are looking around and going “His future’s in the classroom, and his is, and his is, but mine is not.” You know, because that’s part of the attitude that they need.

Not only are the forces powerful for a kind of corruption in the system, but there are definitely people who are acting on it, who are putting team welfare ahead of school welfare. In a way, I guess, that’s no different from life in general, it’s just that the stakes are high and the pressures are great. But it was a surprise to me how much the university is doing to get these guys an education, to get them to graduate.

The NCAA, every time it pushes in one direction for one kind of reform, it seems to create a herneation in another, so that when they try to push harder to make students better, to some extent they’re pushing harder to make students cheat. Because these guys, if the standards rise, to make what they’re doing academically more legitimate, the pressure to do that rises with that, and they’ve still got to go to practice, and they’ve still got to do all these other things. And they still only had whatever education they had before they got there.

I go into most every play, into every situation assuming that the people I’m going to work with are smarter than I think, and even doing that I was surprised by how intelligent the players were. I saw immaturity, but I saw amazing maturity too. I met some young men who were really philosophical about their situation and who really understood, in part because I think sports teaches it, the value of community, really understood giving it up for teammates.

I didn’t fully appreciate what a massive industry college sports was. I didn’t understand, and I guess I still don’t understand fully how it is so big in the hearts and minds of the states and the areas in which it exists. It seems like everything. It seems like the way that an entire world view can be expressed. Every college team has its logos, its colors. I say I don’t understand it, but I guess I’m creeping towards it.

Lein Walseth: This play raises myriad issues – athletics vs academics, scandals, strategic essentialism, who has a right to education, individual vs. the team, academic dishonesty, a disconnect between ‘classic’ poetry and modern hip hop rhyming, etc. What issue, for you, is at the heart of this piece? Does one rise above the others?

Yeaton: I hope there’s a single thing at the heart. I know I can get it down to two. If you follow the central character, you watch someone who’s in the process of defining and redefining himself, and you see the role that his estimation of himself plays, you see how his thoughts about what his abilities are determine his abilities and how his thoughts about his intellect determine that. The way I think that reverberates is, there’s a line where a character in all honestly turns to someone and says, “Do I sound ignorant to you?” That brings tears to my eyes every time I hear it and when I think about it; the thought that we all feel that sometimes, that we all are afraid of seeming ignorant, and sometimes we cover it up. But the idea that someone, essentially because of educational opportunity or lack thereof, walks around with that question on their mind and that awful self-awareness that disturbs, I think that drives a big part of the play for me.

The other, if I get it down to only two, is I keep being drawn to the African American experience. Not always, but in the past 5 years. It seems to me that the professor, when she talks about seeing African American students who get to be at a southern university, and they are treated to some extent like kings, the fact that they don’t get civil rights, that they don’t get what got them there, must make her feel such rage, being the daughter of the civil rights. She’s too young to really have been active at that time, but she would’ve been raised in the waves caused by that. Her line that reverberates for me is when she says, “There are people who were ripped up by dogs to be able to come to a southern university library, and I don’t think you even know where ours is.” When she comes out with that line, that’s another moment for me of, “How awful and how did we get here?” The fact that when you read about higher education you pretty quickly get into the controversy about affirmative action, and you pretty quickly get into uncomfortable questions about “How do we explain this achievement gap thing? Is it real?” That is something that really matters to me a lot and that I find infinitely interesting. Maybe those two things are connected enough that that’s the heart of it.

A thing that I honestly feel and want to convey, is that two days in I can already feel the play growing exponentially because of what those actors are bringing to it and some of it is the questions that they’ve got at this point. A lot of it is their initial hits and instincts that are almost, they’re too far in, too deep down to be conscious. I’m learning about this play on a cellular level. It’s really coming to life because the casting is pretty phenomenal. I think you’re going to see that. And the guy steering the ship has done this. It’s very interesting, the first rehearsal with Lou yesterday was, it’s a wonderful time for the playwright to hear the director talk about your characters to the cast. It’s a little bit like hearing someone talk about your children. It’s like “Hey, he gets my daughter. He notices that thing about my daughter. And not only that, I haven’t.” That’s a really exciting part of this process. And Lou is the kind of director who doesn’t ask for re-writes. He doesn’t assume that if there’s trouble the trouble is the script. He’s a ‘make it work’ director. But at the same time he’s quite open to these re-writes. And I’m really grateful for that, because you have to be a really confident director to let somebody into your process. We’re still figuring out how we’re going to work together. My early sense of it is that he’s got no ego issues around this thing and it’s all just, “Go team go. Let’s take this thing for a spin.”

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