Audience Guide Written and compiled by Jack Marshall July 8–August 6, 2011 Theatre Two, Gunston Arts Center Theater you can afford to see— plays you can’t afford to miss! About The American Century Theater The American Century Theater was founded in 1994. We are a professional company dedicated to presenting great, important, but overlooked American plays of the twentieth century . what Henry Luce called ―the American Century.‖ The company’s mission is one of rediscovery, enlightenment, and perspective, not nostalgia or preservation. Americans must not lose the extraordinary vision and wisdom of past playwrights, nor can we afford to surrender our moorings to our shared cultural heritage. Our mission is also driven by a conviction that communities need theater, and theater needs audiences. To those ends, this company is committed to producing plays that challenge and move all Americans, of all ages, origins and points of view. In particular, we strive to create theatrical experiences that entire families can watch, enjoy, and discuss long afterward. These audience guides are part of our effort to enhance the appreciation of these works, so rich in history, content, and grist for debate. The American Century Theater is a 501(c)(3) professional nonprofit theater company dedicated to producing significant 20th Century American plays and musicals at risk of being forgotten. The American Century Theater is supported in part by Arlington County through the Cultural Affairs Division of the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Resources and the Arlington Commission for the Arts. This arts event is made possible in part by the Virginia Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as by many generous donors. Contents The Playwright: Gore Vidal (b. 1925) . 1 A Fish Called Kreton: Visit to a Small Planet and the ―Fish Out of Water‖ Comedy . 5 The Battle of Manassas, or First Bull Run . 7 A Tale of Three Kretons, by Jack Marshall . 8 The American Oscar Wilde . 11 The Playwright: Gore Vidal (b. 1925) Novelist, playwright, essayist, pundit, iconoclast, wit—Gore Vidal has been one of the most interesting, versatile, prolific, and entertaining men of letters on the American scene for six decades. Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was born at West Point, New York. He eventually shortened his name to the catchier, edgier Gore Vidal. He was born into wealth, influence, and accomplishment: His father became one of the pioneers of commercial aviation in the United States, involved in the founding of TWA and Eastern and Northeastern Airlines. The elder Vidal would also serve as Director of Air Commerce in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. His mother, Nina, was the daughter of U.S. Senator Thomas Pryor Gore of Mississippi. After divorcing Eugene Vidal, Sr., Nina Gore married financier Hugh D. Auchincloss. Young Gore Vidal went to live with the couple at Merrywood, Auchincloss’s vast estate in Northern Virginia. His life of pricey boarding schools ended after his graduation from one of the ritziest, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. The 17-year-old enlisted in the United States Army to fight in World War II. Vidal was assigned to duty as a warrant officer on a transport ship in the Aleutian Islands, where his ship encountered a fierce arctic storm, known to the native Aleuts as a williwaw. While recuperating from his injuries in military hospitals, he wrote his first novel, Williwaw, completed when he was 19 and published when he was 20. After his discharge from the army in 1946, Vidal joined the literary life of New York City. His second novel, In a Yellow Wood, about the dilemmas of a returning veteran, was well received, but Vidal began what would be a lifetime pattern by leaving the country, this time to Guatemala, where he believed he could commune with his Muse with fewer distractions. His third novel, The City and the Pillar, portrayed homosexual relationships sympathetically and as natural. Thus Vidal, who is gay, confronted a taboo in American literature, for the topic of homosexuality had always been treated as solely a subject of shame. For the first time but definitely not the last, Vidal was condemned as immoral and treated as a pariah. The New York 1 Times, for example, refused to review Vidal’s subsequent books for almost a decade; some publications even refused to print his name, much less review his books. His fourth novel, A Season of Comfort, was sabotaged by a near- total blacklisting by the mainstream press. Vidal, defiant and unbowed, traveled between New York and Europe, where his work was more charitably received. More novels came, on a variety of subjects. A Search for the King revisited a medieval legend. Dark Green, Bright Red portrayed an American-led coup in Central America. In 1953 he published his most successful and acclaimed novel to that point, The Judgment of Paris, setting a contemporary story against themes from classical antiquity. Widening his range to futuristic fantasy, his 1955 novel Messiah told the tale of a dictator who rises to power in the United States by exploiting the new medium of television. Still Vidal was scorned in the U.S., but he was on his way back. He bought a large house on the Hudson River in Dutchess County, New York. Needing money to pay for the estate, he resorted to commercial fiction, writing a series of mysteries under the pseudonym Edgar Box. Since they were neither serious nor attributed to Gore Vidal, the Box mysteries were very well received by critics. Next, Vidal moved into the new medium of television, which had fascinated him from its beginnings. In just a few years, Vidal was to write twenty live television dramas and joined Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling, Reginald Rose, and Abby Mann in the select group of great early television dramatists. Vidal scored his most notable success with an original fantasy-satire, Visit to a Small Planet. He then adapted Visit to a Small Planet for the Broadway stage and had a hit in his first foray into playwriting. Like Chayefsky and Serling, Vidal was asked to appear as a guest on the new TV talk shows like Today and The Tonight Show, where he was a favorite of host Jack Paar. He was a natural: dashing and handsome, with a performer’s flair, a mellifluous voice, sly wit, a gift for mimicry, and an endless supply of wry observations about sex, politics, show business, and every other subject. Soon he was one of the most popular members on the TV talk show guest list. Vidal detested the film adaptations of Visit to a Small Planet (starring Jerry Lewis as the space man) and his Billy-the-Kid drama, Left-Handed Gun (starring Paul Newman as Billy) and resolved to learn about the movie 2 business. He accepted an offer to write for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and conquered Hollywood, writing acclaimed screenplays for The Catered Affair (based on a play by Paddy Chayefsky), Suddenly Last Summer (based on a play by his close friend Tennessee Williams), and J’Accuse, about the famous Dreyfus case. He also worked as an uncredited script doctor on the epic film Ben Hur, in which, some believe, he enhanced homoerotic undertones in the relationship between Messala and Ben Hur. (Charlton Heston denied that such undertones existed, which amused Vidal no end.) Broadway and Hollywood had given him financial freedom, but, just as he was prepared to plunge back into serious writing, a new world, or rather an old one that he had neglected, called out for his attention: politics. When Vidal’s mother divorced Hugh D. Auchincloss in the 1940s, Auchincloss married Janet Lee Bouvier, whose daughter, Jacqueline, married Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, then preparing to run for the presidency. JFK was eager to meet his wife’s famous literary relative, and soon Gore Vidal was immersed in the heady environment of high-stakes politics, Kennedy style. His experiences spawned the Broadway hit The Best Man, a comic drama about the intrigues at a presidential nominating convention. Vidal was so absorbed in politics that he ran for Congress himself, losing in a Republican district but drawing unexpectedly strong support. His interest in politics was shattered by Kennedy’s assassination, however, and he moved, or escaped, to Italy to work on the novel Julian, about the fourth- century Roman Emperor who attempted to turn the Empire away from its official Christianity and back to the ancient traditions of Greek philosophy. The book was a triumph and topped the best-seller lists in 1964. The 1967 novel Washington, D.C. followed a set of invented characters through the changing political atmosphere of the city from the New Deal to the Cold War. The following year, Vidal attacked sexual conventions again with Myra Breckenridge, about a beautiful transexual’s adventures. It was later made into a film starring Raquel Welch and Rex Reed and supplanted the film of Visit to a Small Planet as Vidal’s least favorite movie version of one of his works. 3 Vidal returned to his fictional chronicle of American history with the 1973 novel Burr, which many consider his masterpiece. In 1876, set against the backdrop of the disputed presidential election of the nation’s centennial year, Vidal continued the political and cultural history theme and carried it through with Lincoln, Empire, Hollywood, and The Golden Age, following several generations of related families through nearly two centuries of the American journey. These Vidal alternated with more satirical works, like Duluth, The Smithsonian Institution, Live from Golgotha, and Creation, which follows its protagonist from Persia to Athens to India and China and explores the origins of some of the world’s major religions.