Personal History

Montage describe her current projects, that some kinds of change have come on quite sud- Adams University denly. “Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and o p e n b o o k professor emeritus then a few things at once,” is how she de- Bernard Bailyn, Ph.D. scribes her career trajectory so far. ’53, LL.D. ’99, remains a The “few things” include a screenplay Personal History giant among early- for Amazon Studios, an adaptation of Naf- American historians, issa Thompson-Spires’s short story “Wash and among the ranks of Clean the Bones.” As Nwandu’s first paid Harvard University citizens. Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades (W.W. studio-writing job, the project has meant Norton, $28.95) contains five of his razor-sharp portraits of “small, strange, obscure, learning the industry ropes, on top of ad- but illuminating documents or individuals,” extending from each “datum” to “its mean- justing from the stage to the screen. She has ing for the world at large.” Harvardians may value even more having the texts of his another screenplay in the works, as well as a Memorial Minutes for fellow giants Samuel Eliot Morison and Oscar Handlin (see The TV show in development with Annapurna College Pump, page 64). Historians will value his epilogue on his scholarship, “The Pictures, both in the early stages. And then Elusive Past.” All readers will cherish the unusually warm, personal introduction, there are the plays: yet another commission, “Entering the Past,” from which this excerpt comes—explaining an education that this one for “a fairly large institution” in the “began in an addiction I had somehow acquired to reading.” theater world. Meanwhile, she is working through rewrites of her newest play, Tuvalu My parents were complicit in this ad- school years that was so memorable and or, The Saddest Song, for its forthcoming pre- diction, and they had an expert to advise implicitly historical contained a series of miere at Manhattan’s Vineyard Theater. them. Hartford’s biggest and best book- comparisons on facing pages of towns in Graduating from New York University’s store, which once had sold books to England and in New England that bore the Tisch School of the Arts with an M.F.A. Mark Twain, was then owned by a friend same names. Thus there were photos in playwriting on the brink of the 2008 fi- of theirs, Israel Witkower, an émigré with comment on the towns of Bidd- nancial crisis was her stark awakening to from Vienna. eford, Devon, and Biddeford, Maine; of the economic realities of theater; Pass Over He knew about books of all kinds, in Bath, Somerset, and Bath, Maine; of marked the light at the end of a long tunnel. several languages, and visiting his store, Portsmouth, Hampshire, and Ports- The play was first performed in 2017 by Chi- with its deep central corridor crowded mouth, New Hampshire; of Newhaven, cago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company and with books, its alcoves, and its jumbled Sussex, and New Haven, Connecticut; ignited some controversy and excitement. bargain basement, was an adventure.… and of Hartford, Hertfordshire, and my It earned a second run, at Lincoln Center, History was of no special interest, but I own town, Hartford, Connecticut. It was but it was Spike Lee who accelerated Nwan- recall two books…that I du’s growing career. He filmed one of the read before high school performances for Amazon Studios, making and that I later realized Nwandu a Writer’s Guild of America-eli- were historical in essence. gible screenwriter, and then invited her to I read and reread them, write for his Netflix show,She’s Gotta Have and I never forgot them. It, based on his 1986 film of the same name. One was a big coffee-ta- Now, Nwandu says, the question is: “Do I ble book with a deeply like being the sort of person who has a nor- embossed purple cover, mal life for a little while and then does a big published, I think by the thing, or do I like being the sort of person Collier’s magazine compa- who has a few big things going at the same ny, largely consisting of time?” But that’s mainly rhetorical: like it or close-up photos of the not, big things are happening. great men and events of She never meant to be a playwright or a the early twentieth cen- screenwriter. She grew up in Los Angeles tury. The pages were Bookworms often start young. in the 1980s, raised by a single mother in a printed in the brownish, PHOTOSFOX / STRINGER/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES fundamentalist Baptist church that Nwan- “rotogravure” process, but to me they only later that I would understand that du now considers a cult. She speaks frank- were vivid, and the commentary was read- these were mainly towns of England’s ly about the aftershocks of her upbringing. able. The faces of the presidents and other West Country and south coast, and why Theater was nonexistent; television and celebrities were intriguing. But it was the their names would have carried over to movies were tightly controlled. The pro- battle scenes of World War I that mainly New England. But it was enough for me, cess of coming to the theater—at Harvard gripped my imagination.…The comments then, to search for the similarities and as an English concentrator and beyond—co- were innocuous, but the scenes were fear- differences of these towns on either side incided with eradicating the authoritarian ful and unforgettable. of the Atlantic, and to puzzle about how voices that had filled her head. The other book of those pre-high- that could have come about. Looking back, she describes her earlier

Harvard Magazine 51

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