Dramaturgy Research Packet For the Source Festival Production of: Volcanic in Origin by Gregory Hischak Directed by Sonya Robbins Dramaturgy Research compiled by LaRonika Thomas - 1 - TABLE OF CONTENT TABLE OF CONTENTS Volcanic in Origin Dramaturgy Packet ABOUT the PLAYWRIGHT………………………………………………….p.4 Biography Writings MAJOR THEMES in VOLCANIC IN ORIGIN…………………………….p.13 Lewis & Clark………………………………………………………………..p.13 Captain Meriwether Lewis Captain William Clark Sacajawea……………………………………………………………………p.22 Biography Videos Searching for Sacagawea The Expedition – The Corps of Discovery……………………………..p.33 Fun Expedition Facts Circa 1803 Rush's Bilious Pills Recipe – Honey-Black Walnut Bread Timeline for Lewis & Clark The Frontier/Westward Expansion………………………………………p.45 Frederick Jackson Turner “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” New Perspectives on the West The American West as Classroom, Art and Metaphor Nice Work if You Can Get It – This American Life Lewis and Clark Would Have Approved John Logan Allen John Logan Allen Interview Mapping………………………………………………………………………p.86 Maps Mapping – This American Life Continental Divide - 2 - Being Lost……………………………………………………………………p.91 How to Survive Being Lost This American Life – Lost in America Lost & Found – Radiolab 10 Thoughts n the Spiritual Practice of Getting Lost The Art Of Being Lost: An Alternate Approach To Mapping Geology of the United States…………………………………………..p.103 John McPhee Biography Plate Tectonics Rising Oceans Myths & Legends………………………………………………………….p.116 Genesis1 Genesis 2 Genesis 6 Genesis 7 Genesis 8 I Am Waiting Further Resources………………………………………………………..p.125 PROTOCOL for VOLCANIC in ORIGIN…………………………………p.126 - 3 - ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT Gregory Hischak Biography From: The Cape Cod Poets Theatre http://www.capecodpoetstheater.com/who.htm Gregory Hischak is a poet, playwright and book artist. Gregory Hischak's play The Center of Gravity, winner of the 2009 Clauder Prize, received its world premier at Portland Stage in March, 2011. His play Hygiene which was staged as part of the 2010 Boston Theater Marathon was presented at this year's Humana Festival of New American Works in Louisville (KY). Hygiene is included in the Smith & Kraus anthology Best Ten Minute Plays of 2011. Other recent productions have included Poor Shem by Actors Theatre of Louisville (KY), City Theater (FL) and the Boston Theatre Marathon, Amenities at the Source Festival (Wash DC), and Knowing at the Firehouse Theatre's New Works Festival in Newburyport (MA). Poor Shem and his short play Crows Over Wheatfield are included in the Smith & Kraus anthology Best Ten Minute Plays of 2010. Hischak is a 2011 Finalist with the Massachusetts Cultural Council (in Playwrighting). He lives in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts. Writings of Gregory Hischak – Essay & Poems Returning To Sender: or My Precious Thurber Correspondence An essay by Gregory Hischak Reprinted from the Summer 2002 Ohioana Quarterly http://www.ohioana.org/features/legacy/jthurber.asp An overhead voice described how, in the event of a water landing, a very unlikely scenario between Columbus and Minneapolis, I would be able to use my seat cushion as a flotation device. Anticipating such an event, I’d wrapped my carry-on - an Elder Beerman’s shoebox - tightly in a large Ziplock bag. Emblazoned with the now defunct mercantile’s faded Prussian blue logo - reflecting time’s ravages and held tenuously together by rubberbands - my cardboard shoebox fit nicely into the - 4 - overhead compartment. Smiling, a flight attendant assured me that despite any potential shifting that might occur during flight, my shoebox was perfectly safe. “It’s my Thurber letters,” I tried explaining to the back of her head as she shuffled off for cross-checking. I was leaving Ohio, returning via mandated hubs to my pine-scented little northwest corner of the continent and with me, in their shoebox receptacle, were my Thurber letters. A veritable ark of correspondence to the Twentieth Century’s Most Important American Humorist, the shoebox’s excavation from under the basement stairs of my parent’s house was the primary agenda in returning to “The Heart of It All.” That, and a high school reunion which ended up being cancelled due to a hoof and mouth scare. We had our ins and outs, James Thurber and I - never personally close but with an immediate Ohio connection that entwined my life around his the way kudzu sprawls across the base of a towering pylon. A young sprout, I began writing to the Twentieth Century’s Most Important American Humorist after he had been dead and buried in Columbus’ Greenlawn Cemetery for almost a decade. Still, like my long postal relationship with Santa, Karen Carpenter, and Jackie O demonstrated, I was not easily dissuaded by a one-way correspondence. Interpreting his silence as fatherly encouragement, I wrote Thurber all through my formative years until stamps went up past the fifteen-cent mark. Exhaustive field research had been conducted before my returning to Ohio - calling the parents not once but twice during peak hours for pre-dig consultations. My hypothesis concerning how, in the course of many years of spring cleanings, an Elder Beerman’s shoebox might gravitate from an old bedroom closet to beneath the basement stairs proved correct. From the dusty trove of Betty Crocker Easy- Bake Ovens, archaic vacuum cleaner appendages, and layers of ancient orange carpeting, the Thurber box emerged. The letters safely exhumed, I made some final site measurements and bid the parents a warm adieu, assuring them I’d be back for the holidays. * * * * * “Thurber Land,” I mumbled from my window seat at the patchwork quilt of Central Ohio below - not to be confused with the patchwork quilt of Northern Ohio, or the lumpy two hundred threadcount floral coverlet of Southern Ohio. Maybe not so much a patchwork quilt or coverlet as a comforter; an Ohio-colored comforter too - 5 - warm for half the year and not warm enough for the other half, but still nice-looking and bought on sale at Odd Lots. I watched Central Ohio magically transform into West-Central Ohio. Color-coded for easy identification: light beige for new developments, dark weathered beige for older weathered developments, dense green for soybeans, and a xanthic yellow for corn. Ohio’s ribbon of interstate, punctuated with intricate white cloverleafs, seemed to weave and loop and spell out “have a good one” as our plane ascended the thin heavens. Low in the west, the sun cast long shadows from unresponsive livestock. I waved, drawing the attention of the woman sitting next to me in 19E. “Some funny stuff happening down there,” I said - apparently in a tone that caused her to ring for an attendant. * * * * * I grew up with a copy of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat in one jellied hand and Thurber’s Men, Women, and Dogs in the other. I don’t remember where either of them came from, but the combination suggests a foster home might have been in order. I devoured them both, their components becoming so interchangeable that I later had no trouble attaching Thurber drawings to the text of The Lorax. Slightly older, I watched a short-lived and barely remembered television series based on Thurber’s work called My World and Welcome to It (starring William Windom). Spanning a summer replacement season with jerky editing and surreal animation, it confused, mesmerized, and made clear how it was James Thurber who first stumbled on the Midwest’s potential for magical realism. A permanent, but in no way mutual, bond was thus forged, Thurber and I both drawing our greatest inspirations from that hazy blue countryside. Roots penetrating deep into our fertile loams, never far behind and trailing like a wispy strand of tissue paper stuck to the shoe - our Ohio. “In Steubenville alone,” I observed in an early letter to Thurber, “you run the gamut of the human comedy from A to B.” Dorothy Parker later lifted the line from me with minor variations - she was always doing that. - 6 - * * * * * “In the early years of the nineteenth century,” Thurber wrote to someone other than me, “Columbus won out, as state capital, by one vote over Lancaster, and ever since then has had the hallucination that it is being followed, a curious municipal state of mind which affects, in some way or other, all those who live there.” Posed across blue-lined paper, my early mailings to Thurber were full of puerile inquiries that would forever go unanswered: was Piqua funnier than Tipp City; Zanesville giddier than Coshocton; Wapakoneta more knee-slapping than Sidney? It was a one-sided debate raging like an untended barbecue grill as to whether history would eventually deem either Dayton or Columbus as America’s Humor Capital. Despite Thurber’s obvious pro-Columbus stance, I strove to make a strong case for Dayton as the Hometown of Humor. Having spent too many developmental years drinking Fresca outside Dayton’s laundromats, I felt I knew the place. Watching its tide of humanity pass by, one tire-squealing Chevy Nova at a time, had allowed me to crown Dayton “Birthplace of Whimsical Flight” long before it became a common moniker. “After all,” I boldly stated in another unanswered letter to Thurber, “Jonathan Winters is from Dayton.” Of course, Winters didn’t write The Seal in the Bedroom but he certainly could have made the sound effects for it - had Jim asked. I don’t think he ever did though; it was that Dayton- Columbus rivalry, I suspect. My plane passed somewhere over the Indiana border where a front of massing cumulus had a run-in with a pocket of low pressure, or high pressure, I couldn’t tell which, and turned to ask the woman in 19E, but she’d changed seats. Against such amorphous cloud shapes Thurber squinted and traced his characters.