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Dramatic North Carolina

This year’s edition of “The North Carolina Literary Review” (East Carolina University and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association: Greenville; 259 pages, $15 paper) is especially dramatic. With the theme of North Carolina drama and a redesign, the Review steps to center stage as the most handsome such publication in the state.

Theater in North Carolina gets overshadowed. The state’s novelists, poets and story writers hog the spotlight, upstaging the playwrights. The Review, edited by Margaret Bauer of the English department at East Carolina, brings the dramatists from the darkened wings in this edition.

You can’t talk about North Carolina drama without talking about Paul Green. By reprinting a 1960 interview with the playwright in his Chapel Hill home, the Review lets Green get in a word, too. “The real theater of our country should be – and is rapidly becoming – the theater of the people, the amateur theater,” he told an interviewer. “ ‘The death of drama’ in America that everybody is worried about, I believe, is nothing more than the righteous whittling down to size of Broadway.”

In addition to novels and stories, Green wrote seventeen outdoor historical plays, “four of which are still in production in Texas, Kentucky, Ohio and North Carolina,” writes Laurence Avery, who is retired from the English department at UNC-Chapel Hill. Avery notes that each summer across the country 35 to 50 such dramas are staged. “But in terms of his legacy, the thing to understand is that this vigorous national movement grew … from the first of his outdoor historical plays, “The Lost Colony,” which opened in the summer of 1937 at the Waterside Theater on Roanoke Island.” It’s still in production today, the oldest such drama in the country.

Another form of theater is rooted in North Carolina, too. It sprang from “Diamond Studs: The Life of Jesse James, A Saloon Musical,” written by North Carolinians Bland Simpson and Jim Wann. Critics raved when the musical, performed by the Red Clay Ramblers and the Southern States Fidelity Choir, began its off-Broadway run in New York in 1975. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!” wrote Clive Barnes of The New York Times.

“Ultimately,” Simpson writes, “it scarcely matters whether one calls ‘musicians’ theater’ a new musical form, a sub-genre, or an identifiable hybrid. Certainly it is an approach to stagecraft that has served a lot of us musicians (many with Tar Heel roots) quite well over most of four decades.”

The only play by story writer Elizabeth Spencer of Chapel Hill is reprinted here. The wickedly funny short play, “Husbands Found Dead,” is here, too. It was written by Kat Meads, a graduate of the MFA creative writing program at UNCG. (There’s also a nice interview with Meads, a native of Currituck County.) Sam Post, a resident of Salisbury, is here with three of what I would call short-shorts. Interesting.

June Guralnick, who now lives in Apex, writes in one piece that in 1997 she was artist in residence at Rockingham Community College in Reidsville. She planned to work on a play about the Jazz Age.

“It took a few months before I realized that a seismic volcanic shift – the end of the Industrial Era – was erupting in this corner of the world,” she says. “I wasn’t sure how to understand or respond to what I was seeing and hearing. To better grasp what was happening around me, I determined to find out more about the history of mills in the Piedmont.”

The result was “Finding Clara.” Guralnick describes it this way: “The play counterpoints the life of Mary Victoria Woolson, a North Carolina ‘linthead,’ with her idol, silent screen actress Clara Bow, against a background of labor and racial unrest in pre-Depression 1929 America.” Excerpts of the play are reprinted.

One notable interview is with Jim Grimsley, the North Carolinian who is director of the creative writing program at Emory. He’s a playwright, and many of his novels and stories are set in North Carolina. He surveys the state of Southern drama.

This edition of the Review has more than drama. The section titled North Carolina Miscellany includes a snapshot of what’s up across the state in poetry and fiction with reviews and interviews. I can’t remember if it’s in this section, but there’s a good interview with Betty Adcock, the outstanding poet who lives in Raleigh. The analysis of  “Kate Vaiden” by Reynolds Price as an example of Southern gothic realism is rewarding, too.

The new design, while full of movement and abounding in entry points, should be reined in. The doodads get in the way of clarity and coherence at times. In the parsing of a Tennessee Williams play set in Asheville about the Fitzgeralds, the graphics went overboard. I suppose they reflected the chaos of the Fitzgeralds’ lives.

Another annoyance: The Review lacks a workable table of contents. You’re made to do a lot of thumbing through when you’re trying to find something you’ve read and want to look at again. The Review contains a lot of literary award stories. You know, the grip and grin kind like, oh, Rotarian of the Year. They are hardly arresting reading.

Even so, North Carolina is fortunate to have such a publication. It merits your support. http://www.nclr.ecu.edu/

Accompanying Photos