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Roger Rosenblatt found himself standing on the edge of the Synge’s Chair, looking out at the beautiful emptiness of the place, when a song came to mind.
Then an idea.
Then a character.
“What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” He had hummed the standard to himself, staring at the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean from his vantage point on Inishmaan, the middle of the three main Aran Islands on the west coast of Ireland—a place that’s stuck with him ever since visiting during his Fulbright year in the mid-1960s, and where he returned three years ago. A place he still feels in his bones.
Nostalgia and anticipation washed over him, simultaneously.
“That is a song typical of my age. People who turn 70 these days—if they’re healthy, God willing—have 20, 25 more years. It’s not the way it was 50 years ago,” said Mr. Rosenblatt, who is 76. “With all that time ahead of you, what does somebody do with the rest of one’s life? And that idea then became Thomas Murphy.”
Thomas Murphy is many things. He is an Irishman, an aging poet, an honest and tough friend, and a family man. He is a dreamer, equal parts hilarious, profound and stubborn.
And he is also a work of fiction. But the way Mr. Rosenblatt wrote the character in the eponymous novel “Thomas Murphy,” which was released in January 2016, he could pass as a real person.
How Thomas Murphy will come across on stage in the play of the same name remains to be seen: The work-in-progress has a reading on Saturday, April 29, at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, as part of the fourth annual New Works Festival.
“After I wrote the novel ‘Thomas Murphy,’ my wife, Ginny, thought it might be a play. I never actually thought of it, but I looked at it and I saw there was a way I could rearrange things in the novel that might make a nice one-person play,” he said. “She really is a terrific editor and by far the most reliable editor of my most miserable work—and I never write anything without showing it to her. I never would have seen it. I thought a novel is a novel, and she saw the play.”
He would go on to write the adaptation in six days—“I’m interested in setting speed records in writing. It’s not about quality,” he deadpanned—and, as he did, found himself within Thomas Murphy for a second time.
“Obviously, it wasn’t much of a stretch to talk about an old man looking for what to do with the rest of his life,” he said of both the novel and the play. “The poet part was interesting to me, because I always wanted to be a poet. I wasn’t good enough. I don’t think I had the talent—I know I didn’t have the patience to develop it. But it was always in the back of my mind. I honor poetry more than any other form. I saw an opportunity to create a poet and think about poetry through him.”
The novel, and the play, both become about more than they seem. The tale is multi-layered, a study in friendship, memory, loss, love and Ireland. Thomas Murphy, or “Murph,” is a man grappling with the deaths of his wife and best friend, possibly losing his own mind in the process, and navigating a slow burning romance with a dying blind woman who comes into his life by way of her husband, who asks him to comfort her as a poet would.
While Mr. Rosenblatt cannot relate to his protagonist’s specific struggles, he said he identifies with his thoughts. “Everything he says about poetry, I believe. Everything he says about Ireland, I certainly believe. Everything he says about friendship and memory are all things I believe. I’m not making them up for him. And he loves his grandson, and I love mine.”
He added, “I have six grandchildren—I love them all to death, but one in particular I had to rear after our daughter died—and he becomes William in the novel.”
In the dialogue between Murph and William, Mr. Rosenblatt can hear his own conversations with his own grandson, James, who will soon turn 10. When he first took the boy in, upon the unexpected death of his daughter Amy Solomon at age 38 in 2007, the child was 14 months old.
“It’s been a lifetime of being together,” he said. “Actually, the conversations Murph has with his daughter, Máire, are very similar to the conversations, the relationship I had with my own daughter, which was just as funny and contentious as we could make it.”
Thinking of one scene in particular made Mr. Rosenblatt pause and laugh out loud. “After she takes him to the neurologist, she writes to him and says, ‘I hope you understand that I’m not here to put you in the loony bin. I’m just worried about you being on your own. Signed, your loving daughter,’” he said. “He writes back, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve never had a daughter.’ And goes on with that nonsense. She writes back, ‘Go f--- yourself.’ He writes back, ‘Oh, now I remember you!’
“That is exactly the kind of thing Amy and I used to do,” he continued. “Once, when I went for a jog on Montauk Highway, I was hit by a car. But it was all right—I got up and went home. The driver was more terrified than I was. So I got home, and Amy was a doctor, and she wasn’t here, but Ginny was on the phone, and she said, ‘Well, did he go to the hospital?’ And Ginny said, ‘Of course not.’ Amy said, ‘He behaves like a child, treat him like a child.’ Nothing could have been truer.”
Co-produced with The Flea Theater, “Thomas Murphy” may go on to be staged at the Manhattan venue following Bay Street’s one-night run. After that, who knows, Mr. Rosenblatt said.
“The play is finished. The mother’s going on in three weeks. It’s as good as I can make it now. If we nail the actor this week, I’ll listen to him. And if other things occur to me, I’ll change it,” he said. “But it’s still a reading. If the play became a real play, I don’t think there would be an elaborate set. There’s no point to it. It would look a little fancy to have anything but an interesting older man sitting and telling you a story.”
He laughed and said, “We’ll all see whether it’s worthwhile first.”
Bay Street Theater’s fourth annual New Works Festival will kick off with “Molly Sweeney: A New Musical,” with book by Eric Ulloa and music and lyrics by Caleb Damschroder, on Friday, April 28, at 7 p.m. at the Sag Harbor venue. A reading of “The Impossibility of Now” by Y York will stage on Saturday, April 29, at 3 p.m., followed by Roger Rosenblatt’s “Thomas Murphy” at 8 p.m. “The Cocktail Party Effect” by Scooter Pietsch will round out the festival on Sunday, April 30, at 3 p.m. Admission to all readings is free. For more information, call 631-725-9500, or visit baystreet.org.
on Apr 14, 2017