Playwright Robert Schenkkan Shares Insight Into Process

Some seven years ago, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan bought a house in Sag Harbor. He readily admits that, back then, he wasn’t particularly keyed into the literary history of the village, but in the years since, has come to realize it’s the ideal place for a writer to be.

“I had lived in New York and had an apartment there for about 30 years. I was in Seattle at the time and decided to come back to the East Coast and knew I needed something outside the city,” explained Schenkkan in a recent phone interview. “I didn’t know this area at all. My girlfriend has had a presence through her brother on the South Fork forever and so she knew the area.”

It may have been predicated on a bit of chance, but Schenkkan has had the good fortune to end up in a village that has built a reputation as a haven for writers of all sorts over the years, from James Fennimore Cooper and John Steinbeck (whose Sag Harbor homestead will soon become an artist residency for writers), to monologuist Spalding Gray and playwright Lanford Wilson.

“It’s been home to literary figures going back 150 years. It certainly punches above its weight,” said Schenkkan. “I’ve found a warm community, largely through Bay Street Theater or through other colleagues either living or working here, so we feel lucky.”

And Bay Street Theater is exactly where Schenkkan will be on Sunday, April 23, at 5 p.m. when he joins his friend, playwright and director Vincent Murphy, for a panel discussion titled “Page to Stage: The Craft of Adaptation” (which also happens to be the name of a book by Murphy). Part of Bay Street’s New Perspectives Series, the conversation immediately follows a one-day creative writing workshop, “Page to Stage,” that will be led by Murphy from 1 to 4 p.m. and facilitated by Scott Schwartz, Bay Street’s artistic director.

As the name implies, the April 23 discussion will focus on the art of adaptation and the challenges writers face when taking on different types of literature and adapting it for plays or films. Schenkkan has a great deal of experience in this realm, having written 14 full-length plays (including two musicals and a collection of one-act plays). He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1992 for “The Kentucky Cycle,” his series of nine one-acts that explore American mythology through successive generations of a single family, while his 2012 play “All the Way,” about President Lyndon B. Johnson’s efforts to convince southern legislators to sign on to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, earned the 2014 Tony Award for Best Play. Schenkkan wrote a second play about Johnson, “The Great Society,” in 2017, and in 2016, HBO Films turned “All the Way” into a movie starring Bryan Cranston (who was an executive producer along with Steven Spielberg and Schenkkan himself). Also for the screen, Schenkkan co-wrote the Academy Award-nominated feature film “Hacksaw Ridge” a 2016 movie about the real-life World War II experiences of Desmond Doss, an American pacifist and combat medic who, despite his refusal to carry a weapon, ended up saving dozens of fellow soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa.

It’s interesting that Schenkkan has settled in an area that is so keenly aware of its past, given that history and the people who have made it frequently find their way into his work — as was the case with his plays about Lyndon B. Johnson, a towering figure of personality and politics. But Schenkkan has also written adaptations of fictional works, including a pair of children’s books which he turned into stage productions for a theater in Seattle.

“One is a short story, ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster,’ something I loved as a kid, and I also adapted a popular novel, ‘A Single Shard’ by Linda Sue Park, which is set in Korea in the 16th century,” said Schenkkan. “They’re two very different kinds of pieces.”

At the moment, Schenkkan is branching out even further by jumping into the new realm of podcasting, and this week, goes into the studio with Audible to record “Bob and Jean,” a three-character play based on the correspondence between his own parents in WWII.

“It’s an interesting division in podcasting. This one commissions writers to write material that will be both a podcast and a stage production, which Audible retains rights for,” said Schenkkan. “From a very personal level, it’s a glimpse, for me, from the point of view of my parents when they were young. My mom was 21, my father 24, at a moment, not too dissimilar from today, where the world seems to be hanging by a thread and it’s not at all clear that truth, justice and the American way will triumph.

“It’s two young people falling in love and trying to figure it out and just as they recognize feelings for each other, he is sent off to the Pacific and she’s an actress touring the U.S. in a USO show of ‘Arsenic and Old Lace,’” he continued. “What I think is interesting is, it’s this moment for America. We’d been a fairly insular nation and WWII blew that up in so many ways. People were plucked from small towns and farms and sent all across the world, and they encountered cultures and met people they would’ve never met otherwise and it really opened people’s eyes and changed America.”

In this new project, there is also the understanding of a reality with much larger consequences than that of simply two young people falling in love.

“At first, there’s posturing going on, then from this standpoint that they don’t know when or if they will see each other again, they get more honest and more vulnerable with each other,” he said. “There is optimism, but also despair and fear, and confusion about their place in the world. I have this beautiful letter, my father was designated to be in the second wave of the invasions of Japan, he defused unexploded munitions, so it was a very dangerous job.

“On the boat to the invasion, he heard about the dropping of the atomic bomb. It’s a letter of elation, and then it gets technical about how it works,” Schenkkan said. “But then it moves into a surprisingly sober reflection on what this means for the world. Can the world survive this? It’s a fascinating response. Yes, the war is over — yet what does it mean for the world?”

Addressing the harder — and bigger — real world questions is always part of a playwright’s job, and when asked which is more difficult, writing scripts based on actual people and events or those drawn from his imagination, Schenkkan responds, “I think both are challenging in their own way. If it’s entirely original, I don’t have to worry about rights issues or expectations. But in particular, the more famous a figure is, the more fervent the fan base — and the more people have strong feelings.”

Schenkkan goes on to stress the fact that although he frequently writes about history, he is not a historian, but rather, a dramatist.

“When I’m interested in an individual, I’m drawn to some particular aspect or conflict and work to try and understand on an emotional level what that might be,” he said. “For the two LBJ plays, I spent a long time reading widely all the major biographies, but not just of LBJ. I also read a biography for each of the individuals in the inner circle and center of power in politics at this time. I also read original sources, newspapers, magazine articles. The LBJ library was welcoming and helped me to their material. I tried to interview as many people as I could, including Johnson family members and individuals who had served with him in the legislature or worked for him in his administration.

“It’s a wide net, and rarely do I know exactly what I’m looking for, but getting people to open up about their experience until I get closer to them, that interests me, which in the case of LBJ was power, acquisition, pursuit of power and exercise of power,” he added. “I find him to be a Shakespearean-size figure in every way. Not just physically, but emotionally. He was a tragic figure. He did tremendous good, but also tremendous harm.”

In terms of towering figures, there is probably none larger than the subject at the center of a new musical Schenkkan has been working on in recent years with director John Doyle. Called “The 12,” the musical opens at Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut this September. It tells the story of the disciples as they gather to debate how they should proceed as a group in the wake of the crucifixion of Jesus in Jerusalem.

“We had a production in Denver six years ago. It was very successful and I like so much where this is going. We’ve revised it extensively and just finished casting in New York,” Schenkkan explained. “Here we are, it’s Easter weekend and this is a small part of the passion story that, to my knowledge, has never been dramatized.

“It is the moment after the major figures have exited the stage — Jesus is dead, Judas is dead — and you have the followers who are blue collar men and women who have given up everything to follow this individual without understanding entirely what it was about,” he noted. “This guy had an annoying habit of talking in parables, but you knew you were in the middle of something amazing. They go into Jerusalem, he’s a rock stars and within 48 hours, he’s dead and they’re being hunted and everything they gave up for this notion looks like it’s all for nothing.”

Schenkkan explains that the action of “The 12” takes place in an upper room where the disciples gather to process what they’ve experienced with the loss of their leader and debate about how they should go forward.

“After 48 hours, they emerge prepared to preach a radically new idea, and the idea is what happened in the room? What happened to these people? They weren’t the rock star, they were the followers,” said Schenkkan. “What’s interesting about them, whether it’s a story you embrace and gives you comfort or not, everybody has had a dark night of the soul. Whatever it is you put your money on, gave your life to, whether it’s marriage, career, and it blows up, you think what have I done? What do I do?

“That’s a very human experience and I’m interested in these people we don’t know a lot about. It’s contradictory and layered with centuries of history.”

Though it is based on Jesus, he is, in fact, not on the scene anymore, which gives Schenkkan some poetic license to approach this age-old story from an entirely new perspective.

“It’s very different because he’s not there anymore, and that’s how every Christian and person who identifies as a Christian experiences it,” said Schenkkan. “But I find him unavoidable, he is as provocative now as he was then.

“I just tell stories I’m interested in and that I want to see — and I write to understand them,” he added. “I’m fortunate people want to hear what I have to say.”

“Page to Stage: The Craft of Adaptation, a New Perspectives Series panel discussion with playwright and director Vincent Murphy and playwright Robert Schenkkan is Sunday, April 23, at 5 p.m. at Bay Street Theater. Tickets are a suggested donation of $20. To register for the Page To Stage workshop led by Vincent Murphy, which takes place Sunday, April 23, from 1 to 4 p.m. visit baystreet.org or contact Allen O’Reilly, director of education, at allen@baystreet.org.