A Tall Tale, A Great Wall and Denver: Great Wall Story is based on Denver history
by Doug Langworthy, Literary Manager for the Denver Center Theatre Company, for Applause magazine
In 1894 Denver was in the middle of a severe economic depression. The Silver Panic engulfed the city when the bottom fell out of the silver market. Unemployment was high and many banks had failed. Middle class families had to give up newly purchased homes. Angry citizens coalesced around the Populist Party, which cast the blame for the economic crisis on the fat cats—the banks, the stockbrokers and the wealthy elite. A group of unemployed men known as Coxey’s Army, having marched on Washington to demand jobs, was camping in tents along the shore of the South Platte River.
Sound familiar?
By 1899, the year that Lloyd Suh’s GREAT WALL STORY takes place, things were looking up. Denver’s coffers were shored up by huge gold deposits found at Cripple Creek, Colorado, and efforts were underway to diversify the economy into new areas. People were confident that the boom times of the 1880s were just around the corner. The turn of the century was sure to usher in a prosperous future.
But in many ways Denver had yet to shed its mining-camp origins and become fully civilized. According to local historian Tom Noel, “It was a city ugly. Mayor Speer was yet to come into office in 1904 and transform the city, so it was smoky and smelly and filled with saloons. It was politically quite corrupt.”
Newspapers were king then, the only source of information for the man on the street. The Rocky Mountain News had been the leader ever since 1859. The Denver Post favored sensational headlines. The papers played a critical role in rooting out local corruption.
Against this backdrop, the Great Wall hoax played itself out. Here are the facts: On June 24, 1899 reporters from Denver’s four major papers (Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post, Denver Times and The Republican) were hanging around Union Station on a slow news day, hoping to spot a newsworthy celebrity. Retiring to the bar at the adjacent Oxford Hotel, they hatched a scheme to plant a splashy yet fictitious story in each of their papers.
They had to concoct something that was high-profile yet difficult to trace. They landed on China, as it was halfway around the world and politically isolationist. From there the hoax seemed almost obvious: the Great Wall of China was coming down! Needing a local hook, they invented a Chicago engineer, Frank C. Lewis, who was stopping over in Denver on his way to China. Lewis’ plan was to win for his firm the job of tearing down the Wall.
The reporters dashed off to their desks to make sure the story got in the next day’s papers. Each of the reporters embellished the story slightly differently, but the basic “facts” remained the same.
Over the next few days, the story was picked up by newspapers in Chicago, New York and abroad. A few follow-up stories ran, but eventually the hoax ran out of steam and was forgotten. Years later, one of the reporters or one of the reporters’ wives let the cat out of the bag. Over time an urban legend grew that suggested the hoax had actually caused the Boxer Rebellion in China, a fact that, although disproved, has had irresistible dramatic value in Great Wall Story.
One hundred years later, enter playwright Lloyd Suh, who was captivated by the story when he came across it in a book of hoaxes: “I was immediately interested in the unexpected ramifications of something like that.” He quickly drafted the play’s first two scenes. Then, three years ago, he discovered the famous investigative journalist Nellie Bly, who would put on disguises and immerse herself in the milieu of her story. Most notably she faked insanity in order to report on an insane asylum from the inside. So he created his own Nellie Bly in the form of Harriet Sparrow, assistant to publishing giant Joseph Pulitzer, who sends her to Denver to get to the root of the Great Wall story.
“And so my way in was the character of Harriet who ultimately creates a sort of engine for the unfolding of the story,” Suh asserts. “That was great because it also brought to the fore themes that I found really interesting: truth and lie, myth, and the interesting connection between lying and wishing and mythologizing.
“I think that what’s most exciting about the notion of Denver in 1899,” he continues, “is the spirit of newness. It’s the West and it’s the verge of a new century, the feeling that things are constantly new. Denver had been growing and growing and on the other side of the century it kept growing and growing. I found that progression really exciting. What it means to push further West and what it means to push into a new century.”
Suh is thrilled to be completing his play in Denver, surrounded by the history of the city and the resources available here. “Doing the play in Denver,” he concludes, “makes the play better.”
For more information on the play or to purchase tickets, please visit www.denvercenter.org/greatwallstory
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His Own Private Idaho: Samuel D. Hunter, Playwright of The Whale
by Douglas Langworthy for Applause magazine
Weighing in at 600 lbs, Charlie’s health is failing fast. He refuses to go to the hospital because he has no insurance and doesn’t want to lose the substantial nest egg he has squirreled away for Ellie, his daughter, with whom he desperately wants to reconcile. But Ellie’s a bitter, angry girl who blames Charlie for abandoning the family 15 years earlier. From this fraught set of given circumstances the stakes keep getting higher in The Whale, Samuel D. Hunter’s gripping new play now playing at the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Ricketson Theatre.
There is nothing faint-hearted about Hunter’s writing—his taut, deeply human dramas present sharply etched portraits of struggling individuals who often get swept along in strong cultural currents. But although issues such as international terrorism, genocide, suicide, the Rapture figure into his plays, they are never about these issues. Take Charlie, for instance. While obesity presents a major obstacle for him (he may die before making peace with his daughter), The Whale is not a power point presentation about America’s obsession with food, but rather one man’s personal struggle to find greater meaning in his life before it’s too late.
Another topic Hunter is not afraid to confront is religion, which is folded into many of his plays. In The Whale Elder Thomas, a young Mormon missionary struggling with his own troubled past, tries to share his faith with Charlie.
“Most of my plays are about seeking hope and meaning,” says Hunter, “and [religion] is the eternal well of hope and meaning for most Americans. It so shaped my childhood growing up in Idaho and going to a religious school, and so I see it in the larger cultural dialogue a lot. Mostly I write about it because people don’t seem to want to talk about it.”
When Sam graduated from his fundamentalist Christian high school, he assumed he would go to the University of Idaho like all those ancestors before him. But on a lark he sent in an application to NYU and was accepted into the playwriting program. After NYU, he went straight into a Masters program at the Iowa playwrights program and from there he entered Juilliard’s graduate playwriting program. While in Iowa he was mentored by playwright Sherry Kramer, who helped him look at plays in unconventional ways: “Sherry had a way of talking about how plays move, the way plays are organized other than plot. How plays are organized by image and metaphor—deeper organizational tools that really allowed me to start thinking about plays not as plots but as structured time.”
Certainly one of the organizing metaphors in The Whale is that of the whale itself, with its strong biblical and literary resonances. But Hunter did not start writing with that image in mind, it came to him organically. He initially included Moby Dick in the play because he needed Charlie’s students to be writing essays about a novel: “I picked Moby Dick because I like the book and the essential conflict in the novel related to the central conflict in the play—going after this thing that you can never get.”
Charlie’s job, teaching writing on-line, came in part from Hunter’s own experience. One year he found himself teaching expository writing at Rutgers in New Jersey, where he discovered that writing a good play and writing a good essay are very similar—they both need honesty and genuine thought. But the students were resistant.
“These kids couldn’t be honest,” Hunter laments. “Their main question was, ‘What do you want me to say?’ It was so deeply frustrating and deeply intriguing that they all-out refused to have a voice.” Throughout the play Charlie uses every trick in the book to get his students and even his daughter to express themselves honestly.
Hunter tends to people his plays with members of the working class—the sales clerks, nurses, on-line instructors and adjunct professors that make up the 99% of this country. There’s no social agenda here, he just finds them more representative of who we are: “I think the prevalence of upper middle class and upper class characters in our plays is surprising, especially given the fact that the majority of America is not these people. When I think about America, [working class people] are the people I think about.”
Writing without an ounce of irony or condescension, Hunter makes us feel his empathy for his characters. He has a way of unearthing their contradictions and creating individuals we at first may think we have very little in common with (the obese gay man, the religious fundamentalist blogger), until we understand them in a deeper way.
While Hunter was at NYU, he wanted to branch out academically so he minored in Middle Eastern Studies, even learning a little Arabic. Then in 2005, the first year of his Masters program in Iowa, he was offered a chance to teach a playwriting workshop in Ramallah. He eagerly seized the opportunity, later teaching in war-torn Hebron as well. “I knew the headlines of the Israel-Palestinian conflict,” Hunter says “but I had no opinions either way, and I became even less on either side after spending a couple of summers there. It was just so deeply complicated. It was terrifying and beautiful.”
As with his own writing, Hunter had to look at it all through a human lens: “So much of my experience in Palestine was not about guns and bombs, it was about learning to live with guns and bombs. How people go to the supermarket even though the checkpoints are closed and there’s gunfire going on.”
At the end of one of Sam’s plays you come away with the feeling you’ve just witnessed something profound. Whether you’ve just seen a wife mourning the loss of her husband or a father trying to reconnect with his estranged child, you’ve had a rare chance to set aside surface impressions and walk in someone else’s shoes. And although the play may have its sad, even tragic side, there is always the counterweight of compassion and hope. Deeply complicated. Terrible and beautiful indeed.
Douglas Langworthy is the Literary Manager of the Denver Center Theatre Company
What’s In A Name? Plenty if you’re Dickens
by Douglas Langworthy for Applause magazine
Dickens had a way with names. They were much more than personal identifiers for him; they were expressions of a character’s personality, often served up with a comic twist: Sloppy, Wopsie, Bumble, Polly Toodle, the Squeers, Uriah Heep, Pumblechook—and on and on. In A Christmas Carol, the name Scrooge, with its initial twisted clump of consonants and long dark vowels, sounds like what the word has come to mean: a miserly, mean-spirited grump.
On the other side of the holiday tale’s name game is Tiny Tim, whose moniker, with those three short syllables, speaks not only of fragility but of hope. But the name that hits the Dickensian jackpot has to be Fezziwig, the family that hosts everyone’s favorite Christmas party—a cornucopia brimming with food, drink, dance and song. Hard to say without smiling, “Fezziwig” suggests champagne bubbles, giddiness, activity, festivity and merriment—in short, the Christmas spirit.
In the Denver Center’s perennial production of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, with its humor, fright, spectacle, song, dance and cast of thousands (large cast anyway), the Fezziwig’s party is a highlight of raucous and buoyant fun. Watch the young Scrooge celebrate his engagement with Belle. Enjoy the revelers as they take a spin around the dance floor. Then follow this timeless tale of Yuletide redemption to its happy end, when stingy old Scrooge is finally filled with the generous Fezziwigian spirit of Christmas.
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Douglas Langworthy
Literary Manager, Denver Center Theatre Company
