Entire Talley trilogy gets a rare showing
When Lanford Wilson died in 2011, Aurora Theatre Artistic Director Tom Ross says, he was “dismayed” that the death of such an important playwright received so little coverage. The prolific Wilson (“Balm in Gilead,” “The Hot L Baltimore,” “Burn This”) was a major figure when Ross moved to New York in the late 1970s ( eventually to work with Joe Papp of the Public Theater), one of the first off-off-Broadway mainstays to break through on Broadway, winning a Pulitzer Prize for the still often-produced “Talley’s Folly.”
“I felt then that he was writing about my generation and the times I was living through,” Ross says. “I really wanted to honor him in some way.”
What better way than with a very rare staging of Wilson’s entire “Talley Trilogy”? Ross had long wanted to direct the larger “Fifth of July,” set in the Talley homestead in 1977, 33 years after the 1944 Fourth of July wooing of Sally Talley in “Talley’s Folly” and the same- day family drama of the hardly- ever- revived “Talley & Son.” Then it hit him that he could do all three. “Folly,” directed by Joy Carlin, on Aurora’s small Harry’s UpStage; his own production of “Fifth of July” on the main stage; and Monday staged readings of “Talley & Son” ( starting April 27).
Q: “Fifth of July” is a big play.
A: Right. It’s Chekhovian, a big- house play. I think it’s Wilson’s “Cherry Orchard,” in a way. Yeah, it’s been quite a challenge moving eight actors around on our little stage. But it’s been fun and I’ve got a great cast.
Q: It’s the most current of the plays.
A: I always felt these people were my age, but they’re 10 years older. Four of them were going to UC Berkeley in the ’ 60s. And that’s another reason I wanted to do this. They talk about Oakland and the Sausalito ferry and things like that. That’s fun. But it’s also my generation, post- Vietnam. It’s a play moving from the social activism and optimism of the 1960s into the Me Decade ’ 70s and right on the cusp of the Greed Is Good ’ 80s. It feels kind of like a Robert Altman film, characterdriven, with all these people intersecting and overlapping. It’s a piece of music, really.
Q: And the central character is
a disabled Vietnam veteran.
A: Yes. The whole trilogy is a tapestry of American society dealing with war. And the other thing I thought was amazing when I saw it in 1980 was that the people at its center are a gay couple. And that is not an issue. It’s not a coming- out play. It’s not about being gay. They’re just lovers living in the middle of all these other people and it’s not an issue. Way back in 1980, I thought that was a brilliant, subversive work of art.
Besides, when I saw it on Broadway, that role was played by Christopher Reeve, post- Superman. So to have a gay Vietnam vet played by Superman, that was pretty cool.