INTERVIEW: New play showcases educational influence of John Kennedy Toole
Photo: Ryan Spahn stars as the title character in Mr. Toole, now playing at 59E59 Theaters. Photo courtesy of Ken Howard / Provided by Karen Greco PR with permission.
John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is a contemporary classic of literature that is still enjoyed and appreciated by readers 40 years after its initial release. The novel, which was posthumously published and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, follows the character of Ignatius J. Reilly as he enters in and out of comedic adventures in 1960s New Orleans.
Toole was a longtime resident and educator in New Orleans, and that’s where Vivian Neuwirth first met him. She was his student at St. Mary’s Dominican College in the Garden District of the Crescent City, and the lessons he taught her during that formative time in her life still live on.
Neuwirth was so inspired to honor Toole’s influence on her life that she began working on a one-act play with the late professor as the main character. It took several years and several readings, but eventually that one-act was expanded to a full-length, which is now running through March 15 at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. The production comes to the theater complex courtesy of Articulate Theatre Company and Lagniappe Productions.
“I went to St. Mary’s Dominican, which was an all-girls college in New Orleans, and I had just graduated from St. Joseph’s Academy, which was an all-girls high school,” Neuwirth said in a recent phone interview. “So I guess you could say that I was sheltered, and when I was at St. Mary’s Dominican College, I signed up for a writing class with Mr. Toole. And the first time he entered the class, I just had a feeling that he was going to change my life, to be honest with you.”
Neuwirth found Toole to be handsome, young, brilliant and eloquent, and she formed a crush on him almost immediately. To Neuwirth, who didn’t know that she would one day write plays for a living, he wasn’t like all the nuns who had taught her previously.
“When I look back in time, it seems almost like a dream,” the playwright said about her time with Toole. “The class was in a beautiful large room in an old mansion in the Garden District, and there was light coming in. And he would walk around the room acting out the poems, and one of his favorites was ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ [by T.S. Eliot]. And he would walk around the room, acting out the role of Prufrock, and I remember when he said, ‘Do I dare / Do I dare / Do I dare to eat a peach.’ And he held his hand up as those he was trying to hold a peach, so he was very theatrical.”
That scene of Toole teaching a young Neuwirth about Eliot’s famous poem is actually included in Mr. Toole, which envisions a young woman by the name of Lisette falling under the spell of her poetry professor.
At this time in Neuwirth’s life, when she was sitting with her fellow students in Toole’s class, she was more interested in novels because of their interesting characters. When it came to poetry, she was a neophyte with a few preconceived notions.
“I had always read, but I had never really written,” she remembers. “I wrote papers for him, but they were almost like love letters, in the sense that they were designed to please him and impress him. I would use a thesaurus to try to find all the best words, and he would then grade my papers. And at the top of the papers, he would say, ‘Please don’t use a thesaurus.’ So that’s actually in my play.”
Neuwirth left Toole when she was accepted to The Juilliard School in New York City, and she remembers her final conversation with the professor. There was a look of disappointment on Toole’s face, Neuwirth said, but he was simultaneously happy for her.
“I would like to think that there was a feeling that he was going to miss me because I really tried so hard in his class, and I think that I understood what he was trying to do, and he knew that,” she said. “So then I went to New York, and I started at Juilliard. And then at some point my mother called me and told me that he had died, and that it was suicide. I was so much in shock because I had no idea. There were no signs. I didn’t see anything in him that would make me worry about him in any way, but I started to feel that if I had, if there was something I could have done, something I could have said…”
Neuwirth moved on with her life, but she was haunted by memories of her professor. She kept wondering about him, for years and years after his 1969 death. Then, something remarkable happened.
“I was living in the Village, and there was a little bookstore around the corner called the Paperback Bookstore,” Neuwirth said. “One night I was walking by, and I saw a book called A Confederacy of Dunces, and it said it was written by John Kennedy Toole. So I just stood there in disbelief because I didn’t know that he was a writer, so I went in and I bought the book. I felt that when I read the book that I had him back and that I was able to understand him more fully. I had no idea that he had that side to him, that satirical side, that hilarious side. That was the beginning of my idea to write a play about him.”
Neuwirth’s first efforts resulted in an incomplete one-act play, but she was distracted for a number of years because of Hurricane Katrina and left the project behind. The storm wreaked havoc on New Orleans, so she started to write a trilogy of plays — NOLA, Three Plays About Home — to respond to the storm and its botched relief efforts.
“After the trilogy had been written and performed with the EstroGenius Festival, I went back to the play, and I kept working on it with my writing lab,” she said. “And I brought it as a one-act to the EstroGenius Festival, and it was very well-received. I was encouraged, and then I brought it in again to their development lab as a full-length in 2016 in March. And then I submitted it to the Midtown International Theatre Festival, and it was accepted. So it went from being a reading to a production in just a couple of months, so that was five performances at the Midtown. And I had this dream that it would go further.”
Neuwirth at this time was working for an employer who had a subscription to 59E59 Theaters, and he had seen Mr. Toole in its run at the Midtown festival. He started to put two and two together, and he figured that Neuwirth’s play would be a logical choice for 59E59.
“I thought it was impossible,” she said. “It’s very competitive there, but the director, Cat Parker, who had directed the production at Midtown, submitted it. And after a long period of waiting and giving up hope and working out all of the details, finally they made an offer, so I’m ecstatic and thrilled to be there. I’m really looking forward to this, especially because this is the 40th anniversary of the publication of A Confederacy of Dunces. I like to think in this way that I’m honoring him and that I’m writing a love letter to him. I would like to think that he would like it and that he would give me a good grade.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Mr. Toole, written by Vivian Neuwirth and directed by Cat Parker, plays through March 15 at 59E59 Theaters in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
