The "itinerant" for/word company opens a limited run of Little Book at Seattle’s Little Theatre, 608 19th Ave. E., tonight (July 14). Playwright and for/word joint artistic director Jennifer Schlueter’s literary script revolves around the writing of Stuart Little by E.B. White, a project that brought the notoriously slow and precise wordsmith into direct conflict with powerful children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore.
You describe for/word as "an itinerant theatre company that creates plays about writers." Can you explain how this works?
We are project-based, not season-based (something like the way SITI or Builders Association works). So there isn't any typical season: we come up with a project, workshop it, mull it over, play with it, get it up on its feet, and then we find theaters to stage it in. Right now, I'm based in Columbus, Ohio (as is our designer, Brad Steinmetz). Christina Ritter is in Lexington, Kentucky. John Schmor, who's directing Little Book, is out of Eugene, Oregon (where I had been teaching)....so we don't own a space or even have a "home base" really: we just do the work and then we take it around the country.
In an earlier e-mail you said Seattle’s literary theater, Book-It, was an inspiration for this trip. Have you seen their shows? Do you think you have a similar audience?
I think we might have a similar audience, yes. Our director for Little Book had his adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts given a staged reading by Book-It, so he's our strong connection. Our work is not as full of third person narration as Book-It, nor do we focus exclusively on adapting works of fiction.
How would you say you differ from Book-It?
We work pretty heavily in the archive, on letters and memoirs as well as with fiction. But there are other companies whose approach to text resonate with our own, like the UK's Shared Experience, or even, in some ways, the work of Chuck Mee.
What drew you to this story about E.B. White?
I read Jill Lepore's New Yorker article about the event. We passed it around the company and it felt like it was the right piece for us.
What do you think the audience will be surprised to learn about the writing of Stuart Little?
Lots of things, I hope. I knew E.B. White as the author of Charlotte's Web...I didn't know much about him beyond that. His long career at the New Yorker was a surprise to me. Certainly the amazing relationship he had with his powerful wife, Katharine White, was a delight to learn about. And also, Anne Carroll Moore's tremendous sphere of influence in children's literature—her role as an advocate and a tastemaker—was fresh territory for me. So I hope, above all, that everyone walks away with a little more respect for the trio of them.
Part of this play focuses on the growth of children's books as "literature" and the influence of Anne Carroll Moore, who famously didn't like this book after urging White to write a book for children. What type of book do you think she expected White to write?
Well, she never said (and that bugged White himself). It seems to me, judging from the kinds of books she loved, she expected something a little bit more like a Beatrix Potter story or the Velveteen Rabbit (two of her favorites). She liked the Victorian, and the sentimental. Stuart was a little too modern for her, a little too ambiguous, and certainly not droll. She liked talking animals, but she hated how Stuart was neither a boy nor a mouse. It unnerved her.
As any student of English knows, E.B. White contributed to one of the most influential books on grammar, Strunk & White's Elements of Style. How do you think White's obsession with comma, and other points of grammar, contributed to the long, long writing process of Stuart Little?
Andy White had a love-hate relationship with writing, and that's very much at the core of our story. He loved it being done, but the doing of it regularly made him physically ill. Will Strunk had been his teacher, and the "little book" (as it was known) was originally a campus-produced pamphlet of writing guidelines. So White was invited, later in life, to edit his teacher's guidelines and produce what we now know as The Elements of Style.
White was a stylist, for sure. The thing is: his letters, which he dashed off at an amazing clip, are every bit as well constructed as the New Yorker essays he labored over, or Stuart Little, for that matter. So I don't think it was a seven-year process because he was persnickity as a writer. He had a very natural way with writing. Rather, it seems to me, he was a man of diffuse energies. He loved his farm in Maine, he loved writing essays, and he also worked on Stuart Little. All at once. And he got sick a lot in between. So "writer's block" is part of what slowed down the production of the book itself.
Finally, when did you first read Stuart Little?
I read it in the third or fourth grade, and I honestly didn't like it very much. Then (and now) I prefer Charlotte's Web. But I've come to appreciate the surrealism of Stuart, its peculiar archness, in digging more deeply into it for this piece. I sort of understand why Anne objected to it, I suppose.
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