Sometimes, two different people can be connected in ways that are impossible to imagine.
In Plan-B Theatre Company’s upcoming production of “Wallace,” which will be running March 4-14, two separate plays are twined together to explore the connections in the lives of well-known writers Wallace Stegner and Wallace Thurman. Both men chronicled different aspect of American life, but at one point both called Salt Lake City home.
In biographical plays, it’s often easier to catch the subtleties if you go in to the show already knowing something about the people’s lives. Wallace Thurman (right) was a young gay black man who became one of the movers and shakers of the Harlem Renaissance. He was best known for his novel “The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life,” which explores discrimination among black people based on skin color, but was also the first to publish the adult-themed stories of author and poet Langston Hughes. Thurman was born in Salt Lake City, and lived there until he moved to Harlem in 1925.
Wallace Thurman, often known as “The Dean of Western Writers,” was born in Iowa in 1909 but grew up in Salt Lake City. He wrote several novels including “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “The Spectator Bird” (for which he won the National Book Award), and “Angle of Repose” (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize). He also wrote several non-fiction books, including “Mormon Country” and “Wolf Willow.”
Of his time in Salt Lake City, Stegner wrote: “There is only this solid sense of having had or having been or having lived something real and good and satisfying, and the knowledge that having had or been or lived those things I can never lose them again. Home is what you can take away with you.”
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