Poet's turn to play

October 23, 1:16 PMSF Poetry ExaminerJannie Dresser

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"I was born reading," says Deborah Dashow Ruth, East Bay poet turned playwright, "and was so affected by books that I wanted to affect others that way." Her love of writing and drama, sparked in childhood, recently led her to become a major contributor facilitating construction of a new wing of the Aurora Theater Company in Berkeley. Her gift granted her naming rights to the performance and administrative space and she named it for her parents, the Nell & Jules Dashow Wing, making it a point to put her mother's name first.

Deborah and her husband, Leo Ruth, of Kensington, were among Aurora’s first subscribers when it was created in the early 1990s. Whenever Deborah’s parents visited from the Chicago area, the Ruths took them to Aurora productions. Eight years ago, the Aurora left their small digs at the Berkeley City Club to move into a beautifully remodeled space just down Addison Street from the Berkeley Repertory Theater. In 2008, Ruth learned from Aurora's artistic director Tom Ross that the company wanted to develop an adjacent 2,600-square-foot space into a new facility for offices, rehearsals, play-readings, performance projects, and possibly a venue for poetry readings. The capital campaign, set to raise $2.1 million, was also intended to expand and diversify the theater’s audience. Edward Albee commended Aurora’s expansion plans noting that the space would afford longer rehearsal times which would facilitate productions on plays such as his own.

Ross mentioned that the Aurora needed lead donors to commence construction. That same year, the estate of Ruth’s mother who had died in 2004, was distributed, and Deborah and Leo Ruth offered a donation large enough to earn them naming rights for the new space. "To prove it was the right thing to do, I completed the final payment via a stock transfer [to Aurora] in July 2008, just before the stock market took a nosedive."


My mother would probably get teary," says Deborah Ruth about Nell Dashow, born in 1914 in Atlanta. Her mother was married for 70 years to Chicago attorney Jules Dashow, and had been a housewife for most of her life. But, she was also "a crackerjack tennis player until the age of 87," mentions Ruth, and  "took literature courses for at least 30 years." Her mother was an avid reader who also organized family excursions to musical theatre productions, such as "South Pacific" and "My Fair Lady."

Deborah Dashow Ruth inherited her mother’s passion for literature and theatre, and has been writing her entire life. However, it wasn’t until she quit her longtime administrative job at the University of California Berkeley’s Extension program, that she could finally devote herself to writing. Originally, Ruth wrote fiction, completing several stories and two novels (all unpublished), but she found herself returning to the poetry she had abandoned in college.

To her surprise, she was accepted at the prestigious Squaw Valley Community of Writers, where the challenge was to write a new poem every day. After six frustrating attempts in as many days, she met with poet and instructor Galway Kinnell (photo at left). He looked at the rough draft of her seventh poem, then said, "There’s really nothing here." He asked to see her notes and "began to underline phrases I had written but hadn’t included in the poem. Then, he said, ‘That’s where your poem is.’" She worked until 3 a.m. that night, revising and rewriting. When she shared her poem in the workshop the following day, Kinnell said: "It’s wonderful. You did it." Ruth has since published many poems in literary magazines and journals; two of them have even been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.

Praised for writing good dialogue, Ruth embarked on an ambitious learning curve to acquire playwriting skills. Her latent drama bug bit hard after she saw Berkeley Rep’s production of "The Margaret Ghost," a play-in-progress by Carol Braverman about transcendentalist writer and philosopher Margaret Fuller. . Ruth found her way to Will Dunne’s playwriting workshops in San Francisco and attended 19 of them. As a result, she wrote a dozen short plays, five of them coalescing into "Families in the ‘50s: A Quintet of Short Plays," which enjoyed a staged reading in San Francisco by local actors and an invited audience in 2008.

Ruth decided she "needed to see what a director does." By co-sponsoring plays, she and Leo have been able to attend rehearsals and peer over the shoulders of Aurora directors Tom Ross (for Harold Pinter’s "The Birthday Party"), Barbara Oliver ("The Trojan Women"), and this past spring, Joy Carlin who directed the popular production of "Jack Goes Boating." The Ruths have also co-produced plays at Berkeley Rep, TheatreFIRST, and The Virago Theatre.

According to Dashow, plays are a "wonderful combination of fiction and poetry." In dramatic writing, there is both "the arc of narrative that exists in good fiction, and the importance of every word that is part of poetry." Not surprisingly, Ruth’s taste in literature is often for poets who are also fiction writers, such as Marge Piercy  and Margaret Atwood. She is also a big fan of the poetry of Sharon Olds,  Maxine Kumin, Stephen Dunn, and, of course, Kinnell.

Ruth isn’t inclined to fight the impulse that pulls her toward multiple genres. In coming years, she plans not only to complete a collection of her verse but to see one or more of her plays through production. With a great act of public-mindedness behind her manifested in the christening and opening of the Nell & Jules Dashow Wing at the Aurora, she has time to devote to her own work again.

Poems by Deborah Dashow Ruth

Unfinished
The brain is wired for completion.
Dr. Dawn McGuire

Sheltered and incredibly naïve
A childhood spent in unquestioning
Sex was something I didn’t
I could never bring myself to ask about certain
This was before the sixties made everything so
My first too-early marriage was
What a shock when he told
I had nobody I could talk
But after he left for
On my own for the first
Gave myself the freedom to do anything I
After all, the birth control pill
Escape the prison of a straitlaced
Like making up for

Then I found my real
A lifelong bachelor until I
Neither of us wanted any
Although I kept asking him if
He’d reply it was my
Leave it up to me whether or
And I’ve never regretted
It’s been thirty-two
Naturally we’ve had our
But we’ve always managed to
Sometimes I think it’s been our cat who
Altogether more satisfying than I could ever
Wish is how things
Now

Why I Don’t Like Irish Plays

The father drinks, both brothers drink,
the mother hides a guilty secret.
The script builds slowly toward a climax,
promising catharsis, change.
But the characters only talk of change,
their fine-tuned voices tell of suffering
in lush language the playwright treasures,
while I sit lost in the haze of words.
(Haven’t I heard these lines already?)
Three hours later, the men still drink
and no one’s learned the mother’s secret.
Everything is just the same
as it was in the beginning
when the curtain rose on all the troubles.

Midwife
For G.

Conception occurred
before I met you,
but you were present
when the pains began.
You coached me
with patience and skill,
urging me along
with such assurance
that I could go off and spend
the long night laboring alone.
I struggled with
what wanted to be born,
but when the morning broke
and brought a crowning,
you welcomed into the world
my first-begotten
poem.

Photograph of the Nell & Jules Dashow Wing at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley is from the Berkeley Daily Planet. Photograph of Deborah Dashow Ruth is by Jannie M. Dresser.