A New Play About Dorothy Day
Interview with Laura Pittenger on The Saint of Staten Island
I’m Haley, a book midwife (editor) and author. I write about faith and all things literary. Current features: This Week Miscellany (weekly roundup of interesting links) and the Year of Jane (we’re reading Sense & Sensibility right now). When the mood strikes me, you get the occasional essay or interview with someone wonderful. If you’re not a subscriber it’s a great time to subscribe:
I’ve followed novelist, director, and playwright Laura Pittenger on Twitter for years and years. I’ve always been fascinating by what the life of a NYC-based playwright must be like! When I heard that she wrote a new play about Servant of God Dorothy Day I was eager to learn more. Laura graciously allowed me to read the play and I was so impressed by her portrayal of Dorothy Day and how the play tackled her conversion to Catholicism. Laura agreed to answer some questions for me to share with you!
Haley: What's it like to be a playwright in NYC?
Laura: It’s about 5% actually writing plays, 20% sending out submissions and managing the distribution and royalties of my work, and 75% working a day job that has absolutely nothing to do with playwriting at all, so that I can write. I’m fully supportive of people with sellout jobs – if I didn’t have one, I’d have more time to write, but I’d be a lot more worried about money! (And I like having healthcare.)
I don’t make much money off of playwriting, but I do have schools and students frequently perform my shorter plays. I’ve even gotten to attend some of them. I’ve had work produced in New York City, the regional U.S. and the U.K.
Since I don’t always have much time to write, I have to be diligent and disciplined about scheduling writing time, but I also need to carve out time to have interesting experiences and read interesting books/see plays/travel. New York is an inspiring place to live in terms of observing human behavior, but I try not to write about New York much anymore. I’m big into historical fiction and the imagined past. I’ve also written about growing up in Indiana – an oddly exotic experience to lifelong New Yorkers.
Basically, I try to live my life in such a way that I can come into contact with lots of different types of people, living lots of different types of lives, and that’s what I find in New York. Being a playwright isn’t always about “writing what you know” – it’s a lot about broadening your own perspective and digging into non-theater topics that are interesting to you. As I hit my 30s, I’ve also started to view relationships with greater depth and complexity than I did in my teens and 20s – playwriting is a cathartic way to explore all types of relationships.
Haley: What initially got you interested in Dorothy Day? How did you get inspired to write about her?
Laura: My theater colleague Rebecca Cunningham was putting together an evening of short plays based on the lives of women in history, and reached out to me to see if I had any women I wanted to write about. I had heard the name Dorothy Day – where, I don’t know, but probably Twitter – and was intrigued, since she was a fellow New Yorker. I did some reading and found her life story absolutely fascinating, especially her early bohemian life. I was so curious about what led a young agnostic anarchist towards Catholicism.
I decided to write THE DRILL, a 10-minute play about a nuclear drill protest Dorothy Day conducted in the 1950s, where she meets a young stranger who reminds her of the child she aborted in her 20s. Abortion is a lightning rod issue in this day and age, but I was pleasantly surprised at the response the piece received, and it was eventually performed at the Sheen Center in NYC for their One-Act Play Festival.
The turnaround time on that piece was quick, so I kept reading after the initial commission. I read THE LONG LONELINESS and ALL THE WAY TO HEAVEN (a collection of her letters), and I sent the 10-minute play to Robert Ellsberg (Dorothy Day’s biographer) for feedback. He gave me such thoughtful, lovely criticism that I asked him to come to the reading of my new play, THE SAINT OF STATEN ISLAND, which he did. It’s terribly intimidating to have someone who knew her personally attending your fictional work about her life, but so worth it – his advice and insights have been invaluable as I go forward.
Writing about Dorothy Day has changed me. I don’t know that I would have identified as part of the “Catholic left” before encountering her, but I do now. I often felt like there was no place for Catholics like me, but I didn’t realize what a rich history there already exists for Catholics like me. But I don’t think Dorothy Day herself would have considered herself a member of any political party. She was just Catholic. And I admire that.
Haley: This play focuses on the season in Dorothy Day's life when she was converting to Catholicism. Conversion stories are so difficult to portray! I was thinking of famous literary conversion stories like Brideshead Revisited and in that one, Waugh basically skips the conversion. The reader only knows what precedes it and what comes after. But in The Saint of Staten Island, we're drawn into Dorothy Day's conversion in a more intimate way. And yet, I wouldn't be able to nail it down very well. Perhaps my best description would be that we see how God's love pursues Dorothy, especially through her experience of motherhood, in a way she can't quite explain herself! Tell me about this (very successful, in my opinion) exploration of conversion and how you went about crafting this theme.
Laura: Thank you so much, that’s really kind! I think that Catholics watching this play had a spiritual experience, of sorts, especially those who already knew what would happen to her. Non-Catholics may have felt that there should have been more action or that we need to more explicitly state who Dorothy is/was and why she became so famous. This is something I need to wrestle with as I continue rewriting the play. People who come to the material will all have different experiences in their faith life and with the church, and I think that Dorothy’s story can speak to a lot of people, even if they aren’t moved to become Catholics. It’s a story about having the courage to follow your convictions.
I read THE LONG LONELINESS and her letters very intently and I believe I absorbed a lot of her mental state at the time. She was simply in love with two people at once – Forster, her partner, and God. And that’s a tough love triangle to portray when one of the lovers isn’t onstage!
The tricky part is trying to make a conversion story explicit without making God a character. I got away with having the Virgin Mary appear to Dorothy in a dream, but it’s questionable whether it really was Mary or just a dream – and it’s a completely fictional encounter. I’m not aware that Dorothy ever had a mystical experience like that, but that’s her interior life – we really don’t know for sure.
Haley: Lots of people like to "claim" Dorothy Day for their cause. Instead, your play seems more interested in exploring her as a human being, to be invited in to get to know her as she invites her neighbors into the little house the play is set in. What resources did you use to get to know Dorothy and prepare to portray her as a character?
Laura: I mentioned before that the Catholic left does like to claim Dorothy Day, and yet many conservative church leaders have embraced her as well. I think the left probably focuses on the deeds she did, and the right focuses on her faith. Both faith and works are important to Catholics, however, and I think that the only way to treat Dorothy’s story fairly is to show the whole picture. So yes, I definitely wanted to emphasize her humanity over anything else. Anyone – literally anyone – can become a saint.
There are only slim pieces of information in THE LONG LONELINESS about her neighbors on Staten Island, and still more in the letters. Her granddaughter Kate Hennessy wrote an excellent biography that I also found useful. She also wrote a novel called THE ELEVENTH VIRGIN which I skimmed – it helped me to see what kind of writer she was and the kind of writer she became, especially after having her child.
I wanted to get the voice of young Dorothy right – she was young, romantic, and bohemian, very much a woman of the period. Putting her up on a pedestal, having her talk like you’d think a stately woman in her 70s would talk, or an uber-mystical 14th century saint – that wouldn’t work at all. So reading her early writing was very important.
Once you start hearing the character’s true voice speaking to you, the playwright just listens and takes dictation. It’s really a wild experience, but it’s true. I just listen and the characters tell me what it is they want and what it is they want to say about it. It can take you down some really strange roads, but if you know the voice, it will usually speak truthfully.
Think about when you go to a party, and the conversations you have in the kitchen versus the conversations you have in the living room. Maybe your ex-boyfriend walks in the door in the middle of the party. Maybe you’re anxious about leaving your kid home for the first time and are thinking about the babysitter. Maybe you’re hoping your best friend will show up and are crushed when she doesn’t. These are all conversations that change based on who is in the room. In some of the big party scenes of this play, where everyone is hanging out at Dorothy’s house, it can reveal so much about different characters – who they want to impress, who they are annoyed by, what they won’t say when one person is in the room. These are all motivations and conflicts the playwright is tracking while the scene is playing out.
It was important for me to include these major group scenes with the neighbors because so much of Dorothy’s life living at the Catholic Worker WAS pure chaos – people coming in and out, people who lost their homes and gained them again, people with drinking problems, etc. They were all just figuring it out as they went along. And I think Dorothy was more comfortable in that environment than some, simply because of the life she had lived beforehand. That life was on Staten Island and in the Village.
Haley: As Catholics we're sometimes uncomfortable reflecting on the fact that revered figures like Dorothy Day were human beings who sinned and were flawed. But Dorothy Day's story really can't make sense unless we acknowledge her messiness as well as her holiness. Much of the play takes place before her conversion and does highlight this messiness. Do you think this will make people uncomfortable to see Dorothy Day cohabitating and scenes suggestive of her sexual relationship with Forster? How would you respond to that discomfort?
Laura: I know a lot of people feel uncomfortable reflecting on Dorothy’s life prior to her conversion – including Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. His remarks were printed in The New York Times and I have to say, I found them disappointing. He added a color of shame to this portion of her life that I don’t know that Dorothy shared. She called this period of her life “natural happiness.” She was very fond of the love that she created during this time and she would have married Forster if she could have gotten him to agree. I think we can acknowledge love and the goodness that can emerge from that love, even between two people whose lives may not be entirely conforming to Church teaching – like Dorothy and Forster.
I am thinking of the Pope Francis encyclical on love, and his acknowledgment that a lot of people in the church have messy lives and reflections on who gets to take Communion. Most of us know imperfect Catholics and many of us are imperfect Catholics ourselves, even those of us who consciously strive to follow every single rule and then some. And yet we share our lives and love with those imperfect people anyway. We welcome them in to the church and to our lives.
In general, I don’t know that we should ever write somebody off completely as a lost cause (and if we cannot help them ourselves, we can at least throw up a quick prayer to St. Jude). A person could easily look at Dorothy’s life and say that she was too deep in her sin to ever do any good, or even to become a Catholic. But to do that, to have sneered at her desire to become Catholic and to shut her out, would have been an enormous loss to the Catholic church and to the world.
As a playwright I do also take great care not to be salacious for the sake of being edgy. There is a point and purpose to all the romantic moments between the two characters in this play. I understand that some people may not want to see any kind of suggestion that an unmarried couple has sex, but sex is an important part of Dorothy’s story – she had a baby, and it changed her life! Sex can be part of a story, and not simply something included to be gratuitous. That’s simply not my impulse or philosophy.
Haley: As a storyteller, how do you understand the role of writers in our world and the power of stories? In other words, why do we need stories like this one to be told?
Laura: Writers don’t change the world simply by the act of writing. I know I’ve written a lot of self-indulgent garbage in my life that wouldn’t change anybody’s point of view about anything. I also believe that writing for the sake of changing somebody’s mind is basically propaganda, or at best something politicians do to get you to vote for them.
The power of writing and storytellers lies in our ability to help a reader see the truth of another human being’s experience. It’s as close as any of us usually get to inhabiting the body of another person. I’ve read a lot of memoirs in the past few years that moved me, particularly a book called HEAVY by Kiese Laymon, who wrote about his experience as a Black man growing up in the South and entering the very white world of academia. There is no movie in the world that could tell me the story that he told with such grace and gravity, using just his words. He has not lived a life I recognize or have almost anything in common with, but while I read his story, I felt the truth of his experience he has had in his body in America. It’s a really brave book.
I have not personally lived Dorothy Day’s life. I never lived with my lover or had a child. I have started a Catholic non-profit, so we at last have that in common. But I’ve never owned a house or spent hours in a bar swapping cigarettes with Eugene O’Neill. That said, there is a lot of my own life in her story that rang emotionally true for me, so in that way, this play is an emotional autobiography of me. Many of my plays are.
Writing stories helps me work through the questions that are shaping my real life. And I know that I cannot be the only person in the world asking those questions, so I think me wrestling with this stuff, even through the lens of a fictional character, can help somebody feel seen, feel less alone, and even help them answer a question about their own lives.
I’m really not out to convince anybody to do anything or behave differently. People can take away anything they want from my work and I can’t stop them. I can just share the emotional truth of an experience, and if I’ve done my job right, a story can shift a heart in imperceptible, slow ways that only God sees. Pretty cool, really.
Haley: What impact can good stories have in a dark world?
Laura: I’ll focus on the theatrical aspect of this question, since I could probably write a novel about it and I’ve already said too much.
I have found myself at a loss in the last few years as to how to communicate with people who think very differently than I do. Stories can help bridge that gap. When you’re sitting in a dark theatre, watching a story, we’re all having a shared experience. Whether you are sitting next to a politician or your mom or your kid or your partner, you are sharing that live experience with them. Church is much the same way.
Maybe you don’t walk away with the same ideas about what you saw, and the conversation outside the theater at the bar gets heated, but you shared something with each other, and you were in community – or communion – with other human beings.
When we are isolated at home and on our phones, the community bonds grow weaker and weaker. When we leave our homes and turn off our phones, and share a couple of hours together in the dark, listening to what basically amounts to campfire stories, we’ve got a common ground from which to build.
That’s what stories can do in a dark world.
LAURA PITTENGER is a NYC-based novelist, playwright and director, specializing in dark comedies which challenge the body, heart and soul. Her plays have been published by YouthPLAYS (“Pride and Prejudice Abridged”) and Smith & Kraus (“The Gospel of Huxley” in 105 Ten-Minute Plays for Study and Performance). Her work has been presented at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, where she was a 2019 Playwriting Fellow, as well as at FringeNYC, Project Y, The Playwrights’ Center, The Tank, and KCACTF, among others. Laura was commissioned to write an Ecclesiastes-inspired surrealist play for Spark and Echo Arts and was featured in America Magazine. She is the treasurer of the Catholic Artist Connection, a non-profit organization serving Catholic artists in the New York City metropolitan area, and a member of the Dramatists Guild. She is a graduate of Ball State University. www.laurapittenger.com
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