Donald Margulies: A Play About the Power of Storytelling
For playwright Donald Margulies, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Dinner With Friends, sometimes truth is stranger and more interesting than fiction. The author of plays such as Brooklyn Boy, Sight Unseen, What’s Wrong With This Picture? and The Model Apartment originally sat down in 2006 to write a children’s play for longtime collaborator South Coast Repertory. What he ended up penning was the epically titled Shipwrecked! An Entertainment—The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont As Told by Himself inspired by the real-life story and stories of adventurer and publicly humiliated historical figure Louis de Rougemont. The three-person show, an intentionally old-school return to classical theatrics and story-telling, debuted at South Coast Rep in September 2007 to rave reviews, sailing on to Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theater the following spring and wowing audiences of all ages. Now, with Shipwrecked! finally landing off-Broadway at Primary Stages, Margulies breaks down for Broadway.com the fascinating man who inspired the piece, the tricks for presenting a globe-trotting tale on one tiny stage, and the rave review that meant as much to him as any he’s ever received.
So let me try to track the evolution of Louis de Rougemont and how this play about him came to be.
South Coast Repertory commissioned me to write a play a few years ago that was intended for their Theatre for Young Audiences series. I wrestled with it for a while, but, as sometimes happens, it simply wasn’t working. Then I remembered the story of an historical figure, Louis de Rougemont, described in the book Impostors, which I was reading as research for another project. Around the same time, the James Frey incident occurred, in which Oprah Winfrey had anointed his “memoir” A Million Little Pieces and his story turned out to be fraudulent. I found myself intrigued by the notion of people who make things up, which is arguably what I do for a living.
Louis de Rougemont was a man who claimed to have survived in the outback for 30 years after being shipwrecked. He eventually returned to society, where he told his story of heroics publicly and in print, and became a celebrity—until the story began to unravel. Various anthropologists and oceanographers began to find clues in his text that pointed to fabrication, and slowly his story fell apart until he was basically disgraced. The debunking is one of the things that fascinated me; the tale he told is so captivating that it raises the question, “How significant is it that it was made up when the pleasure of the journey was so powerful?”
I think that’s an interesting question. It was then that, for me, Shipwrecked! became a story about the power of storytelling. It also became a way to celebrate theater, to do what theater does better than spectacle, film or multimillion-dollar musicals: to simply get back to the essence of telling a good story.
Even though the origin of the play was a commission for a theater for young audiences series, it became more sophisticated than a typical children’s play. I decided that I wasn’t going to pander in any way and would simply write a rip-roaring yarn. I wanted to return to a bare stage and literally get back to basics, forcing the designers to use as few props and as little scenery as possible. I wanted to write a play that would invite people who had never seen one into the theater and to give them a sense of the excitement I had when I was a kid at my first Broadway shows.
Once I found the form for the play and decided it would be Louis himself telling us his story, it became a great deal of fun to write, I have to say. I really got to tear loose. The theatricality of it is something I went in determined to explore, though it’s a collaborative piece—it really is dependent on actors and a director and designers. What I’ve done is supply the structure for the story and give all the clues within it about what needs to be dramatized, illustrated and suggested. Part of the fun of it is seeing how so much can be conjured with so little.
The sound effects, for instance, are a return to the golden days of radio. We see how all of these sounds are conjured, right before our eyes. For instance, a tempest, a terrible storm that results in the shipwreck, is created on stage with sound. I have had the pleasure to look around at audiences during these scenes and see that everyone from eight-year olds to 80-year-olds are transported. It’s a joy to watch.
What’s been wonderful about Shipwrecked!, now that I’ve seen a few productions of it, is that it’s succeeding at telling its story. Older people who don’t know what they’re seeing end up returning with their children and grandchildren I don’t mean to suggest that it is for children, but I would say kids over the age of eight or 10 would certainly appreciate the play, on a different level than a more sophisticated theatergoer. The essence of story-telling is universal.
Let me put it this way. I had one of the greatest responses to anything I’ve ever written in response to Shipwrecked! A kid who was about 12 years old came up to me when the play was running in New Haven and he said to me with wonder, “Are you the man who wrote Shipwrecked!?” I said “Yes, I am.” And he said, “That was the best thing I’ve ever seen!” I thought, “OK, I’ve got one. I’ve captured a new theatergoer.” That felt terrific: It was the best review I ever got.
This show is one of those things I’m really glad I wrote. People who know my work say, “Gee, where is this coming from?” Well, for me, it seems like it was always there—I just needed Louis de Rougemont as inspiration.