| Issue #30, October 20, 2006 |
review: eudora...by jan silver
Actress Sloane Shelton brings the great writer Eudora Welty vividly to life in Jan Buckaloo’s new play Eudora. Alone onstage for 90 minutes, the actress and play are never boring. This dramatization shows why Welty was such a genius- she let people speak for themselves, and people are endlessly fascinating.
Welty found her voice with the success of her first published story, “The Death of the Traveling Salesman” in 1936. The playwright effectively uses Welty’s own words from One Writer’s Beginnings- “I began writing from a distance……then went inside……and received the shock of having touched, for the first time, on my real subject: human relationships.”
Sloane Shelton’s portrayal captures the spirit, humor, acumen and inner strength of this unique writer. She has the soft southern speech inflections and the timing to allow Welty’s words to stand on their own.
Welty was friendly with other well-known Southern writers- Willie Morris, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams- always relating interesting times with them in her essays. She claims they never talked about writing and, the one time she was invited to the writers’ retreat Yaddo by Katherine Anne Porter, “I couldn’t write a thing!”
Welty’s fiction is about “long ago or far ahead but never now” – yet her observations about human beings are eternal. She loved the popular music of her day, especially Fats Waller, and never judged people by their skin color. When civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered in Jackson, right near her home, she wrote a daring essay condemning the deed.
This premiere production of Eudora inaugurates a new series for Bay Street Theatre. Workshop Productions invites the audience to share in the creative process of developing new work for the theater. Not all work will originate at Bay Street Theatre but local playwright Jan Buckaloo happened to be working on Eudora at Bay Street’s playwriting seminars with William Burford and accomplished actress Sloane Shelton took an interest in the project.
As a “workshop production,” Eudora is very polished. Ms. Shelton was sensitively directed by actor/director Austin Pendleton. Bay Street’s talented designer/producer Gary Hygom created an evocative set, including photos from Welty’s life. Tony Melfa did the sound design. Bay Street Theatre hopes to troop this show to university theaters. We look forward to more of Bay Street’s Workshop Productions.Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was a prolific writer of short stories, novels and nonfiction. Many of her stories were first published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Two of her novels are very well-known: The Robber Bridegroom and The Optimist’s Daughter, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
She lived in Jackson, Mississippi, for most of her life and attended college in Mississippi, as well as the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Columbia University. She loved New York City and lived at the Barbizon Hotel for Women while studying at Columbia. She returned to Jackson in 1931 when her father died at age 53. She started out as a social writer for the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
She went on to do public relations work throughout Mississippi for the federal Works Progress Administration during the Depression and began to write fiction in 1936. She was on the staff of The New York Times Book Review in 1944 and traveled throughout western Europe as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1949-50, so she is not provincial and abhorred being labeled a “regional writer.”
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