An Interview with Jo Ann Tedesco

 

by Luciana Polney

 

Jo Ann Tedesco began her theatrical career as a child performer, first as a dancer, then as an actress, having worked in some-thirty-three Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, as well as in summer stock regionally. She began her career as a playwright in the late 1970s with her own theater company. Her play, Sacraments ran at the Joseph Papp Public Theater and at the Harold Clurman Theater on New York’s Theater Row.

    This interview was conducted in New York City on November 1, 1995 and June 16, 1996.

L.P.     Can you tell me about the genesis of your latest play Perfi­dia?

J.T.    The bare bones came together some fifteen years ago. The story is based upon family incidents relating to a little known historical event in American History, the internment of Italian Americans during WWII. I only knew about it from family stories and hadn’t read anything. After outlining a play, with huge chunks of dialogue, about a year ago I told another writer about it, suggesting he use it for a screenplay. He chose not to and since it was “on the tip of my tongue,” so to speak, I took it out of the infamous writer’s desk drawer. Amazingly, sometimes these things happen serendipitously.

    Immediately after writing it, my friend Emilese Aleandri told me about a West Coast photography exhibit on this esoteric subject and asked if I knew about the internment. I said, “of course I know about it, I have written a short play about it.” And she said the exhibit was heading East.

L.P.     Which of your family members does the story deal with?

J.T.    Three in-laws, a mother and two daughters who visited the interned Americans and the POW’s. The in-laws weren’t at all interested in the historical aspect of the event, so the only information I could get was what they did socially at these gatherings. What little information I had, I put into the play.

L.P.     I am curious about the character of Enzo Benincasa, an illiterate young Italian-American man who is one of the interned in the play. Was his selling of a fascist publication for his second cousin part of the true story?

J.T.    No, that little bit of information I got when Emilese handed me an article. I said, “oh I’ll throw this in along with the DiMaggio information.”

L.P.     Do you often draw from history?

J.T.    I have and I like to. The play Of Penguins and Peacocks is about Eleanora Duse, D’Annunzio, Bernhardt, Stanislavski, Chekhov, and Shaw.

L. P.    How did you start out as a playwright?

J.T.    I’m going to give you one of my favorite anecdotes. George Bernard Shaw was approached by a young man at a party. The young man said, “Mr. Shaw, I am thinking of becoming a writer, what advice can you give to me?” Shaw asked him his age and he answered that he was twenty-three. Shaw then replied that he was sorry, that the young man was already twenty-three years too late, stating that “Writers are born, not made.” I was a voracious reader, I think all writers are. You never saw me with­out a book. Then when I could write, I wrote. My mother took an interest in my efforts. She would type my little fledgling writ­ings. I wrote two novels by the age of nine. Granted they weren’t any more than sixty or seventy pages each, including illustra­tions! I didn’t realize that many writers do this as children. They were done as serials. After my weekly Ballet lesson, I wrote another chapter of “Christina Crystal, Ballet Dancer. . . .” Corny as could be. But the other thing I wrote at nine I revamped. It was so clever and so good I submitted it to William Morris. To this day I think it would make a terrific children’s movie.

L.P.     How did William Morris become interested in your work?

J.T.    They found me at The Public Theater. When “Sacraments” first opened, every big agent in town came to see it. What made me go with them was a female agent who came with two of her other clients, other women playwrights, one of whom was Donna DeMatteo. I thought, “my God, there are other women play­wrights.” I hadn’t even considered that there were any out there. I knew of Julie Bovasso, but she had done things before I was on the scene, so I didn’t know what had happened to her other than she had gone into acting. So when I saw these two writers I thought, “oh how great I have a little coffee clatch of writers here.”

L.P.     Was there any real notion of an Italian-American theater back then?

J.T.    I was on the board of an Italian-American theater organi­zation.

L.P.     What year are we talking about?

J.T.    Late seventies, seventy-eight, seventy-nine.

L.P.     What was it called?

J.T.    The Forum of Italian-American Playwrights. Then it existed almost exclusively on paper because many of the head honchos were inactive. There were a few people who were still keeping it alive, such as Ken Eulo of the Courtyard Playhouse. I think they had a few meetings a year. At that time Louis La Russo had Lampost Reunion and Knockout on Broadway. Leonard Melfi had any number of plays. He was the most prolific of the group. Michael Gazzo had already moved to L.A. Up until that point I didn’t even know many Italian Americans in theater in New York. I met Italian-American actors when I started to cast Sacraments. But when I saw the roster of members at the Forum I said, “let me get these people back.” So I got on the phone and called them. Leonard Melfi came back and brought Louis LaRusso with him. We refer to it as the one brief shining moment “that was known as Camelot.” For about a year it flourished. I was instrumental in getting their first funding.

L.P.     So you knew the only two Italian-American women play­wrights ever produced at that time, Donna DeMatteo and Julie Bovasso?

J.T.    I knew Julie tangentially. We spoke from time to time.

L.P.     How did you become a playwright? Did you have a men­tor?

J.T.    No, and I don’t believe you really have them. You emerge full blown from Zeus’s head. But you must know plays. I grew up in the theater. I started acting at the age of nine, in the Syracuse University Boarshead Children’s Theater. You get to know plays from the inside out. My favorites were many of the classics: Shakespeare, Checkov, and Shaw. I would go on reading binges, finding plays of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. My aunt Mary is a bibliophile and at her home I gravitated toward play anthologies. So I was familiar with many obscure plays. My training ground was reading and acting in plays.

    How I came to write my first play was accidental. At first, I wanted to be a novelist. When my children were little, I co-founded a theater company for the purpose of acting. One night we timed a production and realized it was too short an evening. So I wrote my first play that night, a one-person, one-scene play, about a woman in an insane asylum.

L.P.     What was the name of the play?

J.T.    The title was Interesting. (Laughs.) A kind of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Who’s the true wacko? The character, Sylvia, was a kind of artist looking out at the non-perceptives. After I did that one play and acted in it, I thought, “Oh I really can do this.”

L.P.     You ever doubted it? The nine-year-old double novelist?

J.T.    Playwriting is a far more difficult genre, infinitely more difficult than writing a novel. In a novel you have the luxury of description. In a play, you only have the character’s words to paint the picture. You must create time and place, through dia­logue. It’s an extract, a concentrate, a distillation.

L.P.     I find screen writing easier than play writing.

J.T.    It’s much simpler because you can tell the story visually, like novel writing, even better. You don’t have to spend a para­graph describing a sunset.

L.P.     You say “CUT TO: Sunset.”

J.T.    Right. But theater, that’s where the art of dramatic writing lies, where the craft lies. It looks deceptively simple. People think it’s the same as screen writing. Nay not so!

L.P.     Are you interested in screen writing at this time?

J.T.    Some material I have collected and have worked on lends itself better to the screen than to theater, because I am interested in the complete background when dealing with a particular his­toric period and with more characters than anyone is willing to produce at this time.

L.P.     What makes you continue to write for the theater despite the pitfalls?

J.T.    The highest form of art is still theater. You can still do much of Shakespeare in film, but much of his play is lost to make it palatable for the mass market. I hate to see it cut out. Film is definitely more popular, but people are the poorer for it.

L.P.     What about the role of the writer in the theater?

J.T.    In the theater, the writer reigns supreme. Film is usually a director’s medium, unless the screen writer has a very big name. In the theater is where you separate the men from the boys. Any writer can write a film, but let them write a scene that will hold up on the stage. In the twenties, thirties, forties, screen writers were accomplished playwrights. They refined their art, not their craft. Now we have craftsmen. We might as well have plumbers. Because they will never do anything more than per­functory technical writing. It is not beauty, art, truth, literature. Nothing will replace the word.

L.P.     In what way have your children been influenced by you as a writer?

J.T.    They were exposed to a bohemian life from early child­hood. They saw me write. They went to rehearsals, watch me cast actors, went to openings. At the age of seven, my daughter Jennifer had a part in Sacraments. Sacraments was written so that my children would know about my mother, who died when my son Christopher was eight months old and before my daugh­ter was born. I am relieved that neither of my children are playwrights. It’s a very hard life. Christopher is a newscaster in Syracuse and Jennifer is a marketing executive at Lincoln Center. They are happy with their careers, that is the most important thing.