Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theater by Alexis Greene

Author:Alexis Greene [Greene, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, Performing Arts, theater, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781493060320
Google: 3u4ezgEACAAJ
Publisher: Hal Leonard
Published: 2021-11-15T23:50:09.037812+00:00

“I am just now coming up out of the haze of child-birth and starting to think about this project again,” Emily wrote her father in October. “I do feel we must reexamine our notion of justice and our system of administering it if we are to have a future and with little Nick in my arms I care more and more about our future.” She sent a draft of Execution of Justice to Jon Jory at the Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL), and he scheduled a production for the 8th Humana Festival of New American Plays, in spring 1984. Taccone and Eustis would co-direct.

The birth of their son brought Emily and Gerry both happiness and change. For one thing, they decided to move from New York City. The apartment on Sixth Street was essentially one long room, and even before Nicholas was born, Emily often borrowed a friend’s studio when she needed quiet to write and a floor on which to spread out her research or the pages of a script. “If she were in her space, writing, you did not bother her,” said Bamman. Now they needed extra rooms, for Nicholas, and for grandparents and friends who wished to visit, and for Mann when she was writing.

Another reason for leaving the city was Emily’s fear. In a diary entry from 1981, she wrote about having just seen the film Body Heat, and images in that film of a mutilated woman had remained with her. “I realize I am afraid of being murdered,” she wrote. “My terror of violence–of people’s capacity for it & my fear of it happening to me invade my every waking hr.” One day, soon after Nicholas was born, she was walking in the East Village with Nicholas in her arms, and a man, possibly drunk, lunged at them. Emily kicked and kicked the man until he fell, and she rushed home and told Gerry they had to leave. By the end of November they had found a new place to live: a white, three-story clapboard house at 508 South Broadway, in Grandview, New York, a sliver of a village on the western side of the Hudson River. And they were just a forty-minute drive from Manhattan.

There were lingering, apparently inexplicable after-effects of the pregnancy and the Caesarian. Emily experienced what she later described as “a huge memory deficit. I really could not remember big things.” At times, she also suffered relentless spinal pain. The discomfort had not interfered with her attending the first read-through of Execution in January. But at the beginning of February she started rehearsals at Hartford Stage Company for The Value of Names, which Jeffrey Sweet had expanded to a full-length play, and she was in so much pain she could barely walk. Mark Lamos, Hartford’s artistic director, remembered that they set up a bed for her in the rehearsal room. “She was coping,” he said, “she was directing. She just couldn’t get up and run around.” Lamos worried that he might have to take over the staging.

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