Earlier this summer, Women Playwrights Series (WPS) Program Director Catherine Rust had the opportunity to talk with Playwright Jeanne Murray Walker about this project and her work as a writer.

Question:. Jeanne, I know that CSC chose you for this project because of a certain quality of writing that you bring to all your work. Can you tell us what things are most important to you when you are developing a play?

Odd as it may sound, whatever any play is about, what's most important is its structure. That's not very glamorous. It's a writer's secret. There's no way any audience will watch a play for ten minutes unless it's structured properly.

This interview wouldn't work as a play, for example. It doesn't have enough conflict. Invite an audience into the theatre, start talking like this, and most people will start fanaticizing about leaving. So my first concern is to find a character an audience will love and to put him/her in danger and to keep ratcheting up the threat until some kind of climax occurs. That kind of structure is the first and minimum requirement for a play.

After that, my goal is to help the audience pass through an experience that is harrowing enough to transform them. Theatre developed out of religious ritual. The goal of that ritual was to change people. I don't like plays that waste time. I don't like polite little plays. I love to make people laugh and I think plays should be entertaining, but I also believe that people should come out of the theatre changed. I don't mean audiences should learn something, such as the natural products of Brazil. I mean I hope to write something that alters them emotionally.

Finally, I remind myself to love all my characters. I want to create a world on stage that's a mirror of the way we really are. That means whatever the plot, no one person can be the fall guy. We're all flawed. We fail. We love imperfectly. We fight. But I don't believe anyone is unmitigated evil. I try to remember that even for the worst character there can be some kind of forgiveness, though it might involve suffering. You could say that my vision is comic, not because I write one-liners-which I'm actually bad at--but because I believe, ultimately, in redemption.

Question:. This has been a long process, developing a play about a character from our own local history . Can you tell us something about how you went about the research for this project?

From the beginning I understood that Centenary was commissioning a play about Tillie rather than about her murder, or the town, for example. So I looked everywhere for Tillie.

Remember the day you introduced me to Centenary College Library and the Hackettstown Historical Society? That was the beginning of my intimate relationship with microfilm machines. Searching for clues to the meaning of Tillie's life and murder, I sat at them for hundreds of hours and read century-old newspapers-both local New Jersey and New York papers and found out their stories contradicted one another. I read Denis Sullivan's excellent book, and at some point Denis generously loaned me the trial transcript, which is 1,500 pages long. I read that several times. I interviewed Sheila Abrams, who pulled the first thread of the story in the late eighties, and who talked with great insight about Tillie and the town. And I spoke to other residents of the town who took me in like one of their own and shared their knowledge. I wandered around the town, spent hours sitting by the river, and visited Tillie's monument. The town meeting was maybe the most important moment in my research. I'm profoundly grateful to everyone who stood that night to tell their stories about Tillie.

I remember the morning last winter when, after all this research, it finally dawned on me, there is no Tillie! She's nothing but a chalk line in a field. This was a catastrophic and amazing moment for me. I suddenly realized that Tillie's murderer not only deprived her of her life, he stole her legacy. Even I, who had been desperately looking for her, couldn't find her. That's real victimization. I understood then that Tillie would either fight that silence or she wouldn't.

Her fight became the driving force of the play. Tillie wants to be known--not as a dead body, as she would if I had chosen to make this a murder mystery, but as an influential, active character. That's why she comes back as a ghost. She wants to be known.

What we actually know about Tillie comes down to a few facts. She was very poor. Her mother left home when she was young, and her father seems not to have been a real presence in her life. Her job at Centenary was a step up from her previous job. The night she was murdered, she carried a red purse and wore leather gloves. I finally realized that if I was going to write a play about Tillie, I would have to re-construct her from these clues. That's what I did. And that is part of the reason why, in spite of all my research, the play is not entirely historical.

Question:. One of my favorite things about this project were the town-hall style meetings, where members of the public contributed their stories to the process. How did these encounters influence the writing process for you?

Those meetings were your idea, and I'm very grateful to you for thinking them up and arranging them. For me they have been a sine qua non. At those meetings I heard real, intelligent, believable people say how and when and where they saw Tillie as a ghost.

What do you do with this kind of information? Of course logic and society don't allow us to take seriously the accounts of people who say they've seen a ghost. So do you say, oh, they're putting me on! Do you say, this is folklore? Well, no, it isn't. It sounded to me like personal experience. I think the people who told their stories at those meetings believed them. And they wanted me to believe them in quite a literal way. And I thought, either they're fools, or they're lying-- or it's true. It took me a long time to figure out how to walk on that knife-edge.

It took a while for me to figure out that if I wrote a play pretending there is a ghost, it would appear either campy or condescending to the audience. On the other hand, it seemed to me if I could believe that Tillie is a presence in the world today--whatever that means--I would be tapping into great power. So that is what I've tried to do. I believe in her. And the play believes. Tillie's ghost, who will be played by an actor, is more real in the play than some of the characters around town, who will not be represented by actors. This line of thought was started by the town hall meetings.

Question:. Two elements which seem to appear frequently in your work are community and ties to history . Can you talk a bit about that?

I was born in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota, a tiny Swedish/German town over by the South Dakota border. It is very cold there and life is communal. We all went to the same high school basketball games in the hot, thundering, brilliantly lit gym, most of us from the time we were born. We all came out in the crisp September weather wearing our new sweaters for the Fall Fair. We sang hymns together in church on Sunday morning and evening. We met one another in the town cafe and exchanged jokes in the hardware store.

Of course community has its drawbacks, too. For example, a few older women presided over clubs in Parkers Prairie and some people were not invited to join. Then there was the day I picked up our phone and heard someone on our party line gossiping about the fact that my parents were moving. I told my mother, expecting her to contradict me, but I found out we were, indeed, moving. My parents had told absolutely no one except their own parents--on the phone. For good or for bad, most things we did, including having secrets, were communal. I was shaped by a multi-generational, communal town.

Maybe as a result of that, I am pretty aware of people outside my own generation. I adore holidays and parties. Not that I'm the life of those parties. I've been known to sit in the corner. I'm a writer, and I guess everyone knows that writers are often solitary and detached. But gatherings, especially across generations, make me happy.

My last book of poetry, Gaining Time, talks about the way we live at the intersection between the past and the future, the way each of us is like a bookmark in the pages of history.

I think Tillie makes that point, too. After all, why are we still talking about Tillie? Because we have to know about our past. In the play a young woman named Margaret searches for Tillie. She is a stand-in for us, I suppose. I don't want to spoil the plot for people who haven't seen it. But the play, Tillie, is driven by the need of the old for the young and the young for the old.

Question: You have said that you want people to remember that TILLIE, the play, is a work of fiction,Inspired by history . How do you think audiences should receive the work?

Well, not as pure history! I've labeled the contents Fiction so audiences won't be confused. The last thing I want to do is to alienate people from Hackettstown, who have made the experience of writing the play so pleasurable for me.

In fact, many of the details in this play are absolutely accurate. Parts of the trial scenes, for example, are lifted straight from the trial transcripts. Most of the historical characters really existed. John White had his dog with him the morning he discovered Tillie's body, for example, but I have no idea whether the dog was named Rags, as he is in the play. Almost all the information I could find about White and the other characters, was "public" rather than interior and, since what drives a play is the desires of its characters, that kind of statistical data doesn't make very good theater. That's why, in the end, I gave in and imagined characters not only for Tillie but for James Titus and a number of other historical figures. I only did that after learning everything I could about them first, then extrapolating from the facts.

For example, in the play Tillie uses ambition to overcome her loneliness. Where did I get this? We know that Tillie moved through a succession of menial dead-end jobs into a place at the Seminary that would allow her to be promoted and move into the middle class. Her choice seems to have been either to manage this climb or to perish. She appears to have been virtually without help from her parents. Her father and mother were separated from one another and neither could prevent her from being buried in a pauper's grave, the final indignity. It is reasonable to infer that they had been unable to do much at all for her from the beginning.

Sometimes there is an actual discrepancy between what happened in history and in the play. For example, I left out of the play the fact that Tillie's mother came to the viewing of her body. I did this because, given the ruthless speed essential to drama, I felt that detail would detract from the essential truth that Tillie was on her own.

What it comes down to is this: when I lied, I did it in the hope of telling a truer truth. It is similar to the way painters create depth in landscapes. They use the trick of perspective on a two dimensional surface to make us imagine a three dimensional world. A trick, yes, but in the service of showing what we really see.

Question: You are also a poet, with 5 books of poetry now in publication. How do you think that aspect of your background has influenced your work?

Themes and images I use on the stage seem to follow about five years after what I've worked out in poems. I am writing and publishing poems in journals all the time. I give a lot of poetry readings. This summer I taught poetry writing workshops for adults in various places around the country, as well as at Oxford and Cambridge. Poetry is the lead car in the race. It's at the center. It is the mother lode. If I don't make time to attend to it, nothing else works very well.

I'm not sure why that is. I don't believe writing poetry is any more difficult than writing for the theatre, but it's more condensed. It's like hieroglyphs. It's nurturing, somehow.
Although it's difficult to find time for both forms, it's also a great pleasure to indulge in both. Poetry is rewardingly solitary while theatre is wonderfully collaborative.

Question: What are some of the most interesting experiences you have had while researching this project?

Well, it was fun to walk into The New York Public Library and call for microfilm and sit and study it beside the other readers who looked interesting and were dressed in assorted odd clothes. I liked imagining who they were. I had researched projects for my PhD at The British Museum Library, but not in New York. I had always wanted to do research there.

The growing understanding Tillie and the town's relationship to the murder was fascinating, too. Have you ever watched photographs being developed? First you spot a bit up in the left-hand corner, say, and then something begins blooming in the middle, and slowly, piece by piece, a picture emerges. That's the way the idea for this play came. The process was intriguing.

Finally, I have been delighted by the way Hackettstown people have taken me in and have supported this project. You and Carl had the idea that we should try creating theatre from the bottom up-that is, instead of always imposing scripts from the outside, we should try telling one of the town's stories. People from the town have responded with wholehearted enthusiasm and practical help.Maybe that's particularly exciting to me because I love small towns.

Question: Words of wisdom for other aspiring writers?

First, write. Don't let writers' conferences or articles about writing take the place of writing. Write. When ideas occur to you, jot them down on an envelope or whatever you've got. Believe in them. Look at them from all different angles. Take that awful step of facing the blank white page on the word processor. Hack out a first draft. Even if you know it's not great, keep going.

Secondly, copy the file, rename it, save it, and rewrite. Even the greatest writers rarely get a perfect first draft. Hammer away at the thing until it's better. Don't give up. Leave time between drafts so you can come back to the work and look at it with fresh eyes. I wrote over twenty separate drafts of Tillie.

Third, read. Read constantly. Read the best work you can find in whatever form you write in. Pay attention to the structure of what you read.

Fourth, find good readers to comment on your work. Find a workshop group if you can. Take their comments seriously.

Finally, don't give up. Writing can be slow and it will remind you every day that you're not perfect. But if you keep at it, you might write something wonderful.