Play Background
The two main characters in Bird of Passage are writers. Larry, is loosely based on Lawrence S. Hall, in whose home on Orr’s Island, Maine, the play takes place. Hall is the prize-winning author of “The Ledge.”
Ginny, a struggling young writer, rents Hall’s house. Some (but not all) of what happens to Ginny in Bird of Passage happened to me when I rented Hall’s house the winter after he died.
The real estate agent warned me that Hall’s ghost was rumored to be on the premises. Neighbors heard doors slamming, she said, and a former tenant had seen him at his desk typing. I never saw Hall’s ghost, but I definitely heard his footsteps and felt his presence, which was not threatening or unkind. I came to call him Larry. Larry’s footfall – on the stairs after I’d gone to bed — was steady and unhurried. When I mentioned to a visitor that he was known to be cantankerous, the lights went out. When I added, “but he was an exquisite writer,” the lights came on. I never heard a door slam. On the contrary, I would find doors I knew I’d shut wide open in the morning. Larry opened the door to my becoming a playwright.
Larry is not a portrait of Lawrence S. Hall. I made no effort to re-create him as the person he was. I focused on his writing of “The Ledge” (1959) for which he won the O. Henry Prize in 1960. Larry’s household, his dusty bar, his love of sailing, his pipe smoking, his star guide and navigational charts, and what I remember learning about him from all the objects in his house, helped me imagine the set and build his character. The wood stove, the snow, the sea, the cleaning lady who reassured me (“He’ll like you. You shoot from the hip. Just pour him a Vodka”), the real estate agent, my discomfort that I was writing at the desk of a famous writer — were all borrowed from that difficult winter in my life.
At some point, I learned Larry had based “The Ledge” on a local tragedy. (see Resources.) A few days after Christmas 1956, a Harpswell fisherman, Buster Estes, his son Steven and nephew Harry, went duck hunting on a ledge two miles south of Larry’s house. They never came back. In “The Ledge,” Larry imagined the harrowing final moments before they drowned. That imagining turned into a short story at the desk where I was writing. I imagined Larry looking out the same window at the same field and the sea beyond.
Fifteen years later, when I began writing about that winter in Larry’s house, the characters in “The Ledge” came forward. Steven, the fisherman’s son, was not in the early drafts, but one day he came into my study; I could feel his tenacity, a compelling “pay attention to me.” Steven became a character until I realized he was tipping the play sideways. Deleting Steven’s character felt wrong. (I still regret it.) Steven survives as Larry’s obsession and to some extent mine. Perhaps Steven deserves his own play.
As I began Bird of Passage, I contacted Larry’s children who generously gave me permission to write about their father. I also contacted the only surviving relative of the Estes’ family. Lou Ward, Steven’s first cousin, was living in Harpswell. I learned from Lou that Steven never had a tombstone (his body was never found). To thank Lou Ward for letting me write about his family, my husband and I bought Steven a proper stone which is now beside his father’s in the West Harpswell Cemetery. Lou sadly died on May 18, 2019.
When I lived in Larry’s house, I was writing about feeling dislocated and about the stars which were steadfast and comforting to stare at night after night. The working title was, “Polaris.” I scribbled a note on the first page: “This is not a story; it’s a play.” Fifteen years later I found “Polaris” and saw my scribbled note. Why did I feel it was a play? Nothing much happened in that cold house. Or did it?
The title, “Bird of Passage” is what my steward on the QE2 said when I asked how long she’d worked for Cunard. “Eighteen years,” she said, “bird of passage.” When you book an ocean crossing, you book a passage. It’s a beautiful word — passage. A passage is a place you go through to get somewhere else. The house on Orr’s Island was a passageway for me, as it is for all four characters in my play.
During the early writing, my cousin’s son was brutally murdered. He was older than Steven, but still a young man. Jim was a painter. He particularly loved to paint stars and planets. Maybe, I thought, Jim is still painting his stars. Maybe, when I heard Larry’s footsteps on the stairs, he was going up to his study to write about Steven. I was intrigued by the idea that when we die we continue doing what we care about most.
The opposite of death is not life. The opposite of death is creation. Making something out of nothing.