UpDate - Vol. 14, No. 27, Page 9
April 13, 1995
With NEA grant; Walker to work full-time next year on play

     Jeanne Walker, professor of English, is a playwright on the road,
visiting productions of her works in such diverse locales as London,
Iowa, North Carolina, Utah and, closer to home, outside of
Philadelphia.
     Walker's most recent play, Rowing into Light on Lake Adley, which
she wrote while on leave with a grant from the University's Center for
Advanced Study, won the Virginia Duvall Mann Award at the Charlotte
Repertory Festival in January.
     Performed in Charlotte by equity actors, the play was first read
and then revised for a second staged production, complete with scenery
and props.
     Earlier, it won the Brigham Young Arlene P. Lewis Award at
Brigham Young University where it was performed as well. In that
reading, the actors lined up, each stepping forward to deliver his or
her lines, also an effective way to develop a play, Walker said.
     In its early stages, the play also had a reading at the Hedgerow
Theatre outside Philadelphia.
     During Winter Session, a reading of Rowing into Light on Lake
Adley  was held at the Finborough Theatre in London. Walker was there
as part of the Study Abroad Program, teaching drama on the British
stage, and her students were able to learn firsthand how a play is
developed.
     The focal character is Walker's Aunt Josephine from Parkers
Prairie, Minn., where Walker grew up. Set in the late 19th century,
the plot revolves around Josephine's relationships with two men-one a
drifter who arrives in town on a freight train and another who comes
to town in the first automobile ever to appear in Parkers Prairie.
     "I knew Aunt Josephine when she was older, living with her
sister, Hilda, who was the dutiful daughter, doing what was expected
of her by marrying and having children. Josephine was more
adventurous, had a joie de vivre, with a wonderful sense of humor,"
Walker recalled.
     The play has a underlying theme of lost optimism and a lost sense
of control over one's destiny, reflecting the mood of America, Walker
said.
     Another play, The Chosen Daughter, written in 1993, was recently
produced in Sioux Center, Iowa, and has been published by Encore
Performance Press.
     "Writing a play is an ongoing process with innumerable revisions
before you reach the finished version," Walker said. "People who
haven't tried it may think script writing is a one-shot, inspirational
process, but it is not. A play is an art form in time, and, only
through reading and performance, can you see what works. When a play
is read or acted, such things as the length of an entrance line for an
actor to get from here to there, have to be timed. What works on paper
may not work within the physical confines of a stage."
     Play writing is not a "sometime thing," but a continuous
vocation, according to Walker. "If you don't keep producing, you lose
steam and directors lose interest," she said.
     Walker already is working on a new play, A House Not Made with
Hands, about a group of persons from different ethnic backgrounds,
living in apartments in a building that is about to be repossessed.
     The author of Stories from the National Enquirer, which won the
1990 National Theatre Playwrighting Competition, and four published
collections of poetry, Walker will be writing full time next year with
a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts.
                                                   -Sue Swyers Moncure