2006 Tony Awards Q&A: Marsha Norman

Playwright Marsha Norman is nominated for Best Book for her work on The Color Purple. Previously, she won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize, Blackburn Prize and the Drama Desk Award for 'night, Mother. She also won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for her book of the Broadway musical, The Secret Garden. Her other award-winning plays include Getting Out, Third and Oak: The Laundromat, The Pool Hall, Trudy Blue and Last Dance.

 

Congratulations on your nomination, which certainly isn't your first time going through awards season…

It's fabulous to be on the road again, because it's a fabulous, fabulous road. It's amazing how joyous of a road it is, especially with this core group of people. I have to say that I wish Gary Griffin was here today, as he's the one that held this show together – not me, not them, not the cast, but it was Gary Griffin.

Why was that?

It was a really rough, tough process, and the way he directs with such grace, and is so inspiring that got us through it. I'm sure that there will be a time for him down the line and I hope that I get to write it – whatever that show is. It's unfortunate that people do get left off of this list, but he's amazing – that's my speech.

Was it a challenge for you as a playwright to bring this show to the stage?

Well, I am a playwright, but I'm also a creature of musical theatre. I grew up playing the piano and got myself through college on a music scholarship so musicals were where I always wanted to be.

What a playwright does for you is to help the sequence, and you have the machinery of the play so that the thing will run right. That's what's critical about musicals because they can't just go, and stop and have a song, and go and stop and have another song. – it has to have great mood, and it has to have sweep.

As a playwright that's what you know how to do, and that's what you're trained to do.

So how did you approach working on The Color Purple?

In the case of The Color Purple, we had the book which I loved from moment one. When I started working on it, I could see what we needed. I didn't need to be faithful to the book, I needed to give people another experience of the book that was a faithful experience

And how did you do that?

I had to find a way to have the moments where we needed to sing, and the moments that shouldn't. How do we keep for example Nettie, who disappears in scene three, in people's minds so that when she's comes back at the end the reunion scene works. She has to be in people's minds for that to work, and it does work because people cry in the end for this character that they haven't seen since scene 3, 2 hours ago. That's a trick, and that's what I knew coming in that I had to do… I had to solve this problem by keeping her in her mind and dropping her in, making references to her and making sure that she didn't disappear. Also, the book can take you to Africa. If you're reading the book, you can spend a couple of nights, reading about Africa, which is nice, but in the musical you can't just stop and go to Africa for a while, and then come back to Georgia and pick up where you left off. So you have to think of a way to make Africa pay off, and the actual story that we're telling like Georgia's march to freedom – what does Africa have to do with that?

Aside from The Color Purple, you also have Princesses in development at Good Speed?

It's in rehearsal today… Gary is directing that, and we just need a new title, we can't call it Princesses. We have to call it something else, because it doesn't sound like anything. We can't call it Caraboo, because it sounds like a disease or an animal. Who wants to see anything with the title of Princesses? So I don't know what we're thinking, but we'll see. I think that it's really funny, and the music is out of this world.

Did Oprah have any input on the book after seeing the show?

Oprah did ask us – there was where one line where one of the children sassed the old mistress right before the picnic and Oprah said the kid wouldn't do that, take that out. So, we took that out. How great is she though to bring that audience in and talk about it on the show. We're grateful.

You've received many awards in the past, do you have a special spot for them at home?

They're all scattered about in my library, fairly randomly… The Pulitzer though is on top of the "H" row and when people ask why and I say that's because I pass it going to bed! Whatever the day has been like, I say that I still have that at least!