Fresh Ink - Willa Cather is Dying at Illusion Theater

We’re in New York City and in Nebraska, a space that exists in the physical world and in the mind; a crucible of memory, art and reckoning. Willa Cather prepares for an interview with a graduate student, Jackie Robinson has just broken the color line in baseball, spring has sprung, and Willa, as her longtime partner, Edith Lewis wrote, is “never more herself than on the last morning of her life; her spirit was high, her grasp of reality as firm as always.” It’s 1947 and even as such momentous events as the Marshall Plan and the beginnings of the House Un-American Committee stir, Edith and Willa are trying to determine what the day will be. An interview, egg salad or chicken salad for lunch, and a look at Willa’s new pages.

Edith, unsung hero of the partnership, is an editor, and the play is filtered through her sharp eyes, as Willa feels something, unknown and unbidden — a “great wave” — is upon her. When that something becomes a cerebral hemorrhage, the interview begins to morph and change, as characters from fiction become real, as the past intrudes, and as Edith struggles to get the interviewer to understand who she is. This is a play about creative partnership, focusing on the unsung heroes of writers’ lives, those who work with them, unknown and unappreciated. It’s about ghosts and rituals, and love and the questions every artist face: what was sacrificed along the way?