THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 12, 1994 TAG: 9410120056
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 168 lines
For more than a decade, Virginia Beach playwright Deborah Pryor has been watching characters arise from some subterranean river in her psyche.
To Pryor, an acclaimed writer whose work is produced at top regional theaters, it's no different than shaking hands with a shoemaker. Or a serial killer. Or a real live ghost.
Lately, something else started rearing up from the swamp-washed cellar of her mind.
She was walking in her neighborhood - the suburban, middle-class community of Thoroughgood, where she lives with her parents and writes most days in a cozy attic room.
``And I heard this song. It sounded real spooky, and it kept going through my head,'' said Pryor, seated in her attic office, surrounded by scripts, books and snapshots of family members and favorite horror film actors.
Her blue eyes were wide with amazement, as if describing something wild outside of herself. ``I remember writing it down and saving it, not really knowing what to do with it.''
Months later, Pryor's song-from-nowhere became ``No One Knows'' - the first of 11 tunes she wrote for ``Cock Lane,'' a musical comedy ghost story opening Thursday at Old Dominion University's Stables Theater.
No one knows what I can do.
Little, helpless, pitiful me -!
They're in for a surprise or two.
Like blackbirds on a telephone wire, Pryor's melodic line is strung with spooks.
Pryor may be a ghost story writer, but she is in no way scary. At age 38, her face is as fresh and open as a child's. She has a graduate degree in playwrighting from the University of Iowa and has won top awards for her craft. Her works have been presented at major playhouses in Atlanta, New York and Louisville, Ky.
Yet she remains sweet, polite, even prone to giggling.
``Yes, sir!'' she called out rigorously when her father, Donald, a retired physician who once headed DePaul Hospital's emergency room, told her a guest had arrived. From the kitchen came the aroma of cinnamon bread baked by her mother, Barbara, a former teacher.
Pryor's style is unpretentious. With black jeans, she wore a big black T-shirt that read ``Planet Fred'' and heart-shaped earrings. Her old red pickup truck, its camper shell decorated with lace curtains, was parked outside. Her only bumper sticker was one she had specially made: ``Dwight, Baby'' in homage to early horror movie actor Dwight Frye.
In 1988, Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., one of the nation's most important regional theaters, commissioned a play by Pryor about Frye. It frustrates Pryor that the play still hasn't arrived, so to speak.
Fortunately, ``Cock Lane'' has been presenting itself on schedule.
Pryor based ``Cock Lane'' on a true account from 1762 about an English girl, Lizzie Parsons, widely believed to be in contact with a ghost called Scratching Fanny.
As it turned out, the girl and her father had concocted the hoax to discredit her father's tenant, to whom he owed money. The girl was pretending to conjure the tenant's dead sister; through Lizzie, the ghost claimed the brother had killed her.
Lizzie kept wooden blocks attached to her knees, so she could make spooky knocking and scratching noises when visitors were present. When the scam was revealed, believers felt deflated.
``I read that story again and again,'' Pryor said. ``But I thought, it's much more fun if it's true.''
So Pryor bent the story to her ends. She kept the girl's name and titled the play after Lizzie's street. Scratching Fanny became Scratching Annie, for obvious reasons.
Then she dipped into her secret source - her insistently imaginative unconscious mind - for the rest of it.
Just like she always does. Open up that vein and connect with some story out there tromping around like a ghost horse with no rider.
Off she runs - Deborah Pryor writing on the open planes.
Thoughts of danger got her started on ``Cock Lane.''
Smallbeer Theater in Washington, D.C., once commissioned her to write a play concerning a mother. She came up with ``Mud Flap Goddess,'' about a serial killer and his mom, who once resembled those curvaceous sexpots drawn on the backs of truck tire mud flaps.
Last year, Smallbeer gave Pryor another theme - danger.
``And I had had this idea about `Cock Lane' for a long time. Songs were beginning to come to it. And I had never written a musical before.
``So I thought, `That is just about the most dangerous thing I could do.'
``I don't know what possessed me. But I thought, well, if you hear songs with the story, they must belong there. So just believe in that.''
``I'm learning as I go. I'm learning about working with singers,'' she said. ``And how the lyrics and the sound of the music just fills the character. It isn't something just stuck in because you want a song there.''
Pryor wrote lyrics and picked out the melodies on piano, then taped herself singing for the show's musical director, June Cooper, who devised arrangements.
``I heard the music for the first time (last) Wednesday night,'' Pryor said. ``It was really exciting. I just hacked it out. But June has built it. She has created a lot more music out of it.''
Cock Lane'' is Pryor's most comic piece to date.
Usually her plays are filled with sex, murder and the macabre; they can be as horrific as her dad's emergency room. A man keeps hacked-off hands in his freezer. A girl chops her sister to bits.
No writer of polite parlor pieces, Pryor is more likely to set a play in her childhood haunt - the Great Dismal Swamp, where she fished with her dad and where her Uncle John drowned.
``You can get lost in a swamp,'' said Pryor, who takes actors and directors to Seashore State Park in Virginia Beach when she wants to give them a feel for the Dismal. ``A swamp is twisty and curvy and mysterious. And apparently chaotic.
``Something in me knows that the swamp is the way things are.''
And then there's ``Cock Lane,'' about a 12-year-old girl who calls forth a ghost, who haunts the family until Lizzie deals with her directly.
At the end of August, Pryor committed to completing the piece on deadline. Only half the show was written.
The director, Erlene Hendrix, head of ODU's theater department, ``was very courageous to take this on. I mean, I was glad she believed in me. But it proved hard.''
Given Pryor's intuitive method, it was a big risk. ``I would spend all day at the computer. And I would get a scene as far as it would go. I'd like squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. But the scene was taking as long as it was taking.''
In nearly two decades of play-wrighting, Pryor has learned her lesson well. Early on, she practically graphed out her plays. Now, if she feels herself getting tense and trying to control it, ``I stop and do the scariest thing: Follow the story and characters wherever they go.
``Trust them. They know what they're doing. They know what their story is.
``It seems as if the story exists in its entirety somewhere in your mind. The process of writing is just finding it.''
As ``Cock Lane'' was presented to her, she'd tell it to the cast, even before the dialogue was written. ``Then I'd write a scene and bring it in for rehearsal. Bring in a song. And I'd do the same the next night. So they got it piecemeal until it was finally done.''
All in all, ``this was a real stepping-over-the-edge type thing for me.''
Cock Lane'' is ``me writing the play I wanted to see when I was 10.''
As a child, Pryor's parents took her to theater. ``But it was all smarmy Rumpelstiltskin, really shallow stuff. And I loved theater. The make-believe and the theatricality. But the stories were so blah and sugar-coated.''
Make no mistake, Pryor wrote this show for adults. But she hopes children will see it, too.
``Cock Lane'' is about growing up. Lizzie's journey involves taking a hard look at difficult and scary feelings stuffed deep inside her. That's what Scratching Annie represents.
At 12, Lizzie doesn't want to wear dresses and be courted by boys and go to grown-up parties. She feels safer in her room with her toys.
``It's the feeling that making a big change is like dying. It's as scary as facing that. You have to believe it really won't mean death,'' Pryor said.
As Scratching Annie sings to Lizzie in the song ``Fly Away'':
A seed falls not to death
But rises green and shining.
Pryor, too, senses changes in the wind. After living in her family's home for more than a decade, she is actively seeking a job so she can flee the nest.
As a rule, even successful playwrights like Pryor don't make enough to live on. She collects a modest salary from contests, awards and royalties. So she is trying for teaching positions and sales of her screenplays. She has applied to film schools.
``Cock Lane,'' she said, ``is partly about my own struggle to go forth and not be afraid of the world.'' ILLUSTRATION: JOSEPH JOHN KOTLOWSKI/Staff color photos
Playwright Deborah Pryor, creator of the musical comedy ghost story
``Cock Lane,'' feels at home among the goblins at the Haunted Fun
House in Virginia Beach.
Christa Jones, rear, and Cortney Morse rehearse a scene in ``Cock
Lane,'' which premieres at 8 Thursday night at Old Dominion
University's Stables Theater in Norfolk.
by CNB