Interview with Neal Bell

JODY MCAULIFFE What got you interested in theater in the first place?

NEAL BELL I guess it was seeing theater when I was a kid. I grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, and Norfolk had a vigorous little theater movement that grew out of the Federal Theater Project in the thirties when the Federal Theater was founding small regional theaters all over the country. When I was six years old I saw a production of Cinderella and was trying to figure out how they could possibly do live on stage what I had seen in the animated version, and was prepared to be completely bored out of my mind, then discovered through the magic of theater—somehow or other, just by using my imagination—that all the things that seemed so easy to do in the animated version they did on stage. That was pretty much it. I started doing plays in my backyard. Although I don’t remember any of this, I’ve been told this by my aunt, my one surviving relative. My little cousin and I used to put on plays in my backyard by using a sheet as a curtain.

Very Brechtian.

Oh, yeah, I’m still doing it. It’s still pretty much the level of the stagecraft.

Well, your work relies very much on the audience’s imagination.

I think I’ve never lost that.

It’s a good thing not to lose.

Well, it’s one of the interesting things about the amateur theater movement in this country. Because they didn’t have the resources of the supposed cosmopolitan centers, they were able to challenge and stretch the audience’s imagination just because they had to, not because they had an aesthetic plan. It just worked out that way.

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen On the Bum, but there’s that spirit in that, too, isn’t there?

I think On the Bum is my tribute, in some ways.

What was your first play?

My first play was an outrageously direct rip-off of The Glass Menagerie substituting my family for Tennessee Williams’s family. Which was in response to an eleventh-grade English classroom assignment. And then the winner (it was a contest) was to have his play read out loud in class. And it turned out that I won, and the play that I wrote was read out loud. Everybody recognized the thinly disguised versions of my family as my family, much to my family’s horror.

What kind of theater attracted you—clearly Williams?

Well, I loved The Glass Menagerie, which we had studied in high school. I remember when I was older than the Cinderella stage, one of the plays that knocked me out in high school was Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, which they did in a theater in the park in Norfolk. I was always afraid to go back to that play because I have no idea whether it’s as good as it seemed to me at the time.

He has a magical touch—very imaginative, very poetic.

I found this completely thrilling, challenging. The other thing that grabbed me was musicals.

Really? Which ones?

It was a Little Theater production of Wonderful Town, the Bernstein. I don’t think I’d ever seen a musical before, it seemed like a whole new world was opening up. I’d never seen that kind of explosion of energy and excitement. When the cast started conga-ing down the aisle—

You were lost—

I was gone. I was so thrilled that I used to have dreams. I didn’t know that there was a movie version of it. In fact, I thought there wasn’t, but I used to wish that there was a movie version of it so that I could see it over and over again.

What kinds of works or artists have influenced you as a writer?

That’s an enormous question...