This entry is about how I create characters, so if such things do not interest you, you might want to skip it.

While I was working on my show Jim Fitzmorris Puts Marlin Gusman in a Hurt Locker, I hit upon the idea that Death, sometimes known as Dis, should run for mayor of New Orleans. It struck me that he was doing a better job serving our city than our mayor at the time, and more improtantly, I really wanted to pull out the Death puppet I had bought in Chicago at the end of my show.  That idea of Death as a political candidate carried forward, and after I had performed Lockhart in The Seafarer, I decided to write about a play about just that. It was called The Thanatos Brass Band, and it began my obsession with starting all writing projects with a mythological spine.

So, when I began From A Long Way Off, I decided that I would return to my own roots and steal from Irish Mythology. I went back to my Yeats and plundered the story of Hibernian Giant Finn McCool’s great battle with The Scottish Giant Cuhullin. I loved the idea of a giant not powerful enough to win with brawn and having to fall back on his wits. I began with that premise and began to build a character.

The character needed both a backstory and a current one. I had a couple of threads from the previous five years that I felt fit well with the McCool story. There were three big ones. My friend Sean Mellot and I spent an entire week at my house brainstorming a plot outline for a family that become better people after Katrina than they were before; I had conducted a series of interviews with political players about The Great New Orleans Mayor’s Race of 1977; and I had a collection of wonderful family anecdotes that were waiting a chance to work their way onto a stage. Included among those stories was one about an uncle who, as a child, took a face first dive into a mud puddle on Easter Sunday Morning… wearing a white suit.

I took the basic premise Sean and I designed, and then I turned the character into a vessel for failed mayoral candidate Toni Morrison. Morrison was a man of incredible promise whose own personal demons ultimately undid him before he died at the age of 52. I wanted to imagine a world wherein Morrison had lived long enough to turn his life around.  As the last piece of the character puzzle, I determined that very funny Easter Sunday story my mother had told me would be a crucial device in the backstory.

While the backstory was driven by Irish Mythology, the one in the present day would be deeply Catholic. I have always been fascinated by the parable of The Prodigal Son. I have never ceased to moved by the image of the father racing wildly from the house to greet the son. A tale of unconditional love and forgiveness with an undertone of sibling rivalry felt like powerful stuff worth pursuing. I wanted to set the play in a fictional Catholic parish in Irish Channel and come up with a Saint that embodied the main character. Over a dinner at Mandina’s, my brother John and my father hit upon Saint Columban. This patron saint of bibliophiles, men on motorcycles and women surrounded by wolves would be the heart of the character.

I narcissitically dubbed him Seamus and then attached the name Quincannon. I chose that last name because it is the same as Victor McLaglen from She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, and as you will see from the previous link, that character contains the fighting spirit I wanted to capture in a central character.

It really is Frankenstein Monster writing: a series of disparate pieces brought together and looking for the spark of life that a story would provide. When coupled with the profound impact that Mark Rylance’s turn as Rooster Byron in Jerusalem, I had all the pieces to creates a deeply flawed charismatic figure to become the fulcrum of a drama.

Now, I just needed a story for Seamus to tell.

I sing of the 1970s. Get your powder-blue shirts with cloud patterns and wind up your Showdown Sam Christmas presents. Scuff your knee and don’t run instantly home to clean it. Play unbuckled in the backseat of the deathtrap station wagon, air-conditioned turned off, waiting for the next gas pump to open. Movies are lines to be waited in; albums are camping outside of record stores; cable TV is down the block in the possession of the kid with the pool. One friend told me the sunlight was different in the 70s, and another thinks it is the great, underrated decade of the 20^th Century. Personally, I do remember that the days lingered a bit more, and the movies were better than they have been since… but that is only in retrospect. Besides, television these days, other than the lack of Johnny Carson and Howard Cosell, is better.

Those are some of my lingering memories of my childhood. Most are fading, and I feel like I lose a few more each day. I promise myself that I going to write all that I remember soon… but I have a play or two to finish… The most intense memories I have of that time, and the ones that have inspired the play I am currently working on, are that of the 1977 New Orleans Mayoral Election. I remember it clearer than any election that happened in not only the 70s but also the 80s. It was intense, rough, and put everyone on edge. I think it was the last New Orleans election where anything was really at stake until the racially polarizing 2006 event. I think I remember it so well, because my family was not as deeply involved in it. Don’t misunderstand me, we were involved, but for the Fitzmorris family, the dog was in another hunt.  However, for reasons I will explain, we were not in it so deep that my view was muddled by a blinding allegiance to a particular candidate.

My mom and dad were minor political players. This is not to say that were without juice; after all, they were minor players loved and respected by many major ones. Minor players tend to become crucial in tight elections. In fact, minor players transform into major ones when the stakes are high and the game is close. The election of 1977 was a high stakes, close affair. While the rest of the country was wallowing in stagflation, Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular, was roaring. OPEC chicanery had set off an oil boom in the Gulf South, the newly completed Superdome had made New Orleans a destination for world class events, and the city had escaped the racial conflagration of the late 60s and early 70s due to the inclusive administration of Mayor Moon Landrieu. The city had a friend in reformist Governor Edwin Edwards and was awash in money from Great Society programs that had been re-funded by President Carter. A World’s Fair on the horizon and two professional sports franchises had poised the city to reassert itself into the conversation with Houston and Atlanta as the preeminent Southern City. The election was a doozy then, and given the quality of candidates, it would have been a doozy now. New Orleans was a city worth the fight. It had four major candidates in a city of just under six hundred thousand residents. Each candidate felt they had ferocious claim to the city.

But I am getting ahead of myself. This entry should be about my memories… not what I have been able to reconstruct through research. So, let’s return to them. The first half of my childhood was modest. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was an Assistant DA for Orleans Parish. They had four kids, three boys and a girl, at the time, and we all lived in a small two-bedroom home in Lakeview. My mom and dad had converted the front office of the house into a room for my sister Katey, so, needless to say, space was at a premium. However, we had a generous extended family topped off by two sets of living and vibrant grandparents, therefore, real want was not part of our existence. We might not have kept up with The Joneses, but dinner left you feeling full and none of our shoes had holes in them. Few children experience the blur that I did. I was one of the first wave of thirty-two cousins on my mom’s side. Our lives were focused around St. Dominic Grammar School, and the various parties and get-togethers that our family and the church provided. Lenten fish fries, Knights of Columbus breakfasts, Halloween Penny Parties, and summer softball leagues were all a part of the landscape. Every family member on my mother’s side was in charge of a major holiday, and events like the 4^th of July were all hands on deck affairs that required everyone to do their part.

In short, it was a hectic, sensory overload, and I miss it more with each passing day. Of course, I was the kid who would wander around the events, steal ham sandwiches, and listen to the people talking, gossiping and telling stories. It was always about one of two things: sports or politics. Either way, it was who was up, who was down, or who was making a move. My mom’s dad counted baseball insiders and political ward heelers among his friends. My dad’s cousin, Jimmy Fitzmorris, was the sitting Lieutenant Governor, had lost two contentious elections for mayor, and played a major part in getting The Superdome built. I had a host of aunts and uncles who were also getting involved with local politics. Needless to say, the buzz was constant and intoxicating.

Jimmy Fitzmorris was also considering a run for mayor in early 1977, and civic leaders approached him to give it serious consideration in light of the developing field. For an eight year old, that was exciting. I was looking forward to those parties, those stories. However, Jimmy rented a room at The Fairmont Hotel and announced he would not seek that office. But told his friends to stay tuned, because a gubernatorial announcement would be forthcoming. I would have to wait over a year for that action. But Jimmy’s decision not to run would ignite the most contentious election in New Orleans’ history.

Jimmy Fitzmorris’ decision to set his sights on the governor’s mansion would turn my entire family, on both sides, into free agents and make me privy to more inside information than any eight year old should ever have.  It would effect my life in the classroom, my life in my relatives homes, and even my life on the playground. I would soon find out the cost of having an opinion.

If you have spent a moment around me, you know I have not been happy about post-Katrina dramatic work. With the notable exceptions of a few precious moments from ArtSpot’s Loup Garou and Universe’s Ameriville, I have felt the majority of the work to be clichéd, moralistic, or slavishly formalistic in its effort to “get it right.” In other and less mincing words, it has been full of a sort of bloviating liberal humanism that the late Arthur Miller would have written a well-meaning essay about. Almost to a note, the work has missed three crucial elements of creating a New Orleans landscape: its sense of past, its sense of humor, and its cacophony of scheming life. Memory, laughter, and cacophony. Not only did the hurricane not take any of that away, but I believe it also amplified it. On the other hand, the dramatic work in Katrina’s aftermath presents a morose, quiet meditation in a city where humor is in short supply, no one knows where they came from, and something might have happened once. If that sounds a bit like a Beckett reference, you can make your own inference. Few characters in these visions of New Orleans have any sense of neighborhood history, nor do they have an amusing anecdote that would communicate that knowledge. Granted, it is nowhere near as offensive as the perpetual party held in The Sliver by the River, but it is equally as insidious and, when done with artistic competence, far more destructive.

I can hear the howls already. Jim, have you watched an episode of Treme? This is the moment where you tell me the show is based around a neighborhood with an immense sense of history. Furthermore, the stories of the music drive everything and laughter abounds. I am inclined to agree. So, what is my problem? It has those things to a point. This is what I think is missing: I have no sense what has been lost. I do not see what John Goodman’s college professor misses. I do not perceive a better time that has been swept away in water and wind. Wendell Pierce’s life has not seemingly changed an inch from its previous existence. Do not mistake me; I am not looking for feel good stories. I am searching for something that felt good before disaster chose its own carnival route. I am searching for pain that springs out of something lost. Right now, all we have is a world full of pain where no sense of what it means to miss New Orleans is present. Make that loss more palpable and the wince factor doubles down.

I want my New Orleans back. It is a complicated request, because it forces a debate over whether that is worth having. That is a play. That is a discussion. I do not mean Republican congressman explaining how a little disaster is good for the body/soul politic or how a FEMA check can give someone a fresh start, hopefully in a neighborhood other than mine. I mean something a bit more rigorous. For instance, does a culture that allows people to linger and be five-minutes late for work prevent a first-rate school system from existing? Does a city that improves its funding for the arts do so at the detriment of its three week theatrical explosion called Mardi Gras. Finally, is our racial tension the direct result of the fact that we live in close proximity to one another and would a more gentrified existence cool the temperature but kill the fusion?

These are the ideas my friends and I are going to explore as I begin writing my own Katrina play From A Long Way Off. It tells the story of a political, Irish Channel family fighting to keep open the church they have called their spiritual home for over half a century in the wake of its imminent closing. I will explain my inspirations for this play through the New Orleans’ model I have laid out earlier: memory, laughter, and cacophony.