Clyde Edgerton’s recipe for a laugh-out-loud-funny story — a lonely widow, a stray dog and a hungry juvenile delinquent — proved to be just right for a best-selling novel called “Walking Across Egypt.”
Tonight, Salisbury will have its chance to sample the story with a taste of local flavor as Piedmont Players Theatre presents “Egypt” a la resident director Reid Leonard.
When looking for a comedy for PPT’s 2000-2001 season, Leonard and the play reading committee looked back on the success of their production of “Raney”(based on Edgerton’s first book) five years ago and wanted to produce something similar. Leonard suggested “Egypt.”
Edgerton’s story is about 78-year-old Mattie Rigsbee, a widowed but spunky old lady living in rural
Listre, N.C., whose peaceful golden years are stirred up after making the acquaintance of a little stray dog (to which she comments, ‘I have as much business keeping a dog as I have Walking Across Egypt’) and Wesley
Benfield, a “delinquent with a mouth full of foul language and bad teeth.”
In looking for a stage script, Leonard contacted John Justice, who had adapted “Raney”and turned it into a stage play, and talked with him about a technique he’d worked with before, through which the actors, writers and director work on the adaptation together. Justice’s schedule wouldn’t allow him to work with
PPT, but he had enough confidence in Leonard’s adaptation that he encouraged him to “go for it”and put him in touch with Edgerton, who says he’d already heard good things about PPT from its production of “Raney.”
Nearly every Sunday night last summer, Leonard and the cast read the novel and discussed potential problems that could come with putting it on stage. After they’d worked through the story, Leonard wrote two versions of it, the first being the “straight out-and-out story.”
From that, the group learned something, Leonard says. “The characters are hysterical, eccentric and interesting, but the novelist’s voice is what is essential. So when you write just as dialogue — just what the characters say— part of the novel is missing.”
Edgerton’s storytelling perspective of life in the rural South comes growing up in a large family of farmers in the small community Bethesda, outside Durham.
“If you have an agrarian background, which most Southerners do, life was insulated and there was a lot of storytelling and emphasis on life and language,”Edgerton says. “And it was passed down. You didn’t go to college to learn to write about it. You saw and heard and lived it, and in my family, it was playful language. People who have that base in religion, agriculture and music and are now writing are getting rid of that stuff through stories.”
Some of Edgerton’s own life experiences were interpreted in ‘Egypt,’ symbolically and literally.
Edgerton says his own mother, Truma, was the Mattie in his life. Once, when Truma was feeding a dog at her back door and accidentally fell through a chair when she finally sat down, Edgerton thought it was so funny that he wrote a short story about it, which later became the inspiration for one of the most famous scenes in the novel.
Edgerton’s inspiration, and that of other Southern writers, can be so rich and colorful that it’s sometimes the envy of other writers.
“I was eating dinner with (mystery novelist) Lawrence Block, who is from the Northeast, and he said, ‘Where’d you get the idea of the woman in the rocking chair?’ And
Isaid, ‘It happened to my momma.’ He said, ‘That’s the problem with you damn Southern writers. You don’t have to make up anything,’ ” Edgerton fondly remembers.
After the actors, who made many contributions in developing their characters, read both of Leonard’s ‘Egypt’ adaptations, they settled on the one which used the voice of the narrator (Edgerton) interpreted by the characters.
“Clyde’s characters are rich and full, and he creates them with a liveliness that jumps out from the stage,”says Tammie Casper, who plays Mattie’s grown daughter, Elaine, and played the lead role in “Raney.” “Even the hardest-core characters he picks have a warmth about them, a redeeming quality... and Clyde finds a way to bring it out and show it to the world.”
Casper, whose husband, Darryl, plays a minor role that “packs a wallop,” says she’s glad to be in another production based on an Edgerton novel, especially when she feels so close to her character.
“Ithink Elaine is a little harsher then Iam, or at least Ilike to think so,”Casper says. “There is a tiny bit of Elaine in Tammie and a tiny bit of Tammie in Elaine.”
Carole Davis, who plays the “feisty pistol”Mattie, to whom everybody flocks because of her delicious home cooking, is just as real to her role, saying she is as “typically Southern” as Mattie. She and husband Tom have driven from Asheboro nightly for rehearsal with
PPT.
Davis heard about the production when her local art guild planned a trip to Salisbury to tour the historic district.
“Ithought, ‘Iwould love to do that role,’ ” remembers Davis, who has also held lead roles in “Driving Miss Daisy,”“On Golden Pond”and “The Glass Menagerie.” She had read “Egypt”when it was first published in the 1980s. “I not only smiled, but Ilaughed out loud, and you don’t do that with a lot of books when you’re alone,” she says.
Leonard and the cast agree that Edgerton is as pleasing as his novels, which makes it easier to give their best effort to make the play a success.
Casper met Edgerton when the author was at Lenoir-Rhyne College, her alma mater, doing a reading from “Raney” not long after the PPT production. When Edgerton realized Casper had played Raney, he asked her to do him the honor of reading from the novel.
“The only thing you could hope for is that you do the character justice,”she says. “If you see a smile on his face, you know you’ve done the right thing.”
“Walking Across Egypt”was also directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman for release on the silver screen, starring Ellen Burstyn and Jonathan Taylor Thomas, among others, but Edgerton says it didn’t make it that far.
“It’s a whole different feel from the play because it comes from a different motivation,”he says.
Edgerton says the play was “made to preserve the sense of the (Southern) language” and hopes that in this adaptation, the audience will recognize that the characters are very much like the people in their families — very real.
“I was very pleased with the (Piedmont Players)script,” Edgerton says. “It gets at some of the more subtle aspects that I wouldn’t have anticipated would have made it to a play.”
For Piedmont Players, that’s probably the cherry on top.
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