NOTES ON RED HERRING
By Michael Hollinger
Red Herring is a fable about marriage. I didn't know that when I started. I thought I was writing a comic noir detective story.
As far as I can remember, Red Herring began years ago as an in-class exercise for one of my playwriting classes: "Write a short scene around two characters and a significant set piece." The scene I came up with had this hard-boiled detective interviewing a belligerent landlady about one of her tenants, whose naked legs stuck out of the bathtub before them. I really liked this image, and the comic noir style, and they kept coming back over the years until I was ready to start the play in earnest.
Most of my plays take place in specific periods and specific geographic locations. I like having period and setting become "characters" in the play, rather than making them invisible, as in "Setting: Here; Time: Now." Since my detective play evoked the noir sensibility that burgeoned (at least in film) between the late 1940's and early 1950's, I decided to set my play in that period. Somehow, the title Red Herring came to mind. I thought, "This is such a great title for a detective play, it must have been done before." Happily, I couldn't find any other plays by that title. Since "red" evoked the Red Scares of the McCarthy era and "herring" evoked New England fisheries, I narrowed the period to the early 1950's and the setting to Boston.
In the meantime, I'd run across a book about a recently-discovered spy who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during World War II. I was struck by the young man's misguided idealism (he passed information to the Soviets without payment of any kind) and also by an anecdote wherein another spy told his wife he was a Soviet agent on their honeymoon. This, I thought, would make a great scene.
Since I wanted the McCarthy era, I built my spy story around the development of the hydrogen bomb rather than the atomic bomb. In researching the period, I discovered that the first H-bomb test took place on November 1, 1952, just a few days before the presidential election of Dwight Eisenhower. Perhaps because his two terms in office help define the 50's (in the same way Ronald Reagan's administration helps define the 80's), I liked the idea of ending the play with Ike's election and the news of the successful H-bomb test. Together, those are important icons for the decade of "domestic peace and prosperity" under the shadow of the Cold War arms race.
Exploring New England and its fisheries (I may be the only playwright to have read the riveting 1950 tome A Study of the New England Fishing Industry) led me to artists who have explored this terrain, specifically Herman Melville (with Moby Dick) and Winslow Homer (with his many famous seascapes). It was pure luck that I stumbled on Homer's “The Herring Net” online, and noticed how the subject of the painting could be seen as an apt metaphor for marriage. Since I couldn't imagine anyone in this play being conversant with the paintings of Winslow Homer, I decided to make it part of a billboard for kippers (kind of like "Dutch Masters" cigars appropriated Rembrandt) so the painting could be referred to. The image of a couple in a boat also led to my writing three scenes, one of each central couple in bed.
With these three couples – in their early 20's, mid-30's and late 40's -- I wanted to show three stages of a relationship, with decreasing amounts of naivete and increasing number of "cracks in the plaster" as they grow older. Recognizing one's own brokenness and that of one's partner is, I think, a key notion in the play. Maggie describes herself and Frank as "two ordinary people in an imperfect world who happen to love each other something fierce." When these couples ultimately get together, they do so without romantic illusions, warts intact. Surely my take on this owes a great deal to my parents, both of whom suffered serious betrayals in their first marriages, only to find each other and forge a successful marriage with all its ups and downs. (I treasure the tape recording of their marriage, which was officiated by a justice of the peace in a Virginia police station, my mother sporting a cast on her leg. You don't get much more broken than that.)
My dictionary tells me a fable is "1. a short tale to teach a moral; 2. a story not founded on fact; 3. a story about supernatural or extraordinary persons or incidents, legend; 4. to speak falsely, lie; 5. to describe as if actually so; talk about as if true." I liked all the definitions, because they suggested a dark, colorful, strange, fairy tale world, one that tells the truth by lying. Red Herring shares certain structural elements with both Shakespearean comedies and 1950's musicals, with its leapfrogging scenes that follow two or three different couples until they all converge at the end. (It may be interesting to note that Guys and Dolls is also subtitled "A fable.")
I think I began seriously working on the play in the beginning of 1998. I finished the first draft the day of its first public reading at Philadelphia Theatre Company in November of that year. Many drafts followed, and a number of readings, including a mini-workshop at Berkshire Theatre Festival in September, 1999. When it finally premiered at Arden Theatre Company in January, 2000, the play had dropped from 30 scenes to 25 (two entire scenes were cut the night after our first preview audience). Since my other three full-length plays take place in single settings with a small number of characters, I wanted to do the opposite with this play, exploring instead multiple settings and character doublings. I thought a lot of the fun would come out of watching the same half dozen actors transform themselves to play many parts throughout the evening, so that at curtain call you somehow can't believe there were only six of them.
Working out the five interlocking plots (spy story, murder mystery, and three love stories) just about killed me. I kept moving the scenes around, on note cards, on napkins, until the stories seemed to "leapfrog" correctly. One of the major challenges was trying to reduce the number of quick costume changes actors must make to a minimum. Another was looking for good blackout lines – both comic and dramatic – for over two dozen scenes.
When the play was first done, it was a wonderful production. As it’s been done at other theaters, it’s still a great thrill to see it working in every regard.
