John Austin Connolly's first play was rejected - but then won the coveted David C Horn Prize for Playwriting. He talks to Sara Keating
It would be hard for an aspiring playwright to imagine their first play winning a prestigious international accolade before it had even been produced, but such was the good fortune that greeted John Austin Connolly when his debut play, The Boys From Siam, won the inaugural David C Horn Prize for Playwriting last year.
In his speech at the awards ceremony, Edward Albee, who chose the play as the winner from 508 entries, commended it as "a big sprawling novel of a play . . . unhesitatingly assuming it knows what it's doing (which is almost always) and making us care - really care."
Even established playwrights - perhaps especially those who had entered the competition - would call Connolly the luckiest man alive. Connolly himself, however, uses the word "serendipity", but while providence is certainly a theme that recurs throughout our conversation, there is considerable imagination, skill and determination that must be commended too.
Connolly finds his new-found celebration as an "emerging writer" modestly amusing, but he insists that, having almost 50 years of writing experience behind him, he is certainly not a 'new voice'. "I have been writing since I was 12 years old, and I have never thrown away anything that I have written. In fact, I have rejection slips [ from publishers] going back to the 1970s! What a neck I had!
"I was a psychologist by trade, but in 1984 I told my wife, Margaret, that I wanted to take a year off to write. Despite the fact that we had five small children, she was very supportive, so I borrowed money from the bank and wrote for a year and finished a novel. [ An agency] in New York agreed to take it and it went through the usual, 20, 30, rejections, and at the end of the year we decided that was enough, so I went back to work. But I continued to write."
However, The Boys from Siamis a play that was almost never written at all, a series of unfortunate personal circumstances conspiring to frustrate Connolly's professional and personal ambitions. But having been forced into early retirement by what he calls his "ludicrous medical history", Connolly's several brushes with near-death - three heart attacks, two different cancers, associated neurological problems, the near self-amputation of his leg with a chainsaw - gave him an unexpected drive for success again.
"I'm like the bionic man," he jokes, "a cat with nine lives. But the real thing that came from this horrific history of illness was an alteration in my perception of writing. I decided that I really did want to make this work, so I retired, and writing became my work. I insisted [ to myself] that I'd do it every day. I've always believed that I had a good enough voice to make it as a writer, and I wanted to see what I could achieve."
A SHORT COURSE on writing plays for children with Barnstorm in Kilkenny gave Connolly the inspiration to write for the theatre. "I had done an MA in Screenwriting [ at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology] but I missed the words. There is no room for fine writing in film. I hadn't read a lot of plays before [ the Barnstorm course] but I realised that my writing has a visual aspect to it which suits the theatre, and I liked the [ principle] of 'show, not say'.
"So for the last three years I have focused on playwriting. Before, I would have gone to plays only intermittently, but I started going to the theatre regularly and I now go every fortnight, because I'm still learning the technique." Peter Schaeffer and Brian Friel are two playwrights that he has found particularly inspirational, "but Faith Healeris my favourite play. In most plays the parts where you tend to become most engaged is when characters are reflecting [ in soliloquies], and the pinnacle for every playwright has to be to get to write four monologues for one play."
The Boys From Siamcertainly reveals a sophisticated command of language and form, intense moments of poignant revelation juxtaposed against sharp fast-paced exchanges. More importantly, it probes universal human issues through the extraordinary story of the "original" Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, who toured around America with circuses and freak-shows in the 1800s. However, the initial inspiration for the play was a contemporary, rather than an historical event.
"In April of 2005 there were a set of conjoined twins born in Dublin. They got a lot of publicity, seeing as it's such an unusual thing, and they decided that they'd try and separate them, but unfortunately they both died. It was an amazing and sad story. I started thinking about conjoined twins, and what would happen if one had lived and the other had died. My speciality as a psychologist was trauma, which was what this alerted in my mind, and The Boys From Siamlooks at what happens in the hours after Chang's death, when [ Eng] is waiting to die too.
"The play took me 16 months to write," Connolly says, "and I was happy with it, because I felt that it was the best that I could do. It had come to the stage where it was as honed as it could be. I knew it was the best piece of work that I had ever done, that I had done it to the best of my ability, and I knew that it was a good piece."
BUT THE PLAY'S first contact with the world was one of rejection. "[ I had sent the play forward] for the Bioethics Playwriting Competition (run by Fishamble and the Council of Bioethics earlier this year). I sent in a synopsis and a statement on why I thought it would be relevant, and I was reasonably optimistic, but it was rejected. The day after I received the [ rejection] letter I was in bed when a senior editor at Yale University Press called me and told me that Albee had chosen me as the winner. Luckily I was lying down at the time.
"There were three parts to the prize", Connolly explains, "publication of the play, which will happen next autumn; a staged reading of the play by the Yale Repertory Theatre (which happened under the direction of Liz Diamond in September); and $10,000. We spent the money inviting our five children over for the prize-giving. It was great, because usually when Margaret says 'I've something to tell you about Dad', it is bad news [ about another illness].
"It was so important for us to be able to give them good news. We were like the Irish mafia there on the night."
Striking up a friendship with Albee, who incidentally has just written a play about identical twins (Me, Myself and I, which will premiere at the McCarter Theatre Centre this month), was a bonus. Albee introduced Connolly to his agent at William Morris - "the biggest and most important performance arts agency in the world" - and has been advising him on the revision of the play for publication. A rare first edition of an Albee play, inscribed "To John, from one playwright to another", sits proudly within reach as we talk.
With such acclaim already, the play's premiere production will surely be an anti-climax for the buoyant Connolly, but he is confidently philosophical about his writing future. "I would be disappointed, but not devastated [ if The Boys from Siamnever got produced]. I'm not one to boast, but I know that if this doesn't [ make it to the stage], the next one will. I feel that I've reached a standard."
In fact, Connolly already has two new manuscripts in progress, which he hopes will form a trilogy alongside The Boys from Siamabout "attachment and loss, identity and differentiation, and what makes us who we are." Having been confronted with his own mortality so many times, Connolly is surely an expert on such issues. But there is certainly no denying that he is also an astonishingly lucky man.
