Of Murder, Morals and the World's First
Vegetarians
By Patrick Tandy
As a behind-the-scenes Special Projects attorney
for the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Williams &
Connolly LLP, Rich Amada doesn’t see much courtroom drama firsthand.
But that hasn’t stopped the playwright
from making his own.
“I stumbled across Mary Surratt’s
story years ago, by accident, while looking up something else in the library,” Amada
explains of the inspiration behind his most recent work, The Judicial
Murder of Mrs. Surratt. “She was tied up in the Lincoln assassination
conspiracy; she was implicated, and she was arrested and tried and holds
the dubious distinction of being the first woman [to be] judicially executed
by the United States of America. Of course, [John Wilkes] Booth gets all
of the publicity as far as the assassination goes, and a lot of people also
know the story of Dr. [Samuel] Mudd. [But] you almost never hear of Mary
Surratt
– the only woman involved – and most people, when I mention her
to them, don’t have any idea who she was.”
Amada, who has authored more than 20 plays in
the 15 years that he has been writing them, spent two years exhaustively
researching the case, including the complete transcript of the trial, in
preparation for his work, which premiered this past July.
“The fact that this woman was the first
woman judicially executed by our government and that I had never heard her
story before made it very intriguing to me,” he admits. “You
know that whenever something is done for the very first time there’s
always a story behind it, and something big has to have occurred for people
to suddenly do something that before they thought unthinkable. Hang a woman?
Unheard of. Most people, even while she was being tried, I’m told,
never dreamed that the government would go so far as to hang her. It had
to be a pretty cataclysmic moment in history.
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If you
have the
compulsion,
you will
do it.
Rich Amada
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“She ran a boarding house on H Street in
Washington,” he continues. “The building is still there; it’s
currently the Wok and Roll Restaurant – [a] Chinese/Japanese restaurant
in Chinatown. But this was her boarding house, and although the inside is
nothing like what it once was, the exterior of the building is pretty much
the way it looked then. It’s within those walls [that] John Wilkes
Booth and the others are said to have conspired and plotted the assassination
of Abraham Lincoln.”
Amada’s choice of venue in which to debut
his dramatization of those events was, therefore, only natural. “It
was only after I had written the play that, like a bolt of lightning out
of the sky, it occurred to me, ‘Hey, the building’s still there –
we can do the play in her old home!’ So that’s what we did this
past July 7. I got a cast together, made arrangements with the restaurant,
and on July 7 – the 140th anniversary of Mary Surratt’s execution – we
performed the play in that building.”
Amada chuckles dryly.
“She returned home after 140 years.”
♦♦♦
Amada drafted his first play in 1989 while working
as a television news reporter in Tucson, Arizona. “I saw an advertisement
for a one-act playwriting competition in Tucson, and the theme of the competition
was ‘The Arizona Story’,” he explains. “That’s
a pretty wide-open theme, but having covered the American Indian reservations
as a beat, I had a good opportunity to talk with a lot of American Indians
about the things that were important to them. I also attended a number of
traditional events both on the reservation and in other places where American
Indians were involved in things.
“I just got this idea for a story about
an American Indian father and son who have an argument about whether to continue
a tribal ritual into the next generation. [Now,] I cannot claim to be a spokesperson
for the American Indian, but the theme, I believe, is one that is common
to everybody, regardless of ancestry: the conflict of old and new, progressive
versus traditional. Those things I understand – those things everybody
understands and can relate to, and so I wrote it from that perspective. I
was fortunate in that it was one of the winners of that playwriting competition.
It received a staged reading and was later fully-produced by that theater
company. So it gave me a great incentive to continue writing plays.”
Since then, Amada has had numerous works translated
to staged readings and full productions. And outside of The Judicial Murder
of Mrs. Surratt, this year has been a particularly busy one for the New
Jersey-native; his 10-minute comedy The World’s First Vegetarians
by Moral Conviction was recently included as one of the nine works to
be staged for a three-week run as part of the New York-based Triangle
Theatre Company’s annual
“Beast Festival”.
“The premise of all of the short plays
in the festival has to be that an animal is at the center of the dramatic
conflict – but the animal can’t appear on stage,” Amada
explains. “[Vegetarians] is a comedy about a Stone Age couple
that has vowed to have a meatless life. However, the man has strayed, and
it results in some domestic squabbles in the cave. It’s not so much
a play about vegetarians as it is about contemporary society’s ability
to have an argument over just about any noble conviction that we make, because
we all take ourselves a bit too seriously sometimes. The comedy of the play
is based on anachronism; it’s all written in contemporary American
speech and slang, even though it’s set in the Stone Age, with actors
wearing skins and wild wigs. It was kind of fun to watch it take place.”
Amada’s own subject-interests are as varied
as the several thousand years between Vegetarians and Surratt,
and he approaches whatever genre strikes his fancy with little reservation.
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It's not
going to be
perfect on
the first draft.
It's not
going to be
perfect on
the tenth draft.
Rich Amada
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[Comedy and drama] both have their pluses and
minuses in terms of difficulty,” he admits. “Comedy is typically
more difficult to write because it has to be funny. If a drama is not working
well, the audience is quiet, and they may just be attentive. If a comedy’s
not working well and the audience is quiet, you do not have a good situation.
With drama, you don’t have to worry about getting laughs, but you do
have to have a situation that your audience will buy into and care about.
It’s something that we talk about quite frequently at the playwright
organizations that I belong to: I, as an audience member watching your play,
don’t start with the same interests and fascinations that you may have,
so you have to get me interested. You have to get me to care about characters.
I have to care about what happens to them, I have to think that there’s
a significant stake in what happens, and carrying that through for the duration
of the play is a real challenge.”
Amada has, in fact, built his life upon seeking
out new challenges. “This is actually my third career,” he says
with regard to his practice of law. “I started in journalism…got
out of that and went into public relations, working for the University of
Arizona, doing communications for them. And while I was there I took advantage
of the tuition waiver that employees get and went to the law school. So I
literally worked my way through law school.”
For his playwriting, Amada draws from all corners
of his experience. “I think it’s a combination of always having
enjoyed creative writing and having been trained as a broadcast journalist
to write for the visuals that appear on the television screen,” he
explains of his chosen medium. “I was writing for the ear – which
is what we’re trained to write for in television, as opposed to the
longer compound sentences that are acceptable for print – so I was
already writing in a dialogue-type fashion in my professional career. And
writing for visuals, and putting that together for something that would appear
onstage where an audience is going to both see and hear the action – it
just seemed like a natural way to go. I find this to be a great outlet for
creativity.”
As for uncharted waters, Amada admits that he’s
mulling a possible stab at horror. In the meantime, his next staged production, Free
Shot, will mark a return to drama.
“Set in the near future, [Free Shot]
takes place in a society where government has determined that victims of
violent crimes who do not get what might be considered ‘real justice’
in the courtroom get a new form of justice: a permit that allows them to kill
one person of their choice,” Amada explains of Free Shot, which
has undergone numerous revisions in the decade or so since the concept first
took root. “The protagonist is a woman who has lost her family due to
senseless gang violence – a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time kind of situation.
She’s morally outraged by the notion of vigilantism being a way to deal
with these things, but she’s pressured by her own parents, who want justice
for the loss of their granddaughter and son-in-law; by her boss, who sees this
as a really good business opportunity to bump off his principal business competition,
since she’s got a license to kill; and by her own government, which is
anxious for her to use the card so they can take it back from her when she’s
finished and [restore] equilibrium.”
The world-premiere, full production of Free
Shot will be staged this January by Theatre
Conspiracy this January in Fort Myers, Florida
♦♦♦
But when exactly does an attorney with
a busy, high-profile firm find the time to write award-winning plays?
“I carve out the time,” Amada says. “I
have to think it out in my head and maybe outline it on paper. And I have
to know what the last line of the play is going to be before I sit down to
type the first line. Once I’ve got it all in my head as to how it’s
going to go, I will usually pick a weekend so I can get a good running start
at it. And I will just write all day, through the whole weekend. And depending
on the length of the play, it may take me a couple of weeks to get through
that first draft, but it goes pretty quickly for me from there. I don’t
try to make it perfect on the first draft. I know that no matter how hard
I try it’s not going to be perfect on the first draft. It’s not
going to be perfect on the tenth draft. So I just plow through and get it
done. Then I take it to groups like the Playwright’s
Forum, where I can have it read before my peers and have them give me
honest critique. ‘Loved your show, babe,’ is wonderful to hear,
and it’s a good ego-stroke, but it doesn’t help you fix the problems
in your play. And the people in these groups know that.
“Every writer I know says exactly the same
thing: you have to be compelled to write. If you have the compulsion, you
will do it. You will make the time. The hardest thing to do is to sit down
and type “Act I” or “Chapter I” – whatever
it is – to just get started.
“Unless you are Neil Simon or David Mamet,
you can’t make a living as a playwright. You could make much more money
working a minimum-wage job at any fast-food restaurant than you can in being
a playwright, but I feel the compulsion to do it.”
