Adapted from the novel by Booth Tarkington, Seventeen is set in midwestern America in the early 1900s. William Silvanus Baxter is seventeen long years of age, and in love with the baby-talking Lola Pratt. His endeavors to court her are thwarted by the existence of other suitors, his overly-frank little sister, and his woes over not having a proper evening suit. A mix of dry humour and tenderness.

October 21, 22, 23, 28, & 29, 2011
Fridays & Saturdays | 8 PM
Sunday | 2 PM

Ayisha Synnestvedt, who adapted the play, describes herself as “a big Tarkington fan” who’d like to see a resurgence in Tarkington’s popularity–very much my own motivation for adapting Beasley’s Christmas Party a few years ago.  She describes her adaptation of Seventeen as “very faithful to the book, with a few amputations for length and PCness that don’t take away from the spirit of it.”

If you’re interested in taking a look at Synnestvedt’s adaptation, you can look her up on Facebook, or I can put you in touch with her.

After a successful off-Broadway premiere and run two years ago, and in the wake of successful remounting in other markets last year, the play will make its debut this coming Christmas… in my very own back yard.  And I even know some of these Taproot guys!

Here’s the press release from Broadway World:

Taproot Theatre brings Christmas cheer and old-fashioned Americana to the stage this holiday season with Beasley’s Christmas Party. The charming 1909 novel from Booth Tarkington was adapted for the stage by C.W. Munger. Beasley’s Christmas Party opens on November 25 and runs through December 30, with low-price previews on November 18 & 19, plus a pay-what-you-can performance on November 23.

A holiday classic reborn! When a curious journalist moves to a small Midwestern town in 1909, he’s captivated by his unusual next door neighbor, gubernatorial candidate David Beasley. Is Beasley crazy or does he just have more imaginary friends than we can count? Full of hope and heart, this holiday tale will charm your whole family with its surprising twists.

Tickets go on sale to the public on October 4; 2011 subscribers may preorder their tickets with their 2012 subscription renewal.

Just call me “Chopped Liver.”

Please join us for a black-tie Opening Night Event as we raise the curtain at the Tarkington Theater and celebrate the completion of the Center for the Performing Arts campus. The evening begins with a red-carpet arrival and cocktail reception at the Palladium. Next, five-time Grammy nominee and Artistic Director Michael Feinstein performs with Tony award-winning Broadway and TV star David Hyde Pierce. Following the performance, enjoy the Post-Show Wrap Party, featuring gourmet food stations, dessert buffets, cocktails, live music, dancing and more!

Ticket prices range from a single-seat “Bronze Package,” at $150, which includes “show, post-show wrap party, and perimeter seat locations in the Tarkington for the Opening Night show,” all the way up to a 12-ticket $10,000 “Founder’s Package.”

In my Google news alert for “Booth Tarkington” came this amazing tweet a while back: “I’m at Booth Tarkington Rest Area Westbound (Mile Marker 146 Indiana East–West Toll Road, IN-120, Fremont).”  The Tweet referenced a foursquare meetup.

Okay.  So that’s weird enough.  But this is where my own weirdness set in.  From foursquare I went to satellite maps of I-80/I-90 near Fremont in Indiana.  The Rest Area is indicated by the cursor location, middle right.

Next is a closeup of what the rest area configuration looks like.  At this level, you can see a McDonald’s and two Mobil stations labeled.

So I zoomed in even closer, wondering if I could spy any details that might be a Booth Tarkington memorial.  See that green patch there, with a walkway out from the office building?  Might that be a memorial?

So then I went to Google street view for the answer:

Is this sick, or what?

The first play I developed for motivity was an adaptation of Tarkington’s Beasley’s Christmas Party, which was subsequently also adapted as a short off-Broadway play by the Keen Company.  (Another group also independently developed a musical.) We had a single staged reading of my own adaptation before the idea of Motivity was scrapped as well.

Another play I was looking at, based on a description in James Woodress’ biography of Tarkington, was The Wren–about the relationship between an aging sea captain and his daughter.  It was mounted on Broadway in 1922, written by Tarkington expressly for Helen Hayes, but flopped.  Tarkington took the play’s failure very hard.

But look as I might, I couldn’t find a copy anywhere.  It was as if the play never existed, though Tarkington’s bibliography did state that it was published by Samuel French (Russo and Sullivan, p.64).

Last year, thanks to the inevitability of technology and the inexorable drive of the free market, The Wren is now available in facsimile edition.  Who knows why, but someone finally got the notion that putting this public-domain work back in print would be a great idea.  And who knows?  Maybe it is.  As it was published in 1922 and its copyright was never renewed, it’s in anyone’s purview to see what the market will bear.  But if you want to read these editions, they will still set you back $20.00 or more after shipping… unless you simply download a free copy from one of any number of “Open Library” sources.

For a serious collector, though, like me, simply reading it will not be enough.  I finally managed to track down a copy of the original 1922 Samuel French edition on ABE Books, and am anxiously awaiting its arrival.

Here’s the description from Woodress:

Laid in a Maine summer boarding house, The Wren dramatizes a low-keyed contest between Seeby Olds, the quiet daughter of an invalided sea captain, and Clara Frazee, a neurotic city boarder, for the affections of Roddy, a young artist guest … and in the last two acts the romance between the Maine girl and the painter blossoms with minor complications and a minimum of action.  When the Boston Transcript reviewer called the play an exquisite miniature with “some excellent subtleties in character and dialect,” Tarkington replied that he intended it to be a little play and added: “it’s taken me 30 years to learn how to make ‘em little.”

Leslie Howard was brought over from England to play Roddy.  The play opened in Boston, but closed in New York after only three weeks.

He is beginning work on a book tentatively titled “In a Dark Time: American literature and culture in the 1940s.”

“I’m working on a book on American literature and culture in the 1940s, which is a remarkably neglected period in American literary history despite the fact that it was really transformational and a period of major achievements,” he said.  The fellowship allows Hutchinson to not teach for a year so he is able to focus on his interests and writing.

“I’m interested in the rise of the prestige and popularity of modernism and of American literature itself, and in how the literature tried to give shape to experience in the midst of epochal events,” Hutchinson said.

The award is ironic, given that Hutchinson’s I.U. post is named after Tarkington, a noted American author left in the dust by the movement which Hutchinson proposes to study.

Directed by SC senior Lenita Krejci, a theater-education major from Enid, Okla., the play is a project for her Directing II class. Southwestern’s theater-education program provides the opportunity for theater-education majors to build their skills in directing by directing a one-act in the second semester.

“The Trysting Place” is a comedy about two generations of a family and the secret relationships they pursue while trying to keep their proper upper-class appearances. The cast includes Winfield theater majors Jessica Trout, freshman, as Mrs. Fanny Briggs, and John Crosser, senior, as the mysterious voice, along with music-major Christian Pressley, freshman, as Mr. Lancelot Briggs. It also includes senior Kevin Mnich of Bartlesville, Okla., as Mr. Henry Ingoldsby, sophomore Aaron Pfingsten of Hugoton as Rupert, along with freshmen Julia Faust of Dallas and Stephanie Wheeler of Wichita in the roles of Miss Jessie Briggs and Mrs. Curtis.
…

The sets and lighting for the two one-acts were designed by students of the SC spring semester class, Design for the Stage. Prater and Lashae Bacon designed lights and sets for “The Trysting Place” and Justin Tinker designed sets and lights for “Riders to the Sea.” Cooper Hart, who designed sets for the recent production of “Almost, Maine,” assisted with lighting design for the one-acts.

Publicity design for both productions was by Lael Porter, publicity management by Julz Faust, freshman, and house management by Nikki Prokopis, senior.

“The Trysting Place” technical management and crews are led by Marie Hart, sophomore, as stage manager. Stephanie Wheeler, freshman, is in charge of costumes.

1, he was normal, and 2, his interest in the facts, mores, and actual building of America in his time suggests a level of preoccupation that suggests…he actually loved it.  Bad Booth Tarkington!

As readers of BT.com know, it’s my contention that Tarkington’s oeuvre establishes him as the literary Dean of American Values.  Noonan somewhat agrees… and yet she differs with me in this more recent assessment:

The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought—wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances—that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better. They’ll be richer or more educated, they’ll have a better job or a better house, they’ll take a step up in terms of rank, class or status. America always claimed to be, and meant to be, a nation that made little of class. But America is human. “The richest family in town,” they said, admiringly. Read Booth Tarkington on turn-of-the-last-century Indiana. It’s all about trying to rise.

Tarkington’s turn-of-the-century Indiana romances—The Gentleman from Indiana, The Two Van Revels, and The Conquest of Canaan—are not really about trying to rise.  They’re about being morally anchored in a way that weathers the shifting political tides: ambitions and “rising” be damned.

After Conquest of Canaan, Tarkington then took a long break from provincial melodramatic novels; but by the time he returned with Ramsey Milholland, The Turmoil, The Midlander, Alice Adams, and The Magnificent Ambersons, his setting was no longer Indiana per se—but, more broadly, Middle America, and an industrialized heartland at that.  And the thrust of those novels: not rising, but implosion.  He presciently anticipated that boosterism and rampant growth were unsustainable—and that there would be high personal and national moral costs involved.

It’s great seeing Tarkington mentioned by writers like Noonan, though.  Tarkington and his many lessons have not been entirely forgotten.

The biographical comments in the full record of “Papers” are illuminating:

During the years of their marriage, Susanah Tarkington concentrated on running a large household for a husband who worked at home, collected furniture and paintings, and loved company. The Tarkingtons had large homes at 4270 North Meridian Street in Indianapolis and at Kennebunkport in Maine. Both house were run as semi-baronial establishments, with Mrs. Tarkington presiding graciously and quietly making sure that things ran smoothly. When Mr. Tarkington began to lose his sight, further exertions were required to keep him writing productively. The household usually included Mrs. Tarkington’s sister, Louise Kiefer; Mr. Tarkington’s secretary, Betty Trotter; and often Miss Trotter’s mother. Numerous friends and relatives came and went.

Mrs. Tarkington was given credit for giving her husband a sense of direction and an education in business matters. In one passage in her 1932 diary she remarks that it has been fun handling his investments, which have not been adversely affected by the Depression.

Last September, Indiana’s Butler University announced that the “Tarkington Writer-in-Residence for 2010-2011 is Michael Dahlie, author of A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living, and winner of the 2009 PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel.”

So some explanations are probably in order.  First, Butler University is connected to Booth Tarkington through family ties, his mother being of the same Butlers that endowed Butler University.

Second, Butler’s website explains the deal with “writers in residence”:

Every year, the MFA-Creative Writing program hosts several writers for extended visits: these writers meet with the MFA students in social settings, lead classroom discussions, read manuscripts, and provide mentoring and inspiration throughout their stays. Writers-in-residence for 2010-2011 include Jonathan Lethem, National Book Critic’s Circle Award winner in 2000 for Motherless Brooklyn; Alicia Erian, author of the acclaimed coming-of-age novel, Towelhead; and Jean Valentine, National Book Award-winning poet.

In 2010, Butler was “pleased to announce the inauguration of the Booth Tarkington Writer-in-Residence, a program designed to bring exciting emerging writers to the program as guest faculty.”  I can’t find any information as to how this new position has been endowed, but apparently the MFA program of which the endowment is a part is relatively recent development, having been established only in 2008. But in an unrelated interview, faculty member Robert Stapleton mentions that, “for this position, we’re creating an office with Tarkington’s actual desk.” And in November, the University received a $1 million gift to establish a new “Center for Creative Writing” to house and nurture writers and students in the MFA program.

Here’s some of what Butler’s press release concerning Dahlie’s appointment had to say:

English Professor Andy Levy, director of the MFA program, said Dahlie brings “a rich variety of writing, teaching, and publishing experiences to share with our students. We were impressed by how engagingly he talks about other people’s writing, and the writing life in general.

“We are trying to build a national-quality program here, to teach students that the distance between the Writer’s Studio and the world of New York publishing is a short one. Mike’s a perfect fit for those goals, and for the clarity, compassion, and humor with which he helps us fulfill them.”

During his year at Butler, Dahlie will teach workshops and a class on the craft of writing. He’ll also read the theses written by seniors graduating with a creative-writing degree to offer feedback, and he’ll talk to them about their future.

Also in November, Butler University announced that Dahlie also won a 50,000 prize, the Whiting Writers Award.  He will be concluding his inaugural appointment as Tarkington Writer-in-Residence at the end of this academic year.