How Linney Found a Play in His Novel

“I’m not sure why I wanted to do it,” said Romulus Linney about his novel “Heathen Valley” that he turned into a play. “Maybe it was just wondering if I could. As a novel, it’s a sprawling historical story with many characters. But as I got into it, I found that underneath a great deal of what was the novel, there was a sort of play lurking.”

Linney, who wrote the novel 27 years ago, rewrote it as a play two years ago and directed the piece in its maiden stagings--at the Philadelphia Festival for New Plays, Milwaukee Rep and New York’s Theatre for the New City.

“It’s in as good shape as I could get it,” noted the writer on the phone from his home in New York. “And now it’s on its own. On Friday, a new production of “Heathen Valley” opens at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove.

Based on an actual 19th-Century incident in rural North Carolina (where Linney’s father’s family was from, and where he himself spent many of his growing-up years), the story centers on a community parish, founded by an Episcopalian bishop and run by a native-born “mountain man.” When the bishop has a change of heart and joins the Catholic Church, the mission falls apart.

“I asked myself, ‘What would happen to these very basic Appalachian mountaineers if this mission was built up--which they thought a great deal of and which did a great deal for them--and then, for some reason, it was taken away?’ For me, it was a story of regeneration betrayed. I don’t know about other writers, but the first thing I have to find is a good story. And somehow it has to have something to do with me personally.”

Linney notes that the connection needn’t be first-hand.

“I’ve written plays about historical figures, Frederick the Great and (Lord) Byron among them. But in both cases, in reading about these great lives, there’s been something about them that’s had great personal meaning. Then I have the authority--or feel I have the authority--to go ahead and write about such titanic figures.

“It’s the same with ‘Heathen Valley.’ Also, these people are kind of my ancestors. So I felt that I had some kinship and a great deal of admiration for them.”

Nowadays, Linney, who squeezed in an Army stint between studies at Oberlin College and graduate directing/acting courses at Yale Drama School, divides his time between teaching duties at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia College. He is married to a college professor and is the father of two grown daughters.

“Of course, creative writing can’t be taught,” he said. “But what you can do is create an atmosphere in class where somebody’s work is presented and very candid, supportive things can be said: truthful yet helpful.”

The work is emotionally satisfying--and physically manageable.

“I teach (in Pennsylvania) one day a week; it’s only 1 1/2 hours on the Amtrak. When I get there I have a three-hour seminar, then I see some students--then I get on the train and come back. When you’re an adjunct, you’re not responsible for the running of the department. You’re not on committees, you’re not terribly involved in faculty life. I don’t think I’d be able to write well if I were a full-time member of any department.”

Linney (who’s received Rockefeller, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts grants, plus an Obie for “Tennessee” and an American Theatre Critics award for “Heathen Valley”) counts music as his primary influence.

“When I was growing up, I had no idea what I was going to do--but I knew it would be something that music spoke about. My father was a doctor, a very fine, civilized man. We had a nice life, but there was no art connected to it. The thing that affected me most--way back in the ‘30s--was hearing concerts on the radio. Whatever it was, I responded to. I guess music being the most abstract of the arts, once you’re moved by it you want to find out everything that has to do with it.

“So you start reading really good books instead of detective stories--and it becomes a search. It’s like when you first read Poe instead of having somebody tell you how wonderful it is. Then it becomes yours. Of course, when you first start writing, you do imitate. I wrote a little bit like Faulkner--those huge, sprawling rhetorical things--and a Swedish Nobel Prize-winner, Par Lagerkvist, who writes very fine, concise, crystalline prose. So it was kind of an odd crossbreeding.”