O.C.’s South Coast Gave Playwright the Break That Led to Her Pulitzer

Margaret Edson was cleaning up her classroom Monday after school when she learned she had won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Her kindergarten students at Centennial Place Elementary School had just begun a new project on insects. Its title: “Six Legs Over Georgia.”

Edson, 37, said she doesn’t plan to write any more plays. “I just wanted to say this one thing,” she said of the award-winning “Wit,” the story of a professor dying of ovarian cancer. “I’m a teacher. It’s the taxpayers of Atlanta to whom I owe my time and energy.”

Jerry Patch, a dramaturge at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa who was instrumental in staging “Wit,” said, “She thinks teaching is more important than writing plays, and she lives her values better than almost anyone I’ve ever met.”

Edson sent the unsolicited script to South Coast Repertory, where Patch and reader Richard Hellesen plucked it from a stack of some of the hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts received by the theater each year. After reading it, Patch showed it to artistic director Martin Benson, who recalled that he “was foaming at the mouth” after reading it, determined to stage the play. “We were flabbergasted. The depth of artistry and craft were astonishing.”

Patch, Benson and Edson worked on the script for about a year by telephone, “primarily making cuts, every one of which I fought passionately,” Edson said. “It cost 50 cents more to mail it at the beginning than it did at the end.”

But Benson’s memory is that Edson displayed “no guardedness in trusting us to help her shape the play. It was an open, easy relationship. She allowed us to convert it from two acts to one and to cut two scenes that inhibited the forward momentum.”

All the work resulted first in a staged reading in 1994--Edson said she wanted to thank South Coast for “using their best people for the staged reading”--and then a full production that opened in January 1995. South Coast decided on the night of the reading to commit to a full production because “the audience response was so powerful,” Benson said.

“The South Coast connection is very dear to me,” Edson said. “Jerry Patch and Martin Benson took a big risk. I hope they feel affirmed.” A year later, the script won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle’s Ted Schmitt Award, for outstanding world premiere in Los Angeles or Orange counties during 1995. Edson also won one of the regular LADCC writing awards, while the production was named one of the year’s outstanding productions and also won awards for director Martin Benson and actress Megan Cole.

The Southland success did not translate to other productions. Benson said he spent three years trying to interest other theaters in the script, but a frequent response was “Ovarian cancer? Forget it.” One of the theaters that passed on the project back then recently asked Benson to use his influence to get the rights now; he responded that the latecomer would have “to get in line.” However, Benson is slated to stage “Wit” for a Seattle Repertory Theatre production opening in October--the first time he will direct at any professional theater outside South Coast.

The play’s fortunes were revived when Derek Anson Jones, a director who was a high school classmate of Edson’s, showed the script to Douglas Hughes, artistic director of the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., and actress Kathleen Chalfant. The Long Wharf production starring Chalfant led to an off-Broadway production, which opened in September.