Home / Chronology / Strike-Slip / More About When Something Wonderful Ends The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2007 Humana Festival WHEN SOMETHING WONDERFUL ENDS There are moments frozen in our collective memory —we all remember exactly where we were when we heard two planes had gouged the New York skyline, another slammed into the Pentagon and then yet another plunged into a field in Pennsylvania. Is it possible that little known events from 37 years earlier had smoldered and then exploded that day? “Understanding pattern. Figuring out how the world works. That’s what drives me, as an artist.There was this moment when I was listening to this book on CD about U.S. policy in the Middle east since World War II,” Sherry Kramer remembers, “and when i got to the chapter on 1964 it was literally like lights when off inside my head. I don’t know if they were lights but they were light-like. All of the sudden the picture just came together. There’s something very microscopic about what’s important to me and how I isolate a discrete moment in life and then understand how it connects to all the other moments in life. All the sudden what hit me was, 'Oh! The present cascades out of that single moment.'" What was the United States Government up to in 1964? Well, among other things, we were, at the request of the shah, a significant military presence in Iran, where we were busy securing our access to Persian Gulf oil. We’d just signed SOFA, a Status of Forces Agreement, with the shah’s government which guaranteed U.S. citizens’ immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in foreign countries. This is standard practice when our troops occupy other counties. But, when Iranian pedestrians were killed by U.S. military drivers, and the Iranian courts had no jurisdiction over the drivers, a moment happened and the cascade began. And where was Kramer when she was listening to the CD? in her Pathfinder, on her way back to Springfield, Missouri, to pack up, her childhood home. She was also readying herself to face the daunting, yet potentially lucrative, task of selling her fantastic collection of Barbie dolls and accessories on eBay. In 1964, Barbie and Ken had been dating three years. Barbie seemed to have it all— she was both a cheerleader and a member of the marching band. she had her car, her house, her friends. Her little sister Skipper was grown up enough to join in on the fun with Babs and Midge. Looking at her closet, you really get a sense of adventure: Tennis Anyone?, Dinner at Eight, Pajama Party, Ski Champion, Roman Holiday, Gay Parisienne, Career Girl—how did she find the time? And, where was little sherry Kramer in 1964? Well, she was in Springfield, Missouri.Her mother was buying her a new Barbie outfit. A beautiful pink dress called Enchanted Evening. One of the outfits which the adult Sherry, returning to Springfield, listening to the CD about Persian Gulf Oil and SOFA in Iran, was getting ready to sell. “We are, all of us humans, busy little meaning-making creatures. Once I connected the 1964 SOFA with Barbie and my mother, I had a piece of the big puzzle that was so resonant to me, so precise and so personal.” Kramer’s mother had died a few months before September 11. “So i think the two events have always been conflated, for me. When 9/11 happened, I thought, ‘Oh, the whole country has lost its mother,’ that’s the way it felt to me. And then, I had this new way of understanding my childhood and what my country has been doing my whole life—well, that was a huge epiphany for me.” It is often only at a moment of catastrophe or tragedy that we are fully aware that something has irrevocably changed, that something wonderful has ended. We knew immediately on September 11, 2001. The shared national moment and Kramer’s wholly personal grief were connected, and now the SOFA connected it all to a time of pure innocence from years before. And Barbie connects us too. She was always there. We all had them, wanted them, saw our sisters and their friends dreaming up schemes with them.We all got mad at her at some point for creating body image issues for young girls, and yet we admired the bold career choices she made as a sassy single gal (weren’t you glad she never married Ken?). We lamented her math-phobia, but remembered she was an astronaut, so she had to know some math, right? And now we sigh with satisfaction or shame that our American childhoods can be sold and bought in on-line auctions as we try to understand our lives before and after something wonderful ended. —Julie Felise Dubiner SHERRY KRAMER Sherry Kramer had big plans for her life. “I wanted to be a nuclear physicist,” she recalls, “but I couldn’t add, so I had to throw that out the window. And then i wanted to be a spy…during World War II; that limited me.” Kramer’s path has veered far from physics and espionage; she has been a working playwright for nearly thirty years. Kramer, who affirms that her work is obsessed with investigating a solitary moment, can recall the instant in which she arrived at her future career: “I always say I became a playwright somewhere on Route 91, between Middletown, Connecticut, and New Haven, where I saw two productions of Sam Shepard’s Tooth of Crime. Seeing those two productions back-to-back did something to me.” Although her moment of revelation happened in the Northeast, Kramer grew up in the Midwest (Springfield, Missouri, to be exact). After attending Wellesley College she received two M.F.A.’s from University of Iowa Writers’ Workshops—one in fiction, the other in playwriting. shortly after, she headed out to L.A. for a stint in Columbia Pictures’ Writers’ Workshop, which entailed “being awestruck by famous people ” and completing a “horror movie about marriage ” (She still has it tucked away!). But Kramer soon returned to writing for the stage. “Fool that I was, ” she jokes, “I loved the theatre!” Turns out, it loved her back. In 1981, Kramer was admitted to New Dramatists as the first national member. During her membership, she wrote David’s Red Haired Death, her most produced play, which dissects the fallout after a loved one’s death. Later she completed Wall of Water, a virtuosic farce about four mismatched roommates in a fabulous yet suffocating apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. Toward the end of her tenure at New Dramatists, Kramer returned to Springfield to help her mother care for her ailing grandmother. Even during this difficult period, Kramer continued to write. “Oh, I can’t possibly be stopped,” she affirms. Nothing can stop Sherry Kramer—not even the road. She confesses, “I often write as I’mdriving around. I’ve got a good set-up in the car. I sort of build up a little platform where the writing hand is.” Despite the potential safety hazards of writing while operating a moving vehicle, it is a skill that the playwright utilizes often, as she routinely makes the seventeen-hour commute from the University of Texas at Austin to the University of Iowa, the two schools at which she regularly teaches. This spring, Kramer begins teaching at Bennington College, where she will head the undergraduate playwriting program. Kramer’s reputation as a professor is rivaled only by her incredible body of work. She has a keen understanding of her own aesthetic, of its prismatic nature, of the worlds it creates: “I write plays that are kind of strange. And not really American. People don’t have accents or careers. When Something Wonderful Ends is my first regional play.” Her other plays include Things That Break, The World at Absolute Zero, What a Man Weighs and many more. Her work has been produced across the country at Yale Repertory Theatre, New York’s Second Stage Theatre, Theatre of the First Amendment and Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company, to name a few. Surprisingly, this is her first appearance at the Humana Festival. Actors is proud to finally showcase one of America’s most talented and most enduring playwrights. Now if we could only get our hands on that marriage screenplay. —Diana Grisanti