This story was reported and written by Joyelle Ronan, a student in the Goldring Arts Journalism and Communications program at Syracuse University and an intern for Syracuse Stage.
For playwright Kyle Bass, the thrill of writing comes from seeing his work performed. Unlike a novelist, Bass gets to hear his words inhabited and interpreted while looking over the shoulder of his audience. While that prospect inspires both excitement and fear, he likes the nature of succeeding (or failing) so publicly. His latest play “Tender Rain” will have its world premiere at Syracuse Stage — where Bass has held several positions and is currently the resident playwright.
While he began his writing career with poetry and fiction, Bass says that a graduate school advisor encouraged him to write for the stage. Relying on diction and dialogue to express the interiority of each role, Bass’s character-driven stories lend themselves well to performance. Bass has been living with the story of “Tender Rain” in his head for nearly two decades, since the first draft of his master’s thesis was filed in 2004.
“A play is a dead letter until it’s performed. It’s a blueprint. It’s a map,” Bass says. “You can learn so much about your play, especially from smart actors, they can teach you a lot about your play that you didn’t know and didn’t realize.”
In the collaborative nature of taking a play from page to stage, there comes a point where Bass must give his work away to be interpreted by the director, actors, and eventually the audience.
“Tender Rain” tells the story of Milton Millard, a white banker who lives in a small Southern city in the 1950s. Struggling with his marriage, Milton turns to Ruthie Mimms, an older Black woman who has greatly impacted his life. The play’s themes of pain, violence, and suffering show how oppression bleeds into domestic lives and intimate relationships.
Bass says he wanted a director who knows how to direct actors and not just move bodies in a space. He began working with the play’s director, his friend and frequent collaborator Rodney Hudson, to find the right actors to play Ruthie and Milton. Bass writes in the style of American classics — following characters instead of plot. Because this style isn’t being written very much anymore, it can be difficult to cast actors up for the challenge.
“It’s a lot of work for an actor if they hadn’t worked out that muscle, right? I always think ‘what are you?’ is an easier question to answer than ‘who are you?’ And that’s what I’m asking actors to really consider, ‘who are you?” Bass says.
Actor Marjorie Johnson, who plays Ruthie Mimms, said working with Bass and Hudson has been a wonderful collaboration because she can bring her own interpretation to the character, drawing from the essences of family members and even herself. “For me, Ruthie Mimms is already there,” Johnson says. “There was nothing about Ruthie that I didn’t understand or didn’t agree with. So, I just brought myself to Ruthie Mimms. Because I know Ruthie. I felt like I knew her from the minute I read the script.”
Ruthie is a strong character who has experienced the world and has endured its cruelties. While she is small, Bass says she is a powerful woman and has not elapsed or been worn down. He says Johnson brings all those qualities, and ones he never imagined. Johnson hopes that these traits will cause people to feel compassion for Ruthie.
“She’s a Black woman. But any other ethnicity could feel and understand and relate to the root to Ruthie,” said Johnson. “My hope is that they will see her heart. See what she has given up in life. How she led her life, and why she did what she does in the play. because there’s a lot of things that people might not agree with, I’ll say, but I think they would understand.”
The opening moment of “Tender Rain” will instruct the audience on what to expect and how to watch it, Bass says. He hopes that his words will make people feel something, whether that feeling is love or outrage. Given Bass’s musical background as a pianist, violinist, and flutist, he takes a symphonic approach to writing (he was once told by an advisor that “his characters don’t speak, they sing”). He says that the audience will be able to feel a searching or yearning inspired by symphonies, even if they don’t realize it.
“Not only do I like to write melodious dialogue, but also the very structures of the play, I’ll use the structure of a string quartet,” Bass says. “It’s sort of written in three movements that are marked, you know, Allegro, Adagio, Presto, I know that the audience doesn’t know that, but I do. But what the audience does know is that they feel a sort of structural integrity about it all, something. A beginning, a middle, and an end.
“Tender Rain” written by Kyle Bass and directed by Rodney Hudson opens at Syracuse Stage on Friday, May 5 and runs through May 21. Tickets are available via syracusestage.org.