Bringing Shadows to Life
By Laura Raskin

Kate Stout: “I discovered that a writer’s lot is a pretty lonely one. The whole process is in the privacy of your imagination and your desk. You don’t get to witness the impact of your work. It’s an extraordinarily magical and humbling and wildly enriching experience.”

Independent Arts Writer

Kate Stout was on a vacation with her significant other, Pete Funkhouser, in the summer of 2003 when someone broke into their car and stole everything — including her computer with the completed first act of her play “Shadows of Love.”

There is a long history of writers who have lost manuscripts — Ernest Hemingway, T.E. Lawrence, Nikolay Gogol, Aldous Huxley, Louisa May Alcott, William Carlos Williams, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston. It didn’t soften the blow.

“When I realized what I lost, I wept,” said Stout. “I felt as if my gut had been torn out.”

It has been said that writing is all about rewriting, and the theft of her belongings and her words could not have been more fortuitous. Stout began writing the play again last summer, after having a year to think about it again.

“It was much better and stronger,” she said. “My goal for completing it was 2004. (On New Year’s Eve) Pete was sawing logs and I was on my computer.”

“Shadows of Love” premiered at a staged reading at the home of her friends Beverly Hall and Sascha Illich on a recent Sunday night for “Armchair Theater,” part of the Theater Workshop of Nantucket.

To see the 50 people sitting in photographer Hall’s living room that evening, one would have to assume Stout’s tragedy turned out well. As the setting sun filled Hall’s living room on Hither Creek with pinks and oranges, audience members were entranced — not a cough or a shift could be heard.

“They seemed to be riveted, and that was great,” said Stout, who credits “Armchair Theater” and Hall and Illich for giving her a platform.

Stout believes in writing what you know, and “Shadows of Love” is “about how I grew up.”

All of the action takes place in Louisville, Ky., the first act in 1963 and 1964, when Stout was a teenager. Loosely based on a tight-knit group of friends who make one friend’s basement their nucleus, the play is about the innocence that the group afforded them at a time when the country was brewing: John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in November of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was already a presence, the draft for the Vietnam War was on the minds of young men.

Of the six friends, Jeff is the central figure, and based on Stout’s friendship with Hunter S. Thompson’s younger brother Jim Thompson, to whom the play is dedicated.

“He was arguably one of the most influential people of my childhood,” said Stout of Jim Thompson. “He wasn’t my best friend, but he influenced what I thought, what I like, what I grew up to be.”

A 19-song soundtrack is meant to accompany the play, an indication of Jeff’s ahead-of-his-time fascination with Motown. In real life, Jim Thompson took Stout’s group of friends to a Supremes concert at a state fair in 1962, when they were virtually unknown. He also took them to their first civil rights march in Louisville.

Jim Thompson died of AIDS in 1993.

“He died before his time and never saw his promise realized. Those who get to go on and realize promise to any level have a responsibility to the people who don’t have that opportunity,” said Stout.

There was a strict unspoken rule in Stout’s group that there would be no “boy-girl stuff,” and instead, the group became a safe testing ground for massive flirting. Thompson was dynamic, good looking, charismatic and talented. “There were plenty of girls dying to be his girlfriend,” said Stout. “We all wanted Jim to like us best.”

She recalls that Jim must have been conflicted in high school, knowing that he was gay, and that in some way his group of friends provided his cover. His mother, a character named “Mrs. G” in the play, was a hard-working single woman who put up with an ever-coming-and-going stream of teenagers in her basement at all hours, said Stout.

Jim’s brother, Hunter S. Thompson, never claimed Louisville his home. A famous writer and journalist who made a name writing about and living with the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and then almost getting killed by them, Hunter was cruel to his mother and younger brother Jim when he was around, said Stout.

“He was not kind to Jim and Jim adored him,” said Stout. Hunter is in the play only as a brief and abusive voice off-stage. “If he were (in the play), he’d steal the thunder. He’d say and do anything, especially if he thought he’d shock people. It became his modus.”

Stout finished “Shadows of Love” within weeks of Hunter’s apparent suicide this February. She hopes to rewrite the play after digesting audience comments from the staged reading, and then stage it again at the Arts Festival in the fall. Eventually she would like to see it onstage, she said.

Stout grew up in Louisville wanting to be a writer — first of poetry, then of fiction. While it may not have been overt, her mother was an influence.

“My mother was the most literate person I’ve ever known, in and out of the classroom,” she said. Stout’s mother graduated college in 1933 and had intentions of becoming a doctor. But she met Stout’s father and they married in 1934, and “women didn’t work.” Stout is the youngest of four.

“My mother always wanted to write, but I didn’t know until after her death in the ‘80s when I began reading her 1,300 letters she left.” Stout’s mother had also never told her that she was a journalist, writing for two Pittsburgh papers before Stout was born. “She never wanted to rain on my writing parade,” she said, and never told Stout, a “surprise” eight years after her next oldest sibling, that she forced her mother to give up her profession. “It was a monumental act of grace under pressure,” she said.

After a couple of Stout’s novels were not the stellar success she had hoped, she turned to journalism and freelanced for local papers in Louisville.

“Journalism was a way to keep pen in hand,” she said. She surprised herself by getting into the Columbia School of Journalism — taking a chance on her personal essay by opening with, “I was the product of a night of wild abandon.”

After graduating from the one-year master’s program in 1982, Stout only wrote for national publications, The New York Times and the Washington Post among them, from then on.

She started and ran the island’s Map and Legend from 1986 to 2001, a free publication about the arts and events.

She has now written six or eight plays, after stumbling into the medium by accident. A next-door neighbor in an apartment building in New York City directed plays at a since dissolved theater company there. Intended for school-aged children with not much exposure to live theater, music was integral to the plays. “The older they got, the bigger the children, they’d come in with their headsets, snapping gum. To get ’em you really had to get ’em,” said Stout.

She wrote an original play in 1986, “Number 21,” about Pittsburgh Pirates player Roberto Clemente who died in a plane crash. The play is really about his son and namesake, Tito, who takes a bus trip with his school to the Baseball Hall of Fame where, on the second floor, is a wax statue of his father.

“His father comes to life for him,” said Stout. “That really touched an incredible cord with kids.”

That was Stout’s turning point as a writer. “I discovered that a writer’s lot is a pretty lonely one. The whole process is in the privacy of your imagination and your desk. You don’t get to witness the impact of your work. It’s an extraordinarily magical and humbling and wildly enriching experience.” “Number 21” was later picked up by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

After a production there, a nine-year-old dressed in a suit and fedora approached Stout, throwing open his arms and exclaiming, “Excellent play, excellent play.”

“That changed the direction of my writing life on a dime,” said Stout. “I never looked back. Theater is the only truly collaborative art in the literary arts. Everyone who touches it changes it.”

Stout took some time off from playwriting during the Map and Legend ’s tenure. She was also the former artistic director the Theater Workshop of Nantucket.

Now, Stout divides her time between Concord, Mass., and Nantucket. She leaves her island home on Sunset Hill Lane soon for the summer, taking her only “child,” her lab mix Scylla with her.

“I’ve fallen out of love with Nantucket in the summer,” said Stout, whose parents vacationed here from after World War II until 1980.

Stout spends most of her time writing for herself and may get back to fiction, she said. She will return here in the fall to direct the TWN’s “Matt and Ben.”

She also teaches, via the Internet, for Southern New Hampshire University and does freelance writing.

Stout is not in close contact with the group of friends upon which “Shadows of Love” is based. She sends Christmas cards to a few. In the play, the second act also takes place in Louisville, but in 1993, at Jeff’s funeral. When Jim Thompson died in the early 1990s, “You couldn’t turn around without some dying of AIDS, especially in the art world,” said Stout. “I always thought, what a terrible price to pay for wanting and needing to be held.”

Stout quotes an old Schlitz beer commercial: “You only go around once, you’ve got to grab for the gusto.”

“As long as you don’t hurt anybody else, it is license to get on your toes,” she said.

“Those friendships literally did not survive our college years,” said Stout, speaking of her cast of characters. “It wasn’t meant to. We were meant to help each other grow up.”

Photo by Mark Mattoon