What Was Your Inspiration?
Researching another story, I tripped over Kim Philby, in his 20s, in Spain, reporting Franco’s side of the Civil War for newspapers such as the NY Times, on secret assignment for Stalin.
1950s Philby, famous Third Man of the Cambridge spy cell, whose exploits fuel Cold War books and movies and TV shows, then and now. But 1930s Philby, plotting against Spain’s Franco and Hitler’s Canaris?
The Philby spy character wandered onto the wrong movie set; there are no books, movies and radio or TV shows stored in my mind. No movie memories his contemporaries Franco and Canaris either, beyond bit–player, walk–on snapshots and one–liners, stock villain footage provided by ideological enemies.
Never amplified or expanded, their murky ambiguous intersections blur, overshadowed by WWII. So shards of thoughts about movies and beliefs and revolutions and propaganda and faith and historic reputations flew like filings to the magnet of the stories of these three men, a messy mass which eventually took the shape of the play Spy Garbo.
What interests you?
Three do the same things in support of opposing ideologies and are evaluated differently. Categories of hero and villain, patriot and traitor, good and evil are kaleidoscopic. We think in terms of movie categories and images, conflate fact and fiction, image and reality. We are encouraged to do so by our popular culture which purposefully fuses the staged and the observed, confuses the real and the simulated, and reduces complexities onto t-shirt slogans.
What has been the trajectory of the play?
I would write and my classicist-editor best friend would read and critique it.
Eventually other smart, connected, kind people in my life were generous enough to read it and recommend it to others.
Queens Theatre in the Park produced a reading of it. Then Voice and Vision invited me to their Summer Program at Bard to develop it further.
After, they produced their New York reading of it.
Increasingly encouraged by all I was learning, I continued to watch, think, read, write and refine it, showing it along the way to trusted readers.
Meanwhile, theater professionals Diane Morrison and John Dias and I had formed our theater company.
Alongside our collaborations with co-producers, we continued to develop it in readings and workshops.
Because of John’s expert dramaturgical support and Diane’s exhaustive theatrical expertise, we assembled an experimental screening project with film specialists recommended by the American Film Institute, at Jacob Burns Film Center Media Lab which led us to Kevin Cunningham and Aaron Louis at 3LD where we are now creating the production.