Three years ago, playwright James D'Entremont was co-author/lyricist of a musical called "Banned in Boston."
So far, it hasn't been.It also hasn't, as yet, been fully staged. Commissioned by the Theatre in Process of Boston, it was presented as a workshop production in June of 1988.
D'Entremont (pronounced dawn-tra-mont) is also the author of nine other plays, including "Daylight in Exile," currently being staged at the Babcock Theatre, downstairs in the Pioneer Memorial Theatre Building on the University of Utah campus.
The playwright has been in Salt Lake City for the past month in connection with only the second production of "Daylight in Exile," which he began writing in 1987 during a four-week residence at the William Flanagan Center, Montauk, N.Y., and was initially presented at two staged readings in 1989 - in January for the Playwrights' Platform in Boston and in July at the National Playwrights' Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn.
Until the Babcock production - which local theatergoers should definitely put on their "must-see" list - "Exile" had been staged only once before, as part of the Yale Repertory Theatre's Winterfest, Jan. 15-Feb. 9, 1990, in New Haven, Conn.
D'Entremont has been a free-lance playwright since 1966. He's also dabbled in acting and directing, but writing is his first love.
He is also spokesman and steering committee member for the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression - a group that was formed during the national brouhaha over the controversial Maplethorpe exhibition.
"I've been interested in First Amendment issues for some time," D'Entremont said during an interview at the Deseret News prior to the opening of "Daylight in Exile."
As far as D'Entremont is concerned, the First Amendment is one of our foremost basic freedoms, while the pro-censorship amendments promoted by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., are frightening.
In 1989, the year "Daylight in Exile" was performed as a stage reading at the O'Neill Center, Lloyd Richards, former dean of the Yale School of Drama, told writers attending the National Playwrights Conference that the time had passed when artists could consider themselves apolitical and declared they must be prepared to defend their rights.
"This began to hit home when, in Massachusetts, there were attempts to severely restrict and reduce the available arts funding, which had been eroding steadily anyway," said D'Entremont.
"Last year, as the Maplethorpe show was about to open, there was a coming together of several right-wing groups - Morality in Media, the American Family Association and others - that sought to have the show prosecuted and the director of the Institute for Modern Art prosecuted as well.
"The Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression was formed partly in response to that and other artistic and funding issues," he said, noting that the funding situation has reached the point where schools, performing arts groups and museums have had to either close or curtail their operations or raise admission prices.
D'Entremont added that Helms is at the forefront of the censorship movement.
"My concern with Jesse Helms goes back a long way," he said. "When I was in graduate school in North Carolina in 1966, Helms was a local TV-radio editorialist. In Raleigh, N.C., a university class was assigned to read Andrew Marvell's poem to his mistress - a classic that I had first encountered (about six years earlier) in high school. It was a very poignant poem about death and part of the syllabus," he said.
But during the 1966 incident, a student complained to her parents about having to read the poem; the parents complained to Helms and Helms did a scathing on-the-air editorial "about communist teachers."
"I would have hoped that the university would have responded by claiming that the situation was too silly to address, but, instead, the teacher was relieved of his duties," D'Entremont noted.
"This year, after (a major funding) battle, the Massachusetts Cultural Council's budget was reduced by 72 percent, while, at the same time, we hear louder and stronger voices on the extreme right calling for censorship," he added.
Last year, a Helms amendment was defeated about 67-30, but his newest amendment - which is identical - was passed by the Senate by almost the same ratio, 68-28.
"To me, Jesse Helms represents the absolute dead worst in American character, crassness, bigotry, ignorance and the behavior of a bully," said D'Entremont.
The writer said he is "fascinated and delighted" to be in Salt Lake City - his first
visit here. He arrived Oct. 5 in order to see director Kenneth H. Washington's production of "Daylight in Exile" come together, and will be leaving Utah on Nov. 5."When I was in high school," he said, "I was fascinated by the history of the LDS Church and started to write an embarrassingly unreadable novel about the pioneer trek."
He hopes it's still buried somewhere on a back shelf or maybe even thrown into the trash by his mother.
He graduated from Hampton (Va.) High School in 1962, then majored in English at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., where he graduated magna cum laude in 1966. He was class valedictorian and received the Cushing Medal, given annually to the graduating senior with the highest grade-point average.
In 1966-67 he did graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
His inspiration for "Daylight in Exile" came from two years as an English instructor for the Peace Corps in 1967-69, when he was assigned to the Tunisian public school system.
This gripping drama touches on censorship and freedom of expression. In one scene, English instructor Jonathan Morse complains that pages from his Time magazine have been missing and later, when Morse and colleagues are trying to learn what they can about an Arab-Israeli confrontation, there is dialogue about the censored newscasts, both on the Middle Eastern broadcasts and the Voice of America.
Tampering with freedom of expression also is touched on later in the play when an overzealous Peace Corps supervisor absconds with a student's notebook - a book containing highly incriminating, but not quite truthful, writing.
With his most recent play, "Pax Americana," D'Entremont finds he's becoming more overtly political.
"Every person is political. Whether you do or whether you don't, you express political expressions, and I find that, as time goes by, my work refers more overtly to politics," he said.
"Pax Americana," workshopped in June by the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression, is a two-character play that takes the form of a lecture.
One of the characters is a composite of Phyllis Schlafly, Beverly LaHaye and other leaders of the far right. D'Entremont studied the rhetoric that has been coming from such groups as Jerry Falwell's Liberty Foundation (the Moral Majority under a new name), Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and the American Family Association.
This character gets up in front of an audience and delivers a lecture on the arts, "using all the lies, distortions and half-truths used by people pursuing that agenda."
"We need to recognize that there are other validities for people whose beliefs not only fail to concide, but are at odds with one another. I think there was knowledge of that when the country's Founding Fathers put the Bill of Rights together, and this is still one of the most important documents in our culture," said D'Entremont.
He noted that the framers of the Bill of Rights were a culturally diverse group. James Madison was a devout Christian, while Benjamin Franklin denied the divinity of Christ and Thomas Paine rejected religion altogether. But Madison recognized that there was a basic freedom for people to practice their own religion and not to impose one's feelings on others.
"It is important to have theater that deals with racial minorities, sexual minorities, other cultures, other religions, and important to have theater that recognizes that humanity includes people who are not Americans, but who are still perfectly comfortable with their own cultures," he said.
One of D'Entremont's inspirations for "Daylight in Exile" was seeing the way Americans sometimes act in a foreign country.
All too often, he said, "they believe that everyone wants to become an American. The play is a cultural grab bag of characters representing several religious and cultural persuasions - one is both black and Jewish, another is gay, several are Arabic - all coming together in a situation that strikes sparks, many produced by their cultural misunderstandings."
D'Entremont came from a fairly literary family.
"I was read to a lot before I could read," said the playwright, who admits to being raised as an Army brat, attending 13 different schools in seven different states. His mother and grandfather both wrote poetry, and the relatives on his mother's side of the family like to read and memorize Shakespeare's works and a variety of poetry.
"I was hooked on movies from the age of 3, but I don't think I saw my first play until I was 10 or 11. It was Ayn Rand's `The Night of January 16th,' and I didn't really understand what was going on, but the experience of seeing a narrative with live actors was very exciting," he said.
Commenting on his experience as a writer, D'Entremont said "You usually know whether a play is working about halfway through the first draft. If it isn't, you can stick it away in a drawer, but if it is, then you stick with it. The first draft is the hardest part, and when you finish that, you can really start working on it - and that's a process that can take a couple of years."
However, like arts funding, the opportunities for success in play-writing are shrinking.
"It's very easy to get demoralized when you realize that, at any given time, only 20 people nationwide may be actually earning their entire income from writing plays. Most of us have to do something else. We teach (which D'Entremont still does), we do free-lance writing and some (like a good friend in New York City) work in construction. Even internationally recognized writer John Patrick Shandley was still painting apartments until he got into (writing for) the movies."
D'Entremont, though, is disenchanted by television as a medium of expression. "Video has great artistic potential that hasn't been fully tapped," he said.
D'Entremont has done some writing for television and radio, but prefers writing for the theater.
"The words count more in theater; you hear better dialogue," he said. "Theater is more challenging because there is often less pressure to please the lowest common denominator; we're not just selling products."
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(Additional information)
`Exile' playdates
"Daylight in Exile" continues Thursday through Saturday, Oct. 31-Nov. 2, at 8 p.m. in the Babcock Theatre, with a matinee on Saturday at 2 p.m. and the final performance on Sunday, Nov. 3, at 7 p.m. The Babcock Theatre is downstairs at Pioneer Memorial Theatre, 300 South and 1340 East (Broadway at University). Seating is not reserved, but it is suggested that tickets be purchased in advance, due to the limited seating in the intimate theater. For ticket information, call 581-6961.