Writing Baskerville

Not infrequently in the past few months when I’ve told friends and colleagues about my newest play, I’ve received a stare of surprise and the inevitable question:  why did you choose to write a play based on a 1901 suspense novella involving a grisly murder, a famous detective and a slavering hound?  Haven’t you always told us that your heart is in writing stage comedy that draws on classical roots?  And isn’t all your work deeply American in nature?  The answer to these questions is yes and yes, but I don’t think of The Hound of the Baskervilles as an anomaly.

I’ve staked my professional life on the proposition that stage comedy is deeply rooted in our common culture.  Starting with Plautus in the 3rd century BC and careening right through Shakespeare, Farquhar, Goldsmith, Wilde and Orton, comedy deals with issues of class and marriage, love and friendship, esteem and identity.  It also deals with certain recurring comic motifs that we see again and again down through the ages.  These include mistaken identity, disguise, marriage and its consequences, adultery, city slickers heading to the countryside, competing relatives, wily servants, and the attempts of the older generation to thwart the sexual urges of the young.  Virtually all of these themes are lurking within The Hound of the Baskervilles. 

I came to the idea of writing Baskerville, as I frequently do when trying to come up with an idea for a new play, by reading heavily for days on end and thinking as deeply as I can about the plays and novels that I love in a profound way.  I surveyed my shelves and came upon Conan Doyle.  I reread a few of my favorite Holmes short stories, as well as two of the novels, and came up with the idea of treating The Hound of the Baskervilles in comic form.

Mysteries and comedies have a great deal in common.  I’d go so far as to say that mysteries are a kind of sub-genre of comedy, a notion that I first saw suggested by Northrop Frye in his book on Shakespearean comedy and romance, A Natural Perspective.  The two genres (in their classic forms) have a great deal in common:  they generally deal with common people in their everyday lives; they have strong narratives; they have you rooting for the underdog; and they end happily.  Most importantly, they end with a sense that all the disparate pieces that have been thrown in the air in the course of the story have, miraculously, returned to earth and locked into place in their original pattern.  As Frye points out, there are Odyssey critics and Iliad critics, and mysteries fall squarely into the Odyssey – or comic – side of literature.  

I have dealt with the intersection of comedy and mystery once before, in my 2011 play The Game’s Afoot, which won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.  There I tried to navigate the interplay of comedy and mystery within a traditional comic stage form.  In Baskerville I’ve tried to go a step further and stretch the boundaries of traditional comedy by making it less realist and literal.  We are used to seeing comedies in living rooms and offices; we aren’t used to seeing them on the moors of England’s West Country.  We’re used to seeing comedies about young lovers in a professional setting; we aren’t used to seeing them about friendship where the stakes are death.  

Finally, I have tried to stretch the genres of comedy and mystery by taking a story that plays out on a large scale – in railway stations, at the opera, on London streets and in baronial mansions – and creating it with five actors on a bare stage.  I have a feeling that comedy is becoming too dependent lately on literal sets and specific costumes.  It feels to me that it needs some air.  The choice of Holmes and the hound was largely instinctual – I believe that all creative writing is instinctual at bottom – but I’m hoping that it has ended up in the right intellectual territory.

My hope is that Baskerville connects with a more-than-usually wide audience.  Holmes is one of a handful of genuinely universal literary icons, and America, like most English-speaking countries, has adopted him as one of their own.  I’m hoping that the play as written will speak to lovers of comedy and mystery, and that the play in production, with five actors playing over 25 roles, will speak to the raw creative joy of being in a live theatre and having a wildly good time.

I’m grateful to the McCarter Theatre for making this adventure possible.