World Premiere: Lydia Stryk’s “An Accident” at Magic

by Jean Schiffman

San Francisco Arts Monthly
April 2010 Volume 19 Number 8

Seven years ago, Midwestern-born playwright Lydia Stryk was bicycling in Berlin when she was hit and run over by a truck. She spent three months in the hospital. Five years later, she began writing “An Accident,” a world premiere that opens this month at the Magic Theatre.

In the deceptively stark and simple two-hander, a woman wakes up in a hospital, having been hit by a car while crossing the street. She can’t move and barely knows her own identity. Sitting quietly across the room is the man who hit her.

“I didn’t think I could write a play about my experience,” confesses Stryk, on the phone from Virginia, where she is visiting family; she lives, writes and teaches in both Berlin and New York. Then a theatrical scenario came to her: the beginning of a relationship between two people.

Unlike the fictional Libby, who seems extroverted and is at times abrasive, Stryk speaks in soft, measured tones. “When you write characters, you become them as you write,” she explains, “but Libby became someone different from me, and what happens between the two characters was very unexpected.”

A prolific playwright with a Ph.D in theater and an M.A. in journalism, she has written four plays since her accident, but none that so closely resembles her own, life-altering experience, which, as she writes in the script’s introduction, connected her with “others on the far side of one of life’s great divides.”

The scenario came to Stryk from a writer’s mantra: “what if?” What if the truck driver who hit her had come to visit her in the hospital? (He didn’t.) The character of Anton was inspired by Stryk’s friend, film and stage actor Austin Pendleton, to whom she dedicated the play. She’d never written a role with an actor in mind before, and Anton did not end up being Austin exactly, but Austin’s gentle spirit and sensitivity guided her and gave a certain ease to the writing of the role. Stryk thinks she herself may have more of Anton’s qualities than the more aggressive Libby’s. “I often have fun writing these strong characters,” she says. “Of course you have elements of everyone inside you.”

Even as Anton and Libby work through a series of complex, unpredictable and intensely emotional scenes, both separately and together, life beyond the hospital room resonates. “With the world at war, when your body has been broken, you experience those things viscerally in a way you didn’t before,” explains Stryk. “When I hear about a bus exploding or soldiers getting badly injured, I feel it in my body in a different way.”

For local actor Arwen Anderson, who plays Libby, the character’s initial physical paralysis is personally meaningful; Anderson is an aerial circus performer and teacher and a bicycle commuter around the city. To imagine herself laid up in a hospital bed necessitates a deep look into her own relationship with her body. “Libby is still able to keep such a sense of humor and willingness to move forward,” Anderson marvels, “and yet when something like this happens I’d presume there are some really dark hours of the soul.” She adds, “I haven’t been in that situation, but I’ve had situations that have created some kind of tectonic plate shift within me.” Through her own personal traumatic experiences she can find a way to conjure up Libby’s powerful and conflicted emotions.

“I’m equal parts thrilled and mortified,” she adds, of embarking upon the challenging role. “It’s such a beautiful play, so different from anything I’ve read or seen recently. And I’m thrilled to be working on a new female playwright and a female main character.” Stryk is not new as a playwright, of course; her plays have been produced throughout the country, at regional theaters like the Steppenwolf in Chicago and Perseverance Theatre in Alaska, as well as in Germany–but never in San Francisco.

It’s not surprising that Stryk claims as theatrical inspiration such playwrights as Caryl Churchill and Harold Pinter (as well as the classical works of Chekhov and Ibsen); she studied acting at the Drama Centre in London for three years, and her mother is English. And like the works of Churchill and Pinter, An Accident involves minimal staging and production effects, features long periods of fraught silence and focuses on the mysterious ways that humans connect and disconnect.

“There’s no takeaway moral or little message at the end of this play,” says its director, Rob Melrose, who is also the founder/artistic director of San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater. This is his first directorial job at the venerable Magic, the city’s 43-year-old, new-plays theater that first garnered national attention, under founder John Lion, for premiering works by playwright Sam Shepard.

“It’s kind of elusive in that it’s not any one thing,” continues Melrose. “Lydia’s got a great sense of humor and at the same time is not afraid to look at things that are ugly… So much of this play is either two people in a room or one person in a room [alone], quiet and intimate.” In casting it with Magic artistic director Loretta Greco–Stryk watched audition videos in Berlin–he was looking for “a woman who could be onstage by herself and carry a show… actors who could really reveal something personal, not just playing a character… actors with a good sense of humor and sexuality.” He found those qualities in Arwen Anderson and in Tim Kniffin; local actor Kniffin has studied the work of late master Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, who created techniques to achieve extraordinary depth and raw physicality in acting.

Known locally for directing such absurdist plays as the recent hit “The Bald Soprano” at Cutting Ball, and having been at times an “auteur director,” Melrose says, “In this play, it’s almost more important to create a space where the actors feel like they’re bringing a lot of themselves to the room rather than [having] a brilliant directorial vision.” He adds, “Often we think of theater as live TV, and we don’t get that what’s amazing is that someone is standing right before you, inviting you to probe into their thoughts and feelings…”

Stryk, now healed from her bike accident, says her play is partly about the change that’s come over her since then. “I know that if I turn left right now it would have consequences. Or right. The moments are different. You know that every move you make can have a certain consequence. You move through the world somewhat differently. You’re not as innocent.”

April 15-May 9, Magic Theatre, Bldg. D, Fort Mason. 441-8822 www.magictheatre.org

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