It's No Secret: Playwright Marsha Norman Harvests Her `Garden'

As anybody who tends one knows, a garden can be a source of beauty, wonder, and accomplishment. For playwright Marsha Norman, a garden is also the literary metaphor that revived her fallow stage career.

Norman's book and lyrics for "The Secret Garden," a 1991 Broadway musical based on the treasured children's novel of the same title by Frances Hodgson Burnett, brought her a Tony Award. A thoughtful antidote to the mega-spectacles that dominated Broadway through the 1980s, the show lasted in New York for more than a year.

The national touring production has proven even more successful, grossing over $25 million to date. It finally touches down in Seattle next week, running June 23-28 at the Paramount Theatre (call 292-ARTS).

Speaking by telephone from the New York City home she shares with her artist husband and 5-year-old son, Norman rejected the common wisdom that "Secret Garden" was her comeback vehicle.

"I prefer to think of it as opening up a new kind of life in the theater for me," she said.

"I grew up at the piano, and I longed to write musicals. Lucy Simon (the show's composer) and I worked well together, and I loved being released from the isolation of writing alone."

She also delighted in the challenge of creating an intelligent family musical: "There is a vast, great group of people out there who'd love to take their kids to a Broadway show. And as a parent, I'm aware of how few appropriate ones exist that are this size and scale, or have the strength and power of this material."

Norman, a forthright woman in her early 40s, acknowledges that the invitation from producer-designer Heidi Landesman to adapt "The Secret Garden" into a $6.2 million musical came when her theatrical fortunes were at a low ebb.

A native of Louisville, Ky., Norman blazed to prominence in 1977 with "Getting Out," her award-winning drama about a female ex-convict trying to forge a new life. Then, in 1983, "'night, Mother," Norman's stark and unsentimental look at a woman's decision to commit suicide, garnered critical raves and a Pulitzer Prize.

Soon critics were touting Norman as the Great Feminist Hope of Broadway drama, and the "next Lillian Hellman." But Norman says the rush of gush had a stultifying effect on her career. Everyone was waiting for her to top herself - or stumble badly.

"After I won the Pulitzer, there was this sense of, `OK, that's enough for you. Now go away,' " she noted ruefully.

"What I wanted was to keep writing, keep working. But no one would produce anything of mine they didn't think would be as big as `'night, Mother.' People are amazed to hear I haven't had a (nonmusical) play done in New York since 1983."

BACKLASH

She also believes there was a backlash against her and other rising women playwrights of the time.

"Our emergence triggered a lot of fear. It's very disturbing, very sad to see that from that great era of promise for women writers only three of us - me, Wendy Wasserstein, and Tina Howe - have really made it.

"There are days when I think the National Endowment for the Arts should issue a quota system for the production of plays by women - especially when you realize women buy 70 percent of all theater tickets."

Her 1984 play, "Traveler in the Dark," did get an airing in regional theaters. But its poor reception was so demoralizing Norman turned her focus to screenwriting. Her film version of "'night, Mother," with Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft, came out in 1986. More recently, she penned "The Face of a Stranger," a 1991 TV movie about homelessness that starred Gena Rowlands and Tyne Daly, and was shot in Seattle.

Based on her previous output, Norman did not seem a likely candidate to adapt "The Secret Garden." Why?

"I had been categorized as a specialist in modern tragedy," she notes. "In fact, I think one of the things that made my early work so appealing to men was the violence in it."

A WISTFUL TALE?

But Norman warmed to the idea of musicalizing the wistful Victorian children's tale. And she believed theatergoers would take to the show the way generations of readers have taken to Burnett's 1911 novel. Both relate the saga of Mary Lennox, a lonely English orphan whose world expands when she discovers a hidden garden on her uncle's country estate.

"It's all about loss and the promise of healing and rebirth," Norman explained. "This is a simple idea, with a simple metaphor, but one of those important stories we need to hear again and again."

Gearing the work to children only was never what Norman, director Susan Schulman and their colleagues had in mind: "We wanted a show adults could go to without a child, and still have a fabulous time. That's one reason we split the focus between Mary and her Uncle Archie's story of losing a woman he dearly loved."

The central figure in the show, however, remains 10-year old Mary (played in Seattle by Kimberly Mayhon). That's as Norman intended: "There are so many stories for boys of this age, and so few for little girls. Mary is someone who, like a lot of 10-year-old girls, feels lost and doesn't know where she belongs. In the garden she finds her power, her true friends, and ways of meeting her own needs."

It's hard not to see a parallel journey in Norman's own excursion into "The Secret Garden." With two new plays ("D. Boone" and "Sarah and Abraham") wending toward New York, and a new musical (an adaptation of the classic ballet film, "The Red Shoes," with music by Jule Styne) slated for Broadway next season, Norman's dramatic career is clearly back in full bloom.