A play honoring one of Iowa City’s greatest literary figures will finally be staged to the extent it was originally intended.
Oct. 12, 2008, marked not only Paul Engle’s 100th birthday but also the première reading of Leaner Than Light: 12 Frames of Paul Engle in the Old Capitol. Though meant for the stage, the flooding of the UI Theatre Building and the UI and Coe College libraries in June 2008 made that impossible.
Leaner Than Light: 12 Frames of Paul Engle will be staged for the first time in the Theatre Building’s Theatre B today and Saturday at 8 p.m. The Saturday show will be performed in conjunction with the 6 p.m. Global Express, the International Writing Program’s annual stage-adapted readings of works by IWP writers.
Plans for Leaner Than Light began two years ago, when IWP director Christopher Merrill and Dare Clubb, a cohead of the M.F.A. playwriting program, applied and received a grant from Humanities Iowa to fund a one-person play about Paul Engle.
Engle, a native of Cedar Rapids, pushed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to become one of the best known in the country, and established the IWP with the inspiration from his second wife, Hualing Nieh Engle, a writer from China.
Merrill and Clubb enlisted Art Borreca, Clubb’s cohead of the playwriting and dramaturgy program, to find numerous writers for the project. One emerged — former UI graduate student and adjunct professor Lisa Schlesinger.
Not only was she qualified for the position, but she had what Borreca described as a strong connection to Engle’s character, having graduated from both the Writers’ Workshop and Playwrights’ Workshops.
After further research and a series of interviews with Nieh Engle, Schlesinger decided to include her as the second character.
“I didn’t feel that a one-person play would do Paul Engle justice,” Schlesinger said. “His life was so much about giving face for other people to be heard, and Hualing was a huge part of that process and lifestyle.”
Schlesinger selected Lisa DiFranza, her colleague at Columbia College in Chicago, to direct. It was a natural choice considering DiFranza’s energy and history with the IWP, she said.
A major part of the IWP is taking the writers to different cities to do readings and explore the culture. Six years ago, DiFranza met Merrill at what she called a “mini-writing festival” at Portland Stage in Maine. She became interested in the IWP and started coming to the UI annually to teach. She and Schlesinger met, and, coincidentally, the two started teaching at Columbia.
DiFranza, who has directed Global Express with longtime project director Maggie Conroy in the past, said many IWP writers have never heard their work read by actors.
“They get to discover what is dramatic about their work, which is interesting and exciting,” DiFranza said.
The next step for the crew is to adapt Leaner Than Light for use as an educational tool around Iowa.
But among the most important factors for all of the project’s contributors is that Iowans never forget Engle’s legacy, which has been central to Iowa City’s role as a literary powerhouse.
“Nobody affected the direction of American literature through the ’30s and ’60s [more] than Paul Engle,” Borreca said. “Although most people don’t know it.”