(via The Ghosts of Yaddo Act Up | The New Yorker)
Lucy Liu joined Willem Dafoe, Kathryn Hahn, and Rufus Collins onstage at a fund-raiser for Yaddo, which Liu described as “like a Tinder for artists.”
On a recent Thursday, in a library-like speakeasy at a labyrinthine event space in Chelsea, the actors Rufus Collins, Willem Dafoe, and Kathryn Hahn sat around a coffee table strewn with scripts and bananas. They were conducting a read-through for a performance, guided by the writer-director Tamara Jenkins. The actor Lucy Liu was on her way. Hahn wore a dramatic skirt. (“It’s just an old fisherman’s net.”) She read, “I’ve lived chiefly in Alabama, Louisiana, Connecticut, New York City . . . have never attended college, or taken a formal course in writing. Though Capote (pronounced Ca-Po-Te, more or less) is really a Spanish name, my mother is Dutch, my father Scotch-English.”
“Dear Miss Ames,” Dafoe read. “I am writing to ask whether there would be any possibility of a place at Yaddo, sometime this winter, for James Baldwin, a very gifted young writer of my acquaintance.” He concluded, “Sincerely, Lionel Trilling.” The script consisted of letters sent to and from Yaddo, the writers’ and artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, founded in 1900 and centered on the fifty-five-room Tudor mansion where its founders, Spencer and Katrina Trask, summered with their four children, who all died young. Paintings of the Trasks hang on the walls, and their silverware and photographs remain in the house; ghosts, literary and familial, have long infused the Yaddo experience. That night’s performance, for a Yaddo benefit, aimed to conjure a few.
As Collins read from Katherine Anne Porter’s description of the Trasks (“as wildly romantic as any two Babes in the Woods you could ever expect to find”), the lights in the room dimmed suddenly—“Ooh!” the actors said—then brightened again. A few minutes later, Liu appeared, looking tidy and practical: smart bob, eyeglasses, striped turtleneck, overalls, pumpkin-colored raincoat. “I was lost in the basement,” she said. Hahn squealed and reached out, wiggling her fingers.
“Do you know each other?” Jenkins asked.
“No, but I want to!” Hahn said. Liu took her seat and a script. “I am a composer studying music at Harvard,” she read. “I am ready to come at any time, and at very short notice. . . . Very sincerely, Leonard Bernstein.” They continued on. Dafoe: “I am sitting here at my desk drinking a queer but rather good mixture of tea, red wine, and orange juice.” (Carson McCullers.) Liu: “I am trying to write a handful of good short stories.” (John Cheever.) Hahn: “At Yaddo I would like to work at completing a first volume of poetry.” (Sylvia Plath Hughes.) Flannery O’Connor wrote that she was looking forward to Yaddo, and not just because it wasn’t Georgia. “Lately we have been treated to some parades by the Ku Klux Klan,” Collins read. “It’s too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with red electric light bulbs.”
“Oh, my God,” several actors said. After more letters, and a tally of prizes won by Yaddo alums (some seventy-nine Pulitzers, sixty-nine National Book Awards, a Nobel, etc.), they gossiped a bit.
“Howard Doughty—he was whose boyfriend?” Dafoe said.
“Newton Arvin’s, and then Truman became Newton’s lover,” Elaina Richardson, Yaddo’s president, said.
“It’s where it all happens,” Jenkins said.
“It’s like a Tinder for artists,” Liu said.
Allan Gurganus writes in his essay “The Ghosts of Yaddo” that, according to legend, a young, “satyr-like” Cheever was caught creeping between bedrooms late one night, naked, when he was happened upon by peers. Cheever froze and assumed a glassy-eyed expression. “I am a ghost,” he said.
Gurganus claims to have seen a female, skirted ghost at Yaddo; other atmosphere-enhancing visitations come from bats. “It’s, like, total Preston Sturges absurd,” Jenkins, a Yaddo alum, who set part of her film “Private Life” there, said. “You’re all having cocktails and some writer runs through with a net.”
“I am famous at Yaddo for catching bats,” a writer named Boomer Pinches said, at the benefit. Pinches worked on a seven-hundred-page novel at Yaddo. “They made me a T-shirt about how many bats I caught.” He mimed wielding a net. “In the mansion, they fly in figure eights,” he said. “There’s a method so you don’t hurt them.” (Use two nets.)
“Nothing bonds you faster than grabbing sheets and chasing bats for two minutes,” Doug Wright said. He wore a glitzy, vaguely Masonic dinner jacket. At Yaddo, he worked on his play “I Am My Own Wife,” and a new play about castrati. His Yaddo adventures include playing a prank with Rick Moody and having Martinis at the racetrack with Joy Williams. Ghost-wise, he said, “People—and not people you’d expect to watch ‘Ghost Hunters’ on A&E—have told me about sightings of the children. But they had a consoling air—kind of a copacetic coexistence.”
“Artists getting along with ghosts is not really that weird,” the novelist and performer James Hannaham, a “total colony rat,” said.
“A ghost is nothing compared to a long day of typing and only getting three sentences,” Wright said. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the
, issue, with the headline “Visitations.”
