Reardon

Before he ever wrote a play, Dennis Reardon knew he had something he wanted to say. The award-winning playwright and head of IU Bloomington's playwriting program knew that someday he would have to revisit the experiences he had as a young college student in the mid-1960s and the people who impacted his life during those years.

Now, Reardon, 59, is finally making his statement. His 13th and most intensely personal play, Last Days of the High Flier, will receive its world premiere at IUB on tonight (Feb. 27).

Set in 1963, Last Days of the High Flier is the story of a young man waiting for his life to begin, the mysterious ex-pilot who enters his life and the intricate dance of friendship, betrayal and forgiveness that takes place between the two men. Historically based, the story revolves around political conspiracies, including the CIA's secret war in Laos. It also addresses personal struggles that ocurred almost a half-century ago but still have relevance in an age in which intelligence failures and civil liberties threats dominate the news.

"I hoped to show in a dramatic way how gigantic global events can impact tiny individuals living in small locales," Reardon said, trying not to give away too much of the mystery plot. "We're not immune to the world. The global vastness and darkness can impact kids living in Kansas, in the same way 9/11 impacted so many people."

Through the process of writing the play, Reardon attempted to answer questions that have confounded him most of his adult life, even while he was completing other works that earned him wide acclaim, national awards and several major fellowships. Reardon's first play, The Happiness Cage (1970), had the honor of being the inaugural production in Joseph Papp's Newman Theater, the flagship venue for the complex now known as the Joseph Papp Public Theater. Subsequently, Reardon had a play (The Leaf People) premiere on Broadway, won the National Play Award (for Steeple Jack) from the National Repertory Theater Foundation, received a two-year playwriting fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and took over the playwriting program at IUB.

But throughout it all, he kept coming back to the same period of his life when a bright, young college student, the son of a college history and playwriting professor, searching for his way in small-town Kansas, somehow collided with cultural and global events beyond his control.

Reardon wrote the first draft over a span of four months in 2001, but then came 9/11, which caused him to toss out 91 of the 98 pages he had written. "9/11 exposed a lot of triviality in the first draft," he said. "It forced me to reconnect emphatically with things like the Kennedy assassination, which, in fact, was my generation's 9/11. I realized that the period of time I chose to write about did speak to this generation. There's an enormous amount of resonance in this play for our contemporary times. I just kept thinking to myself, 'history repeats, history repeats.'"

But the heavily autobiographical element in the play was new to Reardon. "That's not how I usually write," he said. "I don't like to insert myself in my work. I'd rather pretend to be someone else. But this particular set of events haunted me for four decades. I couldn't stop thinking about them.

"It's why I write plays," he continued. "I try to answer these questions that nag at me, questions mostly about why people do what they do. I write plays to answer questions about character and reality."

Reardon asks each of the students he recruits for his graduate playwriting program a simple question. He admits that it's probably resulted in a few potential students walking away from the program, but he believes that it's important enough to ask.

"I ask them if there's anything else in the world they wish to do (besides playwriting)," he said. "If there is, I say to them, 'Please go do it.'"

"Learning to be a playwright is like learning to be a blacksmith or a shepherd," Reardon said, adding that it is just as challenging a skill to learn as any other technical profession. His main goal is to find playwrights who already exhibit talent and initiative, and then to hone that talent to the point of "survivability," which he defined as "the ability to do whatever one needs to do to financially provide for oneself while pursuing one's art." In addition to learning the fundamentals and the secrets of the craft, Reardon believes that today's playwrights need to learn other skills to succeed. He said those skills might include doing the legwork to acquire a grant, learning to teach or networking in an urban environment or a professional realm.

Reardon accepts only two people into the playwriting program in a three-year period. Those select two are recruited from a nationwide search of candidates. "We recruit nationally and very carefully because of what we offer," he said, of which the hallmark is a fully budgeted, main stage production of each playwright's thesis project. "It's the defining quality of this program," Reardon said. The thesis plays are now staged at the recently constructed Wells-Metz Theatre at the IU Theatre and Drama Center. The theater features two balconies, movable seating and a flexible performance space.

In recent years, the thesis play has become an indicator of where the best young playwriting talent is coming from, Reardon said. Some of the promising playwrights who have cut their teeth in Bloomington include Greg Owens, whose Life and Times of Tulsa Lovechild earned rave reviews in Chicago in 2001 and has received multiple productions around the country; David van Matre, whose thesis play, The Oblong Man, went on to be staged in Los Angeles; Michael Chemers, a 1997 grad who captured the Sundance Institute's Young Playwright Award; Angeline Larimer, who served as an assistant professor of playwriting while studying at IUB and whose Fish in the Desert premiered in Bloomington in 2001; Jonathan Yukich, who won the Kennedy Center's 2003 Paula Vogel Award for Playwriting for Edible Shoes; and John Drago, whose Playing the Bones was the first student work to premiere in the new Wells-Metz Theatre.