Natalie Symons talks setting, Lark Eden and her first novel
Aurora Theatre recently opened Natalie Symons’ play, Lark Eden. Across the nation, it has received high regard and she was named Most Promising Playwright during the 2012 Creative Loafing Best of the Bay Awards. As Lark Eden continues to gain audience appreciation, Symons’ also embarks on her first novel. The line between both is that setting is extremely important to writer and captive reader. Plus, what’s not to love about a fellow Buffalo comrade.
Below Symons’ talks about her hit play, the impact of place, and her first novel.
Q. Your play, Lark Eden, is currently running at Aurora Theatre. It has already won many accolades. It originally opened in Seattle, what was it like to bring the play to Georgia, the state setting of the play itself?
A. Lark Eden is about home, and what home means to these women. When Aurora Theatre contacted me I was thrilled to have the play come home to Georgia. With that said, someone asked me in the talkback the other night if the play resonates differently in different cities. I honestly think the emotional chords it strikes in someone have less to do with geography and more to do with how you see yourself in the characters.
Q. Lark Eden follows the lives of three friends – Emily, Thelma, and Mary – in the south during an era that can shape lives in many varying ways. Why did you choose to place these women in the south during this time and what impact did this choice have on the characters?
A. Lark Eden is a small fictional town that Emily says “doesn’t show up on most maps.” I wanted to set the play in the south, or more specifically Georgia, mostly because of the imagery that it inspires. I spent some time in Savannah growing up – every spring my family packed up the family station wagon and drove, non-stop from Buffalo to Tybee Island to visit my cousins. For me there is something about the texture of the south – the thick heat, the marshes, live oaks, Spanish moss that evokes a certain lyricism. It’s those images that are heavily connected to place that influenced the language and emotional cores of the three women in the play.
Q. Why was it so important for you to solely focus on just these three female characters during a time and place that still held so many limitations for women?
A. I wanted to write about lives well lived by seemingly unspectacular American women. By unspectacular I certainly don’t mean unimportant women, or dull women – I mean real women. I’ve often thought about the inconspicuous women amongst us whose lives are outwardly unremarkable. They may not “change the world”, but they do leave an imprint on it. Stephen Sondheim says that the things we leave behind are our children and our art. Thelma leaves behind children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. Emily leaves her poetry. But Mary, who spent her entire life as a caregiver for her mother and her grandmother – what does she leave behind? I think Thelma answers that question in her final letter. Emily, Mary and Thelma live the kind of lives that might not fill the pages of history books but hopefully the story of their friendship paints a portrait of unconditional love that other women, and men too, can relate to.
Q. You are also currently writing your first novel about a steel town in Pennsylvania. It seems that setting, throughout your work, has a very large impact on character and story. Is place the first thing you think about before embarking on a new project?
A. Yes, absolutely. I can’t write a story unless I know first and foremost where it’s happening. The steel town in Western Pennsylvania is also a fictional town, however it’s based on a real place in the Mon Valley. I recently started writing a new play, which is set in another rust-belt city, my hometown of Buffalo. I don’t think I could begin to imagine a character until I know where they’re from and what got them to this place. In Lark Eden Emily says, “Lark Eden is you Mary.”
Setting is more than a backdrop for me; it’s so connected to character that I find it difficult to separate the two.
Q. Do you think this curiosity about setting stems from your own vast travels while working as an actress?
A. In a sense that could be true. For someone who has moved around as much as I have in my life I revere the idea of home and creating a home. That probably comes from growing up in Buffalo where my family roots, on both my mother and father’s side are deeply entangled in the city. Couple that with the fact that I’m a nostalgic person – I was even when I was nine – and it’s no mystery why everything that I write is about coming home.
