Kingfisher - A Description of the Creative Process

Exploring the lives of persons of faith has always been central to my life as a playwright. In the summer of 2016, I had just finished a play about the German Catholic personalist philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, based on the journal of his escape from Hitler’s Austria. I thought I might next turn my attention to John Henry Newman. When I mentioned Newman to a friend, he told me, to my surprise, that Newman had been an influence on Gerard Manley Hopkins. At that time, I knew only the basic outlines of Hopkins’ life: that he had been a priest-poet; that he had burned his poems; that he had been a teacher at University College Dublin, established by Newman; that he had died young.

When I first consulted the life of Newman by Ian Ker, I discovered that Newman had not only met with Hopkins, but that he had also received him into the Catholic Church. The more I read, the more I saw Hopkins’s life as full of possibilities for dramatization. I completed a full draft of Kingfisher, Catch Fire in 2016 when I was a parish priest. I never held a play reading with parishioners so I could hear it aloud. I set it in my files and moved on to other projects. Last year I retired from parish ministry and took on a position on the spiritual formation staff at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in Saint Meinrad, Indiana.

When Father Denis Robinson, O.S.B., the President-Rector, approached me in the fall of 2020 about reviving the practice of readers theater at Saint Meinrad, I immediately thought of this 2016 Hopkins play about a priest-poet, struggling to become, by turns, a Catholic, a priest, and a poet - against the opposition of family and friends. I thought his story might speak to seminarians today who experience some of the same conflicts and struggles.

Seminarians responded to the call. At auditions the first weekend of November, I was at last hearing parts of the play aloud. In mid-November, the full cast of thirteen seminarians assembled around a conference table to read the entire play for the first time. I spent Christmas break revising based on what I had learned through the first reading experience. I both cut and compressed some scenes and developed new material as well. The present version has itself gone through eight drafts. Rehearsals began the week of January 25, the first week of spring semester.

In crafting a play, one needs to look for the areas of conflict, dramatic moments. Aristotle in his Poetics says drama is “the imitation of an action.” Conflict erupts into action rather than settles into stasis. Sometimes compressing, sometimes extending moments, the playwright crafts the pieces of action into a plot in the most compelling fashion possible. Hence, a play is wrought into shape, scene by scene.

The focus or organizing principle is called the “dramatic question.” The play is the answer to a question that the playwright poses. In Kingfisher, Catch Fire, the character of Rev. Peter Levi, S.J., poses the question in the Prologue: How did Hopkins become the famed “immortal diamond”? How much pressure did it take to form the diamond? In the Epilogue, poet-physician Robert Bridges, Hopkins’ best friend, articulates the answer. The pressure came from internal and external factors: leaving the Church of England, the demands of the Jesuits, the opposition of friends and family to Hopkins’ vocational choices, the stresses of ministry, the illness Hopkins suffered, all combined with Hopkins’ native gifts to enable him to create a body of work marked by brilliance.

Moments in Hopkins’ life like learning of the wreck of the ship, the Deutschland, that ignited his poetic career, was relatively easy to dramatize.

SCENE. COMMUNITY ROOM. DECEMBER 8, 1875.

SCENE. COMMUNITY ROOM. DECEMBER 8, 1875.

HOPKINS is sitting at a desk, reading. Brother CURTIS enters

with a letter in hand. He stands behind Hopkins’ shoulder.

Hopkins is so absorbed in his reading that he does not sense

that CURTIS is present.

CURTIS

Brother Hop! There is news of a terrible tragedy at sea! All the

newsboys are crying it out on the street corners. The wreck of the “Deutschland” at Kentish Knock!! Fifty are feared drowned!!!

HOPKINS

Oh!!(He is startled.) Lord, have mercy!

CURTIS

Here, see. (Curtis hands Hopkins the newspapers.) The news in the London Times. It’s also in the Illustrated. A terrible shipwreck, to be sure. God be good to them. (Hopkins opens the papers and begins reading.)

HOPKINS

May they rest in peace. Listen, Brother Curtis.

Hopkins begins reading aloud.

The real challenge in dealing with Hopkins was that so much of his life had been interior. Certainly, conflicts with his father, and later with Robert Bridges, provided a motor mechanism. A key principle is that maximum pressure must be placed upon the central character. This dramatizes Hopkins as an active protagonist, in combat, as it were. But how does one dramatize the interior life of praying, of discerning, of struggling both with conscience and bouts of depression? The dramaturgy, or dramatic craft, of the medieval theatre was of immense assistance. The medieval stage of juxtaposition sets past and present time, the natural and supernatural realms, on stage, side-by-side, simultaneously. It is the tradition inherited by Shakespeare. This dramaturgy allowed me, for example, to bring to life John Duns Scotus, the Franciscan priest-philosopher, a major influence on Hopkins:

SCENE. HOPKINS’ JESUIT ROOM. 1874

HOPKINS gathers sheets of verse from a very cluttered room. He reads as he gathers and says aloud first lines of his poem, “The Habit of Perfection”:

HOPKINS

Elected silence, sing to me

And beat upon my whorled ear,

Pipe to me pastures still and be

The music that I care to hear.

Suddenly, John Duns SCOTUS, wearing his brown Franciscan habit, appears.

SCOTUS

Gerard!

HOPKINS

Who are you?

SCOTUS

You need me.

HOPKINS

Have you come to scold me for writing verses?

SCOTUS

Not at all. I have come to speak with you about my Sentences. I wrote it at Oxford, the bond we share.

HOPKINS

Are you Scotus?

SCOTUS

Exactly! Dear boy, read my book, the Sentences. God is found in beauty. In verse as well. Mind you, your own founder, Saint Ignatius Loyola says the same in his Spiritual Exercises, does he not? The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Your tutor Ruskin, something similar, no?

HOPKINS

The grandeur of God...

SCOTUS

Yes, there you have it.

HOPKINS

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” ...

SCOTUS

Precisely! Now you are on to something! Each created thing, created by God, is charged with a unique this-ness. A near sacramental holiness.

HOPKINS

That Kingfisher so blue...

SCOTUS

Yes, boy!

HOPKINS

Each mortal thing does one thing...

SCOTUS

I daresay, you have it.

HOPKINS

Myself it speaks...

SCOTUS

Now do not lose that. Write it down!

HOPKINS

Crying what I do is me.

SCOTUS

Exactly! Write it down, I say! You may make a poem out of it yet! Remember, beauty leads us to God, not away from Him. Do not fear the phenomenal world! Read my Sentences! You will find it all there.

HOPKINS

If what you say is true, I will need a sign - from one of my Superiors, perhaps, to know that this inspiration - and you - come from God.

SCOTUS

Dear boy, just remember, Superiors come, and Superiors go. God’s grace endures and is always breaking in on you! It is like God’s unrelenting stress on you, on the soul, a stress in the soul, pushing us forward! Dear Gerard, onward! Inward!

HOPKINS

A stress in the soul? In stress. Yes! Instress!

Readers’ theatre has a long tradition in theatre history. Before the advent of radio, family and friends might gather around the home hearth and read a play for an evening’s entertainment, a play of Shakespeare, perhaps. The practice was sometimes referred to as fireside theatre. Today plays are developed through a series of steps with revisions at every stage. First comes a private reading, then a public reading, such as this one, before an audience; then a workshop production with minimal staging, sets and costumes, and finally, a fully staged production. Our Saint Meinrad troupe traversed the first three stages in the process.

Readers’ theater proved to be an ideal format for seminary presentation. It freed the invariably busy seminarians from burdensome memorization as well as hours of rehearsal. Script- in-hand performances allow for a shorter time commitment, yet it still magically brings the play alive. It allows for minimal staging and a few costume pieces, sufficient to evoke an entire world. The audience is actively engaged, participating through their imagination, in creating a shared world.

(Photo: Robert Bridges, left; Hopkins, center; William Addis, right)

The Saint Meinrad men were most enthusiastic from the first announcement of the project, through to the auditions and first reading, to the rehearsals and the performance. The enterprise allowed for a much-needed relief from the restrictions imposed by the Covid pandemic. The seminary community actively supported the endeavor. On the performance night, the seminarian pub keepers shuttered the campus bar to support their brothers on stage at Saint Bede Theater. Audience members were notably surprised by seminarians whose talents were being revealed. One remarked that men who had rarely been heard to say “two words” in the classroom or dining room were performing onstage with great abandon. Such is the dramatic life! Encouraged by the success of this phenomenon, I sent copies of the text to various seminary rectors throughout the country to make the Hopkins project available more widely. Father Rector has requested a play on Newman for next year.