KCMETROPOLIS.org
Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

Jessica Showers: What inspired you to write a farce about golf?

Ken Ludwig: Two summers ago, I was between plays, and I was out golfing with my oldest friend, and I said in passing, "I don't know what I'm going to write about next." And he duffed some shot off toward the green and said, "Why don't you write about golf? It's so innately funny. It has people walking around in silly clothes." And then I got to thinking about it, and classic comedy, in order for it to work, needs rules, because the rules then get broken. It always works best if society is stratified—when there are the haves and have-nots. And golf, certainly in the world of golf clubs, has those things. So, the next day I sat down and started thinking about writing a comic play centered on the world of golf. I know theatre so well, and I don't think anybody's ever written a play about golf before.

JS: I know almost nothing about the sport. Do you have to be a golfer to appreciate the play?

KL: I don't think it matters at all. The whole strain of comedy that I love very much is English farce around the turn of the 20th century, around 1890 to 1930, that was often based around sporting themes. Often it was the track, but it was other sports, too. It was a great-old tradition, and I love those traditions, and I thought, "Well, golf is a sport."

JS: In your introduction to The Fox on the Fairway you talk about how farces are minutely plotted. Have you developed a formula for writing a good farce?

KL: I try to come up with the prime movement of the play: What's the play about? It's set on a golf course, but what's it about? On the surface, it's about a bet. What makes the plot tick is the fact that two rival country clubs have a yearly tournament, and the heads of the two golf clubs have a personal rivalry going. What I hope it's about underneath is social norms, love lives, being true to yourself, and not being willing to throw somebody under the track just to win. With those things in mind, each story raises its own challenges. When and where do I open it? How do we get to know the characters? How do I get the audience to relax and understand the comedy? That's really important.

JS: You call farce an "endangered tradition." Why? And why is it important to keep farce alive in today's theatre?

KL: I think it's endangered because it takes a lot of skill. Farces are always hard to write. There's been a big revival in London recently of the plays of Terence Rattigan. He wrote what was called the "well-made play," very carefully, beautifully crafted plays that have a real beginning, middle, and end. He was enormously popular. But with the advent of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, a “kitchen-sink drama” that took place in real, lower-class environments, people thought, "Now there's a playwright finally speaking to us about the things we care about.” And that took over to such an extent that the critics of the time really turned on Rattigan and turned on the well-made play.

Farces, if anything, are well-made plays. That whole tradition came under enormous critical derision for the next 75 years, right into modern times, so I think no one dared to write plays like that for fear they'd come under such criticism from the press, from the viewers, that they'd be doomed. Then, suddenly, about three years ago, the National Theatre of London did one of Rattigan's early plays, and people started saying, "This guy was an incredible writer.” I always loved that kind of writing. It's all I've ever written. And now, suddenly, people are saying, "Gee, it has real value." I've always thought it had value. I purposely set this now to say, "Look, this genre is alive and well. And if not, it's certainly alive and should be well." People should continue to write in this very vital kind of way.

JS: Do you have a favorite character or scene in the play?

KL: Yes, I do. Louise. I think most playwrights—and novelists—have their own little repertory company of characters in their head that they replay again and again. Louise is the waitress at the club who goes to night school to better herself. She's studying the Homeric epic, and she has aspirations to be greater than she appears to be. She is greater than she appears to be. That's a character I've written in about four or five of my plays.

JS: What do you want audiences to experience or take away from the play?

KL: I want them to laugh a lot. I want them to have a whoppingly good time. It's a new play, and it's just going out into the world, and I'll be interested to hear how it goes.

But also…I was just teaching A Midsummer Night's Dream to my son's high school class, and I was trying to explain to them that one of the great joys of a play like that is not only all the amazing things that this god named Shakespeare wrote that are beautiful turns of phrase and poetry so seethingly great that you step back. What is also great about the play is its architecture. It has four plots that are all complex, and he weaves them all together. And yet it's a short play, and you're never confused for a moment. The architecture is magically good, like the greatest magic trick ever performed. How the hell did he do that? And if plays are well made, somehow that architecture works on you.

So, one of the things I want the audience to come away with, whether they're aware of it in the moment or not, is that a day later, they say, "Gee, that worked like a Swiss clock. I didn't notice it, but there's a real art behind that. How did he do that?"

Read KCM’s review of The Fox on the Fairway here. 

Top photo: Ken Ludwig (Photo by Leslie Cashen)

By Jessica Showers

Theatre Contributor

Jessica Showers, a long-time believer in the collaborative power of the performing arts, is a Midwest native and Kansas City-based arts journalist. She is on the editorial board for The Sondheim Review, a quarterly magazine dedicated to the work of renowned composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Jessica received a master's degree in arts journalism with a focus in theatre from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and a bachelor's degree in magazine journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia. As part of her graduate coursework, Jessica partnered with Charleston, S.C.'s daily paper The Post and Courier to cover theatre at Spoleto Festival USA. She also interned in New York City for American Theatre magazine and for Syracuse Stage, Syracuse, N.Y.'s local LORT theatre organization. Jessica looks forward to delving into Kansas City's wealth of theatricality and sharing it with KCM's readers.

More Featured Articles