ANDY DRACHENBERG: What is the story at the heart of The Bridges of Madison County?
MARSHA NORMAN: The heart of the story is about the choices that come upon us by surprise and how those surprises shape our lives. We think that we can make all of these great plans about life, when really it’s the surprises and the unknown things that actually shape our lives. So when our leading lady Francesca is grieving for her lost love, suddenly this handsome young American sailor appears at the harbor in Naples and she looks at him and sees a bright future in a new place that isn’t destroyed and filled with grief. This is the first surprise. Some people call these black swans: the things that you don’t know exist until you see one. In her life in Iowa, where she’s done everything she possibly could to be the best housewife there is, suddenly a photographer walks up her driveway as if from another world entirely, a world she’s forgotten even existed. This encounter not only changes her for the four days that they’re together, but changes the rest of her life. It changes how she feels about everything: the choice she made to come to America, about what love is, about what she needs to do as a woman, as a mom and as a wife. Francesca sings this gorgeous song “Love Is Always Better” about how we don’t know what the choices will be that come along, but those we make out of love are the good ones. The Bridges of Madison County is about what you do with what happens to you and how you make the choices that give you a life filled with love and happiness.
AD: What do you try to find when writing the story for a musical? What makes a show “great” in your eyes?
MN: Jerry Lawrence (who wrote the screenplay for “Inherit the Wind”) once told me that all musicals are about the conflict of two worlds. In the beginning of the musical all of the characters have a strong sense of the world. As the story progresses, a character awakes to the reality of another world. In Bridges, Francesca has this world that she knew in Italy, and Robert has the world that he knows which is, in a sense, the world. Then there is the world of Iowa – a very literal, specific and organized place. In this world everyone knows exactly what everyone else will do in a situation, what their jobs are and what their roles are in their family are. Whereas out in the world where Robert and Francesca come from, people don’t respond as they’re told. People wander around, get in trouble and go to places they haven’t seen before. It isn’t by accident that The Bridges of Madison County’s story takes place in Iowa because it is a central flat plane that really holds all of the American values.
AD: What came first – the scene or the song?
MN: They come in order. What I did in terms of the structure of the entire piece was to first write a treatment of what I would do with the novel by Robert James Waller if we were to obtain the rights. What I wrote was very much an expansion of the world since the original story only has two people in it. We’ve enlarged the world to include all of the people that we need to tell the story: Francesca’s family, neighbors, townspeople, etc. After that Jason Robert Brown and I began to talk – composer to book writer- about either a scene or a song that gets the story rolling. The first thing you need is a song that tells you where you are, what the world is, what people do here and how things work. The opening of The Bridges of Madison County is a song that Francesca sings about how she got from this outside world into this Iowa world where things are very different for her.
AD: What are some of the important themes the show explores?
MN: One of the big themes of Bridges is the choice that we all have to make between security and freedom. And this is a choice that every single person in this story makes. It’s very costly to find yourself choosing freedom if this means you don’t have a home. Robert Kincaid feels this way. He’s spent his whole life traveling the world, but what he’s really looking for is a place to sit down, have supper and have someone love him. It’s not what you would expect a National Geographic photographer to feel, but in this case he is a wild roaming photographer who is looking for a safe place. Bud, and to a certain extent his son Michael, have both grown up in this world of safety. Bud assumes he’ll have safety for his entire life while Michael can’t wait to get away and have his freedom. There’s the struggle all the way through between choices of safety and security or freedom. Everybody in the audience knows that choice and has come across the need to get out and be free. I think that one of the reasons people are drawn to this story is that this choice has such impact. What is so powerful about the book is that it asks: What if?
AD: Can you tell me a bit about the creative team and the collaborative process you have?
MN: It’s been an extraordinary process. Jason and I speak a kind of “high of mind.” We very rarely even need to talk because we are so in sync. We think very clearly about what we’re doing, we know what are jobs are and we do them. In a musical you need people who can carry their part of the load and make you feel comfortable, so it’s been very easy for us. Bart Sher coming into our collaboration is a fantastic additional visual piece. Jason and I tend to think about the people, so when Bart came in with a visual world that was so compatible with our written world, we just instantly said, “Let’s go to work!”
AD: How has this project been different from other projects that you’ve worked on? In addition, how is writing a play different from writing the book for a musical?
MN: Writing for a musical gives you such a bigger toolbox than writing for a play. There are certain things you can say in text such as one person saying, “I love you” and the other person responding, “I love you too.” This exchange lasts twenty seconds. That’s not how love feels. When you say, “I love you” to somebody in song, it captures the full human emotion in all of its size and shape. What we feel inside is so much bigger than what we can say. Songs captures emotion so much better than text. Text captures story. Musicals are a great combination of what texts can do and what songs can do. That is the part of it that I love: I don’t have to stop at what text can do. I can lead right into the song and let the song carry the audience away.
In terms of working on this show in comparison to other musicals, one of Jason’s original ideas for the show is that it was a small show for an octet. For this story I never really imagined writing for an octet, I always imagined writing for 20 people on the stage. So what Bart did was fill up the world with the people of Iowa. So it’s turned out to be a musical for 16 people: 8 of whom are full blown characters, and 8 of whom are part of the world and also the audience. They’re watchers for the community that surrounds the story. Bart has been able to take those original 8 people and give them depth. It’s been quite fabulous to watch the original design for an octet become the big show that it is today.
AD: What are you hoping the audiences experience when they see the show?
MN: I hope that audiences are sent back into their own memory, their own lives and into their own relationships to find themselves living out an experience of their own through the characters on the stage. We’ve found a way to write about all of the loves that had to be left behind. There are a lot of those and that feeling is understood by a lot of men and women. I assumed that the women would affected, but I didn’t expect the men who were taken unaware at the loss of a great love.
MARSHA NORMAN(Book) is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and co-chair of Playwriting at Juilliard. She won a Tony for The Secret Garden, and another nomination for The Color Purple. Coming soon are The Bridges of Madison County, a musical with Jason Robert Brown, and a play for the UN about trafficking. Her first play, Getting Out, received the John Gassner Playwriting Medallion, the Newsday Oppenheimer Award, and a citation from the American Critics Association. Other plays include The Laundromat, The Pool Hall, Loving Daniel Boone,Trudy Blue, and her newest play,Last Dance. Published collections of her works includeFour Plays, Collected Works of Marsha Norman, Vol. 1, and a novel, The Fortune Teller. She has also worked extensively in television and film and has an uncomping play for the UN about trafficking and violence toward women. She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a former advisory member of the Sewanee Writers Conference, and current vice president of The Dramatists Guild of America. She serves on the boards of the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Independent Committee for Arts Policy. Ms. Norman was elected to the Agnes Scott College Board of Trustees in 2003. She lives with her two children in Monterey, MA and New York City.