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Who's the Playwright?

Jeff Daniels

Jeff Daniels is an actor, playwright, theatre founder and executive director, musician, husband, father, businessman, and promoter of the state of Michigan. He has over 50 film acting credits (including The Purple Rose of Cairo and Dumb & Dumber), three Golden Globe nominations, and numerous stage roles (garnering several Drama Desk Award nominations). Daniels has written a dozen plays, most for the nationally acclaimed Purple Rose Theatre, which he founded in 1991 in his and his wife's hometown of Chelsea, MI. This multi-talented Boomer artist (b. 1955) has also written and directed films and written and produced music CDs.

Play Notes

Escanaba in Love is the story of how Albert Jr. and Big Betty Balou-the parents of Remnar and Reuben Soady from Escanaba in Da Moonlight-met and married in the autumn of 1944. Thus, an earlier generation of the Soady family fills the stage; only Albert Soady, Jr. appears in both plays. Playwright Jeff Daniels reprises the speech patterns and humor of the Yoopers (residents of the "UP" - Upper Peninsula of Michigan) in this prequel.

We meet Albert Jr.'s grandfather, Alphonse Soady, and father, Albert, Sr. Joining them at the Soady Deer Camp the night before the first day of deer season is long-time family friend, "Salty" Jim Negamanee, a sailor and boat builder. (He is related somehow to Jimmer Negamanee from Da Moonlight-"Boomadeeboom" and "M'shevyshookashi!")
As in Da Moonlight, Daniels emphasizes family, a sense of place, and rituals. The men are there to support Albert Jr. as he goes off to war. Alphonse revels in retelling how he shot the "Soady Ridge Buck," a story the others can mouth word-for-word. The family is strongly connected to the area around Escanaba: There is Soady Creek, Soady Ridge, and the Soady Deer Camp, where one is not admitted unless one speaks the correct/magic words. This is male territory-firearms, hunting, tellin- stories, lying, drinkin', and...Although males and maleness predominate, as in the first play, so too in this one-a female plays a significant role in helping the men negotiate life. Daniels' female characters connect to the men through "magical realism." This literary device, which is probably most recognizable to CATCO audiences in the writings of Latin American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, inserts the fantastical within the every-day narrative of life (visions, UFOs, abductions by aliens, and cars burning inexplicably). Some might trace this "magical realism" to the drinking habits of the Yoopers. Perhaps. There is actually more drinking and less overt magic in this second play, but when the magic appears it is so real that it just might convince the most cynical among us! CATCO has presented another family from another small town, the Bumillers (Bertha, Hank, Jody, Stanley, and Charlene) from Tuna, Texas (Greater Tuna and Tuna Christmas). They, too, had their odd friends (e.g., Didi and RR Snavely). Those plays are based more on political satire than the Escanaba plays, which are based on gross humor, interlaced with familial sentiments. The Soadys and their friends might become as well known as the citizens of Tuna, for there are indications that Daniels will follow one of his muses, the playwright Lanford Wilson, who has written a trilogy about the Talley family of Lebanon, Missouri.

By Bill Childs, Dramaturg