TEA WITH MARY C.
AN INTERVIEW WITH TOM DOLAND AND DEBBIE WATTS ON THEIR NEW PLAY
Sarah Posey: Tell me about yourselves. What is your name? Where are you from? What's your background?
Tom Doland: I'm from Nebraska. I grew up in Nebraska and went to school there and the University of South Dakota and became an engineer. I came down in 1966 to work for DuPont at the privilege of the U.S. Marines. They wanted engineers to go into the factories and make sure that they got Kevlar developed. So I was in the Texas fibers processing department for quite a few years and DuPont closed down in 1988. And then I went to the University of Tennessee and worked for them as an engineer for 10 years. And then that program closed down. And I started performing for schools–doing shows for schools.
SP: What kind of shows?
TD: I've been doing that pretty much ever since.Mostly historical shows. Portraying historical characters. I've done everything from Davy Crockett to Albert Schweitzer. And, I performed at the Gaylord Entertainment Center for Opera Land as Captain John Smith on the Titanic and then Tom Ryman twice. For the great granddaughter of Tom Ryman. She wrote a book and I did a book tour with her portraying the character. And then Debbie came along and she had this show called The Ryman Diaries. And so we worked on that for, oh, three or four years.
SP: An interesting leap from engineering to theater. Did you always have an interest in theater, or did you discover that later on?
TD: I didn't really have an interest in it, but I was kind of pulled into it, more or less, when I was a young engineer. The ladies club in a little town that I lived in wanted to put on a children's show.
And they didn't know much about putting on a show, and they hired this other lady to assist them and she decided to do Our Town. And there's kids in Our Town, but it's principally an adult show. Well, as the show opened, the main characters were, um, a high school girl and a young boy that was playing a baseball player. And, I think it was the second night, the young lady and the young man got into a squabble and the young man walked off the set. So they pulled me in to be the baseball player.
SP: Okay, so Debbie, what's your background? How did you come to start doing plays?
Debbie Watts: Well, my background is about as varied as Tom's, but I've been performing since I was little. I started playing piano when I was four years old. I loved putting on shows. I loved being in shows. I was an educator. I've been a television producer, now a theatrical playwright and producer. I play piano at the Hermitage Hotel, which is a historic hotel in Nashville. So, when I left the school system, I got back on stage with Tom. Our first production was the Ryman Diaries, a historical show about the building of the Ryman Auditorium. And since then, we've done format plays. That's how we write and that's how we relate to our audiences. It's like letting the audience in on that character's thoughts. And the way we started that style of performance was with the Ryman Diaries, projecting a diary that Betty Ryman kept. And so this has been very pleasing to us and pleasing to the audience. And then I love writing music. So I've given all my characters singing voices.
SP: So tell me about Tea with Mary C. What is the general idea? What's the plot?
DW: It's basically a walk through her life, concentrating on her career as an educator since that was how she made her mark–being the first female superintendent of schools. But what I found about her in the research, yes, there have been millions of teachers, but she was a presence and a character and a fashion icon. And all of that put together and her passion for refinement and good behavior and a future for these children is what I'm trying to infuse into her character in the show, in the play. She was a great humanitarian and of course she was a lady of means. So she also had the privilege of being a fashion icon. And so I found that to be fascinating.
SP: So what led you guys to decide to make a play about Mary C. specifically?
DW: Well, we came to that conclusion when I steamrolled it over him. I steamrolled it.
TD: When Debbie was down here and discovered this really iconic place and came back and told me about it and said that, you know, we could do a show regarding the historical aspects of it. And it intrigued me because my ancestry paralleled the O'Keefe's. My ancestry from Ireland came over in the 1850s as they did. And everything kind of fell into place. With our generations and our passing. And I thought this would be very interesting to be able to portray the Irish ancestry on stage.
SP: What was the writing process like for this play?
DW: I just started selecting key events from her life that I thought would be interesting on stage, that would have the most interest with the most every age of human being in the audience. And I started there. For instance, a nervous young teacher on the afternoon before her first day of school. I thought that would be interesting. School children would like that. Because they like to see a teacher in a vulnerable position. Or on the eve of her retirement reception, where she's expected to deliver a speech and she doesn't want to write a speech. But as she's reminiscing on stage with the audience about her moments as an educator, she goes, “I think I just wrote my speech!” and I felt her to be very relatable. And I modeled the process involved after my experience writing the Ryman Diaries because I wanted this region to feel a source of pride about Mary C. and this place named after her because she was such a refined woman. I like seeing that in the audience.
SP: Speaking of which, what lessons do you hope your audience, both young and old, learn from the play?
DW: Well, I think they'll learn the history of their living quarters in their town here. That they'll learn the history of where it came from–how it developed and why it developed. I think that that's important for people that are going to live here and bring their children up here– that they know the history of where they are at. It's kind of like, even though she's gone on, when they receive a lesson like this on stage, it almost, we hope, would make people feel like Mary's still watching them, and expects a lot out of them, because that's what she did. Even if she was disciplining a child, sitting across from a child brought to the principal's, it was “My dear child, now, what do you want?” She would ask someone in trouble, “What do you want?” And they would go, “Wait a minute, I'm in trouble. Why do you care what I want?” “ Because I want to help you achieve it. And what you did today will not help you achieve what you want. My dear child.” It was always my dear child. Even if they were in trouble.