I.
We knew what we were there to talk about. It was an autumn evening, 1998, when we settled in around my large kitchen table. The artistic director of Nevada City’s Foothill Theatre Company, Philip Sneed, had invited core members of our company—director, costume and lighting designers, key actors, and me, as playwright—to spin ideas about creating a stage adaptation of one of the great American novels.
Our production of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose seemed meant to be. The theater and production offices were not five miles from Grass Valley, where the novel’s narrator, Lyman Ward, lives and writes in a cottage built for his grandparents decades before—and where those remarkable grandparents, Oliver, superintendent of the Zodiac Mine, and his wife, Susan, a writer and illustrator, live out the final years of one of the most extraordinary fictional marriages of the 19th-century West.
“Have you visited the North Star House?” Phil asked. “It’s exactly as Stegner describes it.”
“We should take a field trip,” said Tom Taylor, often our production manager. “Including the North Star Mining Museum.”
“Wait,” someone said. “You mean what Stegner in his novel calls Zodiac Cottage and Zodiac Mine are actually the North Star?”
Tom nodded. Born and raised in Nevada City—the heart of California gold country—he was deeply familiar with the region’s history. “Stegner didn’t just cutely rename the North Star House and the mine,” he said. “He based Susan and Oliver Ward on people who lived there, Mary and Arthur Foote—Arthur was superintendent of the North Star, as Lyman’s grandfather is of the Zodiac.”
Something flickered, but as a fiction writer myself, and the daughter of one, I knew that we often fold in the real with the invented. At the time, I was more concerned with how, as playwright, I’d handle Lyman Ward. After discovering that his wife is having an affair, Lyman, a historian, comes to terms with his own marriage by examining that of his grandparents. I found Lyman unappealing, both self-pitying—he’s lost a leg to a degenerative disease and must use a wheelchair—and full of diatribes against the youth of the ’60s, as personified in his holier-than-thou lefty son. To me, that amputated leg seemed like some bludgeoning effort of Stegner’s to indicate a “missing part,” emotional or otherwise. And the final scene of the novel was a dream, that most unforgivable of fictional devices—made even more so here by featuring the large and naked breasts of Lyman’s caretaker. But while Lyman was a clumsy framing device, I was keen to dramatize what was inside that frame—the life of Lyman’s grandparents, largely unfolded and reconstructed through his grandmother’s letters and reminiscences.
“You should all know,” Tom said, “that there’s a lot of local dudgeon aimed in Stegner’s direction. There’s a rumor he used Mary’s journal, or diary—”
This was met by a
