Jennifer Schlueter

Fragmented identity. Sublimated love affairs. A nagging desire for fame. And the limits of credulity.

Pearl Curran was a housewife in early twentieth century St Louis. She was also the operator of a Ouija board through which Patience Worth, a long-dead early British colonist and thwarted authoress, spoke. Over the course of two decades, a remarkably prolific Patience dictated (and, with the help of Pearl’s husband John, published) millions of words in books, poems, and plays through Pearl’s Ouija board and ultimately through Pearl’s own voice. Over Pearl’s long career as a medium and lecturer, Patience regaled throngs of curious visitors, believers and nonbelievers alike, with cryptic, extemporaneous bon mots. Patience carried on a love affair with a local newspaper editor; Pearl demurred that she was merely the transporting vessel. Patience adopted a child; childless Pearl was delighted.

In keeping with the for/word company’s creative technique, Patience Worthis built out of material written by and about its central characters, including Pearl Curran’s “Rosa Alvaro,” Irene Hickman’s I Knew Patience Worth, Emily Grant Hutchings’s Where Do We Go From Here?, Irving Litvag’s Singer in the Shadows, Walter Prince’s The Case of Patience Worth, William Marion Reedy’s “My Flirtation With Patience Worth,” Daniel B. Shea’s Patience of Pearl, Casper Yost’s Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery, and the extensive Pearl Curran/Patience Worth collection at the Missouri Historical Society.

It’s the late 1930s. EB White is doing everything but finishing the first draft of Stuart Little. His wife, Katharine, is trying to adjust to life in the backwoods of Maine, far from her high powered job as the first female editor at the New Yorker. And Anne Carroll Moore, from behind the walls of her children’s library empire at the New York Public Library, is not at all sure she approves of what’s going on outside.

Little Book is a comedy about the written word. That is: it’s about procrastination, disappointment, hypochondria, unrequited love, and blind hope. It’s about why the semicolon is way sexier than the dash. And why children’s literature matters.

In keeping with the for/word company’s creative technique, Little Book is based in the historical record. The text is constructed exclusively from the fiction, essays, memoirs, letters, and poetry by E.B. White, Katharine White, and Anne Carroll Moore, including among them: Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, One Man’s Meat, Second Tree from the Corner, Letters of E.B. White, Is Sex Necessary?, Onward and Upward in the Garden, The Art of Beatrix Potter, Roads to Childhood, Reading Without Boundaries, Century of Kate Greenaway, Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, Writing and Criticism, and the original “little book,” Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. It also draws from articles and books about E.B., Katharine, and Anne by Roger Angell, Linda H. Davis, Scott Elledge, Nancy Franklin, Louis Menand, Nan Robertson, Frances Clarke Sayers, and William Shawn. This piece was directly inspired by Jill Lepore’s essay, “The Lion and the Mouse,” in the 21 July 2008 New Yorker.

North tells the story of a charged meeting between writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife to aviator Charles, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the man whom she felt best understood her work. Their brief meeting is the beginning point in a spiral of events and memories that ultimately make North the story of one woman’s struggle to orient herself, to reconcile motherhood with work and love with duty, and to articulate the responsibility of the artist to a world sunk in war.

North is based in the historical record. The text is constructed exclusively from Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s prolific letters and journals, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and wartime polemics. It also draws from material written by Charles Lindbergh and by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, including his poetic works on flight, his journals and letters, and his famous children’s book, The Little Prince.

This play was produced Off Broadway at 59E59 Theaters and, in a revised adaptation, on BBC Radio 4.