Marie Kohler is having a banner year. In July, she finally, formally published her play “Boswell” with Dramatic Publishing, and followed that success with the publication of her play “Midnight and Moll Flanders” in August. In March, she was chosen for a 2024 Fellows Award by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, one of just 16 individuals across the state who received the honor for their lifelong commitment to intellectual discourse and public service. (UWM Professor of English Anne Basting was also inducted in the 2024 Fellows class.)
It’s a fitting cap to Kohler’s long tenure in Milwaukee’s theater scene. Upon graduating from UWM with her master’s degree in English in 1979, she embarked on a remarkable career, spending 20 years as Renaissance Theaterworks’ resident playwright and entertaining audiences at home and abroad with her work.
She sat down to talk about her “orphaned” plays, forging her path in the theater world, and her love of literature – especially Moll Flanders.
Congratulations on your 2024 Fellows Award!
(It) is just icing on the cake. It was unexpected and really lovely.
You’ve had a long career in Milwaukee’s Theater scene, including as a co-founder of Renaissance Theaterworks. How did you get involved?
After my children’s earliest years, I began meeting people in Milwaukee. I met a fantastic group of women. We were sitting around the kitchen table in 1993 saying, “Dang, there are not enough professional opportunities for women in this town.”
We all had different expertise, as actor, director, money person, but we all decided that if we threw our energies into a pot together, we could share our skills and get something done. (The name) “Theaterworks” was supposed to mean that not only did we all do a lot of things, like a Renaissance man or woman, but it was also a rebirth for us. In 1993 we incorporated as non-profit and started our work. … Renaissance is still alive and doing well. I worked there for 20 years, and during that time, I wrote three plays and am eternally grateful for Renaissance’s support.
After 20 years on staff, I hadn’t had the time to try and get the plays I’d written out into the world past their first production. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 10 years on my own. I sometimes thought of them as my orphaned plays that weren’t really tended to properly – I wanted to give them a voice in the world. Now I have three of them published, which is marvelous.
That includes your play “Boswell,” which was published this year. What made this a story that you wanted to tell?
When I was a child, I grew up in Kohler, Wisconsin, a plumbing planned community built by my grandfather in the 1920s. He also built a big house with a big library. He never went past eighth grade, but he recognized the importance of books. He filled that library with so many books – limited editions, classics, art books and more. As a girl, I would go in (the library) and just reach up and pull down whatever was there.
One day, I reached up and pulled down a book called London Journal (by James Boswell). It had pictures of lords and ladies and carriages and footmen, one of those charming reenactment pictures of what life must have been like on the streets of London in the 18th century. I found myself delighted and sucked into this world of this journal. I thought, these voices are meant to be heard.
In the writing process, I developed an autobiographical voice for a woman. There are lots of women in Boswell’s life, but I needed a more authorial voice. So, I created the voice of an ambitious, academic woman, trying to make it in a man’s world in the 1950s in Chicago. That story becomes the eye through which you hear the stories of Boswell and his escapades. There’s another woman, the mistress of a manor in Scotland, that I developed. She’s the one who has these journals in her possession. So, the stories of the female friendships are as important as the stories of the male friendships.
I decided that this play should be done in Scotland, because it’s a Scottish literary figure that it’s about. When it was there, it got seen and noticed, and the off-Broadway company 59E59 asked to have it done in New York.
Your most recently published play (August 2024), “Midnight and Moll Flanders,” sounds like a project that came straight from your heart.
It was. It premiered at UWM in 2000 and was adapted from Daniel Defoe’s novel that I read in college. I found Moll Flanders’ voice so recognizable, so clear and unashamed. It’s the voice of a survivor. She’s born in prison because her mother is a felon. It struck me as extraordinary that this woman is portrayed as being able to cut through the criminal class up to the entrepreneurial class by the end of her story. The tragedy of Moll’s story is the children she bore and abandoned. I think this was deliberate on the part of Defoe, to show that even though someone can potentially escape from the box that they’re born into, there is collateral damage. She can’t stay and tend those children and survive, so she farms them out. She hopes and tries to land them in places where they will be nourished, but she can’t know for sure.
For me, the story of what happens to the child is a very potent one. In Moll Flanders, she is the child, but she also bears them. It remains a question in our society: What happens if a child is not tended, and only the strongest and most extraordinary survive? If children are tended to, we have a much healthier society. I feel it’s, in a way, the most political of the plays that I’ve written. It’s about the whole structure of society and how an individual fits into it, and how a destiny is made.
I’m seeing parallels between Moll’s abandoned children and your orphaned plays. What makes playwriting different from writing other genres?
In theater, you need conflict, primarily. You must figure out what your kernel of dramatic conflict is and condense and cut away and highlight. You must boil it down like concentrate. It must be bone broth; it can’t be just chicken stock. There’s not much freedom to go on about things – which is what I like to do! I have developed friendships with directors who, as I’m working on a play, will say, “I think this a Marie Kohler moment where you’re becoming too discursive. You have to go back to the main story.”
You have enjoyed incredible success in your career and this year. Did your UWM degree help you on your way? How did you come to UWM for your graduate work?
This is not a very feminist admission, but I was a young wife and mother, and my then-husband and I had been in Scotland where he had a job with a well-known opera composer.
I had always wanted to get a graduate degree. My undergrad degree was at Harvard in English literature. When we were in Scotland, I was going to matriculate that fall (at the University of Edinburgh). But my husband got a job offer back in Milwaukee. I wasn’t at the stage in my life where I felt fully realized to say, “No. This is my time.” So I said, “Okay.”
I had a friend, Max Patrick. He was a professor of English at UWM. I wrote him and said, can you help me get in at the last minute? He said, absolutely. I loved it. I felt the training and the professors there were as good as any I ever had at Harvard. I graduated in 1979, eight months pregnant with my second child.
UWM saved me. I felt like my life opened up again from that point on, as a person with intellectual needs and a career path.
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science