Alexandra Branyon: Never A Dull Moment

Alexandra Branyon believes she has "a very dramatic life." Not the sort that involves assassination attempts or high-speed chases but rather a continuing series of little mysteries, everyday struggles, front-porch adventures, and fleeting moments of laughter and absurdity. It is fruitful territory for a playwright, playwriting coach, drama critic, and performer.

Her Beach Hampton house, near the ocean in Amagansett, was quiet Friday morning except for the finches twittering between the birdbath and the feeder, but more often is "like Grand Central Station, all these people come and going, asking me questions, phones ringing. Sometimes I don't even know who these people are or what they're doing here."

She works incessantly, on two or three or four projects at a time. Her words, delivered in a fluid Alabama accent, are irretrievably swift. She pauses only to laugh, less frequently to breathe.

Little Mysteries

She seeks peace of mind but is not successful as often as she'd like. Long walks on the beach, these days with a new golden retriever puppy, Bo, instead present some of those infuriating little mysteries to twist and unravel.

One day Ms. Branyon found a parachute. "Who finds a parachute on the beach? How did it get there?" she demanded to know.

The next walk, she came upon a dead deer, with no sign of a bullet hole. "I had to call my cousins in Alabama - they know about deer - and they said maybe it was hit by a car and wandered down there."

Mystery solved, maybe. But the next time she went to the ocean, there was a bowling ball.

"I just want to walk on the beach and find a seashell. What's going on? I just want a calm day," something she said she hasn't seen in years.

Drama Everywhere

Her high energy level and ability to find drama everywhere has fueled a prolific and successful career. Her play "Passed Over," about two widows who together face old age and death in a nursing home, won the 1989 Golden Gate Actors National Playwrights Competition, saw an extended run in the 1995-96 season by the Detroit Repertory Theater, and has had staged readings across the country.

Since receiving an M.A. from the University of Hawaii in 1967, Ms. Branyon has completed nine other works for the stage - musicals and black comedies, a nightclub act, and a drama - has taught playwriting in private workshops and at Manhattan's New School, and has published three cookbooks with her friend Karen Lee (not the Bridgehampton restaurateur), a noted chef and caterer.

With some trepidation that the collaboration might damage their friendship, Ms. Branyon agreed to help with Ms. Lee's three cookbooks. She quickly learned she should have been more concerned about the work itself.

Three Cookbooks

Ms. Lee cooked while Ms. Branyon wrote down the recipes, starting with "Chinese Cooking Secrets," published in 1984.

"She would have five dishes going all at once during a class and there I was with a stopwatch, trying to keep all the cooking times straight. It was very hard. You have to be able to fold wontons because I saw her fold wontons. You have to be able to bone a duck because I saw her bone a duck. But, it made me visually specific as a writer."

Then began "the Great Post-It War," Ms. Branyon becoming increasingly "amazed" and finally "infuriated" at the mistakes introduced in the text by copy editors. (Szechuan Province, in one case, became an island.) She marked each mistake with a Post-It and demanded a meeting that lasted until all the Post-Its were crumpled on the floor.

Overwhelming

Ms. Branyon also plays piano and clarinet, writes musical comedy lyrics, is a theater correspondent for Parco Playbill magazine in Tokyo, and pursues a career as a freelance journalist for The New York Times, Working Woman, and Food and Wine, among others.

She writes in English for the Japanese publication and said she has to consult only occasionally with her "excellent" translator, who works in Japan. Once, a reference to a "bar" of music raised questions. Did she mean a tavern, perhaps one offering entertainment? The puzzle was cleared up when Ms. Branyon sang, long distance, the first bar of "Happy Birthday."

Overwhelmed with work in recent months, she has suspended her playwriting workshops for a year to have time to revise two plays in progress and review four Broadway productions a month for the Japanese Playbill.

"I do like a balance. I think that is what I'm missing in my life," she chuckled.

On Friday afternoon alone, she was under deadline for two reviews, of "Mere Mortals" and "Bees in Honey Drown," and was wondering whether to change the Hamptons setting of one play to somewhere less trendy. "What do you think of Malibu?" she joked.

Her workload has also forced her to decline a "huge" grant from the Japan Foundation, which would have bankrolled a documentary on a Japanese student at Juilliard, where Ms. Branyon herself went to learn to write music.

"How many hats can I wear? I was walking on the beach, where I am clearest, despite the bowling balls, and asked myself, do I really want to be a documentary filmmaker? Yes - but someday."

She misses her playwriting workshops, saying her students have done her proud. One, David Temple, spent a year and a half with her developing "Purple House on Page Street," named runner-up in the most recent Eugene O'Neill Theater Conference.

Spraying The Market

Mr. Temple now has an agent, a possible production deal, and a pleased coach who said he and others have successfully borrowed her "shotgun technique" for marketing one's work. Spraying the market in a wide pattern is better than sending one copy at a time to select agents or producers, she asserted.

To help with the spraying, she had built in her home office a grid of cubbyholes. In each one, she puts copies of an article with her own byline, a review of one of her plays, or some other career-enhancing literature. A request for background information prompts a rapid whisking of one sheet of paper from each cubbyhole. Voila, an instant press kit.

"I designed this. It makes it so easy," she said cheerfully.

Shotgun Technique

The shotgun technique is hitting its target for "Passed Over." After "Detroit's toughest critic," Lawrence DeVine, said the play sounded like Tennessee Williams (and Harold Pinter and D.L. Colburn), the author included Shirley Knight, for whom Williams wrote "A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur," on her mailing list. Ms. Knight wrote back, saying she was interested in playing one of the leading roles.

For all her cheery efficiency, Ms. Branyon has solemn moments of self-doubt. She told the esteemed board of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, which had honored her musical comedy "Lousy Lucy" in 1980, that "there has been a terrible mistake." The two-act work, she insisted, was lousy.

She said she felt at that moment like George Bernard Shaw, who once faced an applauding audience and a single heckler. "You and me against the world," Shaw told the heckler.

Meditation

Walks on the beach being what they are for Ms. Branyon, she also seeks peace through daily meditation, not always finding it. On a recent visit to the Maharishi Ayur-veda's meditation center and spa in Lancaster, Mass., instead of enjoying the tranquillity she queried the employees about the working conditions and nearly incited a strike.

"I think they should have a lunch hour. Don't you?" she laughed. And she sometimes thinks, she said, about how the Maharishi charges $700 or $800 for a one-word mantra while most writers make 10 cents a word.

Raised in Fayette, a one-cinema town with a few farmers and a cotton mill, Ms. Branyon grew up unburdened by any awareness of the South's weighty contribution to the theater but gained an appreciation from her mother, a former drama coach.

"Southerners really do sit on the porch and tell stories," she said.

Alabama Mame

Ms. Branyon described her mother as a colorful, headstrong, adventurous, and mischievous woman - "the country version of Auntie Mame" - who instilled in her daughter a sense of dramatic timing, a dry wit, and the feeling that she is "not at all usual."

Leaving their father, a great reader and wordsmith, at home, Mrs. Branyon took her children on trips all over the world and taught them to live as the Romans do, so to speak, in Europe, the Mideast, and in Japan.

"I could never keep up with her. She was the eternal teenager. Someone once asked did I ever have a child. I said yes, my mother."

She recalled the red convertible Austin-Healy that had been shipped from England, as a graduation present for her brother, to New Orleans. Her mother determined to drive it to Alabama herself. A man on the dock instructed her in the operation of a five-on-the-floor gear shift and concluded by showing her where to find reverse.

"I don't need the reverse," she snapped.

And that, says her daughter now, "is how I feel about my own life. No reverse."