SWITZERLAND by Joanna Murray-Smith runs APRIL 5 – 21, 2024
Director’s Note: The Talented Ms. Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith, subject of our current production, was far too complex and
accomplished an individual to be squeezed into a program bio, so we first assure you that the components of the play and character (albeit not the action) are based on biographical and psychological fact: a good source if you are curious is a multifaceted article in the New York Times (T Magazine) of 19 April 2021, available online at https://www.nytimes.com/section/t-magazine.
The T article, our source here, calls her “a collision of contradictions, a woman for whom every aspect of herself (including being a woman) demanded internal debate. In her private life, she swung dramatically between polar states of desire and disgust. Her personal journals that she kept her whole life … reveal a woman at the mercy of her emotional tides, drawn to the darkest corners of her psyche.”
She was born (despite her mother’s attempts to abort her) into an already stormy marriage in Texas in 1920 between “struggling” commercial artist/fashion illustrator Mary Coates and Jay Bernard Plangman. After his death, Mary entered an unstable relationship (that included several relocations) with Stanley Highsmith, a sometime poet who raped Patricia at least once when she was still a child; when Mary moved to New York City to be with him, she left Patricia in Texas with her grandmother. (Patricia later decided to take his surname.)
Highsmith earned a degree in English literature at Barnard College; then she
took a job writing captions and plots for comic books. In her twenties she also
began therapy for various neuroses and sexual-identity conflicts, including her
persistent feeling that she was “a boy walking around in a girl’s body.”
Homosexuality was considered not only a psychological disease but also
a criminal act, notes the Times; Highsmith found outlets for her fantasies and
anxieties in writing and the visual arts. In 1952, inspired by a beautiful woman
she had seen in Bloomingdale’s and followed around for some time, Highsmith
published The Price of Salt (now re-titled Carol), considered to be the first
American lesbian novel with a happy ending.
Highsmith’s personal life included affairs with men and with women;
meanwhile her public life rewarded her with fame and popularity—particularly
her four Mr. Ripley suspense novels, starring the handsome, stylish, and utterly
amoral con man Edward Ripley, whose life was a series of deadly exploitations
of the rich, the stylish, and the self-centered. She was a writer (of adult and
children’s literature), an artist and illustrator, a person engaged in several intense but painful relationships, a sporadic alcoholic, and a human fascinated by the lives and habits of snails.
Our play is set in the home in Switzerland which Highsmith designed and
built with the assistance of a local builder; its serenity is shaken by a visit from a publisher’s rep who hopes to get her to write another Ripley. It is, of course, interesting to note in this context that at least once she did sign herself “Pat H.,alias Ripley.” Their real and imaginary identities go to war and then meld in Murray-Smith’s drama, which is also a mystery about a writer’s process. The play’s ending invites the question: are we witnessing a death…or a birth?