Among the definitions of “late bloomer,” you should find the name, Ray Werner. As he turned 80 this year, the longtime Point Breeze resident enjoyed his first “Ray Fest,” the debut of five Werner plays produced by Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre (see his Artist Spotlight here.).
He also signed up with PICT’s Alan Stanford who will produce and direct another Werner debut, Run the Rabbit Path, at the end of January. For Werner, this play brings his life full circle, starting with his days growing up in Freedom, Beaver County, and returning to those times in Run the Rabbit Path.
“It’s dedicated to my mother and father. Their marriage was truly a great love story, just another Irish Catholic family in a mill town, but with a wonderful story of their own.”
Werner spent 1½ years studying playwriting at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., before returning to the Pittsburgh area for a job in advertising. By the time he retired in 2001, he had owned his own ad firm.
“I started to write something a while ago about a couple with a good marriage, but I didn’t like it, so I set it aside and went on to other things.”
Along with writing ad copy, producing commercials and planning marketing campaigns, Werner started the hobby of baking bread which included building a brick wood-burning bake oven at his summer place between Somerset and Bedford.
But, the baking wasn’t something new for Werner. His father, who baked weekly for his family, taught him the craft when he was 16.
“I was pretty bad at it at first, but I finally got the hang of it. My dad was good at working with his hands. During the Depression, he and a friend would make bread for the neighborhood and sell it on Saturday. I think he made all of $1 a week.”
The idea of bread conjures many symbols. For Werner, it’s a connection to his family. “I still have the pan my father baked his bread in, and it’s an integral part of the play certainly,” he said. “His memory got me writing plays again. I felt I owed to him to get a play produced.”
Werner succeeded in 2009 when the Washington, D.C., company The Source staged his one-act Night Song. Other productions soon followed, highlighted by the staged readings of Night Song, Mum’s The Word and Wandering Angus with Tom Atkins and Bingo O’Malley.
Mark Clayton Southers then produced full productions of the three at his Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre. In all, 13 Werner plays have been mounted at the theater on Liberty Avenue, he said.
Still, the idea of a memory play continued to interest Werner, particularly after he took an eight-week workshop with fellow writer Tammy Ryan.
“I started from scratch,” he said. “I told myself, ‘I’m going to finish this for my parents,’ and it took about five weeks.”
Run the Rabbit Path opens a day after the death of their father as two brothers and a sister gather in the kitchen of the family home to plan the wake.
“The kitchen was the place where everybody gathered,” Werner remembered. “It was the place where family history was made and was like part of the woodwork. The history comes out of that woodwork and forms like a tapestry of the lives. I wanted to capture that tapestry.”
Ryan held three staged readings of the new play that involved Stanford who said he really liked it, Werner said. “I was honored when he decided to use it in PICT’s season. I feel blessed.”
Run the Rabbit Path is scheduled to play Jan. 31st to Feb. 16th at PICT For more information, www.picttheatre.org.
Categories: Feature