Guild member Elizabeth Gilbert (Liz) was prominently featured in a September 7th New Yorker article as a woman who began a friendship in 1999 with Cameron Todd Willingham, an inmate on Texas’s death row. He was executed February 17, 2004; chances are good that he will be exonerated. Three months prior to Todd’s execution, Liz was paralyzed from the neck down – the result of a car accident in Houston. She was still in the hospital the day of Todd’s execution. After six years of intensive therapy, she has only recently taken a few steps (with the aid of a shoulder-high power-walker), acquired a driver’s license to drive a specially-equipped van, and been able to reduce her round-the-clock homecare aides to 36 hours a week.
Luckily, Liz never lost her drive to write. Although she had a substantial body of work as a playwright prior to these two life-changing experiences, new work has been coming steadily, and I spoke with Liz about these defining moments in her life and the work they have inspired.
Meeting Todd in the maximum-security prison was “a revelation in many ways,” but in getting to know him, Liz was struck by “how creative the human spirit can be even when confined. Todd was funny and witty, and yet serious too, particularly about the conditions on death row and the questionable facts of his case. He was always doing things for other prisoners, writing letters and helping them out with their cases.”
Release Yearning, her play developed from interviews and visits with Todd, premiered at DiverseWorks in Houston less than two years after she met him. “I wanted to focus on the fact that prisoners are human, with a need for expression. There was so much life on death row.” Todd really appreciated the script. He wrote to her “It’s the first time I’ve seen my name in print where they didn’t describe me as a monster.”
Five years after her injury, Liz’s new short play, Nearing Velocity, was performed at the Alley Theatre in March 2008 as part of the 30th anniversary celebration of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She began the play “belly-up, on my back, in the hospital, and immobile except for one toe. To keep myself sane and my imagination active, I started visualizing possibilities—characters, lines of dialogue, conflicts, what-ifs. When friends would come to visit, I would ask them to write down these imaginings for me. When a friend gave me voice-activated software, that freed me to write on my own again.”
Nearing Velocity focuses on “the automobile accident from the perspectives of the various persons involved—myself, the young man, the passenger, hospital workers—a whole world of people coming together because of this event.” Other works written since the spinal cord injury are “Body and Soul, poetry from my notes that I put together for a solo dancer, Sara Draper. I narrated at her performance, even though I still couldn’t sit up well and didn’t have firm control of my diaphragm.” And later in 2008, “I wrote Match.Cripple, a one-act comedy with the main character from Nearing Velocity, starting to date again even though she is still wheelchair-bound. The audience responded well, and now I think these two one-acts can be linked together for a full evening.”
Since The New Yorker article, Liz acquired an agent, is reviewing movie offers for “her story with Todd,” and has started a memoir for Northwestern University Press. We expect, too, there will be new interest in producing her plays.
Houston
Guild member Elizabeth Gilbert (Liz) was prominently featured in a September 7th New Yorker article as a woman who began a friendship in 1999 with Cameron Todd Willingham, an inmate on Texas’s death row. He was executed February 17, 2004; chances are good that he will be exonerated. Three months prior to Todd’s execution, Liz was paralyzed from the neck down – the result of a car accident in Houston. She was still in the hospital the day of Todd’s execution. After six years of intensive therapy, she has only recently taken a few steps (with the aid of a shoulder-high power-walker), acquired a driver’s license to drive a specially-equipped van, and been able to reduce her round-the-clock homecare aides to 36 hours a week.
Luckily, Liz never lost her drive to write. Although she had a substantial body of work as a playwright prior to these two life-changing experiences, new work has been coming steadily, and I spoke with Liz about these defining moments in her life and the work they have inspired.
Meeting Todd in the maximum-security prison was “a revelation in many ways,” but in getting to know him, Liz was struck by “how creative the human spirit can be even when confined. Todd was funny and witty, and yet serious too, particularly about the conditions on death row and the questionable facts of his case. He was always doing things for other prisoners, writing letters and helping them out with their cases.”
Release Yearning, her play developed from interviews and visits with Todd, premiered at DiverseWorks in Houston less than two years after she met him. “I wanted to focus on the fact that prisoners are human, with a need for expression. There was so much life on death row.” Todd really appreciated the script. He wrote to her “It’s the first time I’ve seen my name in print where they didn’t describe me as a monster.”
Five years after her injury, Liz’s new short play, Nearing Velocity, was performed at the Alley Theatre in March 2008 as part of the 30th anniversary celebration of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She began the play “belly-up, on my back, in the hospital, and immobile except for one toe. To keep myself sane and my imagination active, I started visualizing possibilities—characters, lines of dialogue, conflicts, what-ifs. When friends would come to visit, I would ask them to write down these imaginings for me. When a friend gave me voice-activated software, that freed me to write on my own again.”
Nearing Velocity focuses on “the automobile accident from the perspectives of the various persons involved—myself, the young man, the passenger, hospital workers—a whole world of people coming together because of this event.” Other works written since the spinal cord injury are “Body and Soul, poetry from my notes that I put together for a solo dancer, Sara Draper. I narrated at her performance, even though I still couldn’t sit up well and didn’t have firm control of my diaphragm.” And later in 2008, “I wrote Match.Cripple, a one-act comedy with the main character from Nearing Velocity, starting to date again even though she is still wheelchair-bound. The audience responded well, and now I think these two one-acts can be linked together for a full evening.”
Since The New Yorker article, Liz acquired an agent, is reviewing movie offers for “her story with Todd,” and has started a memoir for Northwestern University Press. We expect, too, there will be new interest in producing her plays.
Diana Howie dhowie@dramatistsguild.com