About Frances Benn Hall

Frances Benn Hall’s first play was produced at the University of Wisconsin where she recieved a Master of Arts degree in Theatre. Since that time, she has written many plays and has been in playwriting seminars led by John Gassner, Harold Clurman, Sinclair Lewis, and William Gibson.

She has furthered her theatre studies at UCLA, Trinity College Oxford, and at Yeats and Synge summer schools in Ireland, where in 1995, she was playwright in residence at the Kiltartan Hedge School.

For information about Ms. Hall's book of plays, "Ezra's Noh for Willie," follow this link.

By Claire Cox

A course given by the famous author Sinclair Lewis at the University of Wisconsin more than 60 years ago set Frances Benn Hall off on a career of writing, teaching, directing and lecturing that is still going strong.

Hall’s latest work, a one-act play about a famous Russian woman poet who was persecuted by Josef Stalin, is in rehearsal in her living room for presentation at the Lenox Library and Berkshire Community College in April. See review of Pasternak's Boots

While still fine-tuning the 13th play she has written since 1990 for Berkshire audiences, Hall also leads a weekly class in reading Greek tragedies at the Lenox Community Center and is moderating a Tuesday evening literary discussion group at her home. The group has just completed "The Golden Bowl" by Henry James and is about to embark on a translation of Dante’s "Inferno."

"I started it when my husband died in 1982." she said about the group during an interview last week. "I thought I wouldn’t be so lonely up here in the woods. I started doing it with James Joyce."

Hall, who has "retired" after teaching English, speech and theater at Berkshire Community College for 22 years, said her activities keep her occupied during the winter. She is also preparing for her annual round of the summer theater productions to review at least 20 plays a season for the newberkshire.com Web site, which publishes art and theater news.

"It takes up a lot of time," she said. "It gets me through the summer."

Born in Waukegan, Ill., Hall grew up in Richland Center, the birthplace of Frank Lloyd Wright.

"The only building he designed there was an old warehouse they made into an art museum," she said.

She received undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Wisconsin, where her first play was produced.

"During my first year in college, Sinclair Lewis came out and said he’d be a dollar-a-year man and teach 15 students in a creative writing class," she said. "We had to submit manuscripts, and I was chosen … He stayed only until about Thanksgiving. He was good as a teacher, but newspapers sort of hounded him and he got bored with it. He said, ‘I told you all I know. Go write your paper.’"

She added, "He sent some of my things to his agent in New York who became my agent and sold my first story for $750 that was printed in Red Book magazine. The rights were sold in England, where they adapted the story to English. I called it ‘Shabby Genteel.’ In England, they made it ‘Fugitive from Paradise.’ They changed Amanda to April. But they paid 30 guineas. I found out that England paid in guineas because art is more genteel."

Hall went west to take courses in Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama at UCLA. On her return to New York, she married James Hall, and after the first of their three children, Parnell Hall, reached school age, they moved to Lenox, where they both taught at the Windsor Mountain School, now the site of Berkshire Country Day School. Parnell is a successful mystery novel writer. Their son Terrence is a drummer traveling with the Big Bear band, and their daughter, Dr. Caitlin Chmitz, recently ended a tour of duty on a Navajo reservation in Arizona.

After her husband’s death, Hall was appointed to the BCC faculty to teach and stage plays. During the course of her career, she has directed about 150 plays.

"I write different resumes, depending on what I hope to be doing," she said "To get a job at BCC, I gave them my resume that included my master’s degree in public speaking."

During summer vacations, she has attended schools in England and Ireland. In 1995, she was playwright in residence at the Yeats and Synge summer schools in Ireland.

Her main dramatic interest now is writing plays in the ancient Japanese Noh style. She has recruited a cast to perform her latest one-act drama, "Pasternak Boots," which is about Anna Akhmatova, considered by Hall as "possibly the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century."

It was while teaching poetry, mythology and drama that Hall said she became interested in the ancient Japanese Noh drama. Her first play for her Yes/Noh Players was "Ezra’s Noh for Willie," about poets Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats. Some of her subsequent Noh plays have been about Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Brontes, Byron and Joyce. One was biblical, about Dinah, and another was based on Irish mythology.

"I am not writing another play at the moment," Hall said. "Akhmatova took me two years. This was very hard for me, because I haven’t been to Russia. For every other play I’ve written, I’ve been to the place where the action takes place. I have no ideas for the next one."

First published in The Advocate; used by permission.

About "Ezra's Noh for Willie"

These plays echo techniques of Yeats' plays for dancers and of Japanese Noh. They bring together dialogue, music, dance and art, but require no "scenery" and are designed to be performed in any bare playing space before a small audience.

The plays all concern literary figures from the past - Hawthorne and Melville, the Brontës, Lord Byron, Phillis Wheatley, Lady Gregory, James Joyce - and, of course, Ezra Pound who introduced Yeats to the Noh in 1913.

For more information, or to order the book, e-mail Frances Benn Hall or, write to: Mountain Press - 80 Hawthorne St. - Lenox, MA 01240 (180 pages, ISBN: 0-9625313-6-7)

praise for "Ezra's Noh for Willie and Other Plays"

"These noh plays have the charm of miniature paintings."

- William Gibson, Playwright

"The Delphic Players are proud to have paired Frances Benn Hall's Ezra's Noh for Willie with Yeats' The Only Jealousy of Emer in a festival at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast that featured contributions by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Britain's National Theatre."

- Louis Muinzer, Director, The Delphic Players.

"Frances Benn Hall has had the original and interesting idea of taking well-known figures or characters and using a technique adapted from the Japanese Noh Theatre to dramatize their inner experience.

These little "ghost" plays with their evocative use of quotation, music and dance, offer a theatrically fresh, often poignantly unexpected way in to the hidden contents of famous lives.

The sense of place they evoke through simple means is a part of their charm - Byron at Via Reggio, Hawthorne at Tanglewood, and Lady Gregory on Ben Bulben."

- Katherine Worth, Author, The Irish Theatre of Europe.