Naomi Wallace, the daughter and granddaughter of Louisville journalists, knew early that writing was the best way for her to express herself and her values. But she thought it would be through poetry.
After Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, Wallace went for graduate work at the University of Iowa with the idea of becoming a poet. “I had always told myself that I didn’t like working with other people, that I wanted to work alone,” she said in an interview.
“And it was so wonderful to discover that I was wrong about myself,” she said. “I may have wanted that, but what I needed was collaboration. I’ve become a better writer through collaboration. And theater is one of the most collaborative arts.”
Wallace, 64, has become one of the most acclaimed playwrights of her generation, the author of more than two dozen plays and a long list of projects on her horizon. Those include finishing a trilogy of plays set in Kentucky and writing the book for two Broadway musicals: Coal Miner’s Daughter, the Loretta Lynn story (co-written with Greg Pierce); and Small Town, based on John Mellencamp’s work, especially his 1982 hit “Jack & Diane”.
Wallace’ many awards include a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1999, an Obie Award (Off-Broadway Theatre), the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, the Horton Foote Award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the inaugural Windham Campbell prize for drama.
Her most famous play is One Flea Spare, about a wealthy couple and two intruders quarantined together in 17th century London during the bubonic plague. The play, which explores the clash of social, cultural and sexual boundaries, was made part of the permanent repertoire of Comédie-Française, the French National Theatre. She is only the second American so honored by the 300-year-old theatre company, the other being Tennessee Williams. One Flea Spare had its American premiere at the Humana Festival of New Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1996.
Wallace’s other well-known plays include The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Slaughter City and In the Heart of America. In 1995, she published a book of poetry: To Dance A Stony Field (Peterloo Poets).
Wallace was born in Louisville and grew up with five siblings on a farm near Prospect, as well as in Amsterdam, the hometown of their Dutch mother, Sonja de Vries. Her father, journalist Henry Wallace, later became a civil rights activist. Her grandfather, Tom Wallace, spent most of his career in top editing jobs at The Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times. An ardent conservationist, he led a five-year effort in the 1920s to prevent construction of a hydroelectric dam that would have destroyed Cumberland Falls; then he helped preserve it a state park.
For more than 20 years, Naomi Wallace has lived in North Yorkshire, England, with her British partner, Bruce McLeod, and their three children. Until the COVID pandemic, the family spent every summer at Moncada, the 660-acre Wallace family farm near Prospect, most which is under conservation easements and can never be developed. Wallace says she doesn’t get to the farm as often now that her daughters are grown, but “it’s always an anchor, a place of creativity for me. It lives inside me.”
After the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame ceremony on March 10, Wallace heads to New York for the opening of The Return of Benjamin Lay at the Sheen Center in Greenwich Village. She co-wrote the play with Marcus Rediker, an Owensboro-born historian. It is based on his 2017 book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who became the first Revolutionary Abolitionist. The one-person show premiered last year in London with the same actor, Mark Provinelli.
Wallace said she loves collaborative writing. She co-wrote The Girl Who Fell Through a Hole in Her Sweater with her husband, and Returning to Haifa, an adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s 1969 novella, with Palestinian playwright Ismail Khalidi. She and Khalidi collaborated again on Guernica, Gaza: Visions from the Center of the Earth, which was produced last fall in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Wallace’s work can be controversial. After commissioning Returning to Haifa, the Public Theatre in New York refused to perform it. But censorship often happens quietly in theater, she said, when companies simply decide not to produce a play. “While my work has been highly awarded, I’m not a highly produced playwright,” she said.
“For me, it’s not just about art,” Wallace said of her writing. “It’s about art as a part of envisioning a better world, a more just world. Artists have at times been on the front line of what they call speaking truth to power. Artists have also been the shock troops for colonialism and war. So it really depends on who the artists are and their vision of what the world should be and how power should be shared.”
While she has long had a close relationship with Actors Theatre of Louisville, she says a former artistic director refused to perform a play it had commissioned because of fear its references to the pharmaceutical industry might offend a corporate sponsor. That play, now titled The Breach, about a group of teenagers in 1970s Kentucky who reconnect in the 1990s, also includes content about sexual violence that she describes as “challenging”.
The Breach’s premier was in France, translated into French, and it has been performed in London. But she hopes to see it staged in Kentucky someday, along with two other plays — one she has written and another she plans to write this summer — that she refers to as her Kentucky Trilogy.
Wallace said that being inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame means a lot to her.
“Growing up in Kentucky and listening to people talk, that’s what gave me the foundation for the language I use in the theater,” she said. “Someone was asking me, ‘Kentucky meant so much to you. Why did you leave?’ I said I’ve never left. I live in England but I’ve never left Kentucky. The most powerful time for me about Kentucky was when I was a teenager. That is right there, all the time, with me.”
Selected Bibliography
Plays
- In The Heart of America
- One Flea Spare
- The Inland Sea
- Slaughter City
- The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek
- The Girl Who Fell Through a Hole in Her Jumper (with Bruce E. J. McLeod; licensed under the title The Girl Who Fell Through a Hole in Her Sweater in the United States)
- The War Boys
- Things of Dry Hours
- Birdy (an adaptation of William Wharton’s novel)
- The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East
- Twenty One Positions: A Cartographic Dream of the Middle East (with Lisa Schlesinger and Abdelfattah Abusrour)
- The Hard Weather Boating Party
- One Short Sleepe
- And I and Silence
- The Liquid Plain
- Night is a Room
- Barrel Wave
- The Return of Benjamin Lay (produced at the Finborough Theatre with Marcus Rediker)
- The Breach
- Returning to Haifa (with Ismail Khalidi (writer))
- Guernica, Gaza (with Ismail Khalidi (writer))
Anthologies
- Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora
- Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas
Essays
- “Trump-ocalypse Now? Theater in the Age of Trump”
- “Radical Vision and Form” (interview)
- “Let the Right One In: On resistance, hospitality and new writing for the American stage”
Poetry
To Dance A Stony Field (Peterloo Poets Press)
Films
- Lawn Dogs
- The War Boys, co-written with Bruce E. J. McLeod
- Flying Blind, co-written with Bruce E. J. McLeod
Awards
- MacArthur Foundation Fellow (1999)
- Obie Award for best off-Broadway play (1997)
- Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (1994-1995, 1995-1996)
- Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award (1996)
- Joseph Kesselring Prize (1996)
- Horton Foote Award (2012)
- American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (2015)
- Windham Campbell Prize for Drama (2013)
