Jeanne Bishop, This Is Your Life
Post wasn’t asking Bishop. He was filling her in. “In my efforts to create a timely drama,” he wrote, “I have drawn from the public record. But I have also gone out of my way to fictionalize my story creating a new location, new people, composite characters, actions which never occurred, and events pulled completely from my imagination.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Post wouldn’t talk to me, but between the lines of his ungainly letter I see someone in a tight spot hoping to wriggle out. Through ingratiation and bluff, he wants Bishop to accept the play as a fait accompli.
A better time for Post to talk to Bishop would have been before he wrote a word. A better time would have been before workshopping the play in productions in 2003 and ’04. But he waited until City Lit Theater had bought the rights to Somebody Foreign, scheduled it, cast it, and begun promoting it as “a world premiere play, based on a true story.”
Somebody Foreign: “Swanson had a history of bad behavior including trying to poison his fam-ily’s orange juice, hitting a seven-year-old with an ax, and setting a neighbor’s porch on fire. . . . In the six months between the time of the murders and the moment of his arrest, no one had even knocked on his door. Swanson lived a block and a half from the police station.”
Then McCabe tried out an argument he must have prayed would work on Bishop: “City Lit has no interest in publicizing anybody’s personal pain, and there is no reason to think that a production of Somebody Foreign will publicize Ms. Bishop’s. With all due respect to her ordeal, it may be possible she overestimates the number of people who remember it. I live on the North Shore and did so at the time of the historical events, and I never heard of the story until I read your play.” He told Post, “The only way I can see that the tragedy makes its way back into the newspapers is if City Lit comes under pressure to pull the show.”
Were the revisions skin-deep? Musburger asked for the new draft, and when City Lit dragged its feet Bishop decided it was time for her lawyer to talk to me on the record.
