04/20/2007
It's Ruth Draper. Who?
So there we were; it was New York City in 1983, and you wouldn’t believe the things that seemed new and radical at the time.
For instance, there was a new show opening on Broadway – a one-woman performance by this actress Whoopi Goldberg. And get this: she was black! Goldberg! Ha ha! And she had these awesome dreads! And Mike Nichols was directing, and she did all these cool characters.
Nichols was in a lot of papers, talking about the show. Apparently, he’d seen Whoopi in her earlier version of the production, called The Spook Show, and persuaded her to come to Broadway. In one of the interviews I read, he mentioned that he was surprised to find out that Goldberg (and she was black! What a great name!) had never heard of Ruth Draper, so he gave her one of Draper’s albums, and their bonding process proceeded.
Ruth Draper? Who was Ruth Draper, I wondered.
Another new and wonderful thing in New York in 1983 was the recent opening of Tower Records in a megastore in Greenwich Village. Truly the biggest record store I’d ever been in, and stocked with every damn LP under the sun. After reading the Nichols piece, I schlepped down there and found Draper – 5 album’s worth of her – in the spoken word section. I chose one at random, took it home, listened to it, and the next day went back for the other 4.
"I have always felt that Ruth Draper was (with Martha Graham) the greatest individual performer that America has ever given us."
John Gielgud
I was floored. This woman was absolutely one of the best monologue artists I’d ever heard, and I’d heard a few by that time. Plus, she wrote all her own material, and she had a range that encompassed every sort of person/accent/ethnicity imaginable, and she did it flawlessly, and she did it... in 1920? Hello?
"When I first discovered Ruth Draper's recordings, suddenly I had a standard. I had something to aspire to. I was thrilled at the perfection of these monologues and the richness and the humanity of them."
Lily Tomlin
Draper's recordings – the only ones she was ever persuaded to make – were produced in fabulous circumstances in 1954 and 1956, in the RCA studios in New York. She didn’t like performing without an audience, and kept messing up her timing. The producer persuaded her to do practice runs of all her material, and surreptitously ran tape on them, and that’s what I heard.
I was going to post some pieces of her work, which seems to have retreated into semi-obscurity, but a little cruising around in cybespace reveals a site dedicated to a complete 2-CD reissue of her work with plenty of audio, a nice site by Patricia Norcia (who tours a Draper tribute show which is really good), and a biographical program by NPR. No need for me to test the bounds of Fair Use unnecessarily.
Draper’s acting skill, combined with her stunning ability as a writer, make the scenes complete even though you’re only ever hearing one side of the story. And her intelligence, added to her compassion for all the people she characterizes, elevates the pieces above clever caricatures to masterful theater.
She's the spiritual mother of Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, Claudia Shear, Eric Bogosian, Danny Hoch, and John Leguizamo. A master of her craft.
"I was in awe of Ruth Draper. Each of her characters was like a Rembrandt on stage - a total human being, a total portrait."
Uta Hagen
"Each of Ruth Draper's monodramas presents a dazzling mosaic of a human being. I don't believe there can ever have been an actor who managed to show you so many sides of a character."
Simon Callow