Media Gallery:

Philadelphia-based playwright Thomas Gibbons looks at complicated issues and is able to empathize with people on either side of the conflict. Perhaps this is why when he noticed a charged situation brewing in his own backyard he was able to use part fact and part fiction to create Permanent Collection. The story of the fictional Morris Foundation, Permanent Collection is inspired by the real-life Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. The Barnes Foundation was founded by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a somewhat eccentric self-made millionaire who amassed an incredible collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art in the early part of the twentieth century. Thomas Gibbons recently discussed his inspiration for Permanent Collection and the implications of the play.

Q: What was your inspiration for beginning a career writing plays? What was the first play you ever wrote?

A: I started writing seriously around the age of 12 or 13, but my ambition was to become a novelist. In college I took a playwriting class, primarily out of curiosity. The play I wrote (eventually titled THE EXHIBITION) was passed around by people, ended up beng produced by a small theatre company in Philadelphia, and was published in the Best Short Plays series. The experience of working with actors and a director was transforming, and I’ve been writing plays ever since.

Q: PERMANENT COLLECTION is based on a real art collection and a real art collector, though you have taken many liberties with the source material. Do you feel that people, specifically people in this part of the country who do not know as much about the controversy surrounding the Barnes Foundation, will take the play at face value and think that it is a non-fictional account of the Barnes?

A: One of my intentions in calling the foundation in the play the Morris Foundation was to signal that what I’ve written is not, and should not be taken as, a documentary account of the Barnes. I have used many details of the Barnes’ history and its collections, but I would have been irresponsible as a playwright to ignore such a fascinating source. What I’ve invented is the central conflict and all of the characters (well, with one exception).

Q: An important aspect of the argument between the two central characters of PERMANENT COLLECTION revolves around perceptions of art. Do you think that there is really any universal for judging a painting or a sculpture’s value?

A: “Universal” to a specific society or culture, perhaps. Shakespeare is as close as Western society comes to a gold standard, I suppose---yet I know an excellent theatre director who doesn’t enjoy Shakespeare and has no interest in staging any of his plays. The Impressionist and post-Impressionist painters whose canvases figure so strongly in the play are loved by everyone, of course, but in their own time (and even later) they were regarded with horror.

Q: Morris, the art collector in PERMANENT COLLECTION, is a curmudgeonly, self-indulgent fellow, but also somehow likable. Did you base much of his personality on accounts you had read or heard of Alfred Barnes, the man he’s modeled after? Or is he basically a creation of yours?

A: Morris is the exception I mentioned earlier. He’s largely based on Dr. Albert Barnes, the founder of the Barnes Foundation and a fierce and gleeful provocateur of Philadelphia society for many years. Some of his comments in the play are taken from his writings; others I invented to serve the needs of the play. Dr. Barnes was far more combative and spikier than Alfred Morris, but he was also an extraordinarily perceptive, charismatic man who inspired profound devotion in the people who subscribed to his vision. He was the kind of man who provoked extreme reactions in everyone who met him, which of course makes him a gift to a writer.

Q: PERMANENT COLLECTION is based on a real art collection and a real man who collected art, though the racial conflict has been created by you. Do you find that people in Philadelphia, where the Barnes Foundation is located, are concerned about the fictionalization of an event very close to their hearts?

A: It’s true that the racial conflict in the play (centering on African art found in storage) is my invention, but the Barnes Foundation is no stranger to such conflict. In the early 90s, the then-director of the Barnes, an African-American lawyer named Richard Glanton, proposed building a parking lot on the grounds of the Foundation, which is situated in an affluent suburb. He was opposed by some neighbors, who feared increased traffic on their streets. Glanton accused the neighbors of opposing his plan out of racism, whereupon they sued him for libel. What I found remarkable about the controversy, and what I’ve observed many other times, is the extraordinary potency of “racism” as a stigma. Once the word is introduced into a public issue, it instantly overwhelms every other consideration.

Q: You are a white man living in Philadelphia, a very racially charged city. You often write about racial issues. Your play BEE-LUTHER-HATCHEE deals with a white man who writes under the persona of an African-American woman. Do you find that people get upset about you writing from a point of view that you haven’t lived?

A: I’ve gotten many different reactions---some people are upset, some are puzzled, others are intrigued. In Minneapolis I introduced myself to an African-American actress in a production of BEE-LUTHER-HATCHEE, and she gave me a classic double-take. I regarded it as a compliment. Writers have always adopted points of view that they haven’t lived in order to tell a story. It’s what we do. Most people don’t object when a man writes from a woman’s point of view, and vice versa. Writing from another race’s perspective, though, is somehow regarded by many as illegitimate. But isn’t their argument tantamount to saying that race is the most important determinant of our identities? And isn’t that agreeing with what racists have always said? It’s a hideous irony---but race in America is an inexhaustible begetter of ironies.

Q: Do you think that racial conflicts are improving in America today? Do you feel that people are more or less likely to talk about racial issues than they were twenty years ago?

A: I think our discussion of racial issues has calcified into a sort of code---the dreaded “political correctness.” We say what we know is acceptable, even though we may feel something else entirely. (Since you’re asking my opinion, by the way, I also believe that people who attack “political correctness” frequently are acting from their own PC motives---PC in their case meaning “political convenience.”) But what happens when we submerge our true feelings is that the issue of race boils up in the most unexpected places, at the most unexpected moments. I have noticed that younger people are much more casual about racial issues than people of my age. It doesn’t seem to carry the same charge for them. In the play, the character of Kanika reflects that openness; it’s no accident that she’s the youngest.

Q: Are you currently working on anything? What’s next for you?

A: I’m working on a play that I’ve come to think of as the third in a trilogy that begins with BEE-LUTHER-HATCHEE and continues with PERMANENT COLLECTION. Once again it’s based on a real event in Philadelphia---the controversy that erupted when it was discovered that a new pavilion for the Liberty Bell was being built directly over the site of George Washington’s slaves’ quarters. And again, the theme is the stories we tell ourselves as a nation, but viewed this time from the perspective of history. What do we choose to commemorate, and what do we decide to forget? What particularly excites me about this play is that one of the characters is an African-American conservative, who embodies a viewpoint that has almost no visibility in our society and certainly not in our theatres. The challenge is to represent this viewpoint as fairly and eloquently as I possibly can.