“Wildcat,” May 19, 2024, The Lexington Venue theater. Ethan Hawke co-wrote, co-produced, and directed his daughter, Maya Hawke, in this interpolation of Flannery O’Connor’s biography and a dramatic exploration of her fiction and her struggles to write and publish. Characters in O’Connor’s life (including Hawke herself, Laura Linney as her mother, and Phillip Ettinger) fill numerous counterparts in her fiction. It is dark, as in Catholic theology dark, and pain-induced, as in the suffering of lupus. It is the search for meaning and salvation explored through Southern Gothic Christendom. It is the confrontation with racism of the South and Northern hypocrisy. Passion and perversion take one another on head-to-head. And life lived in isolation poured into writing becomes a stand-in for physical and emotional passion and connection. Hawke is all sharp edges and painful intellect as both O’Connor and her characters. There is no divine salvation through pain, but there is exposition. Liam Nesson as her priest brings an interesting honesty to confession.
Still, I was sometimes in the dark about the characters and the title. I am not familiar with Flannery O’Connor’s life or fiction, save the film version of Wise Blood. “Wildcat” implies a personal relationship, deep and in person, with Robert Lowell, here referred to only as Cal (Phillip Ettinger). Time and place are not clear, and some of the readings I’ve done since seeing the film note a correspondence, not a personal bond. Letters seemingly created a virtual tie not unlike our internet bonds.
Indeed, throughout, I was not sure what, if anything save her writing, Catholicism, and illness, was lived and what was fiction. That was, I suspect, intended.
As to the title, I’ve read it emerged from Maya Hawkes experience of reading about O’Connor’s wrestling with her guardian angel. It didn’t work all that well for me.
In all, I nonetheless appreciated what, in retrospect, feels very much like an experimental, interpretive vision of the intersection of O’Connor’s life and work. I may know more about the spirit of her work, although I’m not sure what I know of her lived experience.