Jack-of-all trades writer puts fantasy-autobiography on stage

Baltimore Evening Sun, November 9, 1985
By Winifred Walsh


Grant Carrington takes a coffee break on the set.
The Saturday Sun photo by Jed Kirschbaum Jr.


  Like the hero of his latest play, "Topanga," Grant Carrington is a middle-aged bachelor, mathematician, computer programmer, poet, novelist, science fiction writer, actor and educated drifter. Unlike the play's hero, he is not going through a middle-age crisis, or so he says.
  "I went through that a long time ago," says the 47-year-old playwright during a break in rehearsals at Fells Point Theatre. "I've watched a lot though," he adds, grinning.
  "Topanga," which opened last Saturday and is running weekends through Dec. 1, is the third Carrington play produced at the little theatre in Fells Point. His first, "UFO," written with Tom Monteleone, launched the first Baltimore Playwrights' Festival in 1982. "A Gentleman from Stratford," a freewheeling biography of William Shakespeare, premiered during the 1984 Playwrights' Festival.
  Carrington's contribution to this production is more than the script. Not satisfied with only having written the play, he volunteered to direct his own work, build the set and set the lights. At times, he says, he wonders if he has taken on too much.
  "You think you have it all together," he says, "and then you find you have ten more things to do. This is the first time I have ever directed a play and I hope my last."
  Like his nature, Carrington's appearance is unconventional--gray straggly beard, wispy moustache, long graying hair, paint-spattered blue jeans and shirt. He is a serious and introspective man, and his sudden bursts of laughter come as a pleasant surprise.
  During this, a particularly difficult rehearsal, he shifts in his chair and announces he is going to quit being a nice guy. "I think I will turn into a monster tonight," he declares.
  His latest work is set in the Topanga Canyon region of California, just outside Los Angeles, an area very familiar to Carrington. The characters are based on people he knows who live there, as well as acquaintances from various other parts of the country he's traveled. "It has always been one of my dreams to put all my friends into one play," he says. "In that sense, this play is a fantasy autobiography, although none of the funny situations happened to me."
  Carrington began writing as early as the third grade. He made his first published sale at the age of 15, when he sold an article on astronomy to the New Haven Register, a publication founded in 1820 by one of his ancestors.
  His poetic works have appeared in more than 15 different magazines, and his science fiction has been published in Amazing and Fantastic magazines and in Weirdbook 14. "Time's Fool," a novel of a musician who turns down a chance for immortality, was published in 1981 by Doubleday. "Curtain Call," a just-completed book, is making the publishing rounds.
  The core and strength of most of Carrington's plays and fiction lie in the relationships of the characters. In "Topanga," two men are going through a mid-life crisis. New and old loves enter their lives and there are amusing on-stage shenanigans.
  "This is the fifth draft and a lot of characters have dropped by the wayside," he says. He admits that the characters are not as deep as he would like them to be. "There is much more to them than I put in," he says.
  Baltimore, which Carrington considers a mecca for the arts, is the longest place he has ever lived after leaving his hometown, New Haven, Conn., more than 20 years ago. Since that time he has led a creatively checkered life. In addition to his sojourns into mathematics (he earned a B.A. and an M.A. in math), he has performed as a poet and folk singer in coffee shops and cafes across the country. He came to Baltimore in 1981 to take a position as computer programmer for Westinghouse.
  When Carrington sits down at this home computer to write, there are no labored all-night sessions, overflowing ashtrays and cups bearing the remains of cold, stale coffee.
  "You just sit down and write every day," he says. "I either write first or run first." (Running is still another dimension of his many-sided life.) "I try to finish two pages a day. It makes up for those days you can't write a thing," he adds, laughing.
  "You might think what you wrote today is garbage and two weeks later think it is great or vice versa, but when it goes good you don't want it to end."
  Friday nights are spent doing what he loves best, singing his original and other little-known folk songs at the Mt. Vernon Place Coffee House. For his new play he has written a country-rock song that describes the Topanga Canyon Highway as "a road going straight to hell."   Carrington says he has four more plays in his head at the moment. One deals with the expulsion of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia during Andrew Jackson's time. Another will reprise the happenings at the Kent State rebellion. "I have a lot of unfinished works," he says with a faint smile. "But you have to stop and go with the one that is screaming."