After discovering that his wife is having an affair, Lyman, a historian, comes to terms with his own marriage by examining that of his grandparents. At the time, I was more concerned with how, as playwright, I’d handle Lyman Ward. Something flickered, but as a fiction writer myself, and the daughter of one, I knew that we often fold in the real with the invented. “He based Susan and Oliver Ward on people who lived there, Mary and Arthur Foote-Arthur was superintendent of the North Star, as Lyman’s grandfather is of the Zodiac.” “Stegner didn’t just cutely rename the North Star House and the mine,” he said. Born and raised in Nevada City-the heart of California gold country-he was deeply familiar with the region’s history.

“You mean what Stegner in his novel calls Zodiac Cottage and Zodiac Mine are actually the North Star?” “Including the North Star Mining Museum.” “We should take a field trip,” said Tom Taylor, often our production manager. “Have you visited the North Star House?” Phil asked. The theater and production offices were not five miles from Grass Valley, where the novel’s narrator, Lyman Ward, lives and writes in a cottage built for his grandparents decades before-and where those remarkable grandparents, Oliver, superintendent of the Zodiac Mine, and his wife, Susan, a writer and illustrator, live out the final years of one of the most extraordinary fictional marriages of the 19th-century West. Our production of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose seemed meant to be. The artistic director of Nevada City’s Foothill Theatre Company, Philip Sneed, had invited core members of our company-director, costume and lighting designers, key actors, and me, as playwright-to spin ideas about creating a stage adaptation of one of the great American novels.

It was an autumn evening, 1998, when we settled in around my large kitchen table. We knew what we were there to talk about.

Author of angle of repose