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The genisis of “Hungry Ghosts”

Written by M.E.H. Lewis

I was asked to write about the genesis of my play, Hungry Ghosts, which is being developed by Infusion Theatre as part of DCA Theater’s INCUBATOR series. I never really know how to answer that question.

Well, here’s the easy answer. The idea first caught me when I read a wonderful essay in the New Yorker, titled “Across the River Styx.” (You can read part of this essay online .) I was fascinated by the incredible scale and near impossibility of these missions to retrieve lost soldiers, especially in Vietnam where the acid content of the soil decays bone in about thirty years (I did the math, just like you are).

So reading that essay was definitely the “ooh” moment, but it doesn’t explain why this idea stuck with me for four years, nagged at me, metamorphosed into the complex and difficult play it’s becoming. A general answer is that the stories choose me. I have always felt that, that I’m a vehicle, and often an unlikely one, for stories that demand telling and choose me to tell them. And these stories are very demanding. They don’t leave me alone. They nag and claw and harass.

And why these stories, why this particular story? I don’t know, but I have noticed some patterns, and certain themes—death, ghosts, searching for lost children or parents, etc. Another thing I’ve noticed is that I’m driven to write about things that horrify and scare me. And I don’t mean that lightly. I routinely have terrible nightmares and anxiety attacks produced by the research I do for plays. When I wrote Burying the Bones, a play about a South African torturer, the stress got so bad that my hair actually started falling out. This may seem like nothing but the fancies of a neurotic writer, but when I write a play, I live in that world and with those characters. They’re very real to me—if they weren’t, I wouldn’t be able to write it. And when I try to stick to the shallower end, the writing suffers. It just doesn’t work. It’s an odd relationship, being drawn to the things I fear most, forcing myself to live with them, even learn to love them. I’m sure a psychiatrist would have plenty to say about it.

So here I am, writing a ghost story. Like many people, I’ve always loved ghost stories, and I’ve always been scared by them. When I started this play three weeks ago, I was at a writers’ retreat, staying in a lovely old mansion on the prairie. A lovely, old, creaky, sighing mansion, surrounded by acres of empty prairie, howling coyotes, hooting owls, branches scratching on the window, floorboards groaning, doors banging open in the middle of the night. And then I came home to my creaky, sighing old Evanston house complete with its own shadows and groans and scrapes. And here I am, conjuring ghosts. Thank God for Tylenol PM.