Pod Insights Personally Resurrection, Episode 4: Kansas (Part Two) About this episode In the second part of our trip to Kansas, we go on a hunt for the Allen Family Farm.
The creation of this podcast was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseildes arts de Montréal, le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
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0:31 Speaker 01 This is a CBC Podcast.
0:35 Speaker 02 Just a note on content. This episode contains discussions of depression and suicide. Do what you need to take care of yourself.
0:47 Speaker 02 In the 80s, tens of thousands of queer people died from AIDS.
0:54 Speaker 02 Daryl Allen, the subject of this podcast, he was one of them. But he was only one. It's taken me years, hundreds of hours, to rediscover his work.
1:09 Speaker 02 But what about the others? Can you imagine how many queer artists, how many queer stories are buried out there in bundles of letters and boxes of scripts, tucked neatly away, or worse, destroyed, after HIV took yet another life?
1:30 Speaker 02 It's staggering to think about just how many Darrells there are out there.
1:36 Speaker 02 This sometimes makes me question, what is it that makes some of these people's stories live on in history? Or, for artists like Daryl, what makes an artist known?
1:50 Speaker 02 Before we get back to Daryl's story, first, I want to talk about another artist, another playwright like Daryl. And stick with me for a minute because I promise it's related.
2:01 Speaker 03 William Inge was an American playwright whose big hits happened in the 1940s, 50s.
2:07 Speaker 02 William Inge.
2:09 Speaker 03 He had four major plays on Broadway. He had Picnic.
2:12 Speaker 02 Which won a Pulitzer.
2:13 Speaker 03 He had Dark at the Top of the Stairs.
2:15 Speaker 02 Which was nominated for five Tony Awards.
2:17 Speaker 03 He had Bus Stop.
2:18 Speaker 02 Which was adapted into a film starring Marilyn Monroe.
2:22 Speaker 03 And Come Back, Little Shiva.
2:23 Speaker 02 Which won an Oscar for its film adaptation.
2:26 Speaker 03 So his success hit really, really fast.
2:28 Speaker 02 Unlike Daryl Allen, William Inge is a playwright who found fame through his art during his lifetime. But Daryl and Inge did have something in common. They were both born and raised in the same place.
2:42 Speaker 03 He was a playwright that was born in Independence, Kansas.
2:45 Speaker 02 That's Sarah Owen.
2:46 Speaker 03 And I'm the library director and archivist at Independence Community College.
2:52 Speaker 02 And back in 2019, when I visited Independence, Kansas to meet Daryl's surviving family members, Sarah let me spend an entire day at the college in the William Inge archive.
3:03 Speaker 03 My job here is to run the library and archive the William Inge collection.
3:07 Speaker 02 And whether or not you or I know much about a famous playwright from the 1950s, everyone in Independence knows about Inge.
3:15 Speaker 04 One of his good friends that spurred him on to write was Tennessee Williams.
3:19 Speaker 05 And William Inge definitely did a really dark side, but his dark side, people could relate to that.
3:27 Speaker 02 That's Todd, who you might remember we met at the local bar on our first night in town, and his friend Kim. She tells us about how Independence celebrates Inge every year.
3:37 Speaker 04 So the Inge Festival is to celebrate the playwrights so that they don't ever feel alone.
3:43 Speaker 02 The William Inge Festival takes place every year in Independence, celebrating playwrights from within the community and from across the country. And Inge's childhood home still stands in downtown Independence.
3:54 Speaker 06 So William Inge's home is a lovely Victorian-style home, two floors.
4:04 Speaker 02 That's Ian, a playwright from New Jersey who was staying in the Inge House when we visited Kansas.
4:08 Speaker 06 Hopefully getting inspiration from all the old William Inge stuff that is upstairs and trying not to think about.
4:19 Speaker 06 Ghosts.
4:20 Speaker 02 So William Inge has a legacy here in Independence. To be completely honest, I didn't know anything about William Inge before I came here. I'd never heard of him before, but once I was here, it was easy to learn about his life. I visited his childhood home. I saw his old movie posters. I sat in archival collections of his work, letters and scripts and photos, all organized and categorized, pristine and easy to access. William Inge's legacy is tangible. It permeates the town. It feels real. But William Inge is in the playwright I came here to learn about.
5:01 Speaker 02 I came to Kansas on a quest to learn about Daryl Allen, on a quest to make Daryl's legacy feel real. But when I set out to find Daryl's childhood home, I failed. Confession, I think the building isn't there anymore. That's my producer, Matt, who came to Kansas with me. He was recording when we went searching for Daryl's childhood home. Wow, okay, let's go back.
5:29 Speaker 02 William Inge has an entire town dedicated to preserving his legacy. He has staff that keep his old home clean and warm and invite aspiring young playwrights to stay there and write. And Daryl, well, Daryl's got me and Matt. But he wrote plays too, good plays. Plays about war and trauma in Vietnam, about bisexuality and queerness in the era of gay liberation, plays that deserve to be known. So fuck it. If playwrights can come and stay in Inge's house, if they can draw such inspiration by staying in an artist's childhood home, then I'm not going to leave Kansas until I find Daryl's childhood home. I'm gonna make this real, goddammit.
6:19 Speaker 02 This is Resurrection, a podcast that tells the stories of ordinary queer people who are lost to HIV.
6:31 Speaker 02 We thought we would find Daryl's childhood home in Cherryvale. We thought we had the address. We were wrong. But Daryl's nieces, Ellen and Dorothy, the two sisters, the grandmothers, who did their best to love their Uncle Daryl, they gave us a lead.
6:46 Speaker 03 Cindy will help you there.
6:48 Speaker 02 Cindy, another one of Daryl's nieces. I'm Cindy Lopez, and I grew up as Cindy Allen, and I'm the daughter of Daryl's brother, Richard Allen. And Cindy's eager to help us out. Daryl was special to her. Daryl was always my favorite uncle. Cindy's in her 60s. She's extremely sociable. Her hair is dyed light purple, lilac. She's a bit rebellious. I mean, she must be to get in the car with Matt and me. Two strangers, two extremely intimidating strangers. Okay, and right now, we're in the car, driving out of Independence, and we are headed where?
7:27 Speaker 02 To, we're going to go north of Dennis, Kansas, and try to find my grandparents' house. And as it turns out, we're not the first people to head out and try and find the Allen family farm. Ellen and Dorothy had tried themselves.
7:45 Speaker 03 We tried to look for it, and we didn't find. Couldn't find it.
7:48 Speaker 02 Can't remember. And Cindy says that her mom has driven out to where the farm used to be, looking for it, too. But mom said there's no house there. I think I would, if the trees are the same, I think I would still recognize the area, but I could be wrong. As far as we know, no one in the Allen family has seen the farm in decades. Remember, Daryl's mom, Bee, left the farm and got her trailer in Cherryvale back in the 80s, so it's been years. But apparently, if anyone can find the farm, it's Cindy. I have a good sense of direction, and I can find my way around pretty. Once I've been there one time, I will remember it. Cindy and I have never met before, but despite this, she agrees to head out on a road trip with us to try to find the farm.
8:31 Speaker 02 I pull up outside her house in Independence with Matt in the backseat, and she jaunts over, hops in the passenger seat, and starts telling us about the farm, chatting with us like we're old friends. Welcome to Kansas.
8:47 Speaker 02 I have just wonderful mail.
8:49 Speaker 06 Memories of going there. When we were, when we'd be out of school in the, in the summer, we'd take turns going and staying with grandma and grandpa a week at a time. And my, my grandma, Bea, Daryl's mom, she was so good at making you feel like you were the most important child in her life. She was just, she was an amazing woman.
9:13 Speaker 02 How, like, how did she do that? What was it that made you feel that way?
9:18 Speaker 06 Because I, I was there just myself, one-on-one with her. And she, she was the best listener. She treated children as if their thoughts and ideas were important, you know?
9:33 Speaker 02 Cindy strikes me as one of those people who never lost the child inside of her. You know how life kind of beats that out of us, makes us grow up? I feel like Cindy's resisted that.
9:43 Speaker 06 And Daryl was always my favorite uncle. And back then, when we'd have our Sunday dinners, there was the kids' table and there was the adults' table. And as soon as we were done eating, Daryl would come in wherever all the kids were hanging out, and he'd make up games for us. He made up-
10:03 Speaker 02 Cindy has this ability to make you feel at ease when you're with her. Her energy honestly reminds me a bit of the descriptions I've heard of someone else, of Daryl.
10:11 Speaker 06 He had the most infectious laugh I had ever known. He, it was just this big, like, belly laugh. I mean, you know, from his whole body. It would be super loud. In fact, one time when we were at grandma's house in Cherryville, when Daryl came back to visit, he, I had a baby, my oldest, and she was only like three months old, and he laughed so loud, and it was in that little trailer, that she started crying because it scared her, it was so abrupt, you know? And then he felt really bad, and I said, "Oh, no, that's okay," you know? But he was just one of those people I could talk to forever.
10:49 Speaker 02 I came to Kansas looking for something tangible, something to make Daryl feel real, something to reach out and touch. I thought the farm was the answer, but maybe the farm isn't necessary.
11:01 Speaker 06 And another fun memory I have of his is I love, love to dance. And we had, one of the reunions we had, we had-
11:11 Speaker 02 Music or something and Darrell and his companion were both there. I can't remember what is, what the guy's name was, but. Was it his companion? Uh huh. Jonathan? Jonathan, that Jonathan didn't like to dance and so I told Darrell, I said, I'll dance with you. So we got out there and danced a lot and he was just, he was just one of those people you love to be around. He, I loved talking to him and, and everything that, that he did, you know. Maybe Darrell doesn't get a fancy library collection or a big festival, but maybe his archive was here the whole time, sitting across from me at a dining room table or next to me in the passenger seat. The stories.
11:54 Speaker 02 Dad created this Allen Recreation Area and we had horseback riding, swimming and fishing. And as Cindy talks, I drive further and further away from Independence, away from Cherryvale, away from, well, civilization, really. Yeah, we're now driving down a little, what I would describe as a little country road. Past a couple of farms, lots of fields around us. Lots of cows. And on this drive, I try my best to ask hard hitting questions. What are these little like pools of water called? Is there like? Creeks. Creeks? Creeks, right. Yep. It depends, you know, and there were creeks. What was childhood like out here for Darrell?
12:36 Speaker 02 Did he spend time playing in the fields like Cindy did years later? Did he ever dip his toe into one of the creeks? Did he sit under a tree reading? Did he read plays by William Inge, the local hero? William Inge was born in 1913. He was 26 years older than Darrell. When Darrell was a teenager, Inge was at the height of his fame. Was Inge an inspiration to Darrell? One of the reasons Darrell wrote plays? As I drive with Darrell's niece along country roads with endless skies stretching above us and endless fields drenched in golden light stretching out beside us, our conversation turns to those topics that often come easy when we're confronted with the vastness of it all. I don't know.
13:21 Speaker 02 I don't know all the details and I don't know if that's because people didn't tell. I had heard. He had cancer, but I don't know what kind of cancer or anything. So. Yeah, I mean, I'll just tell you what, as much as I know of the situation, because I've sort of gained my information on the other side of it from his friends at the time. But my understanding is that he did have cancer as a result of AIDS. I thought, I figured that's probably what it was. So what we're gonna do when this curves, the very first road, you go straight north on this very first road here. The worry I'd had in discussing the more private parts of Daryl's life dissipates
14:05 Speaker 02 more and more the longer I'm in Kansas. I worried about revealing parts of him that would change how his family viewed him. But they already knew. We are now driving down a gravel road.
14:19 Speaker 02 Right now, pretty much all we can see on either side of the car are fields. We've been driving for about an hour, and it feels a bit like we've gone back in time, partly because of the dirt road and the stillness and the gold dust of the long Kansas sunbeams, and partly because it looks like there's a horse-drawn carriage coming down the road towards us. No, wait, there is actually a horse-drawn carriage coming down the road towards us.
14:46 Speaker 02 Maybe we have gone back in time. Is that a hor- oh, you know, we have the Mennonites or the Amish that live around here, if that's what's coming towards us, it's a horse and buggy. And it's around here that Cindy thinks the Allen family farm used to be. I'm thinking it'll be, it might, it should be the next intersection. But I can't help feeling like Cindy has already shown me the farm, in a sense. She rebuilt it through her stories. This is what I'm thinking it is. But if it is, there should be a drive from this direction, and there'll be a drive from But there is no drive from the other direction. Grandma had like a great big weeping willow tree in the yard. But there is no weeping willow tree in the yard.
15:30 Speaker 02 I'm just looking to see if this might be it. The farm Cindy can picture in her head, it isn't here. But then a lot can change in 30 years. A place might look different than what you picture in your head. This is it. This is it? This is it, because I remember those bushes. See, why couldn't my mother find this house? But that's about where Grandma's house sat. But there was a great big huge barn off of it. And that's what I don't see is the big barn. The barn is gone. So is the willow tree and the second driveway. And to be fair, so is every Allen from Daryl's generation. But the house is still here. It's a big family home, two stories, a brick chimney. But beyond the house, my attention is immediately captured by what surrounds it.
16:15 Speaker 02 Endless fields, infinite sky, a dirt road snaking away towards the horizon. Just so much space. As I'm wrapped up, looking at the house and the fields, Matt spots someone. Do you think this woman walking the cat is the owner of this house? A woman walking a cat?
16:36 Speaker 02 Nope, wait. Oh, it's a dog. That's entirely my fault.
16:41 Speaker 02 And while Matt usually has to give me a pep talk and hype me up when we have to go talk to strangers, neither of us banked on our secret social weapon, Cindy. Yeah, we'll ask her if she lives here or wherever. Yeah. And before I've even brought the car to a stop, Cindy is out the door. Hey, I have a question. Cindy bounds away with a jaunt reminiscent of childhood. And after a minute, she's back and she is already overflowing with stories. Grandma had these snowball bushes that were all along this and here. And she had a huge weeping willow tree right there. And she had a... I don't remember what's Colly's name was, but that dog was the coolest dog. Yeah. And she's convinced the current owner of the house to take us inside to look around. Yes. OK.
17:26 Speaker 02 Yes. We are here. I'm gonna take some pictures too, because I want them. We have found the house. So we're gonna go inside. We're going to talk to this lovely woman who apparently owns the house now and has some pictures, but we're gonna turn the recorder off for a couple of minutes until we ask her. We're gonna take a little break here, but stick around, because right after this, we're heading inside Daryl's childhood home.
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18:27 Speaker 00 Season one of Sold a Story hit a nerve. It was about teaching kids to read. We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation.
18:35 Speaker 02 Now we're back with a new season. This time, we go beyond reading. I've literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math. I'm Emily Hanford. Go to your podcast app and follow Sold a Story. So we're gonna go inside. We're going to talk to this lovely woman who apparently owns the house now and has some pictures, but we're gonna turn the recorder off for a couple of minutes until we ask her if she's down. With Cindy at the helm, we head into Daryl's childhood home, the Allen Family Farm. I'm standing in Daryl's living room. Let me say that again. I am standing in Daryl Allen's childhood living room. How the hell did I end up here? When we turn the mic back on and ask our new Friend to introduce herself.
19:20 Speaker 04 Uh, my name is Tina Schill. We've had the house since, uh, forty-two years ago, so.
19:26 Speaker 02 Okay, and you bought it from the Allens?
19:28 Speaker 04 No, uh, they had sold it to the Kepharts.
19:31 Speaker 02 Okay, and what's it, what's it like living in this area? So we're from Canada, actually.
19:36 Speaker 04 Oh, really?
19:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, we're, it's our first time in Kansas, so, uh, can you just tell me a little bit about what it's like living, living around here?
19:43 Speaker 04 Well, I wouldn't live anywhere but in the country, but, yeah, it's quiet and peaceful and most of the neighbors are pretty good people, so.
19:51 Speaker 02 Okay.
19:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:52 Speaker 02 And look, before I said that maybe the stories were enough, maybe we didn't need the farm, but being here, standing inside Daryl's childhood home, it adds a new dimension. All at once, I can start to imagine the people from Cindy's stories and from Daryl's letters, I can see them come to life. It's like we did step back in time when we passed that horse and buggy on the road. I picture a Sunday in December.
20:20 Speaker 02 Did you guys do any Christmases here? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes, we did. It was like everybody came? Yeah, whoever, yeah, whoever came. Grandma Bee made the best cinnamon rolls, and the other thing that I thought felt like was heaven. I can imagine Bee, Daryl's mom, loving and kind, the matriarch, listener-in-chief, standing in the kitchen, making her famous cinnamon rolls, listening intently to one of Cindy's tales from school. I can picture Dawn and Richard, Daryl's brothers, stoic, cold, few words between them, traipsing in through the back door, hungry after a day's work in the fields.
20:59 Speaker 02 Necessary even at Christmas. I can see Daryl's sister, Lillian, in the living room, filling out Christmas cards, always wanting to stay in touch. And I picture Daryl, a younger Daryl, in his twenties, gallivanting down the staircase into the living room, maybe he was just working on a script. And he's got a sparkle in his eye, he's ready to teach his nieces and nephews a new game.
21:23 Speaker 02 Standing in Daryl's childhood home, suddenly his legacy doesn't feel so abstract anymore. It feels real. Tina pulls out an envelope with some old photos she was given by a previous owner of the house. Thank you. This is, it's got the names of the family on the back of there. Could we open it up? Sure. Yeah. Great.
21:43 Speaker 04 That'd be cool. Oh, it does. Look.
21:48 Speaker 02 Ron Wilkerson. Is he related?
21:51 Speaker 04 No, he's not related to me at all, but I know him because he was a science teacher when I worked at Parsons Middle School.
21:57 Speaker 02 Isn't that weird?
21:58 Speaker 04 Yeah. Ron brought it to you?
22:00 Speaker 02 Uh huh.
22:02 Speaker 04 And see, I don't know any of those names. That was before Grandma and Grandpa lived here, I guess. That's wild.
22:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, he brought that. We look at the photo from Ron Wilkerson. It's black and white, likely from the early 1900s. But it's taken right in front of the same house, real old-fashioned looking. Two women in long dresses, a young girl and a boy with a sullen expression on his face, sitting, posed, atop a horse with an equally sullen expression on her face. All their names are scrawled across the back of the photo, right down to the horse, Doll. Great name for a horse. I'm struck by the generations that have lived here. That the house was originally built in 1860. A hundred years ago, the Wilkersons lived in this house. Then came Daryl's family, the Allens.
22:52 Speaker 02 Then another family who sold the house to Tina and her family who are living here today. And it took all this effort just to tell the story of one man from one of those families. But now that we've brought two of the families face to face with each other, we decide to let Tina continue her peaceful country life.
23:12 Speaker 02 Thinking of the families, the generations who lived in this house, I can't help but think of another group of people anchored to this area, rural Kansas, but separated by time, different generations.
23:26 Speaker 02 Queer people. Daryl, of course. But also Todd, the man we'd met at the bar in the last episode. A generation younger than Daryl. And, well, William Inge.
23:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right. Inge was gay. Although never openly gay. He was in the closet his entire life. William Inge was one generation older than Daryl. I wonder what acceptance and what hardship these men felt. What changed from generation to generation? And what stayed the same? I think about the darkness inside me. And I wonder what the darkness felt like for them. Let's go back to Todd for a moment. You might remember in the last episode, we were amped up after meeting Todd and a group of queers at a local bar. We had a wonderful man from another table come over named Todd, who seems like he's one of the resident gays of Independence. Todd agreed to let us interview him.
24:22 Speaker 05 Okay, my name's Todd Young. I live here in Independence, Kansas. A 55-year-old gay male.
24:29 Speaker 02 With Todd, it's easy enough to find out what the darkness feels like.
24:33 Speaker 05 I remember, sometimes you forget you're gay and you just think you're human and then someone will remind you. We were in the grocery store and I heard the guys there saying, "See there, there he is. He's one of them right there. Just like a man and wife. They're living together."
24:48 Speaker 02 The guys at the grocery store were talking about Todd and his partner.
24:52 Speaker 05 And I heard that and I was just like, "Just act like it's normal."
24:55 Speaker 02 Todd doesn't give up easy, though. And he kept talking to those guys anytime he saw them around town.
25:01 Speaker 05 By the end of the year on Father's Day, they were all giving me cards and stuff. It just, you don't know what you don't know. They had never known gay people. Of course, it doesn't concern you until your kids become gay.
25:13 Speaker 02 Todd moved to Cherryvale in the 90s. He's lived in this area during the past three decades as the world has become more and more accepting of queer people. And I'm willing to bet that he's played a big part in affecting that change in this area.
25:24 Speaker 05 If you can set a good example, you'll have more allies all the time.
25:29 Speaker 02 So what about the generation before Todd? Daryl's generation?
25:34 Speaker 02 Well, we know that Daryl had his own struggles. He wrestled with his own darkness. Daryl's play about the Vietnam War, Mustang 01, made that clear enough. If you remember in the opening episode, I shared an excerpt from a monologue from the play, one of the two men who fall in love talking to the other.
25:49 Speaker 01 I know you're afraid. I am too, way down deep. But I'm more afraid of not discovering who I really am.
25:57 Speaker 02 But Daryl, it seems, pushed through his darkness. He learned to live with it. He had no choice, and his family was all around him, including Cindy, who was a child back then. I think I assumed that it would have been such a challenge to have been...
26:15 Speaker 00 To have been...
26:16 Speaker 02 Like, different, to have been...
26:17 Speaker 00 To have that alternate lifestyle and that day and age. Yeah. Nobody... yeah.
26:24 Speaker 02 But it does... like, I think I wrote off a lot of the positive elements of being in this area.
26:31 Speaker 00 If Daryl were here talking to you, he'd tell you the same thing. He just had a joy for life. He did. I mean, and he had such a magnetic personality, and I don't know if all people that ever met him were like that, but whether he was my uncle or not, I would have liked him. Because he was just... you know how when you meet some people and you just feel drawn to them? That's the kind of person he was.
26:55 Speaker 02 And what about the generation before Daryl? William Inge. Well, William Inge is the one who made it. His plays were on Broadway. Famous actors starred in his movies. He won award after award after award. And then on June 10, 1973, William Inge went out to his garage in Los Angeles. He got in his car, turned on the engine, and he let the darkness take him. William Inge killed himself.
27:36 Speaker 02 I started this episode by asking why it is that certain artists are known, why certain artists become famous. But fame isn't the same thing as happiness. We can look back at generations of queer people, at the Todds and the Darrells and the Williams. There will always be those who persevere, who push for progress. There will be those who can find the joy in life. And there will be those who find the darkness inside them to be utterly overwhelming. I've known people like that. I've sipped beers with friends one night in the muggy Montreal summer heat and had them let the darkness take their life the next day.
28:17 Speaker 02 And having an archive full of your artifacts, having your work turned into movies and a festival in your honor, maybe that's the wrong thing to focus on. Maybe I've been asking the wrong question. It's not, "Why do some people end up famous?" It's, "What do you want your legacy to be?" It doesn't matter if it's big or small, if you have plays on Broadway, or if you slowly fade into oblivion. How did you live your life? And how did you want to be remembered? When I spoke to Sarah, the archivist of the William Inge Archive, I got a glimpse at how William Inge might have answered that question. You had mentioned to me as well, when I was here a couple of days ago, this box.
29:00 Speaker 03 Yes.
29:01 Speaker 02 Can you tell me about this box?
29:02 Speaker 03 So when I got my job here four years ago, as you always do when you get in an office, you start rearranging and cleaning.
29:09 Speaker 02 She was curious about what sort of stuff she was in charge of.
29:11 Speaker 03 And I came upon a archive box.
29:14 Speaker 02 A box, about the size of a briefcase.
29:16 Speaker 03 And it's usually kept for storing papers and from archives, but this box was taped up.
29:22 Speaker 02 She couldn't open it.
29:23 Speaker 03 And it had a paper across it that said it was not to be opened by anyone but direct family members. And it was signed by about four family members about 20 years ago. And that was the last time it had been opened.
29:39 Speaker 02 No one knows what's in that box. No one has opened it in years. So I did the only thing that made sense to do. When Sarah wasn't looking, I stole the box, I took it back to my Airbnb, and I opened it. Just kidding. I did not steal the box. But I do find this box, or the idea of this box, to be so intriguing. Either Inge or his family went through his belongings and determined that these were the things that he wanted kept private. Because shouldn't we all be allowed to decide who opens our most vulnerable boxes? Only a predetermined list of people are allowed to open the Inge box. The Inge box makes me think a lot about Daryl's story.
30:25 Speaker 02 I've ripped Daryl's life wide open, probably some of the worst experiences in his life, and made them public. Maybe I'm helping to create some kind of legacy for Daryl. Maybe I'm helping to stop him from fading away as generations pass. But if the question is not, why are some people famous? If the question is, how does a person want to be remembered? How can I factor that into telling Daryl's story? Well, William Inge has a box, and he has a list of close family members who are allowed to open that box. Can I do the same thing with Daryl? Figure out who would be allowed to open his box and check in with them as I tell his story?
31:05 Speaker 02 Dan, Daryl's ex, who gave me Daryl's scripts and letters. I think Dan would be on that list. That's why Daryl left him with a copy of the play he'd spent his final years working on, Mustang 01. But I'm not sure his nieces would be on that list. They knew Daryl, but did they know him, you know? So who else? Well, there is one thing that happened on my drive with Cindy that I haven't told you up to this point. You know, when he was married, you know, I don't know how many years he was married, but he and his ex-wife stayed friends the whole time, too. And she's an amazing person. Cindy's talking about Daryl's ex-wife, Janet. I've told you might have their contact information. Do you have?
31:49 Speaker 02 He's friends with her on Facebook. I give Dorothy a call, and she tells me where to find Janet on Facebook. Janet, it turns out, had kept Daryl's last name, Janet Allen, but she changed the spelling. Instead of A-L-L-E-N, she goes by A-L-L-Y-N. She had been right there, right in front of me, the whole time, but a single letter had kept her hiding in plain sight. I send her a message that day, while I'm still in Kansas, explaining who I am and what I'm doing. She replies almost immediately. I got a friend of mine to read her reply.
32:28 Speaker 04 Dane, your contact is not entirely out of the blue. Daryl left the rights to all his works jointly to me and the partner he was with when he died, Jonathan Houston. Jonathan died in 2017, so now it's just me. At some point, I plan to compile those of his plays that I have, including Mustang, into a collected works volume. Any project that includes his works could affect the ability to publish those works later.
32:59 Speaker 02 Is Janet telling me to stop? Not quite the rosy introduction I was hoping for. If she does have the rights to Daryl's work, and if she doesn't let me use it, this entire project could be jeopardized. This could be the end. Next time, on Resurrection.
33:23 Speaker 02 Janet Allen.
33:45 Speaker 02 Resurrection is a team effort. If you want to help support us, please rate and review us. It helps us so much. Matthew Rogers is our editor and sound designer and music maker. Ethan Soil wrote all the original guitar you heard in today's episode. Davide Kietseze is the voice of Daryl's letters and scripts. Hannah Sung is our executive producer. Our outro track is called "Easy to Love, Written for Us" by Clara Jones. Special thanks to Rachel O'Brien, Michelle Soicher, Isabel Deluse, Katie Hill, Roger Galvas, Amanda Pledgie, and everyone from Independence who is so generous with us. Matthew Carriette-Somery is the platonic love of my life and my co-producer. Resurrection is written, researched, and
34:28 Speaker 02 hosted by me, Dane Stewart. The creation of this podcast was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal, le Conseil des Arts qui délecte Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
Previous Resurrection, Episode 3: Kansas (Part One) Next Resurrection, Episode 5: Janet Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated