Jim McManus, left, and Prince Albert of Monaco, center, with the other theater awardees: From left, director Alice Reagan, Target Margin Theater; actor Michael Braun, Yale School of Drama; lighting designer Christopher Brown, Mud/Bone; director Suzanne Agins, Williamstown Theatre Festival; and director/digital artist Chi-Wang Yang, California Institute of the Arts.

By Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"In my head, theater was about kings and princes," says playwright Jim McManus, looking back at his college years. Then he read August Wilson's "Seven Guitars" and saw his "Two Trains Running" in 1994 at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.

"I was hooked," he said in a recent interview. "I thought, 'These are folks I know.'"

Those folks he knew were back in Donora -- former Mon Valley steelworkers, mainly, whom he grew up among in the 80s and shared beers with in the 90s.

	Matt Peyton Actress Elisabeth Rohm and Jim McManus at the Princess Grace Awards. Click photo for larger image.

Now, some six full-length plays later, McManus' playwriting has taken him to New York City, where he donned a tuxedo Thursday to meet a real prince, Albert of Monaco, and receive the playwriting award at the 23rd annual Princess Grace Awards. "It was pretty damn great," he reported the next day.

This year, the Princess Grace Foundation gave 22 awards to promising artists in theater, dance and film, with McManus the only playwright. There was an awardees dinner the night before, and he reconnected with New York playwright Adam Rapp -- "we each had a playing-darts-at-Dee's flashback." Rapp, a City Theatre regular, had received the same award in 1999 and was back to receive an alumnus award for all he has accomplished since.

The awards were at Cipriani on 42nd Street, a suitably lavish environment for royalty, with Larry King as emcee. The theater awards were given out by actor Jesse Martin ("Rent," "Law & Order"); film, by Anthony Michael Hall ("The Dead Zone"); and dance, by Broadway legend Chita Rivera -- "when she arrived, it sent a real buzz through the room."

There were pictures, of course. "The amount of security was overwhelming," McManus said. Before the winners posed with the prince, there was a rehearsal with a stand-in, "and you had to remember your spot."

McManus had to be there a couple of hours early, which meant his wife, Laura, had to arrive on her own. It was pretty dazzling: "Enormous ceilings, hundreds of servants and people throwing drinks at you." He posed with Elisabeth Rohm ("Law & Order): "I got the clearance from my wife on that one."

He also posed with Hall and talked about theater, Hall praising playwright John Guare (Hall was in the film of "Six Degrees of Separation") and how he could do rewrites so brilliantly on set. Like any actor, Hall asked McManus what he was working on -- in case there was a role for him

It was an exciting evening for anyone, let alone for a young couple from the Mon Valley.

Back in the real world, the award gives McManus $7,500 and, just as important, a year's membership in New Dramatists. Come spring, the McManuses are moving to New York so Jim can avail himself fully of the supportive facilities, networking and readings (of both his and others' scripts) that New Dramatists provides.

What most people know about Donora is Stan Musial and the killer smog of 1948. Growing up there, McManus says everyone knew about Musial but no one ever talked about the smog. "It was just something that happened, part of doing a dirty industrial job, like in mining towns." He's done research on it for a screenplay and discovered the workers didn't want to shut down the zinc works, feeling "we're a hardy people," unwilling to let "a little darkness" stop the high school football game or Halloween parade.

It was a classic case of "our livelihoods or our lives. In a way, they killed themselves." And that's the background for his plays.

McManus' mom was from Donora, where her father was a cop, His dad, whose father was a miner and milkman, was a steelworker from Belle Vernon, across the river, who would brag that half the steel in New York City was made in Duquesne. That was back, McManus says, "when the job told what they really did. Now everyone's a consultant."

McManus grew up on Allen Avenue, where just about all the guys he knew went into the mills, for a while. There have been broken lives among them -- suicide, alcoholism. "Most of the plays I've written have been about the decline of the mills and the people in the years following, [which is] a lot darker than just the mills closing."

McManus went to Mon Valley Catholic on a diocesan scholarship in the seminary program. "They wanted us to date, but once I discovered girls, that was it" as far as any plans for the priesthood.

He liked English literature and thought about teaching or writing fiction. The first member of his family to go to college, he went to Duquesne and started taking classes with Samuel Hazo and writing poetry.

He hardly saw any plays -- "only if I was on a date and wanted to look classy." He was indeed on a date when he saw a college production of Milan Stitt's "The Runner Stumbles" and was "transfixed by a girl on stage," Kim Zelonis. He found out she was taking a playwriting course the next term from Jay Keenan, so he enrolled. In that class was another burgeoning playwright, Todd Kreidler.

McManus credits Zelonis (now a playwright herself) with getting him into playwriting, but August Wilson sealed the deal. "I kept going back and back to see 'Two Trains' ??? I've been writing plays ever since."

Recently, staying in one of the visiting playwrights' rooms at New Dramatists, he found Wilson had stayed there when writing "Joe Turner's Come and Gone": "a dream for a kid from Pittsburgh."

McManus was in and out of Duquesne for a few years, supporting himself with phone company jobs as "operator, customer service rep, consultant; it was a union job, so it made my dad happy."

In 2001 he graduated with a degree in English, already a produced playwright. His one-act "Cornish Game Hen" was staged at Gemini Theatre in 1999 and they followed with "The Night They Drugged the Orange" and several others in their annual new play festival.

"That buoyed me enough to think that this was working." So in 2001 he quit the phone company and got a job managing the box office at City Theatre, which put him in contact with City dramaturg Carlyn Aquiline. She went to a reading of his "Dorothy 6" and then worked with him on the play for months. "She's incredible."

He began to feel like a legitimate playwright. In 2004 Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre staged "Dorothy 6" twice. The second time was at the historic Pump House in Homestead, supported by the Battle of Homestead Foundation, and the audience included many of the steel workers about whom McManus wrote.

Aquiline also pushed him to apply to the graduate playwriting program at Carnegie Mellon, led by the same Milan Stitt who wrote "The Runner Stumbles." CMU gave him a Shubert Fellowship and he continued writing about the "larger than life" people he knew.

"Back then, the huge people were Dave Parker and your dad," he recalled. But his and his friends' parents had to pull them out of sports because they didn't have health insurance, and other kids would taunt them with cries of "cheese," in reference to the free food they got.

At CMU, he found the generally privileged students acting in his plays had no idea of the lives he wrote about. He and the directors would "look for those with the least money and dirty them up. But they're all so good looking!" Mainly, he says, Stitt helped him learn how to free up his writing and use theater itself to tell his stories.

He submitted plays wherever he could, including the Minneapolis Playwrights Center and the O'Neill Theatre Center, where he was a semifinalist twice. It's hard to get a hearing at professional theaters, which usually accept plays only through agents, though Aquiline opened a few doors.

He finished the two-year CMU program in June, and it was his thesis play, "Cherry Smoke," which won the Princess Grace Award. That's opened a few more doors: A New York theater which turned down "Cherry Smoke" has had a change of heart and is rereading it.

McManus and his wife were originally high school sweethearts, then got back together in 1997 and married in 1998. She has is director of curriculum at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, so they think she'll find a New York job. But they aren't moving until March, after he finishes a short movie with a CMU director, based on a play he wrote for class.

As to himself, McManus figures the New Dramatist membership puts him in a new league. As he met the other members, he thought, "Boy, they expect something of you now -- you'd better be able to hit the curve ball or you'll go back down."

Previous Post-Gazette coverage of McManus:

"Dorothy 6," Sept. 17, 2004, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04261/380410.stm

"Dorothy 6," May 7, 2004, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04128/312251.stm

"Pistachio," Feb. 1, 2003, http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/20030201gemini0201fnp5.asp

Interview, Aug. 22, 2001, http://www.post-gazette.com/neigh_north/20010822nplaywright0822p5.asp

"The Night They Drugged the Orange," Jan. 27, 2001, http://www.post-gazette.com/magazine/20010127gemini5.asp