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Norwood Native’s Second Act

By ALEX KRATZ

Five years ago, at the age of 45, Norwood native Valerie Killigrew made the risky decision to dramatically change the course of her life. She became a writer.

And now, after a half decade of plugging away at her chosen craft, countless hours agonizing over every word in every sentence and suffering at least a hundred rejection letters, Killigrew is finally seeing the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

Starting on Nov. 2, two of her one-act plays, “Interview” and “Behind the Invisible Enemy” will be performed at the 13th Street Repertory Company, a nonprofit with that is “part of the heart of off-Broadway,” says Sandra Nordgren, the company’s general manager and literary director.

Killigrew is billing her plays as “two plays as absurd as the world that inspired them.” The first half of the doubleheader, “Interview,” is about Ilias Tride, the richest man in the world, who is forced to come to grips with his unethical lifestyle and addiction to unhappiness through an encounter with a prospective protégé. “Behind the Enemy Lines” is about a totalitarian dystopia where everyone’s thoughts are controlled by one man named They. Fortunately, a handful of free-thinkers, “retro-revolutionaries,” exist. Their belief in the past is the only hope for the future.

“This is my first big break,” Killigrew said during an interview at her pristine apartment overlooking Williamsbridge Oval Park.

Nordgren, who has been pushing to get Killigrew’s plays produced for the last three years, says she was “blown away” during a reading of the “Interview” script in 2003.

“I found her work really clever,” Nordgren says. “It really made me question what’s going on the world. I was really surprised that she was such a new playwright.”

Rock and Roll

For the majority of her adult life, Killigrew worked in the music industry for big-time recording labels like Capital, Arista and Polygram.

All week long, Killigrew would listen to demo tapes, looking to discover the next big thing. At night, she worked the big rock clubs, rubbing elbows with wild-haired stars. The walls of her apartment are lined with records, CDs and music videos.

But the industry proved fickle and she was constantly moving from company to company, boss to boss. “That’s how the music business happened, sometimes we were going in, sometimes we were going out,” she said.

Finally, she went out for the last time five years ago when she was fired at a job working at Arista for rock ’n’ roll hall-of-famer Clive Davis.

The night she was fired, she made the fateful decision — Killigrew believes it was her destiny — to dedicate herself to writing.

A Bronx Education

Killigrew has always written. As a child, teachers admonished her for writing stories when she should have been listening to a lesson. At the age of 12, Killigrew, who says she’s “always written about insanity,” wrote a story about incest before she even knew what the word meant.

Following a classic Catholic school education, first at St. Brendan’s in Norwood and then at the all-girls Academy of Mt. St. Ursula in Bedford Park, Killigrew did not attend college or directly pursue her interest in writing. She did what she was supposed to do. She got a job.

Though she worked in the frantic world of downtown Manhattan, Killigrew returned each day to the northwest Bronx, where the pace slowed and the volume decreased.

She maintained employment and married a Bronx boy. But stories and ideas were constantly popping into her head – on the subway, in the supermarket – and she continued to write during her spare time, dabbling in fairy tales, short fiction and “the most awful poetry in the whole world.”

Heartache and Happiness

Now, Killigrew is single, unemployed and writes every day from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. She’s a morning person, she says. Sometimes she keeps writing all day until her brain eventually fizzles out.

Though she says she’s never been happier, life is harder these days. The theatre is giving her exposure, but not a check. She’s living off credit cards and the charity of friends and family. “These creditors keep ringing on the phone,” she says, exasperated.

She’s sacrificed a lot, Killigrew says, choking back tears. In addition to financial security, Killigrew says she’s lost friends over her decision to become a writer. And some in her family are just now starting to believe that Killigrew isn’t just “twiddling her thumbs” at home all day.

“All the worrying, all the heartache, it’s all worth it because I believe in what I’m doing,” Killigrew says.

To get away from it all, Killigrew often takes long walks through Woodlawn Cemetery, just blocks from her apartment, and thinks about death and how peaceful it must be. “I love death,” she says. “Life is so hard. I imagine I’d just be hanging out with God – and John Lennon.” (Kiligrew is a huge Lennon fan.)

Whenever Killigrew receives another rejection letter or another call from a creditor, she tries to brush it aside and focus on her work, often invoking her favorite Sylvia Plath line. “The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt,” she tells herself and starts working on her next perfect sentence.

Her ex-husband, Brian Killigrew (the two are neighbors and still close friends), says her carefully wrought sentences come alive when spoken on stage. He saw the same reading in 2003 that Nordgren raved about and he was equally blown away.

“There’s a lot of ideas packed between those words,” says Brian, a photographer and artist in his own right. “It’s great to see anyone creative get some recognition, a lot of artists have work that’s in their closets.”

Killigrew is so busy working on the production of “Interview” and “Behind the Invisible Enemy” that she hasn’t had time for much new writing, but she always has several projects going at once. She’s working on a couple of children’s books, a screenplay and a book of wisdom-packed one-liners (“wisdom never goes out of style,” she says) that were cut from stories, but too good to abandon. She likes writing plays because “I’ve always been good at dialogue,” she says.

Making a living as a playwright in New York City is extremely difficult, Nordgren says. She’s “inundated” with scripts every day. It’s rare, she says, that she picks up page-turners like the two plays she’s received from Killigrew.

The most important thing for an aspiring playwright, Nordgren says, is to receive recognition. If this is true, Killigrew is on her way. “Interview” won third place in the 2003 13th Street Repertory Company’s New Works of Merit Competition and “Behind the Invisible Enemy” won two awards last year, including a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) Award for playwriting.

“I’ve always wanted to write so my work will last for a hundred years,” Killigrew says.

“I don’t think I’m there yet, but I’m on my way.”

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