Postscript: Liz Swados (1951-2016)

Liz Swados, in 1980.Photograph by Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty

It was always exciting to see, around town, those lovely posters by Paul Davis announcing a new production at the Public Theatre—“our” theatre, over on Lafayette Street, a place that promoted, before it was fashionable, color-blind casting, knowing that talent itself was not defined by race or gender but spirit. In 1980, the Davis poster showed a young actress named Meryl Streep in a piece called “Alice in Concert.” Its author was Elizabeth Swados, a name I recognized from another Public event a year before, when her adaptation of Michael Herr’s classic “Dispatches” premièred there.

Every year, it seemed, Swados had a new show out, and often it involved stories of hope and children trying to survive in their delicacy in a delicate world. This was certainly true of her 1978 hit, “Runaways,” which tells the story of kids who’d left home and were living on the city streets. It was another Public production—it had its first life in the cabaret there—before moving on to Broadway, where the then twenty-seven-year-old Elizabeth, or Liz, as she was known to all, was nominated for four Tonys.

Liz was a wunderkind, and with great gifts come great responsibilities, including how she survived what was difficult and painful and sometimes hopeful about her own family. Born in Buffalo, in 1951, she was the only daughter of a successful attorney named Robert Swados; her mother was Sylvia Maisel, who, like Robert, loved the stage. But unlike her daughter, Maisel, who was subject to depression, didn’t get very far with her writing and acting; after a time, she started drinking. There was a brother, Lincoln, who eventually became schizophrenic. Liz’s mother committed suicide in 1974, and Lincoln died in 1989.

Liz wrote about all of this—about the ties that bind and harm the flesh, too—in prose works of great distinction; I am thinking of her 1991 memoir, “The Four of Us,” which is not only a portrait of her parents and brother but some of the chance encounters, lucky breaks, and plain old love of hard work that helped make Liz. There was her time as a student at Bennington, where she studied music; the early music pieces she wrote for the director Andrei Serban before she had even graduated; Joseph Papp’s eventual patronage, and so on. She was born talented and she stayed talented, her eyes always wide with the expectation that something amazing was about to happen—and if it didn’t, she’d make it herself.

I think parents give us as much as they take away, and from her folks Liz inherited a love of theatre—the spectacle of being. But while they were not able to move forward with their dreams, indeed were kind of crushed by unrealized dreams, Liz sidestepped that tragedy and made her way and made work, over and over again: one felt she created to save her life. In a way, shows like “Runaways” and “Alice in Concert,” and her many books for children, are a kind of self-portrait in fragments. They’re stories about survival, but not at the expense of wonder, and hope, and the dream we all share—the dream of inclusion, of being cherished, remembered, and loved. How marvellous to know, then, that Liz achieved all of these things before her premature, cancer-related death last month, right down to having a whole family in the person of the esteemed lawyer, Roz Lichter, and performers such as Diane Lane and Kate Schellenbach and Trini Alvarado—stars who found their respective voices in Swados’s shows because Liz was there to write down what she and other tremendously talented girls were feeling.