"Oh, Jack, don't be such a bloody twit. Come back to Hawthornden."

That was British biographer Hilary Spurling calling in spring 2002. But twit or not, I wasn't interested in returning to Hawthornden Castle International Writer's Retreat. It had been 1989 when Spurling and I first met at the quiet Scottish arts colony. The stay was productive, the company invigorating and the surroundings breathtaking. Why would I not want another fellowship to a 15th-century landmark with servants and free accommodations? Simple! Having been a quasi- "colony rat" for about a decade, Hawthornden had been my Xanadu. I had peaked. Memory preservation was imperative. Like Rocky Marciano . Joe Montana . Ted Williams . I wanted to go out on top.

But wait!

I recalled that the castle was but a quarter-mile walk to the unmarked main gate where the Edinburgh bus stopped. In half an hour I could be on Prince's Street just minutes from the Royal Mile, which during August becomes the hub of the world's greatest arts orgy, the Edinburgh Festival. And didn't I have a 90-minute, two-character political play, the archetypal product for the off-center festival "fringe"? And wasn't the play good enough to buck worldwide competition?

Perhaps I should call my own bluff.

So I rethought Hilary's advice. A residency for autumn '02 would allow me to scout Edinburgh venues for a summer '03 production of my new opus. I'd pre-empt the opposition. So I reapplied and was promptly reaccepted to Hawthornden, admittedly because artists' colonies are dramatist-deprived. Most playwrights savor creative time with other theater artists rather than novelists and poets. But since actors and directors eventually corrupt my product, why give them a leg up on the work-in-progress?

I arrived at Hawthornden in October and settled into Ben Jonson's old bedroom. (Honest! During the winter of 1618-19, or so we're told.) My colony companions were a Chinese novelist, an Irish poet and an Anglo-American children's book author, "trying to write for grown-ups." Since we were here to create, I let it be known that I'd be going to town often in order to "research." If the retreat's brass interpreted that to mean I was working on a play set in Edinburgh, so be it. I was actually working on setting a play in an Edinburgh theater. Close enough.

As a guest playwright at Mount Holyoke College a decade earlier, I hadn't imagined that that experience would eventually lead me to Scotland. I'd been brought to Mount Holyoke to collaborate with history professor Daniel Czitrom on a large-cast play about the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911. We were able to use 41 performers. You can do that when the actors are young, ambitious and paid in credits. The collaboration worked, and Czitrom and I even became friends. Soon afterwards, when I was at the Universidad de Salamanca on a Fulbright, Dan wrote me that two of his Bronx uncles had been Abraham Lincoln Brigade casualties in the Spanish Civil War. He included letters that they'd written home to his aunt, a firebrand member of the militant International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. The correspondence stopped when one uncle, Leo Gordon, was killed at Azuara, and the other, Joe Gordon, lost an eye at Jarama (which didn't keep him from getting killed in WW II). The raw power of those letters from doomed young men made me think "drama."

But not immediately. First-during my Universidad de Salamanca tenure-I boned up on the Spanish Civil War, dragging my wife to the battle sites of Jarama, Teruel, Belchette and the creepy Valley of The Fallen, Franco's monument to himself built by captive slave labor. Between the Czitrom family letters and my own fascination with the international involvement in a localized war against fascism, I returned to Sarasota ready to dramatize. But soon afterwards, I faced a real-life drama of my own when I was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. Theater be damned.

But in matters of health I got lucky-very lucky. And working on Red Bessie was a perfect tonic while I recovered.

Today, I can't conceive of Bessie as anything other than a two-character play. But like architecture, theater is an art form dictated by pragmatism. Czitrom and I had developed a clear line of demarcation: He'd feed me history, I'd theatricalize it. When I suggested that the play should be about his aunt and not his uncles, I rationalized before he could object, "There are two actresses for every actor in the American theater. Thus there are twice as many good women performers as men. Thus it's four times easier finding one good woman than two good men." He nodded in puzzlement, unaware that I hadn't convinced myself of the theory.