The poem was written by Avah Pevlor Johnson, who happens to be Cindy Lou Johnson's mother.
''What happened was that I wrote the play and was seeking a title,'' Ms. Johnson says. ''I've always loved this particular poem - it's my favorite poem of my mother's. And in seeking a title it came to me that I had written a play about people who were scarred but were trying to make something of value out of their pain. And that to me is what the poem is about. It's about seeking higher ground. That we go through life, and we're forced into a terrible struggle with life sometimes. But the point is not just to struggle, or to survive, but to do so with some kind of dignity and beauty.''
''The play is not really based on the poem at all,'' she continues. ''But when Terry Kinney, the play's director, was reading the poem, he said it was as if I wrote the play completely and entirely out of the poem.''
''Brilliant Traces,'' which stars Kevin Anderson and Joan Cusack, opened last week to critical praise and is being presented by the Circle Repertory Company. It is set ''in the state of Alaska, in the middle of nowhere,'' and it begins as a young woman dressed in a wedding gown seeks shelter from a snowstorm in an isolated cabin inhabited by a young man. A Writer Since Age 6
Ms. Johnson, who is 36 years old, has lived many places but never in Alaska. ''I had a very itinerant childhood,'' she says, sitting in the theater. ''My father was in the Air Force, and I spent my first five years in Japan. And then I spent time in the South, and then in the Northeast. I was born in Sacramento, but we left very quickly. I graduated from Cornell, but I went to the Sorbonne, so I spent a year in France. And even after I moved to New York, where I've lived for 10 years now, I spent a year in Europe writing. And then I went off, in '85 or so, and spent time in Australia and India.''
She has been a writer, she says, since she was 6 years old: ''I've always been a writer, but I didn't know I was one until much later. But I was a storyteller as a child. My family is from the South. My parents are from Kentucky, and we have a big tradition of storytelling. Even small events, what you did that day, were turned into a story. It's something that I didn't know was specific to my family until I started realizing that other people didn't quite always make things into a story.
''Somehow we would sit down and encapsulate it. I grew up in that kind of environment, and I think it fed me a great deal.''
And of course, she says, there was her mother, a published poet. ''I think of my mother as an artist at large,'' Ms. Johnson says. ''Everything she does has a sense of perspective - of not just doing something but of having a perspective on it of value and meaning, which to me is what art is.''
Writing for the theater, however, is something she has come to fairly recently, Ms. Johnson says. ''My first play was done at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference in 1984,'' she says. ''I had been writing fiction, but I did that play because I came upon a story that I just felt was a play. I don't know why. I wasn't an aficionado of the theater, and I hadn't studied theater, really. And suddenly I was accepted to the O'Neill, and there I was with Lee Blessing and John Patrick Shanley and August Wilson. It was a funny kind of summer, but it radically informed me. That's quite a lot of feedback to get on your first play.''
Ms. Johnson was selected twice for the O'Neill Conference. Her play ''Blesse'' was produced at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. Her one-act play ''The Person I Once Was'' was commissioned by the Actors Theater of Louisville and then played in New York at the Working Theater. ''Brilliant Traces'' was developed at New York Stage and Film's summer program at Vassar.
''What I usually do,'' she says, ''is I have an idea, and I just leave it there for a while, and then - boom! - I sit down and give it structure. For example, with 'Brilliant Traces' I had the idea in my mind for months of this woman in a car in a wedding gown. And I had no idea of what her story was, no idea of what she was going to do. But I did know I wanted to put it in one theme - the theme of great loss and recovery.
''I just became very interested in how people rise, what is the phoenix - how do you come out of those traumas, be it from something as basic as divorce to something like losing a child, which it seems to me is a tragedy that you almost can't overcome. And I began to examine two characters who for their own particular reasons had suffered tragedies, or at least had suffered something that had put them in a state that made them not really want to connect with other people. It was too painful, and potentially too damaging.''
''Most people in their lives have suffered a great deal of pain.'' she says. ''In order to really be alive, there's a lot of pain that has to be endured. And most people struggle with that choice. Is it worth it? And it's a reasonable question.'' The Necessity to Connect
''And to my mind, what this play is about is that we have to connect with other people,'' she continues. ''We're here. We're not isolated. Through loving, we can grow and heal and change. And as strong as our urge might be to fight it because of the pain it might cause, it's absolutely imperative that we connect.''
With ''Brilliant Traces,'' she has begun to taste theatrical success. But to her, she says, her biggest success came earlier - ''when I began to turn a corner and really write what I felt.''
''I could feel that starting to happen a few years ago,'' she says. ''It came from spending a lot of time alone and examining how I felt about things - really looking at my life and where I came from and where I was going. It came out of contemplation and reflection and struggle.''
''That's why I feel that being successful involves putting something down that I feel, that is the way I see the world,'' she says. ''And you always take a chance when you do that. You sort of put yourself on the line. But when I feel like I've written something well, that's when I feel successful. Because finally, that's where I am. I'm in my room, alone all the time, writing. And either I feel good about it or I don't.''