The colony’s setting is rustic, and the barn itself, surrounded by trees at the end of a pebble driveway, is spartan. The inside of the structure is divided in half. To the left of the front door is the kitchen (a small, penciled message scrawled on the kitchen’s makeshift door handle is a reminder: This Is Not a Vacation). To the right is the dining room, its walls lined to the ceiling with books, their pages swollen by the ocean air. Farther down a cement-floor hallway, which is filled with the work of previous visual arts fellows, there is a bedroom and studio for one of the writers on the right; a bathroom and the laundry room are on the left.
The Barn might not be the right setting for every creative person to get work done, but for those for whom it is right, it inspires not just the creative work itself, but enthusiasm and fond memories as well.
Up a creaky wooden staircase is the common room, with a fusty beige couch, a scruffy red-velvet chaise lounge, a record player, and an extensive collection of vinyl records. Bookshelves hold the rest of the barn’s miscellany of plays, art monographs, gallery catalogues, back issues of literary journals—and the novels, short story collections, and poetry collections of former writing residents. Also on this floor are a second bathroom, two bedrooms for the visual artists, and two slightly larger rooms for the other two writers. The back half of the barn—viewable through sliding windows in the back wall of the common room—is one large, open space that soars forty feet from the cracked tile floor to the wood beams of the roof. A low dividing wall separates it into two studio spaces for the artists.
For more than twenty-five years, two artists, painter Rex Lau and ceramic artist Diane Mayo, have been the caretakers of the place. They spend their summers working in their studios in a cottage on the property, while also making sure the barn’s bathrooms are working, the outdoor shower is functioning, and the kitchen is stocked with paper towels and Chock full o’Nuts coffee. Beyond such basic amenities, though, the five fellows that reside in the barn each month are on their own.
“The Barn is unique not just because it’s rustic,” says Jakob Holder, secretary of the Albee Foundation. “It’s totally laissez-faire.” The colony “doesn’t have any formalized program,” he says. No reading series, no chef preparing the evening meal, no staff quietly leaving lunch boxes on cabin doorsteps. “It’s just as simple as giving time. I think that people sometimes find it a bit unusual, to be so unstructured. But it gives them that sense that, really, this is totally up to you if you’re going to do any work. It would be very easy to just mess around and not do any work when you’re in Montauk—it’s a lovely place.” There is water, and there are beaches, in every direction: Fort Pond Bay to the west, Block Island Sound to the north, Lake Montauk to the east, and the Atlantic coastline to the south. But at the Barn, it’s up to the fellows alone to determine how to best make use of their month’s stay. The colony’s mission is as bare-bones as the barn itself. “It’s themselves, and their work,” Holder says, “or nothing.”
This laissez-faire approach indicates a confidence in the artists and writers to govern themselves, but the results can be somewhat chaotic. Barn fellows discover, upon their arrival, a long list of rules by the telephone in the front hall, specific enough to make them assume that each of its forbidden, detailed activities was once perpetrated there. Indeed, the history of the place is colorful, to say the least. “We’ve had botched suicide attempts,” Albee says, “a couple of marriages, a couple of breakups, a lot of affairs, all sexual combinations, some people being so scared of the country that they slept in their car and left, people getting along, people not getting along—just about what you’d imagine.”
There was once a fistfight in the driveway, having something to do with a resident driving to Montauk in a car she’d stolen from her girlfriend. “There was also a parrot involved in that,” recalls Lau. There was a fellow who simply refused to leave when her month was done (she tried to take up residence on the common-room couch). “She’d just decided she was happy here,” Lau says. “She wasn’t going to go.” But most of the time, Holder says, the atmosphere this confidence cultivates is not just collegial, but convivial as well. “It’s people at the picnic table, at midnight, with a couple bottles of wine and the barbecue going, talking and having a great time.”
Writers and artists leave their regular lives behind when they come to Montauk, but they do have more responsibilities than they would at other residencies. They prepare all their own meals during their stay, and they share in various chores and housekeeping tasks. But unlike many colonies in the United States, they are not charged a residency fee. And the Albee Foundation hopes, in the near future, to make a month at the Barn even more financially feasible for the artists and writers who stay there. The modest annual budget for the Barn is never more than sixty thousand dollars, but the foundation is currently in the middle of a capital campaign to raise money, both to renovate and insulate the barn, and to launch the Jonathan Thomas Fund, named in honor of the artist—and Albee’s partner of thirty-five years—who passed away in May 2005 after a two-year battle with cancer. Albee says he would like to keep the Barn open, if not year-round, then certainly longer than its current four months of summer operation. The foundation also hopes eventually to be able to provide a stipend for residents to offset, at least in part, the expense of taking a month off from their regular, working lives.
