Werner Trieschmann — an accomplished playwright, a prominent figure in the Central Arkansas arts community and a regular contributor to the Arkansas Times — was born in Hot Springs on Sept. 9, 1964. After suffering a stroke in early December, he died on Dec. 26. He is survived by his wife, Marty, and two sons, John and Kit. The following, a eulogy by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon, was originally given at Trieschmann’s memorial service, which took place on Jan. 3 at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock. Click here to donate to the Werner Trieschmann Memorial Fund.

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I am grateful to have these moments to share with you some memories and thoughts about our dear friend, Werner.

John Werner Trieschmann IV. 

Marty, John, Kit, I know that this is a terrible day — a loss that was unimaginable to all of us, especially at this point in your lives and in this way. I hope that some of these stories, and many, many others you will hear, and the presence of all these people who loved Werner, will be at least a small comfort, and memories to carry forward.

Werner was a central figure in two-thirds of the 60 years we were both on Earth. By chance, we were born three days apart in September 1964 — but would not meet until 18 years later, at Hendrix College. At some point, though we only briefly ever lived in the same place after college, we became inseparable in less tangible ways. 

Werner was with me on a kind of blind double-date in Atlanta — two boys, three girls, four of us connected by Hendrix — when I first met Michelle, who would become my wife. He was best man in our wedding. I was the same when he married Marty, who has been so extraordinarily strong for Werner, their sons and all of us over the last four weeks. He loved and cherished them all so deeply.

Nonetheless, in some ways, I feel a little unfit for the task of eulogizing Werner Trieschmann. By the time we met in 1982, as freshmen at Hendrix College, he was already a big man on campus. Every Methodist kid in Arkansas seemed to know him from Lake Tanako summer camp or one of his elections as a youth delegate to the Arkansas Methodist Conference. I only ever vaguely knew the details of that chapter of his life, but it was clear that even at the age of 18, he had already entranced a wide circle of people, many of whom are here today. Later in his life, after college, Werner’s fascination with alternative music — his reviews of bands and venues in Little Rock — also planted a whole network of friendships and admiration which I only periodically glimpsed over the years.

Until I began preparing this eulogy, I also knew almost nothing about the remarkable story of the larger Trieschmann family and its outsized role in Arkansas history. An immigrant shoemaker comes to America from Germany with small children. Two sons wander south to Arkansas when it was mostly virgin forest and wilderness, helped found a town, build companies and give generously to our alma mater. One of those German boys in Arkansas ends up giving advice to a president of the United States. Who knew? 

So with that admission that there was so much I didn’t know, and that I missed important swaths of Werner Trieschmann’s life and creative force — whole arrays of friendships and achievements — let me share a little of what I did know of my dearest and closest friend in life.

From the day I met him, of course, Werner had his distinctive appearance, with one leg significantly longer than the other — and the giant custom-made shoe that he wore on one foot to balance things out. In those days, his whole body also had a kind of disorderly shape — all of that the cruel direct and indirect consequences of Gaucher’s disease, a genetic enzyme deficiency that stalked Werner from infancy.

If he is listening to us right now, it would pain him that I gave even a few seconds to the story of his medical challenges. He accepted that the huge shoes had to be the subject of jokes and wisecracks from juvenile boys, but beyond that he wanted nothing more than for it all to never be noticed, to affect nothing that happened in his life, to define him in no way, and he would tell me at this instant: 

“Doug,” followed by a long pause. “Shut up.”

But I can defy him on this day. And I will, because the force of Werner’s presence in every other way was so great that his leg was the last and least defining aspect of his own self-consciousness and became the smallest detail about him in the minds of everyone who adored him. It was a couple of years later before my parents met Werner for the first time, and by then, they had heard me talk a thousand times of this boy with the very complicated last name.  After finally seeing him in person, they were a little surprised that in all those stories of my friend, I had never once mentioned a giant shoe. That pleased me very much. 

I would like to say my pull toward Werner as soon as I arrived at Hendrix was driven by the literary aspirations he was already expressing. I was having similar thoughts then, too. But it would be more truthful to admit that the primary attraction was that as far as I could tell, in Martin Hall’s giant room 101 that he shared with two roommates, the daily menu consisted of — in addition to the bottles of whatever Ensure was called back in 1982 — a nightly Domino’s Pizza delivery, the contents of a fully-stocked and operating antique Coca-Cola vending machine, and an endless supply of peanut butter and homemade chocolate chip cookies sent weekly by Mrs. Trieschmann, Werner’s adoring mother.

I was hooked. A few months later, he turned off the lights in his room one afternoon and made me listen to the newest record he had acquired, U2’s just-released “War.” At that point, I was still a trumpet player with an eight-track tape deck in my car. My most recent music purchase had probably been the last comeback album Elvis put out. 

But there in the dark with Werner, I heard “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and its haunting helicopter-blades drumbeat. I was never again quite the same. And I realized, hazily, that Werner could see and hear things to which I was still blind.

Soon enough, he was truly a major figure in my life. We were both English majors. Both deeply interested in theater. Both entranced by Rosemary Henenberg and Frank Roland, the two theater department faculty members. Later, Danny Grace joined that same circle.

From the first of our friendship, Werner and I seemed to find in each other something we felt was missing in ourselves. It was in its way a kind of love story. Not the romantic sort, but a bond — an affirmation — from which we each could navigate almost anything or at least believed we could. I truly can’t quite explain it. Maybe it was just that without fail we always could crack each other up.

My other big interest — the student newspaper — was less appealing to Werner initially. By the time I became editor of “The Profile,” though, he had the student job of operating a giant ancient projector used to show free films in Staples Auditorium. One of us had the idea that he should start writing a regular column reviewing whatever movies had been selected for the next desperate effort to keep students on campus over the weekends. Werner wasn’t always the most deadline observant kind of guy, so not a natural newspaperman. But he LOVED films. I said, “Well, why don’t you crank one out, and come up with a name for it, too.” Next thing I knew, I was reading his first column, titled “Werner’s Film Reviews & Break-Dancing Tips.”

My first reaction was: “But there’s nothing in this about the film?”

Begrudgingly, he jammed in the name of a movie and a screening time. But the rest was pure, zany, Werner-speak about the absurd world we occupy. And it worked. People loved it. He was cracking up the world.

At another point early on at Hendrix, Werner and I were in Veasey Hall — a women’s dormitory — doing homework in the one lobby waiting area where girls and boys were permitted to sit together, somewhat privately. (Yes, there were still bits of that prim propriety left even in the 1980s.) Werner and I, and presumably a girl or two whose names are now lost to history, were working on overdue papers to turn in the next day. I can’t recall which class. 

I had been an instinctive grammarian since the fourth grade. I didn’t know the rules, but my spelling and punctuation and subject-verb agreements just flowed out correctly. The closest thing I ever had to an athletic talent. Or magic.

Deep into the night, Werner had me look over his paper. Flipping through the handwritten pages, I thought to myself: 

“My Godddddddd.” 

His handwriting was abominable. Block letters and words turned in every direction. Some of it was inexplicable. His comprehension of concepts like topic sentences and paragraph formatting were — let’s just say — imperceptible. 

My head spun. You can’t be a writer if you can’t even spell. That would be impossible. 

But again, it was me who couldn’t quite see. 

The orderly way to construct a term paper was deeply natural to me. And in the decades that followed, I refined a way of telling stories and gathering devastating news and history that looked like a big construction project. Logs being sawn into lumber. Digging and cutting. Hammering and welding together complicated structures. My work has its curves and ornaments, but it is firstly tight, mortared foundations, right angles, bolts and inescapable, irrefutable boxes. My work is about accountability for the terrible things humans inevitably choose to commit.

Werner’s way, as I came to see, was from the beginning so powerfully and elegantly different. He looked at language the way a gem cutter assesses stones. He broke them open, examined each angle and facet, and ordered them in ways that refract a light that could not have been seen by anyone else.

That first became apparent when he was lured toward writing poetry — an impulse that, practically speaking, is the only professional ambition even more foolish today than playwriting or journalism. Yet Werner persisted, constructing verse and dissecting, word by word, lines of others that might seem impossibly opaque to most of the rest of us. Soon, he was submitting his work for the student literary magazine that he later edited.

In one of those poems, Werner described a rain-drenched October and an unidentified farmer watching the deluge:

These were the wettest days he and the land had ever known …
I felt as if someone wounded the sky
And we all struggled to make sense of the bruise.

There was also a girl in the scene Werner was imagining:

As we stood by my window watching the trees bend
I gave her stories of the great storms of my life
While the world, exorcising some stored pain,
Swirled its insides around. When she laughed at the increasing hum on the roof, I felt tangled in her;
Like twisting thousands of tiny swirling fragments of snow in a shaken plastic Christmas scene.
I tried to tell her but I stuttered, the thunder stopped and she bolted from the house …
I saw her on the exposed road … her palms and face were turned up and she was spinning. 
It was almost enough.

Those were the words of the boy Werner Trieschmann, perhaps 19 or 20 years old. When we still knew almost nothing.

But already Werner was desperately seeking the meaning of what he did know, of the complicated life he had already lived even then. He was looking for some kind of key — an explanation for making sense of things he had seen that too often felt entirely senseless. That never changed, even as his wisdom and words and humor grew deeper and more complex.

He was, as another Arkansas playwright and author — Porter Prize founder Phil McMath — said to me recently, a “true writer.” Werner was the first playwright to be awarded that prize, and the two of them, though a generation apart in age, became genuine friends and collaborators. Phil said Werner was the kind of creative force who never made a choice to write. He simply had to do it.

That is correct. Werner could not stop writing. Because that form of expression was so powerfully embedded in him that the need to share it was as great and inescapable as our need to breathe.

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Much of what we may remember vividly about Werner will be laughter. Because humor and wit were the tools with which he often cut those rough stones into gems. That humor was also part of the special gift he discovered for writing serious but accessible plays designed for production by younger actors and directors. And those plays came to be performed scores of times, all over the United States and in nations all around the globe. That was a staggering achievement, accomplished against extraordinary odds, and I deeply admired Werner for that success.

Less obvious about Werner’s work was how steadily he was always tangling with the most courageous of all writing — when the words were an honest examination of himself, his own life and the people and places he loved.

His very first play, titled “Given Faith,” was a painfully intimate, vulnerable, comical, personally dangerous examination of questions stripped directly from Werner’s own life. He wrote it in a class we took together, and afterwards he and I just decided, “Well, let’s produce it.” So we borrowed a stage, got some lights, held auditions and put the thing on — two staged readings in March 1986.

I hadn’t read “Given Faith” since the last show. But after Werner died, grief compelled me back into my files, and after digging for a while, there it was. I pulled out a folder and inside was the very first script he showed me, and then a second, much more refined version. There was the flier calling for actors, a program from the performance and my handwritten notes from rehearsals, interspersed on the page with notes from him in that beautifully awful scrawl of his handwriting. There we were, talking again, right on the page. I wept.

When I finally reread the script that night, after all those years, I was struck by how much more profound it was, how much braver it had been, than either of us understood at the time.

He had spent the previous summer having a series of operations to finally fix the injury that had caused one leg to end up longer than the other. He went to the Mayo Clinic, and endured through this torturous process of bone grafts and other procedures, most of that time accompanied only by his mother. For that entire summer, they suffered together through the medical drama, and at the same time engaged in an endless dialogue about an epic struggle unfolding within their family.

I had the joy of getting to know that family when Dr. and Mrs. Trieschmann were at the absolute full flowering of their lives. He was a prominent pediatrician in Hot Springs, quietly working behind the scenes to push for more of the research that would eventually lead to the transformational treatment for Werner’s condition. She was a voluble, loving homemaker devoted beyond measure to her four boys. A magnificent family. 

In that same fulsome life moment, Werner’s parents and younger brothers were leaving the traditional Methodist Church and moving to a newly formed charismatic, evangelical congregation nearby. But Werner had spent his whole life as the consummate, committed Methodist kid. All that church camp, all the Methodist conferences, all the people he already knew at the age of 16, 17, 18 — it was a transition Werner simply couldn’t make. To go with his family to this new kind of faith felt impossible to Werner. And of course, Werner’s reaction seemed just as impossible to his parents. 

With Werner lying in bed, and his mother earnestly trying to find more ways to distract him, all they could truly talk about — or around — was the rift in their family. What was happening? Why was it happening? What could be done?

Less than a year later, Werner wrote his first play, taking the experience of that summer of painful surgeries — so powerful and life-altering a kind of experience, so fresh and wounded and vulnerable — and immediately turning it into a piece of art which he then displayed to the world. 

Reading the play, I was also transported back to those days. I could hear Mrs. Trieschmann’s charmed voice and Werner’s—as the two of them struggled to understand exactly what was happening to them. How had the unifying forces of love and faith suddenly come to be things that were dividing them? Neither could answer that, and the play is an often funny — and just as often grueling — exploration of that struggle. In the final lines, with mother and son alone in the hospital room, the son says:

“Isn’t there a passage in the Bible that says something like, ‘And man shall be given faith’? That’s the thing, Mom. I wasn’t given faith. God didn’t give me the faith in him that you … have. I have faith in my power to see. I can’t say that I understand what I’m supposed to do with it. I might never know. But at least I can recognize me in it.”

In the play, and in actual life, Werner and his parents never found a full resolution of that divide. Yet they did find something even more important: the way a family’s love endures anyway.

Werner was discovering his own way, too. Those words — “I have faith in my power to see” — were not a rejection of faith. They were an enunciation of his gift and a faith in his quest to find that key. That’s what drove Werner’s creative force, and he could never abandon it.

Werner had the same fierce resolve with the medical issue that followed him all his life, Gaucher’s disease.

He refused to let it define who he was. He would not let the repeated hospitalizations throughout his childhood and youth create limitations and expectations on the life that he lived or the truth that he sought. He swam and played golf for as long as his body allowed. I was reminded by a Philip Martin column recently that Werner actually went out for the college golf team at Hendrix — and played intercollegiate golf.  

To his final days, he was the most ardent and maniacal Chicago Cubs fan, as purposeless and ridiculous as that was.

He joined our ramshackle intramural basketball team, too. I don’t remember what our name was, but his nickname of course was “Shoe,” for the custom-made, four-inch-tall sole worn on his shorter leg.

And out on the court, that skinny guy, still years before the treatment for Gaucher’s disease had been developed, would recklessly post up in the paint, over and over again — and take the charge. I remember one time some fool ran right over him, and Werner hit the deck. We all gasped. I wanted to beat the hell out of the guy. But looming larger in my mind was: If Werner just broke something, Mrs. Trieschmann is going to kill me — and everyone — on this court. Werner got right back up. Like he always did.

Our creative lives took very different forms over the last 40 years, but they remained entangled with each other’s and never strayed far from the same provocations that had captured us at the beginning. Werner never stopped seeking the same things, those same elusive answers. And in different ways, neither did I.

I became a reporter and a gatherer of history, a prover of empirical wrongs. He chose a vastly more challenging path — attempting to express, in words and scenes that all could understand, answers to simple but nearly impossible questions that haunt us all and that haunted him and his mother over that long summer: Why does life have to be more difficult than it should be? Why do divisions inevitably rise even between people who love each other? Why do we make cruelly important so many fabrications of our minds that simply are not important at all? How do we speak across the tears in the fabric of what should be holding us together?

Those were the same questions that made his first play so intimate, vulnerable and dangerous. It was all very real, and he was willing to put that reality on a stage, even right in front of his own mother.  I was more than a little afraid of how she would react, but in the end she watched that play, was transfixed by it and was buoyant in her pride for Werner.

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By crazy chance, Werner and I talked more in the three weeks before his stroke than we had talked in the previous three years. We went over our old man health issues — there was nothing to suggest anything terrible was about to happen to him. He was very distressed about the election that had just occurred. As a response, he had just started a Substack column, and his first installment was a conversation between the two of us about what to make of it all. What he was most concerned about wasn’t who had been elected president, but those same questions he’d been pursuing all of his life — about unnecessary division, the splintering of society and how to reach across those rips. 

Over all his published 26 plays, Werner compelled his audiences, first and loudest, to laugh at their own foolish pride. He knew the healing nature of that from his own endless physical struggles. More importantly, Werner instinctively understood the liberation that comes with revealing the comedy in human self-importance. He saw our debilitating fears, our hollow demands on each other and almost all our worst inclinations for what they plainly are: laughable absurdities.

At the same time, Werner was no fool. The resilience, and danger, of some absurdities worried him deeply in those last weeks of his conscious life. He was seeking new ways to puncture them. But his core answer remained the same: The threats we sense most ominously are mostly our own baseless concoctions. He kept telling us those fears would vanish if we willingly face them, be honest about our own failures, forgive those of others and release trivial divisions. Werner was certain the monsters growling in our closets would disintegrate if only we allowed him to fling open the doors, pour in the glow of his gifts and make us laugh at our pompous alarmism.

And if Werner heard me and could respond right now, he would say this whole thing of mine over the past several minutes has been a preposterous spectacle in which I should never have engaged.

Werner Trieschmann loved his family and friends and mentors, and lived a life of gusto, laughter, bravery, affection, intellect and creative hunger.

At the hospital in those last days, when many of us saw him, Werner’s light was still lingering. We could see it glimmer, sometimes more brightly than others. I am certain he understood that people who loved and appreciated all the dimensions of his life were surrounding him. He gave back to us gentle signals — the most he had left. 

Today, I feel robbed, and a little angry to be honest. Robbed of all the laughter and revelations that he was yet to bring. I doubt that wound ever quite heals. But I know I am so fortunate — as are all who knew him in any way — to have heard for four decades Werner Trieschmann’s ridiculous, blessed cackle. Rest in peace, Werner. Rest in peace.