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River (originally called To Metastasize a River, until Eisner figured out that the word was usually linked with cancer). Alan Shevlo, who as a freshman performed in the play, says the heroine is kicked out of school for fooling around with boys. She then returns home to “a very unhappy mother-father relationship,” he says. The father (played by Shevlo) runs a bar, and in the family, “everybody is fighting with everybody,” he remembers. Meanwhile, the daughter had started a relationship with a young man whom she met on the train home. The young man arrives unannounced at the bar when the daughter happens to be away, and winds up sleeping with her mother. When the mother realizes what has happened, she commits suicide.
    Shevlo’s character tells his daughter, “Every day your mother was alive was a living hell for me because she was not satisfied with anything…. Ina way, I envy your mother. I’ve been getting kicked in the face all my life but I never thought I’d live to see you do it.”
    How much these themes of marital discord and betrayal were drawn from Eisner’s experience at home is open for speculation. Shevlo says that Eisner came to rehearsals and listened quietly. Eventually, the drama teacher told the students that the play was too talky and instructed them to read the first line of every speech and delete the rest. The play had a short run and was well received by a local paper. A reviewer wrote that it created a “river of enthusiasm and popularity,” though “at times [it] lacked the continuity necessary to make the mission apparent.”
    Later in life, Eisner liked to say that he wrote his plays in hopes of attracting the young woman who starred in them, Barbara Eberhardt. But Eberhardt, who now teaches in Maine, says Eisner was a friend—someone she never regarded as a potential boyfriend and who didn’t seem to have any romantic interest in her. The two were serious about Eisner’s writing efforts and planned to remain partners after graduation. “I think he had aspirations to be a playwright and I was going to be his star,” she remembers.
    Eisner had escaped the rigors of Lawrenceville, but Eberhardt knew himas a “serious” young man. “I wouldn’t call him a party person at all and Denison could be a party school,” she says. “He was very low key and private. I don’t think many people—even his frat brothers—knew that much about him.”
    Al Bonney, who played the feckless boyfriend in To Stop a River, was a member of Eisner’s frat, Delta Upsilon, and shares Eberhardt’s appraisal. “We were a well-respected group of young men, socially active and acceptable, but we were not the jocks and we were not the rich pretty boys,” Bonney says. Eisner had a car and Bonney rode along with him to New York on school holidays. But he didn’t get particularly close to Eisner. “He wasn’t a loner,” Bonney says, “but he was private…. We drank together. We did stuff together. Did I know him real well? No.”
    Eberhardt felt that Eisner had a more spontaneous, less controlled side but kept it under tight rein. “Maybe that was from his parents,” she says. “He learned to toe the mark.” It may also have been that Eisner, following his experience at Lawrenceville, wanted nothing more than to blend in. There was only a handful of Jewish students at Denison, but they weren’t singled out for teasing, and Eisner appreciated that.
    Eberhardt got to know the Eisner family and visited the farmhouse that Maggie and Lester had bought in Vermont. Like many others, she came away impressed by Michael’s mother. “His mother was a very strong woman,” she says. “She was the matriarch. I always experienced her as very warm and generous but watchful…. She always appeared to be taller than Lester, but I’m not sure if