The Philadelphia Connection: Conversations With Playwrights 9781783204885, 1783204885

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THE PHILADELPHIA CONNECTION c o n ve r s a t i o n s w i t h p l ay w r i g h t s

B.J.BURTON

The Philadelphia Connection Conversations with Playwrights

The Philadelphia Connection: Conversations with Playwrights by B.J. Burton “The Philadelphia playwrights whose passions, methods and influences we experience so vividly in these interviews will inspire all playwrights, but particularly those who feel a deep connection to place. This is an absolutely compelling read for anyone interested in how plays are made and the ways in which a community can contribute to that making.”  Abigail Adams, Artistic Director and CEO, People’s Light “B.J. Burton has given us a foundational look into three generations of playwrights whose work can be seen as building blocks for a theatre community that has only recently found its own identity. The Philadelphia Connection is thoughtful, insightful, and illuminating in helping us understand the particular character of Philadelphia’s growing contribution to the American theatre.”  Paul Meshejian, Artistic Director, PlayPenn “What a joy to hear real, working Philadelphia playwrights talking so passionately about their craft. This book is an homage to a rich theatre community and a rare peek into their storytelling process … stories that are fierce and funny, heartbreaking and heart stopping, psychologically complex and straightforward as a punch in the gut … just like their city.”  Joe Canuso, Founding Artistic Director, Theatre Exile “B.J. Burton sets the stage in Philadelphia, original incubator for American ideals, to draw open the curtain and shine a light on thriving local playwrights, who contribute mightily to the vibrant regional theatre scene, incubate new contemporary visions, and share through their works and ideas great promise for the future of an innovative national theatre of distinction. Great work!”  Penelope Reed, Executive Director, Hedgerow Theatre

The Philadelphia Connection Conversations with Playwrights

By B.J. Burton

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2015 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2015 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Copy editor: MPS Technologies Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos Cover image: ©Borges Samuel/123RF.COM Production manager: Claire Organ Typesetting: Contentra Technologies Print ISBN: 978 1 78320 488 5 ePDF ISBN: 978 1 78320 489 2 ePub ISBN: 978 1 78320 490 8 Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

For the storytellers

“There are some pretty interesting people in this town if you know where to look.” Warren from Moon Over the Brewery by Bruce Graham

Contents Acknowledgments 

xi

Foreword

xiii

Preface

xvii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1:  A Conversation with Bruce Graham

3

Chapter 2:  A Conversation with Michael Hollinger

23

Chapter 3:  A Conversation with Thomas Gibbons

49

Chapter 4:  A Conversation with Seth Rozin 

73

Chapter 5:  A Conversation with Louis Lippa 

91

Chapter 6:  A Conversation with Jules Tasca 

105

Chapter 7:  A Conversation with Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon 

115

Chapter 8:  A Conversation with Ed Shockley

127

Chapter 9:  A Conversation with Larry Loebell 

143

Chapter 10: A Conversation with Arden Kass 

161

Chapter 11: A Conversation with William di Canzio 

177

Chapter 12: A Conversation with Nicholas Wardigo 

187

Chapter 13: A Conversation with Alex Dremann 

201

Chapter 14: A Conversation with Katharine Clark Gray

215

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Chapter 15: A Conversation with Jacqueline Goldfinger 

229

Conclusion

241

Bibliography

243

Suggested Reading

245

Photo Credits

247

About the Author

249

x

Acknowledgments I am grateful to many people who encouraged me to complete this book. Abundant thanks must first go to the playwrights, who gave their valuable time and energy to speak with me and express their thoughts and feelings. Thanks to the playwrights who were enthusiastic about this project from the beginning, especially Michael Hollinger and Seth Rozin, who also recommended colleagues for inclusion in this book and who continued to be supportive throughout the process. Second, thanks to the many playwrights not in this book, who contribute to the vibrant Philadelphia theatre community. Thanks to the award-winning playwrights, who have brought attention to Philadelphia, especially Charles Fuller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for A Soldier’s Play in 1982, and Quiara Alegría Hudes, winner in the Philadelphia Young Playwrights Festival, now a resident of New York, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Water By the Spoonful in 2012. Thanks to the other creative theatre artists, actors, directors, designers, and administrators, who devote themselves to new plays and playwrights. Thanks to the funders, foundations, institutions, corporations, and individuals, who generously support theatre. Thanks to the colleges and universities with theatre and playwriting programs who continue to be a source of knowledge and opportunity, especially Temple University, Villanova University, Drexel University, Arcadia University, and University of the Arts. Special thanks to the learning community at Rosemont College, where I was nurtured by a kind and wise faculty, where I continue to be supported as an adjunct professor in the Creative Writing Program. Thanks, also, to my students for the questions they ask and the questions they answer in search of deeper meaning for themselves. Thanks to my first teachers of theatre, Vance C. Enck and Peter Jack Tkatch, who opened the door and turned on the light. Major thanks to all the great people at Intellect Books, with their fabulous staff, who made this book a reality, especially Claire Organ, Jessica Mitchell, and Stephanie Sarlos. Special thanks to Harriet Power, Bob Hedley, Abigail Adams, Joe Canuso, Penelope Reed, Paul Meshejian, Carla Spataro, Michelle Wittle, Maurizio Giammarco, Richard D. Bank, Janice Merendino, Margie Salvante, John Welsh and Beth Goldner for their supportive spirit. Thanks to Joyce Troiano for her friendship. Thanks to Andrea Gomez

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for her generosity and artistic expertise. Thanks to Laurel Carsell and Robb Wenner and family, and the late Carole and Gene C. Wenner, who always encouraged me in the things I love. Thanks to Don and Fran Burton and Pat Pillsbury for their faith. Thanks to Diane Cribbs and Arthur Mann, who have been true and devoted friends. Thanks to Beverly and Peter, for their example of perseverance and commitment, and to Amy, for her contagious love of learning. And a huge thank you to my mother, who read to me as a child, took me to the theatre, and still listens to my stories.

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Foreword Philadelphia is a city of playwrights. When American theatre was dominated by star actors, Philadelphia’s own Edwin Forrest, tired of a diet of King Lears, Othellos, and Richard IIIs, decided he needed fresh material. Thus in 1828, he created one of the first playwriting contests, which, in turn, yielded two writers who would fuel his career until the end of his life. John Augustus Stone’s Metamora; or The Last of The Wampanoags gave Forrest the leading role, which he played for about 40 years; Robert Montgomery Bird contributed The Gladiator, which Forrest claimed to have played more than 1000 times. Bird’s The Broker of Bogota was also a Forrest favorite for 30 years. Neither of these two Philadelphia writers prospered much from the fame of their works, but they made Forrest the best-known actor in America. And thus did Philadelphia first become a city of playwrights. Later writers such as Langdon Mitchell (The New York Idea), George Kelly (The ShowOff and Craig’s Wife), Gilbert Seldes, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Ottie Beatrice Graham were part of a large playwright contingent that lived in the Philadelphia area and created national careers. The contemporary playwrights interviewed for this book often cite as inspiration those playwrights called “the Philadelphia school of writers”: Ed Bullins, Charles Fuller, Clay Goss, Don Evans, Bill Gunn, Leslie Lee, and Ntozake Shange. Other influential dramatists from the same period include David Rabe, Albert Innaurato, Lee Kalcheim, Romulus Linney, Martin Sherman – and also Jules Tasca and Louis Lippa, two of the 15 playwrights interviewed in this volume. Philadelphia theatregoers have long enjoyed the legacy of getting to know their playwrights through their onstage works, but rarely, if ever, have the privilege of making a more personal acquaintance. The Philadelphia Connection: Conversations with Playwrights is poised to change that. Like their Philadelphia play-going counterparts of old, most, if not all, readers of The Philadelphia Connection have seen – and make a point of continuing to see – the plays of the 15 writers with whom B.J. Burton converses. Whether at large, established venues or edgy, intimate theatres, many Philadelphia playgoers choose to see the latest work from our region’s playwrights, and with each new creation are engrossed in ways unique to the new play universe. Are there recurring motifs? New directions? Experiments in style or character or mood? It is exciting to recognize patterns; even more exciting to encounter what seems to be a wholly new structure or subject. But too few new play viewers have ever met these playwrights, except, perhaps, from the distance of post-show talkbacks. Ms. Burton’s

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detailed, expansive interviews allow us the opportunity for an extended “conversation,” and the chance for a very different experience of these four women and eleven men than we have while viewing their plays. The pleasure of these interviews comes, in large part, both from recognition and revelation. I know that voice, the reader may think, I’ve heard those rhythms, that passion, these ideas, this wit. But there are also unexpected anecdotes, jokes, and revelations. For example, even though, as a playwright mentor and teacher [Robert Hedley] and as new play directors and producers [Robert Hedley and Harriet Power], we have worked (often for years) with almost every one of the 15 writers interviewed in The Philadelphia Connection, we were constantly surprised by a new fact, belief, or piece of advice. Here are some examples: Katharine Clark Gray, asked what subjects compel her to write, notes, “I’ve always been fascinated with people’s jobs. That’s been a real touchstone for me always …. It’s probably because I’ve had a million random day jobs. I’ve experienced a lot of worlds for like three months at a time.” Bruce Graham, talking about teaching, says, “It gets me out of the house at least one or two days a week, which Stephanie [his wife] is thrilled about. I have to put pants on and leave the house!” Jackie Goldfinger appreciates Philadelphia playgoers: “In Philadelphia, audiences seem to like plays to be about something, to explore some big ideas, which I really like. Even in comedies, I like plays to have some weight, to have something there you can really chew on.” Michael Hollinger: “I actually think about death a lot … [not] in a frightened way or in a morbid way … but I think about it as in … we’re here for a very short time.” Lou Lippa, who began his theatre career in the 1950s, observes, “As a young apprentice at Hedgerow, I came into a daily awareness of plays by Shaw, Shakespeare, O’Neill, Pirandello, and Chekhov, and so many, many other theatre classics. Just as importantly, I developed a sense of theatre artists as an ensemble, which to this day I still regard as invaluable to a theatre’s meaningfulness.” Kimmika WilliamsWitherspoon, asked what compels her to write, says, “Fear, hurt, pain, anguish, frustration. When a topic wakes me out of my sleep and the characters demand that I write them, I carve out all of the time I need to get it out of my head and onto the paper, so that I won’t lose them or they retreat from me.” Ed Shockley explains, “What makes you a writer is not how well you write, it’s how well you see.” Larry Loebell cites travel as a key inspiration: “The last several plays of mine have had significant foreign locations, and so I do think something happens when I travel. I enter a world that’s new and imaginatively provocative.” Arden Kass, asked about her frequent use of music in her plays, declares, “I’ve always been incredibly moved by music. I played guitar early on. I had a great teacher. Paul Simon’s younger brother, Eddie, taught me guitar.” Nick Wardigo notes, “I’ve been writing since I was six or seven years old. When I went to visit my Grandmom every Saturday, she would pull out a big manual typewriter, and I’d poke out these little stories.” Jules Tasca, Alex Dremann, Tom Gibbons, Seth Rozin, and William di Canzio will, like the playwrights quoted here, also enlighten, surprise, and delight you, as they freely share their obsessions, habits, and life stories. We predict that readers of The Philadelphia Connection: Conversations with Playwrights will find their experience of new plays enriched, and will understand that the legacy of earlier playwrights, such as Langdon Mitchell, Charles Fuller, xiv

Foreword

David Rabe, and Ntozake Shange, continues. The 15 playwrights, and many more, uphold the cultural vibrancy of our region and affirm, as did their predecessors, that Philadelphia is a city of playwrights. Harriet Power, M.F.A. Freelance Director and Dramaturg Professor of Theatre and Director of Graduate Theatre Orals Villanova University Villanova, PA Robert Hedley, M.F.A. Chair, Department of Theater Temple University Philadelphia, PA

xv

Preface I tell people the idea for this book began when I attended the initial Philadelphia New Play Initiative Conference at InterAct Theatre Company in February 2009. Actually, it was years before when I first imagined a book like this. At the time, way back in the 1990s, however, I didn’t know if there were enough Philadelphia playwrights to fill a whole book. Then, the PNPI Conference. I expected to see the usual ten or so playwrights show up. Instead, about 250 playwrights showed up. The other thing, and maybe this is stating the obvious, but time is going by. There isn’t really a published account of these wonderful writers, except in newspaper stories, magazine articles, and program notes, which may or may not remain on the Internet. We want all our plays to continue on and have a life without us, but what about the playwrights and their thoughts about their work? The Philadelphia Connection not only refers to the playwrights and their connections to Philadelphia but also how these playwrights, because of their work, help to connect Philadelphia to the rest of the country and world. In this book, you’ll find that playwrights have been so committed to living in this city that moving would feel like the end of their careers; you’ll find that others left for a period of time and returned because of strong ties to the region and their families; and you’ll find that others have arrived here more or less by accident but have found the theatrical community welcoming and supportive. As I conducted and transcribed the interviews, it became clear that I wouldn’t be able to include all the fabulous playwrights in the Philadelphia area. In order to have some focus, the playwrights included are residents of Philadelphia and adjacent Pennsylvania counties, whose primary artistic endeavor is the writing of straight plays, as opposed to musicals, children’s plays, or adaptations, and whose work has a high degree of visibility in the theatrical community both regionally and nationally. These playwrights continually and consistently work on their craft, send it out into the world, and are recognized with honors and awards. There are, of course, more playwrights that fit this category than are in this book. To those playwrights, I extend heartfelt appreciation, and hopefully, someday, there can be subsequent editions. I have to be honest. I have an advantage here. I’ve grown up with most of these playwrights. I’ve connected with them through the years in classes, through conferences, and from seeing their work onstage. They have been my teachers, my colleagues, my inspiration. I have gotten

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to know them personally and professionally. But I wanted to ask questions that anyone might want answered. And I wanted the playwrights to speak for themselves. My great joy in the process of compiling these in-depth interviews has been not only about learning new things about playwriting but about the great generosity of these writers, who were willing to share the ups and downs of their own journeys as well as help others along the way. It’s not a total surprise. I think writers are by nature generous. Shared characteristics include a passion for the art and craft of playwriting, a recognition that the work is often difficult, and a willingness to persevere even in the midst of an uncertain marketplace. Other common threads are that writing is a lifestyle, that writing often takes sacrifice, and that even when there’s diligent networking and thoughtful attention paid to creating the best work possible, it still sometimes comes down to the culture, timing, and luck. Like most playwrights in this book, I was born in Philadelphia and raised in the surrounding area. At an early age I had a strong sense of the theatrical. I was one of those kids who wrote and performed plays in the basement, in my case with my cousin Ned, and charged the neighborhood kids a few pennies to see our creations. We were probably about eight years old. My creative energy was further fueled by performing in high school productions, then college productions, and then professional productions. For most of my career, I was focused on the acting track until one day … I was working on a film set in New Jersey when a director asked an actor to improv a scene. The response was, “No. I need to see the words written down.” And, as they say at ballgames, “A hush came over the crowd.” “Written down, written down …” echoed in my head. Then, it hit me: “Oh, it’s about the words!” This revelation was like a giant wave had picked me up and thrown me on the shore. (After all, we were in New Jersey.) Okay, I get it now. It’s about the words.

xviii

Introduction When the great expansion of theatre activity moved from New York to the regions, in the 1970s and 1980s, Philadelphia felt the effects as well as other major cities. Once thought of as only a city for pre-Broadway tryouts, Philadelphia began to emerge as a place where excellence in theatre could be experienced. The theatres established during this time were the Philadelphia Theatre Company in 1974, People’s Light & Theatre Company in 1974, The Wilma Theater in 1981, the Arden Theatre Company in 1988, and InterAct Theatre Company, also in 1988. Meanwhile, Hedgerow Theatre, America’s First Repertory Theatre, founded in 1923, continued presenting work performed by its resident theatre company, and the Walnut Street Theatre, founded in 1809, with its long and varied history, became a non-profit regional theatre in 1982. In the regions, the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut began hosting the National Playwrights Conference in 1966, and Actors Theatre of Louisville started the Humana Festival of New American Plays in 1976. The excitement of new play discovery was brought to Philadelphia as professional theatre companies grew to include new work in their seasons. A second wave of expansion occurred in the late 1980s and 1990s as the seating capacities in theatres just weren’t large enough to accommodate audience demand. In 1988, People’s Light expanded the performing space on its property with the newly built Steinbright Stage. In 1995, the Arden moved from its home at St. Stephen’s Theatre, at 10th and Ludlow, to its current location on North Second Street in Old City. The Wilma Theater outgrew its space at 2030 Sansom Street and established residence in its new structure on Avenue of the Arts. As a result, InterAct Theatre Company moved into the 2030 Sansom location in 1997, and Lantern Theater Company, established in 1994, moved into St. Stephen’s Theatre. The Philadelphia Theatre Company, in residence at the historic Plays & Players Theatre for decades, built its own new facility, the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, in 2007. Currently, a third wave of expansion is sweeping the Philadelphia theatrical landscape as new, edgier theatre companies are emerging with exciting new work. Accepting more risk and challenges, companies like Theatre Exile, New Paradise Laboratories, Pig Iron Theatre Company, 1812 Productions, Azuka Theatre Company, Flashpoint Theatre Company, and others are attracting audiences by producing new plays that often break traditional forms and tackle difficult subjects. These theatre companies, along with the Live Arts/Fringe Festival, bring attention to new plays and playwrights and impact the city’s cultural life.

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The consistent growth of theatre in Philadelphia can be attributed to many factors, including the passion and vision of dedicated artistic directors, an increased local talent base, the educational programs and development offices within the theatres, generous and culturally conscious funding organizations, and engaged audiences who are willing to be adventurous. In addition, organizations like Philadelphia Young Playwrights, PlayPenn, and the recently formed Philadelphia New Play Initiative, with varied missions but similar focus, have evolved in the support of new play activity. PNPI, created to encourage better communication between playwrights and theatres, has launched several programs to increase new play production in the region. With the creative vision and enthusiasm of theatre artists and administrators, Philadelphia will continue to have a significant presence in the national theatre scene.

2

Chapter 1 A Conversation with Bruce Graham

B

ruce Graham. Anyone who’s been connected even remotely with the Philadelphia theatre scene in the last 30 years recognizes his name. The quality and quantity of work he’s had produced in almost every major Philadelphia theatre is legendary. Starting with his Playwright-in-Residence status at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, held on the University of Pennsylvania campus, Bruce has continued to inspire theatregoers, actors, directors, and playwrights with his portrayal of the ordinary man in dayto-day, interesting, difficult, unusual, and extraordinary circumstances. His work has especially resonated with local audiences who tend to be repeat customers having become genuine fans throughout his career. His national appeal is evident by his many awards, including the Jeff Award in Chicago for Best New Play for The Outgoing Tide. My own study of playwriting began while attending the free readings of his plays at the Festival Theatre in the early 1990s. It was astounding and exciting at that time to know that a living person from the Philadelphia area could be responsible for creating a play and didn’t have to live in New York or within the pages of a book. The revelation was life-changing. Bruce spoke with me at his townhouse in Philadelphia. BJB: Were you born in the Philadelphia area? BG: Darby. I was born in beautiful, downtown Darby. BJB: And you grew up in Ridley, Delaware County? BG: Yes, grew up in Ridley. BJB: What was that like for you growing up there? BG: It was terrific. I loved living in Ridley, growing up there. It was suburbs, but it still felt like the city. And by the time I was ten or eleven, I was able to hop on public transportation and come to Philly to go to the movies ’cause back then movies didn’t come out to

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the suburbs sometimes for even months at a time. If you wanted to see Mary Poppins [1964], you had to come in to the Midtown Theatre. I loved growing up there, but I think it really influenced me because it is very blue collar. Everybody’s dad worked at Boeing or Sun Ship or Westinghouse or the Airport or the Navy Yard. You know, that was pretty much it, so everybody was kind of equal in that respect. BJB: Do you remember the first play you saw growing up? BG: Yes! Of course, I do! I had my first funeral and my first play in the same day. My Mother’s Great Aunt Em or something died. I guess I was like four years old, and so we were over at the wake in Darby, and my mother loved musicals, and we had tickets to Camelot at the Valley Forge Music Fair [in Devon, Pennsylvania, operated from 1955 to 1996]. I was more fascinated with the guys running up and down the aisles with the scenery and stuff, and so I don’t know what that says about my career, but my first funeral and my first play were on the same day. BJB: Do you remember the first movie you saw? BG: I think it was Pinocchio [1940]. I may be wrong on that, but I vividly remember seeing Pinocchio, and the whale scared the hell out of me! It was almost all Disney until I was like ten or so, and then like every Jack Lemmon movie that came out. One movie that really influenced me was a comedy called Good Neighbor Sam [1964], and I remember seeing that when it was at the Swarthmore College Theater. It’s almost like that moment in Chorus Line: “I can do that!” I remember watching Jack Lemmon up there, and saying literally to myself, “I can do that! I think I’ll be an actor!” And that’s what did it! And that’s how I kind of got involved. I was always, even in kindergarten, at St. Marks or whatever [acting in]: “The Story of David and Goliath Told on a Felt Board.” You know, that was me up there, so I’ve always been an entertainer in one way or the other, but I started out as an actor. BJB: Did you start writing in high school? BG: You know, actually I had a one-act play produced in high school. I directed it, and we did like nine performances of it. It was a great experience because I was used to getting laughs as an actor. I was in the back of the theatre and suddenly when the audience laughed, it was like, “Whoa! This is the greatest thing in the world!” BJB: So, already you were thinking about this. BG: I was! I remember in tenth grade, going to high school, and the guidance counselor asking me what I wanted to be and giving me a form. And I misspelled “playwright.” I 6

A Conversation with Bruce Graham

assumed it was “playwrite,” which makes sense, you know. I didn’t know how to spell it, but I knew I wanted to be it. BJB: Do we want to go to college next? BG: Sure, I’d love to go back to college! That was fun! I went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania, not known for its theatre, but it was cheap and it was 300 miles from home. My sister was in college at the time, too, so money was tight. At the time there was really no department. We were in the English Department. I was there a week and I was cast in my first play, where in some schools, you know, you don’t get cast ’til you’re a junior or something, and I did three shows a semester. By the time I was a sophomore, we were producing a dinner theatre at the student union, and I started working as a night club comic with a friend of mine. I was in Pittsburgh playing Elks halls and night clubs and strip joints and you name it, and it was all great training. While I was there I wrote two one-act plays and we performed them, and this time I didn’t direct them. I had two different directors. Writing the comedy was great, great training because there’s nothing more audience-oriented than comedy. BJB: Did you have some kind of playwriting class at college? BG: No. Never had a playwriting class in my life until I went to grad school at Villanova, at which point I’d already had two plays Off-Broadway. And I never went. And I got a B. BJB: After college at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, you went to New York? BG: Yeah, first I went to New York to be an actor, but I was highly unsuccessful. When you’re 22 and look like me, there’re not a lot of parts. So I came back to Philly and actually got parts in dinner theatre and stuff. I was working in dinner theatre all the time doing comedies. BJB: And then you went to get your teaching certificate? BG: I thought I’d better get a real job, and so I went to Widener [University], and they certified me to teach in like a semester and a half, and it was great. I stumbled into a job at the Rose Tree Media School District, and I was there for five years. BJB: What grade did you teach? BG: Everything from seven to twelve. BJB: Then came Villanova, right? How long were you there? 7

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BG: A year and a half maybe. I was in the master’s program, and they were very kind to me. They were giving me a graduate assistantship. They were paying me to go to college. That was my excuse to quit my school teaching job and try to be a writer. And suddenly I was getting work. I was hired at CBS to write a TV show called Legwork [1987], which went seven episodes. But I couldn’t turn down the money, you know. It was more than I made as a school teacher [in a year] for one episode. BJB: How did your connection come about with the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays? Which no longer exists, sad to say. [The Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays ran from 1981 to 1997.] BG: Carol Rocamora formed this new theatre for just new American plays, and I remember getting a postcard in the mail because I had like a production or something at Delaware County Community College. Bohdan Senkow directed a version of Rainbow Bar & Grille. So I guess I was on a list of local playwrights and they sent me this invitation to come to a reading or something, and I did and got on their mailing list, got on their radar. I sent them a play, they rejected it nicely, and then I wrote Burkie, and in the third year of the Festival’s existence they produced it. Part of it was they liked the play and part of it was I was local, which certainly helps. I was 26, I guess, and I remember the night they called. Stephanie and I were having dinner. We had like no dining room in our apartment. We were sitting on the floor having dinner, and I kicked my plate right across the room when I got the news. And they said, “Is $1,000 okay?” My first response was going to be like, “Well, it’s a little steep, but I’ll try and make it. What? Oh, you’re going to pay me?” So, yeah, and then after that it was like a big hit for them, and then three months later it was Off-Broadway. BJB: How did it get to Off-Broadway so quickly? BG: Variety gave it a review and a good review from the Philadelphia production. Back then in the ’80s there were a lot more little theatres with subscription audiences Off-Broadway, and this was the Hudson Guild and they needed product. They did five plays a year and they liked to do new plays. So they did this one. BJB: And you were able to get your agent that way? BG: Correct. Yes. BJB: How was that first production in New York? BG: I was too close to it. I was 26. I didn’t realize that when you write a play that’s basically depressing, you have to fight against the text, and we played it as tragedy when we 8

A Conversation with Bruce Graham

should have played it as comedy, including the costumes and the set. Everything was dark; everything was blue or gray or purple. My mother died right after the production, and I predicted exactly how she was going to die in Burkie. The last picture I have of the two of us is in the lobby of the Hudson Guild. So I really had to put that play away for a while. Finally, Cincinnati Playhouse wanted to do it and when they did it, Richard Harden directed it and did a great job. And what he did was just the opposite way, played it like it was a Neil Simon comedy down to the set and costumes, and it worked. It worked ten times better. So I learned. I was 26 and I was Off-Broadway, and whoa, I was just saying “yes” to everything. I’ve learned a lot since then. BJB: When you started out at the Festival Theatre, did Carol Rocamora say or do something special to encourage you then? BG: Just the act of giving me the slot, I think, said more than anyone could’ve said. The fact that they had such faith in me to go out and, first of all, finish a play, because when you’re staring out, and you probably went through this too, you know, you’re scared to death you’re not going to finish it. Now, you’ve got enough plays under your belt, you sit down, and go, “I’m going to finish it. It may be crap, but I’m going to finish it.” And that was part of what I did. They pretty much didn’t even know what the plays were about until I wrote them ’cause I never talked about them. If I had to do an interview, I’d say something very vague. But I don’t like to talk about what I’m writing. I think the more you talk, the less you write. BJB: It diffuses something. BG: Exactly, exactly. Like if I’m sitting here telling you about the play and go, “Oh, man, that seems dumb. Maybe I won’t write it.” The last thing I need are any roadblocks, and I think talking about it is a roadblock. BJB: What about the grants you’ve received like from the Theatre Association of Pennsylvania? BG: Oh, boy! What a godsend they were! I’ll never forget. I always tell Marcia Salvatore [previous Director of the Theatre Association of Pennsylvania and Director of Philadelphia Theatre Initiative] this story. I think it was about two weeks after my mother died. And it was so great to go into my father’s house and say, “Hey, Dad! Guess what? I just got two grand!” And he was like, “That’s great!” That was the first time I’d seen him smile in two weeks. I always thank Marcia because, if nothing else, the timing was perfect. I have never been a networker. I have never been a schmoozer, but the name was out there. I would get invited to things I never went to, but you 9

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know, occasionally I’d say, “Alright, I better.” My agent was always saying, “Will you go? Please meet people.” And that is not easy for me. BJB: How long were you with the Festival Theatre? BG: I think we did ten plays in 12 years or something, and some of those plays should not have been done. My own agent said I was the luckiest playwright in America because I’m totally untrained and yet every year they’re giving me a slot, so I wrote a play. And the same thing happened with my movie career. I never had a screenwriting class and Universal says, “Here’s a three-picture deal.” And that turned into a six-picture deal. None of these pictures got made, but I was learning how to write them and they were paying me. I’ve been very lucky. My apprenticeships have been reasonably well paid. BJB: When did that happen with Universal? Was that your first screenplay? BG: No, I had done a couple. I had sold a spec script I had written as a school teacher. Back in the ’80s they were buying anything. It was called A Room Full of Candles. Paramount bought it for like six months and then dropped it. I said to my agents out there, “Where can we take it?” And they said, “No, no, no. It’s been read by everyone in town.” And I didn’t know how this business was. They said, “The minute a script comes in, they go to the computer and they say, ‘Oops! We read A Room Full of Candles, here’s a synopsis, here’s why we rejected it.’” So, okay, I thought I’ll change the title and I rewrote it a little bit, I changed the character names, and I sold it again! So now I had West Coast agents and sold some TV pilots that went nowhere. Then I think it was my play Minor Demons; an executive at Universal got a hold of it. It’s very cinematic, and they said, “Well, here. You want a deal?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he became a very good friend of mine, a guy named Lenny Kornberg, kind of my rabbi, and that’s how I learned to write screenplays. BJB: Have a lot of projects come along like that that you’ve worked on but not seen produced? BG: Back in the ’80s, a studio like Universal would actively develop 120 projects a year and make ten or eleven. So your odds were ten to one it wasn’t going to be made anyway. My first movie was a Richard Dreyfuss project that he was supposed to star in and direct. Michael Phillips, the guy who produced The Sting [1973], was producing. I was in with some heavy company, and then Universal really liked the script but then realized that Richard’s not the box office he once was. Two years later I guess, Mr. Holland’s Opus [1995] comes out, so then Richard’s hot again. They bring me back in and pay me to rewrite the script again, and then by the time I got it done, Richard’s, like, down again. So it was a weird roller coaster. It wasn’t until I went over with 20th 10

A Conversation with Bruce Graham

Century Fox that I got things made. I’ve worked on movies that got made but I didn’t get credit on: ghost writing, polishing, and stuff. BJB: Do you still do that? BG: Oh, yeah. I’ll do anything for a buck. BJB: In your heart of hearts, do you feel closer to playwriting? BG: Oh, absolutely, yeah. I wouldn’t have this house, though, with playwriting, you know. It’s as simple as that. It’s economics. I guess I’m on like the B level of American playwrights or something. I could live off it, but I’d be in a warehouse, a box somewhere. Anybody who goes into playwriting for the money should have their head examined. BJB: I loved your Hallmark Christmas movie, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year [2008]. BG: It was very well directed. BJB: There were so many things that seemed so you in it, like the odd Christmas light in the display on the house across the street to annoy the neighbor. BG: Yeah, that’s me! It was the first Hallmark movie supposedly that had a bar scene and booze jokes, so I like to think I’m bringing them into the 21st century. BJB: Let’s talk about your teaching. You’re teaching now, right? BG: Yeah. BJB: Have you taught continuously throughout your writing career? BG: Back in the ’90s I had to stop. I was teaching in the graduate department at Villanova, but with the movies, I mean I racked up 180,000 frequent flyer miles in a little over a year. I was going out to L.A. twice a week sometimes, or flying out to Arizona where the animation studio was for Anastasia [1997], and even flying to New York sometimes and catching the plane there because we were going to have a meeting on the plane out to L.A., and it was just crazy. I couldn’t teach until I finally found the time. I guess Drexel [University] called me about it about six or seven years ago, and I said yeah, and at the same time [University of] Penn called. I’d also been teaching at Rosemont [College], and I was kind of juggling this semester versus that semester, and I enjoyed all of it. Then Drexel kind of said, “Look, we’re tired of hearing about 11

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Penn. If we offer you a full-time position, will you shut up and quit Penn?” And it was like, “Yeah, okay.” BJB: And you’re teaching playwriting? BG: I teach a little bit of everything. I teach Playwriting I and II. I’ve taught Screenwriting. I teach American Movie Classics. I teach a Hitchcock course. I teach a Stand-up Comedy course. It’s great! No papers to grade. I love that! I just started a course I designed called Sports in Films, so I’m showing sports movies every Tuesday night. I love it! I’m going to show them stuff they haven’t seen, like North Dallas Forty [1979] and The Bad News Bears [1976]. BJB: Do you think teaching has taught you some things about writing? BG: Oh, absolutely. First of all, you like to think as a writer, unlike an athlete, you’re getting better as you get older. I know just the interaction with the students makes me think about my own mistakes. I was just in class lecturing about structure, and then, “Look at the structure here in my own play!” It also keeps you sharp. It gets me out of the house at least one or two days a week, which Stephanie is thrilled about. I have to put pants on and leave the house! BJB: [Laughs] BG: Don’t laugh! That’s a good thing sometimes, me leaving the house. And writing the textbook [The Collaborative Playwright co-written with Michele Volansky, 2007] was fun. It was tough! I mean, I can sit down and knock out 20 pages of dialog and then go for a nice, long walk or a swim or something. I’d write three pages of the book and I wanted a nap! I’m just not used to writing in paragraph form anymore, and it was kind of draining in that respect. I look at the book now and once again I think, “Oh, I should’ve said this. I left that out.” So who knows? I may write another book with all the stuff I forgot to put in the first time. BJB: I remember when you spoke at a Theatre Association [of Pennsylvania] conference in Pittsburgh and Edward Albee was there. This was, I think, during the time you were working on Roseanne [TV series, 1988 to 1997]. How was that experience? BG: Oh, God, it was awful! I wrote most of the episode back in Ridley. Stephanie was pregnant at the time. I was in the writers’ room for about five days and it was hell. BJB: Were there a lot of other writers?

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A Conversation with Bruce Graham

BG: The thing was they were almost interchangeable, and I guess I probably looked like it, too, like a bunch of bald little guys, you know, only they were running around scared, and I just wanted to get out of town. BJB: What happened with Roseanne? BG: They offered me a staff job, and I said, “Great. Fax machines have just come out.” And they said, “No, we’re offering you moving expenses, we’ll guarantee you X amount of weeks.” And I said, “No.” I think back sometimes, “What if I’d taken it?” I’d be a lot richer but probably divorced. At the end of the day, I think I made the right decision. BJB: Is that the only time you’ve felt tempted to move out there? BG: You know, I wasn’t even tempted. Steph was seven months pregnant for one thing, so that kind of gave me an excuse. “I can’t uproot now.” When I was doing that run back and forth, back and forth, I was saying, “Boy, it would be great to have an apartment here.” BJB: When was this? BG: In the ’80s, early ’90s. But it’s boring, and you have to drive every place. I haven’t been out there for about a year and a half, and I am thrilled. BJB: So you’re very happy in Philadelphia? BG: Oh, I love it here. BJB: Do you think your surroundings influence you as a writer? BG: Oh, absolutely, and your background influences you. I mean, Michael Hollinger’s best play so far, I think, is Opus. And what’s his training? Classical musician. I could never write that play. I don’t think Michael could write Belmont Avenue Social Club. It really comes down a lot to how you’re raised and your background and the value system you’re given. Mine is very blue collar, which is why I think Philadelphia responds to my plays. BJB: I think maybe some people see you as someone who doesn’t compromise. BG: [Laughs] I compromise a lot in movies. I have to. I’ve learned, because they can do anything they want anyway. I have no say. So it’s like I want it red and they want it

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green. Alright, I’ll try and make it a little orange for you, so at least I get my vision up there even if it’s been taken by theirs. BJB: How have your collaborations been with other theatre artists, specifically directors? BG: I have been really, really lucky. There’s only a handful of people in the theatre I would say I don’t want to work with again, and so far none of them are in Philly. I mean, Jim Christy and I, we’ve had a great collaboration. Terry [Nolen] did a great job for me. I’ve worked with director Pam Berlin up in New York a few times. And other directors around the country, you just kind of assign them and you show up, and I’ve found they’re usually very eager to take notes and try and get it. Now, I know that it’s a collaborative art, and I’m never going to go in and see it exactly the way I want it. But if you go in, and they’re telling the story correctly and they’re getting the values out and the laughs are there, I’ve really got nothing to complain about. BJB: Do you ever have the desire to direct? BG: Not my own stuff. I take it back. I like directing. If someone wanted to do Moon Over the Brewery, sure. I could go in and direct something like that because it’s set in stone. I’m not worried about, “Oh, my God, I’m going to have to change this.” I can’t because it’s there. A new play? No, I think it’s a mistake. I think you need a separate set of eyes. BJB: Did I read somewhere that you have 20 Moons out there this season? BG: Yeah, and you know what else is coming back is Early One Evening at the Rainbow Bar & Grille, which has had a lot of productions, so many that if I see a theatre is doing it – I have these Google alert things – and I will contact the theatre and say, “Look, I’ve updated some lines because either you do it as a period piece, 1983, or your character is going to look really stupid talking about Ed McMahon and not having cell phones.” So some theatres have used it. But it’s my least favorite play and it’s done a lot. BJB: Why do you think Moon Over the Brewery is so popular? BG: It’s my most produced play. For one thing, it’s clean. There’s one profanity and it’s “damnit” at the end of the first act, and I know some theatres have cut that. It’s one set, four characters, and I think it kind of has a universal theme about loneliness. When I wrote it, I was like, “Oh, okay, it’s cute. Let’s write something else.” And it wasn’t until about two years later Foundation Theatre was doing it and I didn’t watch the play. I went up on the catwalk and I watched the audience, and I thought it was so cool that 14

A Conversation with Bruce Graham

you had senior citizens sitting there and little kids sitting there and teenagers sitting there all enjoying the same play. I went, “Okay, maybe it’s not so bad after all.” Then I didn’t see it for a long time. I’d get invited and sometimes I’d show up for the last ten minutes and thank people, but I wasn’t going to see it again. Then a professional theatre down in Ft. Worth, which has done a lot of my plays, sent me a ticket to come down, and it was a wonderful production. It ended up winning their Barrymore for best actor or something, and I really just sat back and enjoyed it. So it took a few years, but I got to like it. BJB: Have you been to various locations to see your plays? BG: Oh, all over the country if they’re flying me out. I’ve flown into some really funny little airports and done the interviews. The furthest I got was London. Portugal did Minor Demons, but I don’t speak Portuguese, so I didn’t go see it. BJB: What do you think is your most artistically successful play? BG: That would probably be Coyote. It gets nominated in every city it plays. It won Jeff Awards. The guy who plays Bobby always gets an award. In Philly he was nominated, in New York he was nominated, Boston he was nominated, Chicago he won, Milwaukee … I mean, it’s a showy part. It’s the kind of part that gets noticed. So, yes, artistically, that would be the one. BJB: How much rewriting do you do during rehearsals? BG: Depends on the play. Some plays need a lot. According to Goldman needed a lot. Dex and Julie needed a lot of cutting and a lot of fine tuning. And Something Intangible … We had a five-week rehearsal period, which I never had before, so it didn’t feel like a lot, because usually it’s like there’s a gun at your head. You’ve got to get it done tomorrow. I usually do get it done tomorrow, but I didn’t feel the pressure. BJB: And the extended time was because the play got an award? BG: The Edgerton Award. BJB: Do you find that you’re writing smaller cast shows because of budget concerns? BG: No, it really depends on the play. I tell my students … They say, “Well, how many characters?” “How many do you need? Can you take that character and cut him? Can you take what that character does and give it to another character?” I remember in Burkie originally there were two parts that I cut, and it took me about ten minutes. 15

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They were just like Greek messengers. I find writing for theatre is about character, and the fewer the characters that you have the more rich you can make them. Every rewrite I did on Something Intangible, every time I tried to make Sonia more interesting. And we would actually cut a lot of Sonia stuff, and it was Sally [Mercer] who’d say, “I don’t need to say that.” I knew her part as written – it had nothing to do with her performance – wasn’t as interesting as the guys. She was very generous and had no ego at all about cutting lines. BJB: How is it for you working with a dramaturg because in some situations you don’t, right? BG: It depends. Sometimes they’re called literary managers. Michael Hollinger, for years, at Festival Theatre was … He was the second person to read my plays, and his notes were always right on. I worked with a guy, Richard Wolcott, who was actually one of the dedications in Minor Demons because he helped me so much with that play. Died of AIDS, wonderful guy. So, in that respect, I have been lucky, again. And I’ve learned that, you know, you sit down and you’ve got 20 notes for your play. I don’t roll my eyes and go, “Oh, no, no, no.” I’ll listen. Maybe 15 are totally stupid. Maybe five of them are great. So I’ve got five good ideas. I’ve learned to be better about that over the years. I’m less combative than I was, getting old, and I find it’s not worth it. I have the power. Why fight? I’ll just say, “Thank you. I’ll take that, that, that. I’ll leave that, that, that, and that.” BJB: Who are the playwrights who have inspired you? BG: Tennessee Williams I’m in awe of. I like William Saroyan; I don’t always claim to understand him. John Guare. And Neil Simon. I will admit I like Neil Simon. I acted in a lot of his stuff. He’s written some bad ones; he’s written some good ones. I love Lillian Hellman’s structure. I mean that woman can build a play like nobody else. Those would be my main influences. BJB: Do you write every day? BG: Try to. BJB: Is there a hard part of writing for you? BG: Finding the idea. But once I get the idea and get excited about it then it’s fun. It really is. I can’t wait to write my next play. I go out and buy my notebook. I love doing it. I do. BJB: And you write longhand in a notebook? 16

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BG: Absolutely. First draft longhand, yep. I do movies and television into the computer because of the small chunks, small scenes. BJB: You’ve been in this business both as a playwright and screenwriter for about 30 years. What have been your discoveries along the way? BG: I think in some respects, I think it’s definitely gotten easier because I don’t waste time on ideas that don’t work. I get an idea and it’s like, “Can I do this, this, this, and this? No.” Or “Is this a movie? Is this a play? Is this something else?” I’m always first looking for a play idea. Then maybe, “Oh, that’s a movie. I need too many outside scenes and too much action.” BJB: Do you see that things have changed about the business over the years? BG: First of all, you’ve got this new download/upload this, that and the other thing that I still can’t figure out. I mean, I was always kind of old for my age anyway, and it’s a young person’s business. You look at the top ten movies this week. There’s nothing that I want to see. I rarely go. For one thing, they send me all the movies I want to see because they want my vote. I hate writing action. And also I’m seeing people in the business who’ve been five generations in Hollywood and have no idea what the real world is. You know, “I went to Beverly Hills High School, I went to Yale, I came back, and I got a production deal in dad’s company.” BJB: Like The African Queen [1951] story? BG: That’s true. That is true! I was talking about their romantic relationship on the boat. I don’t remember who it was. This was in L.A. in an office in a studio. This guy makes decisions. I said, “It’s sort of like the relationship in African Queen.” And he went, “Is that like a black thing?” And I thought he was kidding! And I realized, “No!” There’s this vacant Dan Quayle-like look on the guy’s face. I went, “1951, Humphrey Bogart won an Oscar!” I couldn’t even hide my disdain for this guy. So, once again, whatever job that was, I didn’t get it. BJB: Are there any screenwriters you like? BG: Ben Hecht, William Goldman. BJB: You said something about being a “craftsman” rather than an “artist.” Can you explain that? BG: A craftsman knows how to build it. An artist builds it but puts in kind of that extra thing that makes it great. Think about the playwrights that you would say are great 17

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playwrights. They weren’t happy people. Tennessee Williams? Not a happy person. I don’t put Arthur Miller in his league, but Arthur Miller was not a happy person, either. William Inge? Killed himself. Saroyan was not a happy person. I look at Lillian Hellman and I say not an artist, a craftswoman. I love her plays, a lot of them, but I don’t think they have that touch of genius that a Streetcar has, you know. So, yeah, I really do believe the cliché that artists along the way have to suffer something because they touch something. I haven’t suffered. I couldn’t find a parking place, okay I’m suffering. The Eagles lost, I’m suffering. I had a good, stable family life growing up. Good friends. We weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I always had three meals. When I was growing up, it was more like six meals. I’ve only known one major tragedy in my life – my mother dying young. So I’ve been lucky, but I know how to build a play. BJB: Do you think being a parent changed the way you write? BG: You know, not really. For years, Kendall couldn’t get to see any of my plays. Not until recently did she get to see Coyote on a Fence. Not ’til London, I think, did she see it. I think sometimes it definitely kind of skews your look at the world because you go through the phases: teenager, college kid, young adult. The weirdest thing was suddenly I got labeled “husband,” you know it’s like, “Whoa, I’m somebody’s husband? I’m somebody’s father?” These titles are weird. But it’s a phase you go through. I mean, you hit your forties, and friends start getting divorced and stuff. You hit your fifties, and everybody’s worried about what they’re going to do with their parents and kids start to move out. BJB: What’s the story about The Philly Fan and Tom McCarthy? It’s been so successful. How did it evolve? BG: It was his idea. He was applying for this grant, and he wanted to do a one-man show about a Philly fan. So I think they said, “Go find a playwright.” And he came to me and we talked a little bit about it. I went to London with Coyote on a Fence and started writing it literally on the plane to London. I wrote most of it in my little flat on Drury Lane in London because, I think, I was homesick, maybe. I mean, that play could be four hours long. The first version, I was throwing in everything. But I think the most important scene in the play is when he talks about his wife dying because suddenly it’s not just about sports, it’s people – that’s why women like the play, if I can be sexist for a moment – because it’s more than that. And, I think that’s one of those elements that suddenly it’s not just a loudmouth in a bar. “Oh, my God. That’s my father, that’s my brother, that’s a neighbor, that’s my husband.” Tom kind of thought, “It’s a comedy. Nobody wants to hear about cancer …” And, I did cut it a little bit, which it did need, but that happens in the last ten minutes of the play, and I think some of the audience members are in another world of, “Oh, my God. This guy exists, and when I leave 18

A Conversation with Bruce Graham

the theatre he’ll still be alive.” I know it sounds crazy, but I think that’s a very pivotal moment in the show, and I like to think it rises above just a comic monologue. But I’ve got nothing against a comic monologue, believe me. I see people really react to it, and that’s what I want. When I go to the theatre I want to run the gamut of emotions, you know, and if you can jerk me around emotionally, I love it. BJB: Do you find that you write plays about a certain situation that you know in real life but you want to change it in the play? BG: You know, if I change it, I usually change it for the worse. I always tell my students: “Play God. If that guy dumped you, well, you get even in the play, or he doesn’t dump you in the play.” But I usually kind of go for the negative except for Moon Over the Brewery, which is a rare, optimistic play. BJB: What things do you think have contributed to your success? BG: I really think just having my roots here. Having the Maryland house, having a place to go write. It’s a godsend. The phone doesn’t ring. I only have one movie station. It’s Turner Classics. I have no distractions. It sounds kind of cliché, I guess, but man, it helps. It really does. BJB: Do you feel like there are a multitude of stories at your grasp? BG: I wish they were at my grasp. They’re up there, but somebody like oiled the ladder. For the next couple of years, I still have to concentrate on making a living, so now I have to go find a movie to write. BJB: Do you have a philosophy of life? BG: I just kind of ad lib. I don’t know how many times Stephanie and I will say … What’s the expression? It’ll come to me in a second. It means basically to ad lib. I mean, I try and stay flexible. This house is bigger than I wanted. I wanted something smaller. I want to start shedding possessions now, and I want to simplify my life. I mean, when I was young, I could pack up in 30 seconds and be out the door and on the road, whatever. I drive a 15-year-old car. I dress like a bum. But I’ve always tried to keep my life as simple as I can. BJB: Well, that’s a philosophy. BG: I guess. I mean, I like to be able to travel light. When we moved here, the hardest part was getting rid of books. That killed me. We took a lot to the Maryland house. That’s 19

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my only real possession that I felt bad about. I mean, I gave away 15, 16 cartons of books. A lot were like, “Oh, I’m never going to read that again.” Then, I immediately went out and started replacing them with more books! But no, I don’t really know if I have a philosophy of life. Play it by ear! That’s the expression! And millions of times, especially with the play going, and this person’s in town and all, it’s always, “Play it by ear.” I’m more easygoing than I used to be, which helps. Sorry I can’t be more deep there. BJB: I think you maybe are and don’t know it. Do you think there are themes in your plays that might reflect that? BG: You know, I’m always jumping, like from Minor Demons to Moon Over the Brewery to Belmont Avenue Social Club. It was over three years and three big jumps. Jim Christy pointed it out: “There’s always an element of loneliness in your plays.” I’m like, “What?” And sometimes comedic. I mean Shep in Rainbow Bar & Grille was alone. Moon Over the Brewery is totally about being alone. Dex and Julie. Even Belmont Avenue … Tommy, the guy who’s mourning his best friend, you know, lost his best friend in the world, and is lost emotionally. And, it’s Christy who pointed that out. I never noticed it. BJB: Is there a question you always wanted to answer that nobody’s asked you? BG: Nope! [Laughs] Oh, wait! I know! If somebody came in and said, “Hey, you want a million dollars?” “Okay! Yeah! Sure!” But no one’s going to ask me that question. Let’s be serious about it. Bruce Graham – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays According to Goldman Any Given Monday Belmont Avenue Social Club Burkie Champagne Charlie Stakes Coyote on a Fence Desperate Affection Dex and Julie Sittin’ in a Tree Early One Evening at the Rainbow Bar & Grille Minor Demons Moon Over the Brewery Mr. Hart & Mr. Brown 20

A Conversation with Bruce Graham

North of the Boulevard Something Intangible Stella & Lou The Outgoing Tide The Philly Fan Rizzo Feature Films Dunston Checks In (Ken Kwapis, 1996) Anastasia (Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, 1997) Steal This Movie (Robert Greenwald, 2000) TV Movies The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer (William A. Graham, 1999) Philadelphia Diary – Co-written with Michael Hollinger and Sonia Sanchez (Glenn Holsten, 1999) The Christmas Secret (Ian Barry, 2000) A Ring of Endless Light (Greg Beeman, 2002) Right on Track (Duwayne Dunham, 2003) Tiger Cruise (Duwayne Dunham, 2004) The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (Michael M. Scott, 2008) Trading Christmas (Michael M. Scott, 2011) Cedar Cove – Pilot (Michael Scott, 2013) Cedar Cove – “Free Spirits” (Michael Scott, 2013) Cedar Cove – “And the Winner Is …” (Martin Wood, 2013) Cedar Cove – “Stormfront” (Neill Fearnley, 2013) Television Legwork – “The American Dream” – CBS (Michael Zinberg, 1987) Roseanne – “Good-bye, Mr. Right” – ABC (John Whitesell, 1990) Book The Collaborative Playwright – Co-written with Michele Volansky (Heinemann, 2007) Awards The Theatre Association of Pennsylvania – Fellowships in Playwriting The Rockefeller Foundation (1986) Princess Grace Foundation (1992) Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1993) Rosenthal New Play Prize – Coyote on a Fence (1998) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding Production of a Play – Coyote on a Fence (1999) 21

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Drama Desk Award Nominations (2) – Coyote on a Fence (2000) Humanitas Award Winner, Best Children’s Screenplay – A Ring of Endless Light (2003) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play – According to Goldman (2004) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play – The Philly Fan (2005) Set in Philadelphia Screenwriting Competition, Regional Award – Middle Aged White Guys (2006) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play – Dex and Julie Sittin’ in a Tree (2007) Edgerton Foundation New Plays Award – Something Intangible (2008) Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play – Something Intangible (2009) Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play – Any Given Monday (2010) Set in Philadelphia Screenwriting Competition, TV Pilot Award – The Darbarians (2011) Joseph Jefferson Award, Best New Play – The Outgoing Tide (2011)

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Chapter 2 A Conversation with Michael Hollinger

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ichael Hollinger sat in his office at Villanova University, where posters of his plays, including the award-winning Opus, lean unceremoniously in a pile against the wall. “I feel it’s too egocentric to actually put them up,” he said. From the window we can see the earth movers outside engaged in new building construction, which undoubtedly reflects the work of one of the most successful playwrights living and working in Philadelphia. Various cases containing string instruments are nestled in corners and tucked on shelves in the room – a reminder that this writer is also a musician. His influence on the national theatre scene can be felt in New York and across the country as well as in Philadelphia. During the 2009–2010 season, Opus was noted on Theatre Communications Group’s Top Ten Most Produced Plays list. I first became acquainted with Michael when he served as literary manager for Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays. BJB: You were born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Is that right? MH: Yes. BJB: And you grew up in York, PA? MH: Yes. BJB: What was it like growing up there? MH: You know, I was happy to get out of York. By the time I left to go to college in the late 1970s/1980, it was kind of a depressed place. I felt a kind of conservativeness around the town that bugged me, and I was uppity anyway as a high school student and kind of anti-authoritarian, and so I couldn’t wait to get out of Dodge. Growing up, I was very happy. I spent a lot of time at the York Little Theatre, which was a very good and well-equipped community theatre, and I assume still is. My parents were quite involved there as actors and occasional directors and, you know, lighting

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designers and all kinds of stuff. So I was onstage at a young age and worked backstage at a young age and in the audience very often, and even did odd little things like work with a children’s theatre improv group that traveled to schools and was music director for something when I was in high school. So I feel like I can attribute a lot of my knowledge to the hands-on experience of what it is like to work in this fourdimensional space called a stage in front of an audience, and so that understanding came from an experiential sense of what theatre is. BJB: So you actually started in theatre as a child? MH: Yeah, I think I was probably performing at York Little Theatre by the time I was nine or ten. BJB: Tell me about the music. You went to Oberlin? MH: Right. I studied viola as a kid, and I went to Oberlin Conservatory and pursued my Bachelor of Music degree, which I received in 1984. I was very interested in writing, but realized I wasn’t interested in getting a second degree. I started out in a double degree program, which would allow me to have my B.M. and a B.A. in English in five years, and I thought, “I can write on my own. I don’t need a degree in it.” So I abandoned the B.A. and stayed with music. The irony is, after I left Oberlin, I got a full assistantship to study viola at Carnegie Mellon and get an M.F.A. in viola performance. And I deferred that for a year because I was kind of burned out from all the practicing, and within a couple of months after moving to Philadelphia, presumably just for a year, I realized I didn’t want to go back and study music anymore. It was physically taxing for me – as a violist, lots of aches and pains. I didn’t enjoy practicing. And the career prospects were most likely playing in an orchestra somewhere and that really didn’t excite me. It took me a few years to figure out what I did want to do. And within those years, I became an actor, again, and worked for a touring children’s theatre company called Children’s Repertory Company, and ultimately began writing plays for them that we toured to schools. And in a very short time realized that if I wanted to do this thing I should learn more about it because I took one playwriting class at Oberlin. Really my self-study began with attending the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays as an audience member, as a subscriber, starting to create a pattern of self-training in terms of, “Well, I’ve got to be reading more of this and more of this and more of this!” And then I eventually became a script reader also at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays around the time that I applied to come to Villanova and get my master’s. BJB: What drew you to Philadelphia in the first place? 26

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MH: Philadelphia might as well have been a dart on the map. You know, I left college, I’d never lived in a city before, and my college roommate had a garage apartment behind his dad’s house in Merion. He was moving back here, and I had a girlfriend at the time, and we didn’t have any particular reason to be any particular place at all. So I said, “Why don’t we move into this garage apartment and we’ll live in Philadelphia for a while? That ought to be fun!” And it was, as it happened. I mean I liked the city. I liked living in the city, and it was really cheap! So, luckily, I wound up landing in a city that was just about to burgeon in terms of its theatrical life and its interest in new plays. I landed in the right city at the right time apparently, and so my life as a playwright has grown up at the same rate that the City [of Philadelphia] has grown in its theatrical endeavors. BJB: How did you get hired as a literary manager at Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays? MH: I spent three years between the end of my undergraduate career and the start of my graduate studies at Villanova. During that time I had all sorts of jobs like, you know, film projectionist, which showed up in Tiny Island, and security guard and that sort of stuff, and then an actor, too. Then after my two-year stint at Villanova and getting my M.A., I went back to being an actor briefly and this position opened up at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for the literary manager/dramaturg slot, and Jim Christy, one of our mutual mentors, recommended me for the job, which I initially resisted and tried to not take, but I was talked into it and very glad that I was because it changed everything. BJB: When were you literary manager there? MH: I was hired in December of 1989, and I was laid off the summer of 1994 when the [Philadelphia Festival] Theatre restructured to finish out its existing grants under the auspices of the Annenberg Center. Then I went immediately to the Wilma Theater to be their dramaturg for another three years. BJB: What did you learn from your position at Festival Theatre? MH: The job was incredible for a playwright who wanted to understand the marketplace, first of all. I mean, everything that was circulating in regional theatre came through the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays and in vast quantities. So I really got a great sense right away about what’s out there. One of the things I learned, to my surprise, coming out of a graduate program where you only study the great works, is that there’re a lot of not great works, you know? In fact, most of what’s circulating is not in as good shape as the work that I read in graduate school, partly because they’re 27

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new plays and they’re not finished yet. They need production to get to the finished state, and partly just because the bulk of work in any field is always going to be under the level of superb, and that the cream, you hope, is going to always rise to the top. So I quickly learned how to recognize the cream from what was not cream. And in doing daily analysis of plays that I read, over and over and over and over again, you know the simple task of “what’s the action of this play, who does what, what’s it all mean,” and writing an assessment of its virtues and debits, I became really good at understanding why I was excited about the ones I was excited about, why I was bored by the ones I was bored by. Then through the process of working as a dramaturg on the shows that we read, workshopped and produced, I was able to practice the muscle of not just diagnosis, but – what’s the other side of “diagnosis?” – I guess “treatment” (sounds too pathological). You know, ways of being a good consultant in the process, to suggest ways that a strong play can become stronger. BJB: Was it during that time you wrote your first full-length play? MH: Yeah, I hadn’t written a full-length straight play. I’d written in college and shortly thereafter. I wrote three musicals with a collaborator with whom I still continue to work. But, apart from those musicals, which I stopped writing by my mid-twenties, I hadn’t written any full-length plays until about 1991–1992. By that time, I was at the Festival Theatre, and the wonderful thing was that I now had professional relationships with literary managers at other theatres, so it didn’t mean that they had to like the plays I sent them, but they did have to read them because we were going to meet at the next conference. BJB: And you would see them? MH: And I would see them! So I did think that it was an advantage in the sense that they couldn’t read ten pages and set the scripts down. And, fortunately, it may have helped as a kind of shortcut to getting to their small pile instead of their big pile. BJB: Did someone say or do something that encouraged you during the time of writing your first full-length play? MH: The biggest encouragements early on were these: I got a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship within six months of leaving Villanova for a solo piece that I had written here as my orals project (Villanova’s equivalent of a thesis). And that fellowship, although it wasn’t a great deal of money, was such a wonderful nod to say, “You keep doing this thing.” The second great inspiration-builder was that my boss at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, Carol Rocamora, knew I was an aspiring playwright, and she gave me a slot in three successive reading series that we 28

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had, one for a little one-act as part of an evening of one-acts and the next two years for full-length plays. The plays were not written when she carved out the space for them. I said, “Here’s a title and I’ll have it done by the day that we do the reading,” and, indeed, they were finished the day of the reading! But, you know, having the deadline, knowing that an audience of 100 people would show up that day was an incredible impetus. Then, the third thing I’d say was that I had a couple of play workshops regionally, I should say nationally, in and around the years where I was really starting to write quite seriously. There was a workshop at Denver Center Theatre at what was then called the US West Theatre Fest, and then two workshops as a result of an exchange between Playwrights’ Center playwrights and Philadelphia playwrights, and so I got a workshop of Tiny Island at the Guthrie and a workshop of Incorruptible at the Illusion Theatre in Minneapolis. So all those were really great opportunities for making connections with other cities and for workshopping the plays themselves because the plays went through huge changes as a result of all those workshops. I was, and I think I still am, kind of voracious about using workshop time well and not being precious about it. So I took really good advantage of those. And finally, if you were going to add one more step to the process, it was a growing acquaintanceship with the Arden Theatre Company through taking classes there, through serving as a dramaturg there, writing an industrial show or two for them, and ultimately, having An Empty Plate in the Café du Grand Boeuf wind up on Terry Nolen’s desk, as a result of my wife, Megan, who worked there at the time, who said, “You ought to read my husband’s play.” BJB: I want to ask you about your association with the Arden. Do you work with a dramaturg there, or do you work only with the director? MH: The primary relationship has always been with Terry Nolen, who is also an excellent dramaturg, and the relationship has been extremely collaborative. As time has gone by, he’s not shy about raising difficult questions about the play, and I’m not shy about raising difficult questions about the blocking or the design or whatever. It’s kind of like we’ve gotten way past the first date where you have to be that polite and careful and tactful ’cause we know we both want to make the work really strong. We have had a dramaturg enter the process in recent years. Amy Dugas Brown, who was the Associate Artistic Director there, acted as a dramaturg a number of times on shows over the years, and also has a very keen eye and helped to add another perspective to the process. But I think knowing there’s a theatre whose aesthetic matches mine very closely, knowing there’s a director who I know pays very careful attention to every beat, pause and ellipsis that I write, knowing that there’s an audience who is in expectation of what I will write next and actually cares about the next thing I write and will be pleased to tell me which of my plays is their favorite – whatever it is – that’s an unspeakable and immeasurable boon to my confidence. This doesn’t mean that the Arden will do every single thing I write; they have not done every single thing 29

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I’ve written. But it’s been really a great boon, and I can’t imagine the alternate reality where I didn’t have that relationship, where there was not a local theatre I could feel was home. BJB: What is your writing schedule like? Do you write every day? MH: I wish I had a schedule that worked better. At the moment, my life is a balance of teaching, administering Villanova Theatre, parenting, and writing. And I’m always dropping some ball in one of these arenas. There are a lot of projects that I’d like to work on, but time is hard. Generally, what I keep doing is, I’ll submit for things, I’ll set deadlines; deadlines are sometimes established for contests and grants and things like that. So that will bring certain projects into the forefront for one period of time. “Oh, my God, I’ve got a deadline on Friday” will mean that that’s the project I have to pay attention to. It’s kind of like a chef who has to mind six different pans on the stove, and one you don’t have to stir for 20 minutes, and one you realize is boiling and you need to attend to it now! BJB: You started teaching as an adjunct? MH: Yeah, I think the first teaching I did was when I was a literary manager, and I was invited to teach for Philadelphia Young Playwrights. Soon after, I was asked to teach a playwriting class for the Walnut Street Theatre. I mean, these were people asking me to teach just based on the fact that I was a literary manager, and I guess ’cause I had a master’s degree, but I didn’t really know anything about teaching playwriting, and I never felt like I’d taken a good playwriting class. So I sort of had to invent what I thought a good playwriting class might be, and it took me awhile to figure it out. I added on the Arden Theatre, then the Wilma Theater; then at Villanova I taught an adjunct class in the graduate program, then La Salle. I would gradually leave off the theatre schools as I started with the universities. Then the University of Pennsylvania, and finally Villanova hired me full time. It was three theatre schools and three universities until the full-time position came about, and now here is the only place I teach, apart from occasional workshops in Philly, New York, or Washington, D.C. BJB: When did you start teaching full time? MH: 2001. BJB: What has teaching taught you? MH: A ton! I almost feel like you shouldn’t be paid for it because you learn so much. It was through the process of trying to identify what are the key principles at work that 30

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really clarified my thinking about what my job was as a playwright. Again, I never felt like I was taught particularly well in playwriting classes, either as an undergraduate student or as a graduate student, and it was only when I started considering what I would consider the Big Principles that I began to figure it out for myself. I was working at the Festival Theatre for New Plays around the same time, so I had lots of opportunity to watch the same play over and over and over again, and finally, on the ninth performance go, “Oh! That’s why that scene doesn’t work!” or “Oh, that’s why the second act is weak!” or, “Oh, that’s why that moment is a knockout!” So, for me, I don’t know if it’s ’cause I have a scientifically-oriented mind, but I’m always looking for the physical principles that interact to make a certain thing happen: “Why is it that when this character does this thing, we are riveted?” Because although much of what we do as playwrights is instinctive and intuitive, there is certain stuff that always, always, always works for profoundly human reasons. So it’s helpful to know, “Hey, you know what? Hide a character in a closet and that’s interesting. You know what? Put a character in clothing that belongs to the other gender and that’s interesting. You know what? Allow a character to lie, allow someone to threaten someone else with an unusual object.” There are certain things that are theatrical and interesting over and over again. It’s no accident that Hamlet has the coolest images written into the play. You stab a guy through a tapestry – cool. You see a character talking to a skull, which turns out to be the skull of his surrogate father when he grew up – cool. Chatting with a gravedigger who turns out to be digging the grave of his girlfriend – cool. Talking to a ghost on a battlement, who is his dad and tells him that he was murdered  – cool. Standing over his uncle with a knife ready to kill him and then realizing that he’d go straight to heaven and therefore delaying the murder. Staging a play to prove the uncle’s guilt. Those are all things that work theatrically. So, as a teacher and as a writer, I’m always trying to arrive at the first principles that we can rely upon, just as physicists want to try to arrive at the first principles and build from there. BJB: Are there writers who have inspired you? You mentioned Shakespeare … MH: Sure. I was turned on as a teenager by Ionesco. I thought, “This guy’s whacked. You can get away with this? You can be this silly?” I mean I liked Monty Python at the time, too, so I think it might have been the silly factor, the absurdity factor. I fell in love with David Mamet’s writing when I was in college – just had never heard anything like that. Since then, I’ve had a chance to steep myself in Chekhov, both as a graduate student and then at the Festival Theatre for New Plays, when Carol Rocamora’s translations were produced there. Gosh, there’re so many. You know, I love playwrights, and I love plays, and I’m kind of voracious. I feel like I’m always a student. BJB: As you’re writing, do you think about the audience? Do you think specifically about the Arden audience? 31

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MH: I don’t think about a specific audience. What I do think about is … you know it may be that I think Philadelphia audiences are smart, I think they’re cultivated, and it’s the assumption I make when I write. You know, writing Opus about string quartets, I didn’t second guess myself and say, “Gosh, are people going to go for this? Are they going to understand what I’m talking about? Is it too arcane a subject?” I’ve never worried about that. And I think part of the reason is that I know that these are the audiences who are NPR members; they are the audiences who go to the Ritz theatres and watch art films; they’re the same audiences who go to the Philadelphia Library to hear speakers and intellectuals of various types; they’re engaged politically. I kind of know who they are demographically ’cause I’ve hung out with a lot of them over the years. I never have to think, “Is this audience going to be behind me?” By the same token, I have pieces of mine which I think would never play in New York. Now that may be as a result of wrongheaded stereotypes about what I think a New York audience is, but I think there are certain pieces of mine that may just have too damn much heart in them for them to be accepted by New York audiences. That’s not a critique because I’ve been very pleased about the plays of mine that have been done in New York; but somehow this City’s [Philadelphia’s] audiences feel like they fit me. BJB: Do you feel like the City of Philadelphia influences your writing? Or do you think you’d be writing the same stories if you were in Chicago or Seattle? MH: My subjects are fairly far flung for the most part. Tiny Island took place in the Philadelphia suburbs, so that was probably more dependent on it. But it’s probably more a sense of … you know, I think people who grow up in a small town and don’t know that being an aeronautical engineer is possible don’t become aeronautical engineers for the most part. So to be in a city where lots of theatre is being done and where lots of new work is being done means that it’s a no-brainer – it’s possible. Of course people write new plays, and of course, the new plays get done, and of course, people try different things and get recognized. And, if you’re a small company or a rising playwright, there’s always the Fringe festival. I think the culture of the City [of Philadelphia] speaks to possibility in a way that other places don’t always do. BJB: What was your experience when Opus was produced in New York in terms of critics and audience? MH: It was great! A couple of things were. One is that I worked with the same director (Terry Nolen) and some of the designers (Jim Kronzer and Jorge Cousineau) who did the first production at the Arden. So that Philadelphia connection was great and that gave consistency to it. The other thing is that Primary Stages is a terrific theatre, 32

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and despite the fact that they’ve got their real estate in Manhattan, they exemplify the best of regional theatre – they’re personable, dedicated to the work before anything else, not devoted to cults of personality or stardom; it’s about getting the play and the production right. It was a wonderful experience. The cherry on top of the sundae was that it was, in fact, very well received critically, and in terms of audiences, I think it broke the box office record for Primary Stages single-ticket sales at that time, so I couldn’t have been happier about it. BJB: I read An Empty Plate again recently, and I forgot how funny it is! You use a lot of humor in your writing. MH: Yeah, and I think even in the dramas, they have a lot of laughs in them. BJB: And unexpected laughs, which makes it really interesting! MH: Different people develop humor in different ways. If you’re the kind of person, as I was and may still be, where you use humor to diffuse tension in social situations and are always trying to find the way to reset the balance by getting people laughing, it would be pretty hard to keep it out of the writing. I think the comedies are more taxing in some ways because when you go to a comedy, you expect to laugh, and if you don’t, it’s a bad night in the theatre. It’s kind of like if you watch a basketball player go to the net ten times and only make one basket, they’re not doing so well. In a comedy, it’s clear when you’re going to the basket. They have to get those laughs. In the dramas, you know, sometimes it’s fine to just be in the middle of a drama. Though there are serious dramas like Death of a Salesman, which has like six laughs in it, and you need to get every one because you need to release the audience so they can engage in the drama again. A rhythm that I love in the theatre is what I call “Ha, ha, ouch,” which is using a big laugh to precede something that’s actually poignant or painful, and the sudden wrench of shifting modes can be very impactful. I think part of the reason is because the laughter actually softens people’s bellies up – it actually makes you vulnerable to emotion because you physically engage, and you get the blood going, and it allows you to be more vulnerable and accessible to feeling. I think if you don’t start off with laughter, it’s a little harder; people may be more guarded about opening up. Anyway, that’s the “Ha, ha, ouch” theory, and I’m hoping to claim it as my own unless somebody has precedence. BJB: Do you think about rhythms when you’re writing, the rhythm of the line? MH: Yeah, very, very much. BJB: You’re very conscious of that? 33

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MH: Yeah, obsessively. I mean, for me, every syllable matters, and so I will seek out synonyms for a word in order to structure lines and the interplay of dialog in a really rigorous way. BJB: Do you discover surprising things along the way? MH: Always, thankfully, always. Usually on the level of character, though plot things, too. I’ll give an example. In Red Herring, there’s a Russian fisherman named Andrei, who’s supposed to be dead but he’s not, and he’s kind of upset about the word getting out that he is dead, but he has to stay undercover. In Act Two he meets the detective who’s investigating his death in a bar, and she notices that he has an accent like the guy whose death she’s investigating, and says, “Where are you from?” And he says, “Why?” She says, “I thought I heard an accent.” And he says, “Oklahoma.” And I had no reason to write “Oklahoma,” but that’s what he said so I wrote it down. And then she says, “Oklahoma?” And he says, “Where the wind comes sweeping down the plain.” And I didn’t know why he knew Rodgers and Hammerstein, so I just about fell off my chair at that. And I thought, “Well, he does now!” And this character turned out to be a hoot, but I didn’t know it, and as it happened I realized that he must know Rodgers and Hammerstein really well, so I built it into the play from the beginning that he’s a fan. But that sort of thing happens a lot where I won’t understand why a character’s there, or I won’t understand a facet of them until they reveal that, at the risk of getting mystical about it. Sometimes I’ll start a scene where a character is holding an object. There’s a scene in Opus where a character answers the door holding a plunger. I didn’t know why. I just said, “That’ll be more interesting than just opening the door with, ‘Hi.’” So the character says, “Perfect timing. I was just about to unclog my toilet … got me thinking of you.” Then later on in the scene I realized that this is a character who has just flushed his meds down the toilet, and he claims that he didn’t take them out of the bottles first. So, it’s a joke, it’s a payoff, it answers the question, “Why does he come to the door with a plunger?” A lot of things came together around the object, but that’s partly the fun of it. I do plan things carefully, but the characters still surprise me. BJB: What do you feel is the hardest part of writing? MH: Probably the hardest part of writing for me is being really honest about how I’m connected deeply and personally to the work because I begin so many plays with these apparently alien worlds – different decades, different countries, areas of work and life that I have no connection to other than an intellectual fascination. The plays that have gone the best for me are generally the ones where I find that these apparently alien terrains are, in fact, autobiographical. You know, just like an actor, unless you find out how you are in Willy Loman and Willy Loman is you, forget about doing 34

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justice to the role. It will never be. You can use a fake nose and create your limp and whatever, and it’s not going to live until you discover that. The plays of mine that have worked out best have been ones where I’ve found myself in them in a deep way, and I didn’t start there. Many writers will start with “Boy, I really want to talk about this experience I had,” and so they begin very close to reality and then fictionalize from there to make it the best story – that’s The Glass Menagerie model. And then there are those playwrights who say, “That thing over there is really fascinating, and I have to find out why it connects to me,” – that’s the Arcadia model. I think writers are driven by different parts of their body; some start with the head and have to move south, and some start with the belly and have to move north. BJB: Is there an easy part of writing for you? MH: Dialog writing comes very fluidly. I mean, I could sit down and just dive into a dialog and follow it. I don’t always trust that. I don’t start a play at line one and end it at “Curtain.” I did when I was a kid, but I haven’t done that in a long time. I’d like to do that again because I feel like in some ways I’d like to see, now that I know much more about structure, whether my instincts take me to a good place without an architectural scheme developing fairly early on. BJB: When you’re writing, do you consider the budget of a theatre in terms of the number of actors/characters? MH: I haven’t done that at all. In fact, it hasn’t represented itself in my plays a whole lot. Now, Incorruptible, which is done more than any other play of mine, has eight actors in it. Tiny Island, which is the smallest play, requires four, and has had the fewest productions. I was quite aware in writing Tooth and Claw, which requires ten actors, eight of whom are Latino, that it’s probably not going to be done a whole lot, and I just had to be willing to let that be the case. Sometimes you have to paint on a big canvas. I realized while writing Opus – and I wrote that play in response to having written Tooth and Claw, which has a bit of an epic quality – that I wanted it to take place in rooms with chairs and five actors, to explore what minimalism can do that the “maximalism” of the other play couldn’t do. I do feel, though, that there’s an aesthetic economy that’s more important than the imperatives of production budget, that it’s very easy to write a play that has too many characters from an aesthetic point of view. Do you really need four brothers in this family? What if there were only three? Do we need the doctor and the lawyer, or is one professional sufficient in this play? Therefore, I’m often killing off characters of my own or in students’ plays in order to make sure the economy of the play is right, and that’s an aesthetic consideration that also happens to have positive ramifications for production because it lowers costs. 35

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BJB: You do a lot of research for your plays. MH: Yeah, right above your head are my Tooth and Claw boxes. I have a box like that for every play I’ve written, and Tooth and Claw has two. BJB: And you went there. To the Galapagos Islands. MH: I went there for two weeks on an Independence Fellowship in the Arts to do research, partly because I’m fond of traveling to alien places and times in my plays. These require a fair amount of research just to enter the world. For Red Herring, which takes place in Boston in 1952 (ten years before I was born), I had to talk to a homicide detective, an allergy specialist, a coroner, an FBI agent. I had to research when Velveeta cheese was created, when various movie stars were hitting their stride, what police work might have been like for a woman – you know, lots and lots of arcane stuff. And I enjoy it! It’s a way of making the place and time become characters in the world of the play. Red Herring allows for the geography and time period to resonate metaphorically with the issues of the play. What is marriage at this time and place? And dealing with Joe McCarthy? What does McCarthy have to do with marriage? What is his particular paranoia in the context of marriage, which is the main subject of the play? How is that destructive to relationship? And how might that resonate within? Opus is the only one of my plays that essentially takes place here and now. It takes place in the present in New York, Washington and Pittsburgh, and it was a great relief to not have to rely upon all that research. I still did research in a number of areas, but because I’m a male musician in his forties, who lives in a major city and works in an artistic discipline, many of those things just came easily. I didn’t have to wonder how people talk in this time period, whether this slang term was in use then, what the conventions are, what’s on the radio, what are people reading and listening to. I’m still going to go back to other times and places in my plays because I like it, but it did make the writing in some ways more spontaneous in Opus because I didn’t need to upload as much information to simply enter the world. BJB: Not everybody does that kind of extensive research, but it certainly gives an authentic feel to the piece. MH: It’s the difference between good con artists and bad con artists. A bad con artist comes up and says, “I need money ’cause I lost my wallet.” A good con artist comes up and says, “Excuse me, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to bother you,” and he’s dressed to the nines, and says, “I just talked with the information desk here at Amtrak Information and I lost my ticket to Boston. It’s $36.75, but my wallet’s missing, and if I can just get back, I’ll be happy to send the money to you.” A good con artist gives you names and dates 36

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and places, so that eventually you give over to this imaginary world and say, “Well, yeah, I know a couple of those things are true. Therefore, it’s probably all true. Here’s your $36.75.” BJB: Do you detect themes in your work? MH: I do, but mostly only in retrospect. I try not to pay too much attention because, really, it’s not my job to be the detector. I do recognize that the artistic impulse is something that shows up in lots of my plays, and that might be as varied as a minstrel in Incorruptible or the waitstaff who create a culinary event in An Empty Plate in the Café du Grand Boeuf. It might be the longing for the romance of the old movies in Tiny Island, and in Opus, obviously, the professional musician’s life and work. My musical, A Wonderful Noise, co-authored with Vance Lehmkuhl, is all about barbershop quartets, and what it means to be generating a sound together and, for a moment, not being just an ordinary guy who works in a feed store but a musician. I think that impulse is in a lot of things I write. Weirdly enough, there are some threads that I didn’t recognize for many years like unorthodox marriage. In An Empty Plate, Incorruptible, and Red Herring, there are marriages that come together in a spiritual way rather than a conventional way. In Incorruptible, the lovers are reunited after a long time, and she’s already pregnant with somebody else’s baby. There’s a little Joseph and Mary kind of feel to that. In An Empty Plate, the characters realize that they’ll never be together because the woman is dying and leaving him so she can spare him, and they have this sort of spiritual declaration of marriage. Red Herring ends in a wedding, but the characters are handcuffed, and it’s a Quaker wedding, so they’re just declaring themselves to each other without an officiant of any kind. My own parents’ wedding was very unconventional. They were married in a police station, while guys in handcuffs were being walked through, and it was the second marriage for both of them, the first having absolutely imploded. I feel very strongly about the notion of romantic love and what is a spiritual phenomenon versus what is sanctified or institutionalized. I mean, Tiny Island in many ways is a critique of marriage, illustrated by the central characters, the two sisters. One marriage is totally gone to bust but she’s in denial about it, and for the other one it’s basically destroyed. She left her husband even though she’s obviously crazy about him and gets back together with him at the end. So I guess it’s important to me. It probably also has helped the work become more broadly accepted because, as it happens, romantic love is a very hardy subject for theatre, and it’s something that I’m a sucker for. BJB: You mentioned before your “job as a playwright.” What do you think that is? MH: I don’t think this is true for all playwrights, but among my imperatives are, first and foremost, don’t bore the audience. People’s time is precious and people’s money is 37

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precious, and people’s attention is precious, and attention is incredibly fragile, and so I feel an obligation to make sure that the audience’s next two hours are engaging. Basically, I feel like there’s only one response that I ever want for any of my plays and that’s “Wow!” I don’t achieve that, certainly, for everybody, but that’s all I ever want to go for, and so that means that if the plays are funny, I want them to delight people to the point of “Wow,” or if I’m aiming for it to be moving or thought-provoking, I want to do it to the point of “Wow!” I never want to be merely “interesting” or “diverting” or “clever.” So part of what I’m very devoted to is storytelling because I believe strongly in narrative and that narrative is the key to engaging people in a fulfilling way over a couple of hours, which is not to say that you can’t be very inventive in how narrative is conveyed. I think that anything that takes two hours to consume is narrative by nature because it passes through time. A sculpture need not necessarily be narrative, though visual artists are always paying attention to how the eye moves and how you can keep an eye or a set of eyes on a painting or a sculpture for a period of time. But anybody who works in a form that requires as much concentrated time as the theatre has to think about how attention develops and deepens and intensifies over time, as opposed to diminishes, which is what naturally happens to human attention over time. BJB: What do you think is your most artistically successful play so far? MH: Probably Opus. As a playwright, I’m always trying to balance several things, and a strength in one area sometimes is a weakness in another. For example, a play that might work out great in terms of dialog or character, or theme is particularly interesting, but might not be structured properly, and therefore doesn’t deliver the impact that it might. For example, I’ve realized over time that Tiny Island has many good things in it, but structurally it doesn’t actually deliver the experience that it should deliver. I think that’s true for Tooth and Claw, as well; it’s terrific material, thematically complex and profound. But the storytelling is more problematic, the way secondary characters and the chorus are used. Every play has its own problems, and I think that’s just part of making art. Getting back to Opus, I feel like that play came through with fewer problems. I believe I was successful on the level of dialog. I feel like the characters have authentic voices that are true and detailed. I feel like it’s about something that matters. I feel like it’s theatrically interesting, partly because it uses flashbacks and this documentary convention, and that structurally it works well in terms of delivering a powerful experience through the way that the story is delivered. Those are all different tracks that as playwrights we’re always trying to balance, in addition to questions like spectacle: Does the piece deliver a visual or aural spectacle as well? In most of my plays I feel I handle some of these aspects well and perhaps one or two not so well, but in Opus I feel I achieved more of them than I have in my other plays. BJB: Are you surprised about any aspect of the business side of playwriting? 38

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MH: Doing stuff in New York has been an education for me in terms of commercial theatre. Since I was a literary manager for eight years, I really understood the regional theatre marketplace pretty well, so that was not a mystery to me. Commercial theatre, however, still makes me shake my head sometimes because the money works entirely differently, the way that stars are important works entirely differently, the way the press works is entirely different. When An Empty Plate was done at Primary Stages in 2000, starring George Wendt, directed by John Rando, with Tony Award winners and nominees in the cast, I had a great deal of expectation about that. I actually permitted myself some outsized dreaming, which I don’t do often. Bruce Graham has taught me to take a kind of “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude professionally, which can keep your expectations realistic, but I had slipped on that, and started to imagine, “Gosh, if this really goes well, what might happen?” We got our [New York] Times review, and it was kind of hard to decode. It was long and talked a lot about the play in kind of descriptive language, but I kept wondering, “Is this sentence a good sentence or is this sentence a bad sentence?” The headline of the review was okay, but it didn’t seem like it was saying either “This is a good play, see it,” or saying “This is a bad play, don’t see it.” It was clearly a mixed review and a little ambiguous, too. But I thought, you know, “This wasn’t bad,” and other reviews were saying some nice things. So I went to visit the commercial producer who had put enhancement money into the Primary Stages production, and who would move it if it were well reviewed and they could get investors. I was expecting to have a discussion about how we might put these reviews together and, you know, give the show the most positive spin. And he might as well have been wearing a mourning band. I stepped into the office and it was like, “I’m sorry.” And I thought “I’m sorry” would only be necessary if the play had been panned, but as I learned, “I’m sorry” was basically anything short of a rave from the Times, that nothing short of a rave would leverage money. Opus received an excellent review in the Times, and many excellent reviews from other New York papers, but even these didn’t seem to leverage a commercial production, though the play was optioned for a year by established commercial producers. I recognize that it’s a very unpredictable environment. And, you know, there are works that are not necessarily strong as plays that do get done, if you can get the right package together, and they can still be strong events. As a playwright, and because I worked as essentially a new play scout for years, I tend to think of the play as the commodity. But in New York, that’s only one piece of it, and in many cases, the stars, or combinations of stars, can be a bigger factor than that. BJB: When you’re in rehearsals, how much of your play changes? Do you ever feel like your play is finished after that first preview, or do you feel like you’re still working on it? MH: I’m crazy for rewrites. Most of the full-lengths I’ve done have been premiered by the Arden, and so my relationship with Terry Nolen has deepened and intensified over 39

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the years. If left to my own devices, I would make changes every single night of the run, to the detriment of the performers, because I’m ultimately looking for the right blueprint that the script wants to become. I’m looking beyond this first production; the director’s obligation is to this production. They would like it to have a life beyond, but for them, the production is not just a workshop for the future life of the play. So Terry’s been very good about drawing the line as to how many changes I can make, especially late in the game, so that when we get to previews, the number and degree of changes I can make gets smaller and smaller, until by the next to last preview, he’ll basically say, “No. I have to freeze the show.” And, what I’ve discovered over the years is that the day you make a change in the script, the actor will mess something up – not the new line but maybe three lines before that, or three lines after. It takes a certain amount of RAM on an actor’s part to incorporate changes. Opus was probably the lightest revision job of all my plays’ first productions, though for some of them, I probably replaced a hundred pages in the script. Red Herring had its first audience at an open dress rehearsal at the Arden, and that evening I cut two entire scenes and reapportioned exposition from those scenes into other scenes of the play over the next couple of nights. It can be crazy sometimes. But I love that; for me, it’s the best part of the process. Tina Howe talks about that, too, saying she would preview forever if she could because it’s about, “Can I get it just right?” Of course, to actors that’s kind of hell because they just want to feel secure in the play and run with it and get comfortable. BJB: Are your plays being produced overseas in Europe and elsewhere? MH: An Empty Plate had a Fringe production in London. There’ve been some things in Canada and Mexico. The fact that Incorruptible has been getting done in Eastern Europe is not coincidence. These are cultures with strong connections to Catholicism and the Medieval Church, and so it’s maybe more universal than some of the other plays. I think that Opus ought to do well abroad because there are a lot of universals there. It’s not that particular to American experience. [Opus has since been produced in Japan.] BJB: You’ve received many awards for your work. Is there one that’s particularly important to you? MH: For different reasons. The Barrymore Awards are very meaningful because they take place here, and that was great for Red Herring and Opus. Ghost-Writer has won as well. The ATCA [American Theatre Critics Association]/Steinberg New Play Citation for Opus was really meaningful because it’s a national award, one of three given out annually, including the main award worth $25,000, so to be in contention for that was quite an honor. The Lucille Lortel and John Gassner 40

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nominations for Opus in New York also were thrilling because I hadn’t really played in that arena before. But there’s not much to say about awards of any kind other than it’s more fun to win them than not win them, and more fun to be nominated than not to be nominated. In the end, they are no more an arbiter of quality than are critical reviews. BJB: Do you see many plays in Philadelphia? MH: I don’t currently. My wife, Megan Bellwoar, is an actor, director and teacher, and we have two kids. So between work here [at Villanova] as a teacher, work here as an administrator, Megan’s duties, and juggling children, and trying to be a writer, it’s a pretty full life. I try to see all the new plays in Philadelphia, all the world premieres because I feel I ought to. I’d like to see everything, but I know I can’t and performance is ephemeral, so I’m going to miss things until the kids go off to college. BJB: What do you think about theatre in Philadelphia now? MH: Right now we’re in the midst of an economic crunch that may, and I suspect probably will, close a few theatres. I’m hoping it’s not the case, but I’ve seen this happen in the early to mid-1990s, where we lost a bunch of theatres when the NEA stopped funding theatres and artists so broadly, and so my guess is that some will fold. I love the diversity of theatres we have and the sort of stature that they have beyond our city – you know, that we would have a Pig Iron here, and a Theatre Exile here, and a Brat Productions here, as well as a Wilma, and a Philadelphia Theatre Company, and an Arden; that we would have an InterAct, and 1812 Productions, as well as a Walnut Street Theatre, and People’s Light, etc. I think the range is really nifty. The fact that so many of these theatres do have an interest in new work and will often premiere at least one new play a season is particularly exciting. I’m encouraged by the fact that many of the theatres have already established their real estate either by building new spaces or renovating spaces, or by taking over spaces vacated by theatres that were built or renovated. It’s a good sign. I’m a little biased because I developed as a playwright alongside these theatres as they grew, and with the people who run them, so I feel very comfortable swimming in these waters now. I would hope that somebody landing here from out of town would soon find that they could find their way around and that doors are open and there are possibilities. But because I’m establishment now, it’s hard to be totally objective about what’s going on in the city. The funny thing about being establishment is that you don’t ever really believe it, after you’ve spent so much time early in a career banging on doors; then at some point, you realize you’re actually already inside – if you’re lucky. Like, “Wait a second, why am I still knocking? Tell the truth here. Be honest with yourself: you’re as establishment as you can be. It’s that young person behind you that you need to open the door for.” 41

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BJB: What would you say to those playwrights? What’s your best advice? MH: I’ll tell you what I say to my students who are leaving here, the ones who are most promising. The first thing is “Write!” You can’t stop writing, and the way you get better is by writing and realizing your impulses, first as scenes, second as completed plays, third as plays you’re willing to send off and be scrutinized, plays that you’re willing to have people hear aloud in your living room, and then later that you’re willing to hear aloud before an audience, plays you hope will ultimately get realized in front of a paying audience with sets and costumes and an intermission or not. But it only happens by getting low-level mistakes out of the way so that you can make interesting mistakes, high-level mistakes. I feel like in all of my full-length plays, the mistakes in them are interesting mistakes, as opposed to the stupid mistakes I made in my early plays that fortunately have disappeared. But, you only get to it, I think, by getting the stupid mistakes out of the way – you know, bad dialog, terrible storytelling, lame structuring, and stuff like that. Write enough plays to get the stupid mistakes out of the way and to get to the place where, you know, you’re hunting for big game: “Can I say something? Can I say it well? Can I make something interesting happen onstage? Can I hold people’s attention for an evening?” All of this is a long way of saying write, keep writing, write more things. On the way to doing that, I find that it’s helpful to look for the contests, find the deadlines, to connect yourself with the theatre community whether that’s by ushering, taking a class, cornering an actor as he leaves a show and saying, “I think you’d be great for this role. Would you mind doing a reading at my house?” Ways of integrating yourself into the community so that it becomes inevitable that you are part of it as opposed to outside of it because, let’s face it, we playwrights spend a lot of time alone in a room, and that social connection is not always an easy thing. And the last thing I’d say is, don’t be a jerk, because both young playwrights and older playwrights can get impatient. The truth in this business is that the literary assistant who is working for nothing at the theatre as an intern is the dramaturg at the major regional theatre in five years, and you don’t want to be a jerk to that person. And they’re an artistic director at another theatre five years after that. So, you know, there are good, selfish reasons to be kind, in addition to it being basically good to be kind. BJB: Yes, you are known for your kindness! MH: Oh, thank you! BJB: I think so! MH: Well, thank you for that! It doesn’t hurt. In the theatre, it’s rare that somebody who’s a big jerk is going to work a lot because who needs it? We don’t make enough! 42

A Conversation with Michael Hollinger

BJB: Do you have any thoughts about moving to New York or L.A.? You’re very happy here? MH: Very happy here. I find I get to New York plenty, and have done so much more in recent years, so I feel like I’ve kind of got a toe in that city anyway. But I love Philadelphia. I think the theatre scene is great. We’ve got an incredible collection of artists here, and theatres that are interested in new work, and my in-laws live in this area, and my wife has a really good job, and I have a really good job, and we’re putting our kids through school. A writer’s work can travel more easily than a director’s work or an actor’s work. With the Internet, I can send scripts in seconds. BJB: Getting back to opening doors for younger playwrights, can you talk a bit about The Foundry? MH: In 2012, Philadelphia playwrights Jackie Goldfinger, Quinn Eli and I got together and discussed the possibility of trying to establish a group for emerging  playwrights  – particularly those who have completed their undergraduate and, in some cases, graduate study, but who have not yet gotten professional traction as a dramatist. The result was The Foundry, which began that fall, and now comprises of about a dozen emerging writers. Thanks to the Arden Theatre Company, which has generously provided space for us, the members meet twice monthly with one of the three cofounders to hear new pages, discuss artistic and professional issues, and hear from a variety of affiliated mentors regarding their particular discipline – directing, designing, producing, etc. Happily, in a very short time, The Foundry has gained quite a lot of attention within the community, bringing members to the attention of a number of theatres as well as other developmental organizations like PlayPenn. I’m very happy that we are able to contribute to the early careers of those promising writers and also to the theatre community as a whole in this way. BJB: Do you have a philosophy of life that has contributed to your success and happiness? MH: I often wonder whether happiness isn’t a genetic predisposition. There’s a temptation to think about it as being evidence of moral superiority or something, you know. To what degree luck? To what degree genetic? To what degree intentional? I don’t know that. I feel like I had a happy childhood; it was not without upset but it was happy. I feel exceptionally lucky, you know, so I feel like I have to attribute happiness to a large degree to that. But also, among the philosophical ideas that are meaningful to me, I actually think about death a lot. I don’t think about it in a frightened way or in a morbid way, though some people who’ve read my plays might say the treatment of death is morbid; but I think about it as in the memento mori sense, that we’re here for a very short time. It puts into perspective both the successes and the failures, you 43

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know. I have often said, for perspective, “Well, in a hundred years, we’ll all be dead.” I can shorten that now, at least for myself. I know I don’t have a hundred years left! But some people are disturbed by such statements. For me, it’s only a relief to think, “Guess what? I’m going to be gone at some point.” So, if you’re basically just dust that happens to come together in a particular form for a brief period, don’t sweat it that much, you know. Celebrate this! What can you get out of this life and what does the moment have? Of course, these are not original ideas. They resonate with all kinds of things within our culture and a lot of stuff outside of our culture. But I do think about them a lot, and the notion of the fleeting and ephemeral nature of life, despite its obviousness, is the easiest thing to forget as we go through a day and get stressed out about the plumbing bill and whether we’re going to make the green light, you know. This shows up in my plays a lot; there is in most of them a spiritual element that is beyond the earthly concerns of the play. Sometimes that’s right, smack in the middle of it, such as Incorruptible, which gets very wrapped up in the concerns of the world and winds up being a spiritual event that ends the play, a miracle. Or An Empty Plate, where the main character is poisoned and literally dying at the end of the play, but for the first time is actually going to relish this meal more than any other. Or Opus, with the notion of playing every note because they disappear and go away and are ephemeral; that’s something very important for me to remember. So maybe I put it in the plays so that I don’t forget? I do forget, of course, on a daily basis. But, I try to remind myself all the time. BJB: Is there a question that no one’s ever asked you that you really want to answer? MH: Oh, that’s a good question! Sometimes I bury things in plays, so that only if you’re looking really hard will you notice them, and so it’s sort of fun when people do notice them. I’ll give you an example. It may be the way characters are named or it may the way certain references are made. In Opus, for example, the characters’ names are Elliot, Alan, Dorian, Grace, and Carl. When I first started writing the play, [they] were named V1, V2, VA, VA2, and C. I was describing them by what their instrument was – first violin, second violin, two violists, and cello. I didn’t know what their names were. Then later on it occurred to me that I could start their names with letters that would indicate the names of the strings of their instruments in descending order from high to low. So, Elliot, Alan, Dorian, Grace, and Carl. Of course, the names had to also feel right. Carl’s not a “Charles”; he was not a “Claude”. Grace was not a “Gloria”. Elliot was not an “Ed”. It was a way of organizing them in my head. So that’s nothing you’ll ever see in the play. But, every now and then somebody stumbles over it and goes, “Oh, look at that! That’s cool.” And for me, I don’t feel like I need to advertise everything that’s layered in like that. My only hope is that when people come across something and they go, “Oh, I didn’t see that on the first three reads,” it gives them confidence in the orderliness of this fictional world. In other words, they can trust 44

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that God is in the universe and therefore nothing is random. Therefore, when the stage directions say, “He reaches into his pocket,” you hope your collaborators will wonder what that may mean, as opposed to say, “Let’s just disregard this because it probably isn’t anything.” That’s one thing I feel strongly about, and talk to my students about, to make sure everything they put in the play is intentional, even if you don’t declare the purpose for it. So that when a reader looks closely enough, just as you might look at a huge canvas, and find in the corner of the still life a little piece of string because of a fraying object, that detail is what lets you give over to the piece and trust it. Because in the theatre, as in the world of painting, viewers can be quick to pull away, to withdrawal trust, cross their arms and pull back instead of pull forward, due to any kind of problem with plausibility. But if plausibility is honored and if the work is detailed and specific and true, even in its lying, then they will continue to give over to it as if it is true. BJB: What do you think about Philadelphia playwrights? MH: There’s an earlier generation, and then there’s the current generation, and then there’s the up-and-coming generation. There were some in the golden days, but  they don’t have a lot of relevance now. I’m talking about George Kelly, who wrote that 1920s’ play, The Show-Off, of the famous Philadelphia Kelly family. But in more recent years folks like Lanie Robertson, Charles Fuller, or David Rabe and Leslie Lee, when they were both at Villanova. There was a crop that emerged here in the late 1960s/early 1970s relative to the regional theatre movement, where it started to feel like companies had resident or all but resident playwrights. Later, in the 1980s, Bruce Graham became very important as a model for me because I saw him as an example of somebody who could live in the city, essentially be a resident playwright here [at the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays] and also dip his toe into other media. The fact that Bruce was so prolific at the Festival Theatre where I came to work over time, writing very different types of plays, alternating comedies with dramas, and that sort of thing was very influential. I also think that helped establish in Philadelphia the notion that a resident playwright was a good investment, not just an act of charity. Tom Gibbons, for example, at InterAct, whose work was always politically charged, and as his craft grew to match the heat of his views, the plays started to have an afterlife outside of Philadelphia, starting with, I guess, Bee-luther-hatchee, and then Permanent Collection – you know, really having a broad influence elsewhere. At Florida Stage, before the theatre’s collapse in 2011, I think three out of maybe five of their plays in one season were by Philadelphia playwrights. They did a play of Tom’s, a play of mine, and a play of Bruce’s. It suddenly felt like “Wow! This is actually a city that people can think about as a place where playwrights come from!” Obviously, the Arden has nurtured my career, as well as that of Aaron Posner and also Bruce, who has premiered stuff now pretty much all 45

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over the City – Act II Playhouse, Theatre Exile, Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, Arden, Philadelphia Theatre Company, People’s Light. I do feel like more theatres are recognizing the value of new work and particularly local playwrights. You can collaborate with them more fluidly ’cause they’re here. You can develop relationships over time; they can develop followings; they’re more visible in terms of press – things like that. I think it’s good for everybody. So where we’re headed, I don’t know, but it is exciting! Michael Hollinger – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays An Empty Plate in the Café du Grand Boeuf A Wonderful Noise, musical – Co-written with Vance Lehmkuhl Cyrano by Edmond Rostand – Translation by Michael Hollinger; co-adaptation with Aaron Posner Ghost-Writer Hope and Gravity Incorruptible Opus Red Herring Tiny Island Tooth and Claw Under the Skin Feature Films Philadelphia Diary – Co-written with Bruce Graham and Sonia Sanchez (Glenn Holsten, 1999) Ten-Minute Plays Battle of the Backyard Naked Lunch Senior Moment Serviette Truth Decay Two-Part Invention Plays For Young Audiences Boxheads Clean Getaway, musical – Co-written with Beth Dannenfelser 46

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Eureka! Hot Air Awards Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – Fellowships in Playwriting – 6 Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play – An Empty Plate in the Café du Grand   Boeuf (1995) Roger L. Stevens Award, Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays – Tiny Island   (1995) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play – Incorruptible (1996) F. Otto Haas Award for Emerging Theatre Artist (1996) Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award for Outstanding Program Feature – Wilma on the Move (1997) Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play – Red Herring (2000) Independence Foundation Fellowship (2000) Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship (2001) Commission from EST/Sloan Science and Technology Project – Tooth and Claw (2001) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play – Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,   adapted with Scott Greer, Tony Lawton, and Aaron Posner (2004) Frederick Loewe Award for Musical Theatre – A Wonderful Noise (2005) Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play – Opus (2006) Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship (2006) Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Citation –   Opus (2007) In the Spirit of America Award from the Barbara Barondess MacLean Foundation – A   Wonderful Noise (2008) Lucille Lortel Award Nomination, Outstanding Play – Opus (2008) Outer Critics Circle Award Nomination, John Gassner Award – Opus (2008) Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award – Opus (2009) Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play – Ghost-Writer (2011) Charles MacArthur Award Nomination for Outstanding New Play – Cyrano (2011)

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Chapter 3 A Conversation with Thomas Gibbons

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ince 1990, when his play Pretending to America premiered at InterAct Theatre Company, Tom Gibbons has been concerned with the social, cultural and political issues of our time. With a strong foundation in the Philadelphia community, he has brought focus not only to the controversies in this city but also to the struggles that affect us as Americans. His inspiration comes from real-life events that encourage us to contemplate conflicts over race, power, and identity. The issues he tackles are difficult and complex. Ultimately, he asks us not only to think and feel, but to imagine and allow for a change in our perceptions. As InterAct Theatre Company’s Playwright-in-Residence, Tom Gibbons continues to be a writer of conscience, impacting Philadelphia and the nation with his challenging work. BJB: Were you born in Philadelphia? TG: I was. I was born in Mayfair. BJB: Did you grow up here? TG: I grew up in King of Prussia. I went to Villanova. I’ve lived in the area my entire life. BJB: Do you remember the first play you saw as a young person? TG: I do. It was a high school production of Miracle Worker, and I went because my cousin was playing Helen Keller. I thought it was really fascinating, not so much the play itself, but I liked the play. I just thought it was really cool that this young woman who I knew as my cousin, who I’d known my whole life, was up on stage portraying this character. I have the feeling that I was maybe eight or nine or ten, somewhere in there. She went to high school in Havertown. And then I don’t think I saw another play after that until I was in college. I remember going to the Walnut Street Theatre to see a couple of O’Neill things because I was really into O’Neill, and that was when I really started going to the theatre, when I was in college.

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BJB: And you went to Villanova for what degree? TG: Liberal Arts. BJB: Was it during that time that you were inspired to write your first play? TG: Actually, I wrote a play in high school, but I really got seriously interested in theatre in college largely through just reading on my own. I was very interested in Eugene O’Neill, and then from there I started to branch out into other American playwrights and then some British playwrights, too. But the second play that I wrote – I wrote a play for a playwriting class taught by Pat Nolan – that was the play that the Philadelphia Company ended up doing, the play about John Merrick, The Exhibition. But I wrote it while I was in college in my senior year. BJB: And that Philadelphia Company became the Philadelphia Theatre Company. TG: Yeah. This was when they were just starting out. It was a non-Equity company. They had a tiny little theatre in a building that no longer exists on Broad Street, and I think it couldn’t have been more than three or four years old at that point. Bob Hedley [cofounder of the Philadelphia Theatre Company and currently Chair, Department of Theatre at Temple University] decided that he wanted to do a series of all new plays by local playwrights, and he was just handed the script. It sort of went through different hands. Pat Nolan gave it to the head of the theatre program at Villanova, who was Jim Christy at that point (I’m not quite sure), and then Jim Christy gave it to Bob Hedley because they knew each other, and so Bob gave it to another director who he was working with, and I got a call from this director six months after I turned the play in saying, “We want to do a reading of your play.” The reading went well, and they decided to produce it, and that happened, I guess, the following year. It got good reviews, it ended up being published, and I got an agent, and all of this was just total dumb luck. BJB: And you got an agent from this one play? TG: From the one play, yeah. BJB: That’s not the same agent you have now, right? TG: No, that was about five agents ago. But it was shear dumb luck. I didn’t even send it around to anybody. I’ve found over and over again how large a role shear dumb luck plays in a playwright’s career, probably in anybody’s career. But that’s how it happened. I didn’t actually start out to be or intend to be a playwright. I wanted to write novels, and I just kind of fell into it. That first production that the Philadelphia Company did, 52

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Lou Lippa was in it and Lanie Robertson, and it was such a tremendous experience that I felt that I had kind of settled into what I was supposed to be doing, and I never went back to writing fiction. I’ve been writing plays ever since. BJB: How did you become connected with InterAct? TG: I got connected because Seth [Rozin] and I both belonged to PlayWorks, the play development group that Christopher Rushton was heading. A writer would say, “I’ve got a script. Can you read it?” And they would meet, I guess, once a month, and would get some actors together and whoever was in the room would read a part. Seth happened to be there when they read one of my plays. I guess it was Pretending to America, and he liked it a lot and decided that he wanted to do it, and that’s how we hooked up. BJB: When you attended the O’Neill Conference, how was that experience for you? Was that for Black Russian? TG: Yeah, it was. I’d already been rejected at least five times to get into the O’Neill with other plays, and the year that I got in for Black Russian, the timing was terrible because my wife and I had a one and a half-year-old at that point, and I just applied because I thought, “Why not? I’ll never get it, but I’ll take one more shot at it.” Then they accepted me, and my wife said, “Look, you’ve been trying to get into this thing for years, so just don’t worry about me, just go and have a good time.” But it was hard on her. I mean, she had a one and a half-year-old. And you’re away for a month. The way it worked then was it was July, and even though your play wasn’t under active development for three of the four weeks, basically, you had a week of rehearsal and then two readings. But you were expected to be there for the entire month. I don’t know if that’s the rule now. I had a great experience, and the play really developed a lot because of it, but I just decided that I didn’t want to apply for any more residences. I don’t like being away for more than a few days. BJB: I want to ask you about your regular job that you’ve kept all these years, which I think has been very smart of you. TG: Well, it isn’t smart, it’s necessary. BJB: And you’re an editor? TG: Yeah. Sort of. BJB: I think it’s good you’ve been thinking practically like that. 53

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TG: Boy, I’d give it up in a second, if I could. If I could make a living as a playwright, I would give it up like that! I’ve been close. I always tell people that if I were living by myself in a lousy one-room apartment somewhere, I could support myself as a playwright. But that’s not my situation, so … BJB: When you’re starting to write your plays, how do they come to you? TG: Mostly, I think in some ways it comes out of a way or feeling that there is a question or an issue that I need to explore for my own sake because I don’t know how I feel about it. I’ll give you an example. With Bee-luther-hatchee, that came out of writing a couple of other earlier plays that dealt with racial issues and being confronted by people and asked the question, “You’re a white guy writing about these African American issues and African American characters. What makes you think you have the right to do that or the ability to do that?” I didn’t necessarily agree with the question because I don’t see those things primarily as African American or white. To me, they’re just American. But, nevertheless, because it was a question that people had asked me, I thought it was worth thinking about. Bee-luther-hatchee came out of wanting to address that whole question of who has the right to tell a story. That was the impulse for that play. That’s what the play’s about. The whole idea of authenticity and do you have to belong to a particular group in order to tell a story about that group because that was a question that was sort of very much in the air then and I think it still is. But, in the theatre and in arts in general, it’s very much in the air, and I was interested in exploring it because I was part of that, I guess, and I understood that at least some African American people were kind of skeptical about a subject like the MOVE bombings, for example, being addressed by a white writer. [In 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on the Osage Avenue residents of the radical MOVE organization, killing 11 people and destroying 61 homes.] BJB: Did you get criticism for that? TG: Yeah. Criticism, but more surprise and just the whole question of, “Why do you think you have the right because this is our story.” I always thought, “Well, it’s a story that happened in Philadelphia, and there are both white and black people involved in that story.” And, of course, maybe a black writer would approach it from a different perspective and do it completely differently. I mean, any writer would do it completely differently. But Bee-luther-hatchee came out of that whole experience of writing the MOVE play. BJB: I had that feeling when I saw Bee-luther-hatchee that this was somehow related to your experience. TG: In some ways, yeah. 54

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BJB: I think I first learned about you when the MOVE play, 6221, was produced. That play created great interest in you and your work. Do you remember that time? TG: Oh, yeah. Very clearly. BJB: How was that for you? TG: Terrifying. BJB: Because so much focus was on you? TG: Not because of that. It was exhilarating because Seth and I both felt that we were working on this project that we knew was going to have a lot of visibility and that people were going to see. Whether it was terrible or good or somewhere in between, we knew it was going to make a splash. And we felt very strongly that it was an important thing to do and that nobody else had done it. We thought, “Here’s this central story in modern Philadelphia history and nobody has touched it.” That’s not exactly true; Lamont Steptoe had written some poetry about it, but nobody was really interested in exploring it. And I give Seth all the credit in the world for wanting to do it. At that point InterAct was a very small company with very limited resources, and he kind of bet the bank on it. It was the only play he did that year. It was incredibly fascinating from the point of view of researching it while we were writing it because we were meeting with the MOVE members, and we met with Wilson Goode [Mayor of Philadelphia from 1984 to 1992], and we met with neighbors on Osage Avenue, and we met with members of the press and TV people who had been covering the story. We were trying to kind of come at it from all the angles that we could. We were giving all these people the script because if there was anything factually incorrect, we wanted them to correct it. We were also interested in getting their perspective on it, and we also wanted people to feel that we were being up front with them, particularly with the MOVE members because they, we both felt, had been drastically misrepresented in the press for a long time. They didn’t trust the press and didn’t really like dealing with them. We wanted them to feel that the play was going to be even-handed, that they would get a chance to tell their side. It was not that the play was going to come down on their side or say that this is the case where this black group was deliberately wiped out by the city, but we were just trying to address all the perspectives and really let the audience decide which one is believed. We met with the MOVE members quite a few times, and we gave them the script as it evolved, and they always had a chance to respond to particular scenes and whatever they wanted, and really, they were very cooperative. They gave us a lot of material that was not available anywhere else, and they let me incorporate it into the play, and it really enriched the play as a result. There were a few moments of particular events in the play or the way the play 55

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portrayed events they didn’t agree with. And we always said, “We’ll be perfectly happy to talk to you about it. You can tell us. You can give us your perspective. We’re not going to guarantee that we’re going to change it, but we’ll listen to you.” And in the end, I think they felt that we had been pretty fair and that the play really didn’t come down on any one side or the other. But then what was really exhilarating about it was the hoopla around it because all the papers sort of singled it out as the most daring production of the season, and we were getting interviewed, and that was really sort of the first time that happened. And I think for Seth, too, it was a case of suddenly everybody is looking at InterAct and what we were doing, and the entire theatre community was really interested in it, and the news media were interested in it. It was one of those moments when the theatre went out of the theatre and became something that affected the larger environment. It was terrifying because it was a big, very complex play, technically difficult, and it just seemed to be getting bigger the more we worked on it. It just kind of expanded and expanded. At that point, InterAct didn’t have any previews. I remember going to the dress rehearsal the night before we opened, and everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. It was just total chaos. I came home and my wife tells me I was just ashen. I said, “My career is over. This is going to be a disaster.” But then as it so often happens in the theatre, the bad dress rehearsal leads to a good show, and it was tremendous. Everything went right. I remember seeing that page in The [Philadelphia] Inquirer, where there was just this huge headline, and there was a review, and then there was an article about it, and I thought, “Wow! I’ve never seen this for a play in Philadelphia!” So, it was this huge thing and that was tremendous. We felt that all the hard work that we and everybody else involved with it had put into it had really paid off in this huge, undeniable way because Seth has always wanted to create theatre that is not just theatre but that is bigger than theatre and it gets people talking, and we certainly did it with that one. BJB: That wasn’t your first collaboration with Seth, though, was it? TG: No. He had done Pretending to America before that. So, it was the second time we had worked together. We have always been in sync about the kind of theatre we’re interested in and want to create, and so that whole experience could have been very difficult if it hadn’t been for the fact that we were really very clear about what we wanted to do, and we agreed about what we wanted to do, and it was a real collaboration between a writer and a director in a very genuine way that doesn’t always happen. BJB: Seth has spoken about your being very conscious about presenting all sides of the issues. Do you still work that way? TG: Yeah, I do, and I feel that’s important because I’ve seen so many plays, and I guess we all have, that are basically kind of agitprop. You go in and you know exactly who 56

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you’re supposed to root for; you know who’s right, who’s wrong; you know how you’re supposed to feel. And, to me, I find that completely boring. Not only boring, but false. Life is just not that simple, and I’m not interested in that. When I go into the theatre, I want to be made to look at something in a new way, and if a play doesn’t do that, and if it doesn’t even attempt to do that, then I feel cheated, and I don’t think that a lot of plays try that. Too often it’s already been decided before you even go into the theatre. I resent that. I want to decide. I think the role of the theatre is not to answer questions; it’s to ask questions. The audience answers the questions. BJB: How do you see your role as a playwright? To ask those questions? TG: Yeah. To me, I see my role as complicating things or maybe pointing out how complicated things are, particularly when you’re dealing with political issues because there’re always people on all sides who are trying to simplify things to the point of completely falsifying them. BJB: You mean like totally black or totally white and nothing in between? TG: Exactly. I’ve always felt that the most important role of art, and there are lots of roles of art, and I’m not saying that art shouldn’t just entertain and amuse and uphold and uplift and be beautiful. All of those things are important, but to me, the most important thing is to repeatedly point out how difficult and complex things are and how what we see as simple is really ambiguous and full of nuance, and that’s really where life resides, in all that ambiguity and nuance. It seems that the media and all of popular culture are always pushing us in the direction of being simple. And to me, art is exactly the opposite. It should be pushing us in the direction of the real complexity of life. BJB: How did Black Russian evolve for you? TG: After the MOVE play, I found that I was really fascinated by the whole concept of race, and I began looking at everything through that lens, and because of the experience that we had in rehearsal, white actors and the African American actors having really drastically different perspectives on all the bombings and what had happened that day and the whole history of MOVE in Philadelphia, and rehearsals were frequently very tense because of that. I had never really realized before that there was a huge divide between the white experience in America and the African American experience, and so I became fascinated by that. I just thought that people weren’t really paying enough attention to that, and I really began to look consciously and wanted to address that in the theatre and look for stories that I thought had not been told. I just happened to come across a book by this Russian woman who was a black Russian. She sort of 57

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told the story of her grandfather, who was a guy named Oliver Golden, who was an African American agronomist, who went to Russia to develop a new strain of cotton. You just can’t make things like that up. I just thought, “I’ve never heard of this!” First of all, the historical irony of that just kind of overwhelmed me, but I saw it also as a way of looking at the whole conflict between America and Russia through this really bizarre, unexpected lens that nobody knew about – of the fact that there were African Americans who went to Russia – and that this particular story was a way of kind of getting at not only America versus Russia, but black and white, the whole question of what does it mean to be an American, what does it mean to be a black American, but telling it through this completely unknown and unexpected angle. So, I did a lot of research about the history of the Communist Party in America, particularly how they tried to appeal to African Americans. The character in the play of Gene Smith is a somewhat fictionalized take on Oliver Golden, but Oliver Golden was a real person, and I just thought it was a really fascinating way of combining those two stories, and again, complicating the whole question of what does it mean to be an American. It’s a lot more complicated for some people anyway. So that’s what that play came out of. BJB: Do you write for specific actors? TG: Definitely. I do, even really beginning with Black Russian because I wrote the part of the son for Frank [X] because he’s really the only person who could do that, and I’d already worked with Frank in Pretending to America, and Frank is just one of greatest actors I’ve ever seen. So, yeah, I wrote the part of the son in Black Russian for him. Then with Bee-luther-hatchee, I wrote the part of Libby for Cathy Simpson because I’d seen her at some things at InterAct, and she was in 6221, of course. I knew I wanted to have her do something. Tim Moyer – I’d seen him in a lot of things. But I really started doing that more with Permanent Collection because the way that play started was I had an image of Frank on stage standing there in a very expensive suit and that whole opening monologue. It was just one of those moments when the character just starts talking and you just write it down. I changed it very little from the very first thing I wrote to the final version of the play. The only thing I changed was I took it out of first person and put it in second person. But that came out of an image of Frank, so I was specifically writing that particular part for Frank, and then Paul Barrow, I wrote that for Tim, and so that was very much a question of writing for those particular guys. BJB: And you wrote the monologue for Permanent Collection before you wrote the rest of the play? The monologue came to you first? TG: It did, yeah. It was funny how it happened. I was working on another play at the time. This was when the whole Barnes thing was going on, and I was just tremendously fascinated by that whole story, and I think on some level I kind of recognized that I was 58

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going to end up writing about it. But I was working on another play that had nothing to do with it, and I took a day off from that play just because this monologue came to me so strongly I just had to get it down, and then we were doing a reading of Act One of this other play. It was very strange because one of the parts in the play was written for Catharine Slusar, so we all went to her house, and she was reading one of the parts, and Tim was reading one of the parts, and Frank was reading one of the parts. It was a play that sort of had interconnected monologues with three characters, and it wasn’t good. They were reading it, and I was sitting there thinking, “This just doesn’t work.” But, I had typed up the monologue from Permanent Collection and brought it with me. Everybody was sitting around after the reading, and they just kind of tore apart the play that they had been reading. So just before everybody left, I said, “Well, could you just humor me?” I gave this thing to Frank, and I said, “Well, would you mind just reading this?” So, he read it and after about five seconds I knew that this was the play I was going to write, and I think after about ten seconds everybody else knew I was going to be writing the play, too, and they wanted me to write that play because at the end, there was just this great moment. So, I just threw the other play away, and I started working on Permanent Collection the next day. But it did come out of an image of Frank. BJB: Did you hear any response from the Barnes Foundation? TG: This was when Kimberly Camp was still the director. So, Seth and I, as is our want, we went to her and said, “We’re doing this play. It’s inspired by the Barnes. It’s not a history. It’s not a documentary. We are taking liberties, but this is what we’re doing.” So, we met with her and had a nice meeting and we gave her the script. Then she called me back, I guess a couple of weeks later, and said that she kind of disagreed with certain things, and I said, “Well, I understand what you’re saying, but again, this is not a documentary. We’re not presenting this as the history of the Barnes. We changed the names clearly and in the program we said this is fictional. It’s inspired. We are making up things.” We weren’t writing about a parking lot. That wasn’t the story to me. But, just before the play opened, she gave an interview to one of the local papers in which she basically blasted us and said some not complimentary things, which I wasn’t upset about because I thought, “Wow! Okay! Controversy!” Controversy sells tickets. So that didn’t bother me. And then after that, I know that there were some people from the Barnes who came to see it, and I heard that some of them liked it, some of them didn’t, which is fine. But we didn’t have any official contact with the Barnes after that. BJB: Do you know if anything you’ve written has changed something in the real world? TG: Not so much that A House With No Walls changed things, but InterAct produced the play when there was this whole question of was there going to be some kind 59

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of commemorative site about the nine slaves and what form would it take. [An archeological excavation in Philadelphia at the President’s House where George Washington presided from 1790 to1797 revealed the quarters for nine slaves. The controversy involved a plan to build on top of the slaves’ quarters. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported the story in 2002.] And so, it just kind of happened right in the middle of that whole discussion. Michael Coard from the Avenging Ancestors Coalition came and did some talkbacks. So, when the Park Service had a press conference announcing the winning design, they actually called InterAct and asked if a couple of the actors could come to the press conference and do a couple of scenes with Oney and Austin. It’s not that we made them decide one thing or the other, but it was nice that they included us because we felt that we had sort of raised the issue in a very good way. So it was nice to be at this press conference and think, “Well, okay. In some small way, we’re a part of this.” BJB: Then some scenes were used in the Fourth of July celebration. TG: Yeah, so that was cool. One of the things when you’re writing about race and living in Philadelphia is it’s a great city to raise that question because it’s all around you. It’s around you just when you walk down the street, but it’s in the buildings, it’s in the history, it’s just so much a part of the fabric of Philadelphia that I’m surprised more people don’t write more about it. BJB: So living in Philadelphia has definitely impacted your writing. TG: Very much. I mean, the MOVE and the Barnes and A House With No Walls are very specifically Philadelphia subjects. BJB: How were you first inspired to write A House With No Walls? Was there an incident or was it because of what was happening there? TG: It was what was happening there because the building that I work in actually looks right down on that whole site. I could literally see it out my window. At that point I was kind of just finishing up Permanent Collection, and I was wondering what I was going to write next, and all of this was going on. I think at that point I realized that what I was writing was a series of connected plays, and that a play about this whole question would be sort of the next logical thing. I started with the conscious thought that this was a trilogy that I was writing, and that this play was the third play in the trilogy. I hadn’t been aware of that with Permanent Collection, but once Permanent Collection was up, I thought, “These plays are definitely connected, not just by the fact that they have white and African American characters, but they’re really about the same central issue; they’re just looking at it from different windows.” 60

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BJB: Before you’ve finished one play, do you feel like another play is coming up? TG: Not always. BJB: Do you have breaks in between? TG: I wouldn’t call them breaks. I would call them more like horrible agonies of wondering if I’m ever going to get another idea for a play because I’m in that right now. Sometimes I know what I’m going to work on next, sometimes I don’t. It’s more pleasant to know. I always feel jealous of those writers who have three or four things lined up. I wish I could do that. BJB: Do you send any work out yourself, or is it all sent out through your agent? TG: I don’t send anything out now. My agent does that, and that’s been true for the past couple of plays. I think Bee-luther-hatchee was the last one I really sent out on my own. BJB: Your plays have been produced all over the country. Have you been to some of these theatres to see your work? TG: I’ve seen quite a few of them. I’ve seen a couple productions that weren’t very good, but I’ve seen more productions that were really good. And to me, it’s one of the most enjoyable parts of being a playwright when a theatre says, “Well, we’ll bring you in if you want to see the production.” I love that. I’m always up for that, and I love seeing what other people bring to the plays. I’m always looking for somebody who shows me something in a play that I didn’t know was there. They do a moment differently or a character, whatever. Then, I’m really thrilled about that. I always love that, and I’ve been lucky enough to see that quite a few times. BJB: Do you see anything in the business or on the artistic side of playwriting that has changed through the years? TG: That’s a good question. Well, one thing I’ve noticed. It seems to be now that if you’re a young playwright you have to get a master’s degree if you’re going to be taken seriously. I’m probably the last generation that that was not true for. I don’t particularly think that’s a good thing. People complain about theatres becoming much more conservative and much less willing to take risks, which I think is true. It’s almost impossible to get large cast plays produced. I’m not so sure it was ever really easy to do, but I think there was more of a willingness to do that 20 or 30 years ago. But now, it’s almost impossible particularly for young writers. They just won’t even consider writing a play that has more 61

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than four [characters], and that’s a shame because I think you really lose. That’s why you see so many plays about dysfunctional families. It’s very hard to write about larger issues if you don’t have the people, if you don’t have the bodies on stage. You can do it, but it’s much harder. It just seems to me that theatres, for what I’m sure they perceive as not only good reasons but total economic necessity, are just not willing to take chances. BJB: Do you think about that with your own work? TG: Yeah, you have to think about it. The play I’m working on now is actually for seven actors, so I guess I don’t think about it. I mean I think about it, but … I would love to write a play for 20 actors. I won’t do that. And again, this is one of the ways that Seth is so unusual. The MOVE play has 15 actors. I’m probably one of the few playwrights in the country who’s ever written a play with 15 actors and got it produced. And it’s important, I think. You learn a lot by writing for that many people. The University of the Arts did a production of it, and they actually had more actors. They had something like 23 actors. Johnnie Hobbs directed it and I went to see it. They did a great job, and at the end they were stretched from one side of the stage to the other, and I thought, “Wow! I never see this!” Maybe for Shakespeare, but I never see this for a new play, and I felt bad that most of the contemporary playwrights, in America anyway, just don’t get that because I think it’s important to learn from it. There’s a whole kind of epic ambition that you really can only have, you can only write on that scale, if you have the actors. BJB: Do you see a lot of plays in Philadelphia? Do you get to New York at all? TG: I haven’t been to see anything in New York in years. For one thing, I wish I lived closer to Chicago because Chicago is really where things are happening. I don’t see as many things as I should see. Every year I make a list of all the things in Philadelphia that I want to see, and then I only end up going to see a fraction of them partly because I have family demands and my job, and I don’t have whole lot of time, and I have to do my own work, too. BJB: What about the time crunch and trying to find time to write? TG: It’s hard. It’s hard. BJB: Do you feel like it’s a fight all the time? TG: It’s always a fight, yeah. When I’m working on a project, I get up at four in the morning, and I write for a couple of hours before I go to my job. I have an hour for lunch, and sometimes I write on my lunch hour, but I wish I didn’t have to get up at 62

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four in the morning although it has a lot to recommend it. I’ve never in my life just had unlimited time to write, to be a full-time writer, and I don’t expect that I ever will. The only time I ever did it was when I was at the O’Neill Conference. That was it. It was a month. It was great. It was really wonderful, but it was an unreal world. I’m thinking, now that my son is older, that maybe I’ll start applying for writer residencies and things like that where I could go away for a couple of weeks and focus. My wife is an artist, and I’m encouraging her to apply for those things, too, because it’s just as important for her. She has the same time crunch that I have. BJB: Is there an easy part of writing for you? TG: The easiest part for me and the part that I always love doing is the research. To me, that’s just the fun part. If I’m basing the play on some historical subject, like with A House With No Walls, reading about Washington and reading about his relationship with his slaves, and then I started reading about the entire history of slavery in the United States. I’d read that stuff just for my own education anyway, but to be reading it with an eye to looking for the details that might actually work themselves into a play, I love that. There comes a point where I just have to say, “I’m really getting carried away with the research here. I actually need to write the play.” With Silverhill, I had to do a lot of research about the history of utopian movements in the United States because the play is about a utopian movement. It’s this rich, almost completely unknown history. There have been a lot of communistic societies in the United States, particularly in the 19th century, and they’ve just been written out of history. Silverhill is based on the history of the Oneida Community. They were a religious, communistic group in upstate New York in the 19th century. They based their religion on the Bible; they were Christians. They didn’t base it on Marx, and they practiced something that they called “complex marriage.” We would call it “free love.” I can’t even begin to tell you how fascinating it is. You read about this, and you think, “These guys actually existed in America?” They were just unbelievably radical. The community group in the play is called Silverhill. The actual group was called the Oneida Community. There were a lot of these groups around. They were one of the largest and the most successful. And, after about 30 years, the founder of the group, a guy named John Noyes, was getting older and wanted to pass their leadership on to his son, and there were also various conflicts between the generations. Some people wanted to continue with complex marriage, and the younger members, ironically enough, wanted monogamy. So this was sort of a case, and this is in the play, too, where the older members are the radicals, and the younger ones want to reject that radicalism and return to something more traditional. But also the community was quite wealthy, and so there was some dissention about how they were going to deal with all the wealth. They had somewhere between 250 and 300 members. They took a vote about whether they were going to continue as a communistic group or become a corporation, and 63

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they chose to become a corporation. So, if you go into supermarkets now, you will find silverware and dishes made by the Oneida Corporation. The corporation still exists, but it started out as this amazingly radical communistic, free commune. The play is a somewhat fictionalized version of what led up to that vote. To me, I’ve come to see that as one of those little-known pivotal moments in American history, when American history could have gone one way, when Christianity could have essentially opposed itself to unrestrained capitalism and positioned itself as an alternative and as a criticism of capitalism, and instead, it chose to align itself with capitalism with the result that I see today, which is American Christianity is essentially a wholly-owned subsidiary of capitalism and ignores the gaping contradictions between capitalism and the Bible and the rejection of wealth. So the play is about this moment and why did it go that way. What were the internal forces within the group, and why did the vote go that way, and what was lost? And it seems very timely to me. BJB: I’m still thinking about the silverware. I always thought the Oneidas were Native Americans. TG: There was an Oneida tribe, but they didn’t have anything to do with the community. As I said, there were lots of these groups around. The Shakers were one; they’re the only ones left, actually. There’s apparently a Shaker community up in New England somewhere. There’re, like, half a dozen members. That’s all, and they’re all pretty old. They were on the other end of the spectrum because the Shakers practiced celibacy, but they’re also socialists. When you read about the history of these groups, you realize that 19th century America was a very radical time. There were all kinds of radical social experiments going on. There were a lot of people who rejected capitalism in favor of something else. It wasn’t all based on the Bible. Some of them were political communists, some of them were philosophical communists, some of them were religious communists, but they came at it from all different angles, and they formed all these different communities, and for various reasons they didn’t last. BJB: What’s your next upcoming project? TG: Over the past few years I’ve been thinking increasingly about the future – specifically, what kind of future are we leaving to our children? Out of that has come a play called Uncanny Valley. It’s about the relationship between Julian, a nonbiological human, and Claire, a neuroscientist who, essentially, is teaching him how to be human. Julian is going to have the consciousness of a terminally ill, wealthy man downloaded into him. The play takes place in the not-too-distant future, but researchers are exploring this kind of technology right now. To me, it raises all kinds of fascinating questions: What do we mean by “consciousness”? What defines a human being? Who will have the opportunity to extend their life span in this way? 64

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BJB: Didn’t I read that 6221 was optioned? Have you had other plays optioned for film? TG: Bee-luther-hatchee was, but nothing ever came of it. Somebody optioned it. It was an independent production company, and they had a director lined up, and they sounded like they were pretty serious. They didn’t give me a lot of money; it was just a few thousand dollars. That was really sort of my first experience with whole option/film thing because they (this production company and my agent) negotiated literally for a year to come up with this contract. It’s not like I made $100,000; I think the option was $5,000. The deal was that I would write a treatment, so I wrote the treatment, and I sent it to them, and they sent it back, and said, “What about if we do this and this and this?” So, I wrote another treatment, and I think I wrote about three of them, and then at one point they came to New York, the head of this company, with the director. They brought me up to New York, and we stayed in a hotel, and we just kind of brainstormed for a couple days about ways that the project could go because there were things in the play that would be hard to film, and there were certain other directions that they wanted to go. So then I did another treatment, and I didn’t hear anything from them for a long time, and then my agent called me, and essentially what they wanted to do was basically give me a couple more thousand dollars to walk away from it because they really wanted to go in a very different direction. The idea was once we arrived at a treatment that everybody liked that I would write the screenplay, but they wanted to find another writer. I thought at this point, “This is never going to happen. I’ll take the few thousand dollars. I’d be happy to take the money.” I said [to my agent], “Sure. Get as much as you can.” Then I heard later that they got another writer; they wanted to get an African American screenwriter. I don’t think they liked it very much, and so the option lapsed and that was the end of it. I came away from it thinking, you know, there’s this whole sense of writing by committee that goes on in the movies, and I’m just not interested. So that was the end of it. If somebody else wanted to option Permanent Collection, I would be perfectly happy to take a few thousand dollars for it, but I would think, you know, sure, it’s like free money. They’ll never do anything with it, but I’m not interested in writing a screenplay or even seeing it in a movie. BJB: Are there other playwrights who inspire you? You mentioned O’Neill before. TG: I’m very inspired by David Hare. Not so much now, but when I was just getting interested in theatre, I was tremendously influenced by Edward Bond. And in fact in general, I’ve been very influenced by the British socialist playwrights who came up in the ’70s: David Hare, Howard Brenton, David Edgar. People like that had a huge influence on me much more so than American playwrights. They, of course, were all influenced by Brecht. It’s this whole idea of not writing about purely personal 65

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psychology but using theatre as a way of looking at the larger society. That, to me, has always been the most interesting use of theatre, and for me, it still is. BJB: Is most of your work produced in the regions? TG: Yep. I think that there are advantages and disadvantages to not being done in New York. I think one of the advantages is that we all know that if a new play goes to New York and it gets bad reviews, it’s dead essentially. I think there’s a lot to be said for not letting it be done in New York because if you send it around to the various theatres they have to make up their own minds about it, and I think that frequently works to a playwright’s advantage. The disadvantage, of course, is that you have a much lower visibility if you’re not done in New York, and there’re certain things, awards, that you’ll just not be considered for. But I think, on the whole, like most Philadelphians, I know that New York’s highly overrated! [Laughs] BJB: When you’re in rehearsal, how much of the play do you change? Do you change a lot of it, or is it essentially the way you want it to be when you get to that point? TG: No, it’s not the way I want it to be, and I keep working on a play after the first three or four productions sometimes, if I’m lucky enough to get three or four. I don’t change a lot in rehearsal because it’s hard for me at least to feel like I have enough time to really think about what I need to do. To me, rehearsal is more of a matter of sort of putting patches on a play and Band-Aids just to kind of make it work for that evening. I’m always very aware of the fact that what people are seeing is this kind of misshapen thing with a lot of Band-Aids sticking all over it. At least that’s how I perceive it, and then I usually will go back after the first production at InterAct and do quite a bit of rewriting to get it ready for another production. I think with Permanent Collection, it was after it was done four times that I felt that I had finally gotten the script to where I was able to say, “Okay, this is done.” And the same thing with A House With No Walls. I rewrote that quite a bit after the InterAct production. BJB: Do you ever work with a dramaturg, or is it mostly with Seth? TG: It’s mostly with Seth. I worked with a dramaturg for the reading at Philadelphia Theatre Company. They assigned me somebody, and it was kind of a new thing for me to work with a dramaturg, and I liked it. She asked me good questions, which is maybe what dramaturgs are most useful for. BJB: What kind of advice would you give to playwrights who are trying to get their work produced? 66

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TG: I would say you very seriously, purely for career reasons, have to think about getting an M.F.A. I think that it’s a huge disadvantage not to do that, from what I understand, and basically there are like four programs – there’s Yale, there’s Columbia, there’s Juilliard, Brown – but everybody sort of knows which are the prestigious ones. I don’t believe that, but … putting aside the question of what you learn or don’t learn, it’s the fact that you make contacts, and they kind of funnel you from being in the playwright program. From the playwright program at Yale, you go to being a literary associate at some big theatre in New York, and all along the way you’re making contacts that are essentially impossible to make for somebody who’s outside that little circle. So, if somebody asks me, I would say, “Look, I don’t know if these programs are any good. I don’t particularly believe that they’ll make you a better writer, but purely for career reasons, you have to do that.” I don’t like that, but that’s the reality. I didn’t go to graduate school for playwriting. I think that writers should do what they’ve always done: go out into the world. The world is your classroom. I really hate the fact, I think it’s very destructive, the way that playwrights go from college to graduate school, and then so many of them go into the academy, into the academic world, to teach playwriting. I think it’s really been very destructive to the theatre. Everybody talks about [how] people don’t go to the theatre anymore because there’re so many other forms of entertainment that are competing with the theatre. I don’t think that’s the case. I think they don’t go to the theatre because so many plays are boring and trivial. People will go to the theatre if they see something that’s ambitious and that takes chances, and particularly, they will go to the theatre to see things that they cannot see anywhere else. But there are so many plays now that are basically TV writing. Why should audiences go to see that stuff, particularly if they have to pay $40 or $50 or $60? Why should they? Boy, I could go on like this for a long time! I think what we’re seeing in the theatre is what’s happened with American fiction because fiction writers went through this – this whole being absorbed by the academy. They went through it like a generation before. There’s a statistic now that there are 5,000 serious readers of fiction in the United States. I think that the problem when you go into the academy is that you end up writing about the academy. You become an English professor writing about English professors for English professors. Most people are not English professors and aren’t particularly interested in the travails of English professors. And so, what’s happened is that as fiction becomes more academic and abstruse, it loses the readership, and I think that this is partly what’s going on in the theatre now. We’re seeing a lot of plays, I read a lot of plays, that are technically impeccable. They’ve got all the attention to subtext and all that crap, but they’re boring. The language is boring, the characters are boring, and the concerns of them are boring. And I think we are boring our audiences, and so they’re leaving. That’s just how I feel. I think theatre should pick you up and throw you against the wall and turn you upside down and make you look at the world in a new way and make you feel in a new way. If it doesn’t do that, then what’s the point? I just can’t stand theatre that doesn’t have ambition. 67

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BJB: Are there certain issues that continue to inspire you? TG: Since I’m not writing about race anymore, I think I’m going to end up writing about money. That’s very much what Silverhill is about. It’s about money and what is our relationship [to money], and what is the relationship between money and wealth and our lives. How can we lead a life that isn’t exclusively concerned with money? I’m doing some reading about economic history of the United States and how we have gotten into this situation that we are in now, not simply a recession, but this situation in which there is this enormous gap between one tenth of one percent of the people at the top and everybody else, and how destructive that is to a sane society and a democracy, and how we are going to handle it. I seem to be thinking about this a lot, this whole subject of money. BJB: Well, that’s a good subject, very relevant. TG: Money is always relevant! BJB: Could you speak about the themes in your work? TG: One of them is the persistence of the weight of history on the present. That’s something that’s always fascinated me, and that’s in all of my plays that the past is not the past, that it continues to weigh on us and affect us in ways that we’re really not even aware of. America has always seen itself as a country that is not interested in the past. We’re interested in the present and even more in the future. It’s always been a country where people could go to escape their past. But you can’t. There’s no escaping the past. The whole question of the relationship between whites and African Americans. Is there any relationship in American life that’s more burdened by the past? And it’s so strange to hear people talk about, “Well, maybe we’re in this post-racial society.” Well, we’re going to be in this post-racial society for another 300 years, if then. You don’t escape the past that easily. So that’s definitely one theme. Sometimes it’s not as obvious in some of the plays as others. In A House With No Walls, it’s going back and forth between the past and the present, and Black Russian does that, too. But even in Permanent Collection, there’s that whole unspoken weight of the past that’s always at play whenever Sterling speaks. In that whole first monologue, he’s talking about this particular instance of him being stopped by a policeman, but every actor I’ve ever talked to who’s played that part, that’s the first thing they say to me: “That happened to me” or “It’s happened to me a dozen times.” Every single one, which I guess leads to one of the other themes which is, as I mentioned earlier, this huge divide between the white experience in America and the black experience, and how so many white people have no understanding at all of the black experience, what it’s like to be black in America. They have no  understanding of it and not much 68

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curiosity, which is, again, part of our history. It’s part of the ongoing tragedy of race in this country. BJB: Do you see an improvement at all, a moving toward better understanding? TG: In some ways, maybe. I think it’s impossible to deny the fact that we elected an African American president. That’s something. That’s a big thing. But then what we also see is some people, I think, essentially showing that they are unable to accept that we have an African American as a president. I think that’s what’s behind all this [controversy]. But I do think that those people are a very small minority. They get a lot of attention because the news media loves conflict and they shout a lot, but I think it’s impossible to deny that the election of Obama is a huge step forward, maybe only the first of hundreds and hundreds of huge steps forward that we have to make. BJB: What do you think makes a good director? TG: I’ll talk about Seth because Seth, to me, is a great director. It’s somebody, first of all, who is not going to do a number on a play. He’s not going to impose an artificial vision on the play but really wants to serve the play, bring out what the play is about and what the writer is trying to say. With that said, it is somebody who clearly has a lot of experience. It’s somebody who is capable of understanding how a particular play works and what the themes are and finding corollaries to that in what he or she does, and I think Seth is really great at that. In some ways, the best directors are the ones you don’t notice. It’s easy, I think, to do some kind of really flashy, attention-getting thing. It’s harder to do something that serves the play and really puts the play forward in the best possible way so that you’re not aware of the directorial touches and you’re not aware of something being imposed. Also, you know, directors can distract an audience from the flaws of the play, and that’s frequently a good thing if they can do that. The relationship that Seth and I have is kind of ideal because we’re completely in sync about what we want to do, and that comes out of the fact that we’ve known each other for so long and worked so long together. It’s not always possible to have that with somebody you’re meeting for the first time. There’s always a certain amount of feeling each other out, and what you can say, how blunt you can be; whereas with Seth, we just say what we think. We’ve gotten past all that ego stuff. Frequently, we don’t even have to say anything at all. Sometimes we’ll do a reading and I’ll just look at Seth and I can just tell from his expression that he doesn’t like that line or something’s wrong, or I can look at him and know, “Okay. This is good.” I feel very lucky that I’ve had that relationship for a long time, and I think it’s really what all playwrights should have, and I don’t think too many get that. It’s really crucial [for playwrights] to be part of a company. 69

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Historically, that’s the way it’s been, and that’s the way it should be. InterAct has been really great to me as a playwright because it’s helped me develop my craft, and it’s helped me get my plays out there. At the same time, I think it’s benefited InterAct, too. It’s raised InterAct’s visibility. It’s gotten their name around as a theatre that does new plays. So, it’s really been a mutually beneficial relationship, and every playwright should have that. BJB: Do you have any thoughts on how that could happen? TG: Well, it would be great, I think, if every theatre company committed themselves to forming a relationship with preferably a local playwright because I think you really need that kind of intensive contact with a writer that you can only get if somebody’s in the area. And it’s even better if you can actually be on staff like Lou Lippa is at People’s Light. BJB: Even if it were for a year or a couple of years. TG: I think theatres should do that as a matter of course. BJB: That would be great. Thomas Gibbons – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays 6221 A House With No Walls Axis Sally Bee-luther-hatchee Black Russian Permanent Collection Pretending to America Silverhill Uncanny Valley Awards Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – Fellowships in Playwriting – 7 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Fund for New American Plays – Axis Sally (1993) Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play – Black Russian (1997) Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1997) 70

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Finalist for American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award – Black Russian (1998) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play – Bee-luther-hatchee (1999) Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play – Permanent Collection (2004) NAACP Theatre Award – Permanent Collection (2006) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play – A House With No Walls (2007)

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Chapter 4 A Conversation with Seth Rozin

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lthough best known as the Producing Artistic Director of InterAct Theatre Company, Seth Rozin is also an award-winning director and playwright. His plays are being produced not only at InterAct but also at theatres across the country in locations like New York, Chicago, Seattle, Kansas City, and West Palm Beach. Most importantly, however, for the last several years he has been perhaps the most important force in support of playwrights and new play development in Philadelphia. His connections to theatre artists as well as to leaders in cultural institutions have led to better communication and positive growth both locally and nationally. In addition, he has been instrumental in founding the National New Play Network and the newly formed Philadelphia New Play Initiative. I spoke to Seth in the middle of his workday at InterAct. BJB: You were born in Philadelphia, correct? SR:

I was actually born at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. I grew up about two blocks from City Line, on the non-Philadelphia side in Merion, and I went to Penn for college, and ever since I’ve been in Philadelphia. I lived in West Philly during my Penn years and then moved into Center City, and have been in Center City and then South Philly for the rest of my adult life.

BJB: Were you encouraged in the arts as a child? SR:

Very much so. My parents were both very creative. My father is a psychology professor but a closet artist in many ways, including always wanting to write lyrics to a musical, and my mother was a writer, originally of fiction, but ultimately a culinary historian and author of several cookbooks. And they were very encouraging of me and my siblings to pursue our talents, without regard for the issues that would face us later in life, basically, because they didn’t understand the realities of pursuing a life in the arts in the 21st century.

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BJB: Do you remember seeing your first play? SR:

You know, I don’t remember what it was that I saw first. I performed in plays pretty early. I remember I was in a show about littering in sixth grade. One of my childhood mentors was Henry Gleitman, who was a psychology professor with my father. He was also a director and he had a group of actors, young actors mostly in high school, that would come over to his house once a week and work on Gilbert and Sullivan and other texts, and I was the young’un in the group, so I learned a little bit through that, both with the older actors and through him. I do have a few memories from when I was younger of shows I saw, but I couldn’t tell you what the first one was and most of them were probably musicals.

BJB: How were you inspired to write your first play? SR:

Well, I’d grown up writing lots of things but never plays. I’d written comedy sketches throughout my life and lyrics to songs. I rewrote the lyrics to songs all the time, you know, comedically, with a lot of success but never expected or even desired to write a full-length play. After starting InterAct in 1988, a number of things happened that led me, ultimately, to being interested in writing. The first was that I met Tom Gibbons, who was somewhat of an established writer when I met him, and we found ourselves very much in sync in our aesthetic and the kind of theatre that we wanted to work on. So he became our resident playwright here at InterAct, and we have ever since been a really strong collaborative team of director and playwright. Through working with Tom, I developed (a) some sense of craft by just working with someone who had a lot of craft, and (b) a sense of what worked in a play and my own sensibilities about what works, and while doing that I was reading a lot of plays for InterAct as we were getting more interested in new work, and as I’m reading them I’m saying to myself, “Boy, a lot of these plays aren’t very good. The craft isn’t good, the ideas aren’t good, the writing is just not up to snuff.” It made me appreciate Tom, but it also made me think, “I have some ideas here and there, and maybe I should eventually put one of them down.” So there was one idea that had been nagging at me and felt very much like something I could write. I actually started writing it in the fall of 1989, but I kind of ditched it. I just wrote like a scene … and it was finished 12 years later! That was my first play. It was called Men of Stone, and it was a play that ultimately got produced here at Theatre Catalyst with Henry Gleitman as director. When I read through it, it felt better than much of what I’d read for InterAct. It did pretty well here, so that encouraged me to keep writing. And, ever since then, I’ve felt that I have something to offer. Because I started late, I feel like I’m rushing to get things out now. I have two or three projects at a time, and I’ve been pretty prolific in the 14 years since I started writing really seriously. And I’ve had a lot of success, so I’m feeling very encouraged by that, and each play feels like a dramatic leap forward for me in understanding how to do it. It’s the hardest thing to do, that’s for sure. [Laughs] 76

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BJB: Did you direct before you wrote? SR:

Oh, I directed well before I wrote. I directed in high school, two or three full productions, and knew I wanted to direct early on. That was sort of unquestioned. I even know that while writing is a growing part of what I do and what I want to be about, I don’t think I could ever give up directing because of the social part of it. Working with actors is so fundamentally rewarding to me that I don’t think I could ever give it up. So I started [directing] in high school and have done that straight through, and I have become mostly interested in new work, not necessarily working on a brand new play but working on a play that hasn’t been done a lot of times. In fact, I’ve directed very, very, very few classics, a couple of modern classics, but most of what I’ve done has been extremely new, and I like that. I’m not at all drawn to things that have been directed hundreds of times.

BJB: And running a theatre is a huge responsibility! SR:

Yeah! [Laughs]

BJB: Do you want to talk about that? SR:

It is a huge responsibility, and I feel very lucky. This is definitely my calling. It’s what feeds my soul. And so, yes, the responsibility is great because of course when you start a theatre, you come to realize very soon into it that you’re always the one who’s going to care the most. No one will care as much as you. And that’s hard because it means that in the down times when other people peel away to do other things, you’re left having to decide whether it’s worth going on or not. And I’ve always made that decision to go on, but it gets harder all the time. The climate has changed dramatically and not in one linear way since we started. We started in the late 1980s when money was aplenty actually and competition was very low. There was very little professional competition in Philadelphia, and there were a lot of opportunities to raise money, and then very quickly that changed. The theatre scene boomed, so the competition steadily has grown, which I think has been terrific for Philadelphia. But the money has gone down, so it has gotten harder and harder. At the same time, our mission has become more and more distinct, and we have become more and more valued, I think, for that mission. The other thing that’s happened is I’ve become more and more immersed in new work, not only as a writer but in trying to lead the effort both locally and nationally around new plays – locally by my work with InterAct and the Philadelphia New Play Initiative, and by having writers that we sponsor, and obviously producing and developing a lot of writers; and nationally, I’ve been involved with the National New Play Network as a founder and as president, and that’s been a big love of mine. It’s something that I think has had a huge impact on the field nationally. We have put 77

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some things into motion that have fundamentally changed the mindset about new plays, particularly the idea of “rolling” world premieres and the continued life of plays as opposed to “world premieres” where everybody wants the first production and nobody wants to touch it after. We have successfully begun to influence the field with the idea that multiple productions of the same new play, if committed to up front, is a great thing for everybody. BJB: How risky does this feel to you, doing new work? People at some theatres say that doing new plays is such a big risk for them. SR:

My attitude is that for a company that’s not doing much new work, that’s doing more mainstream tried and true things, yes, of course it’s a risk. There’s no doubt about it. But if it’s what you want to do, you can do it. I think there’s an economy to anything you do in terms of the marketplace. We’re part of the marketplace. You can start a theatre whose mission is to throw chairs at the audience randomly, but you have to accept what the amount of money is you could generate doing that kind of theatre. The answer is very little. So, if you’re willing to do theatre for very little with no audience and no support, you can do the plays about throwing chairs. If you want to do musical comedies that everybody knows, you have a lot more resources at your fingertips to be able to do that – a big staff, big production budgets, a big space, etc. If you do new work consistently, you have to accept that there’re going to be smaller audiences, you’re going to have a smaller staff and smaller production budget, etc., and we do. But that’s what I want to do, so I’ve always felt that you can do whatever you want to do, just be honest about the economy of it and you can move forward.

BJB: I know you have information on the [InterAct] website about political plays and the theatre’s mission. Could you speak about that because some people are not sure what that means? SR:

We try to define it pretty broadly – political. Actually, the mission is political, social, and cultural issues of our time. It’s in some ways easier to describe what we’re not – plays that are not purely personal, that is, plays that are only about the relationships between the people we meet that have no influence on the outside world or are not influenced by the outside world. Those plays, to me, are not political. I’ll give you an example of two classic American plays and how you might see them the same, but we see them as very different. Long Day’s Journey into Night, the sort of classic family drama. To me, that is not a political play. You could argue that there are some forces on the outside of that world, what it means to be an Irish immigrant and some things like that, but basically, it’s about the four people in that family and the issues they have with each other; it’s personal. All My Sons by Arthur Miller is also a family drama, and everything we see onstage is about the family and its interactions, but it’s clearly tied 78

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directly to issues that are much larger than them – issues about war and ethics, and what it means to be a leader and lead men to battle and fighting for something larger than yourself and so forth. So, to me, we define political basically as the relationship between the individual and the larger world. And if there is a clearly felt presence of the outside world influencing the action in some way, then that probably is enough to define it for us as political. BJB: I’m thinking about the first play you were in about the issue of littering. Maybe that influenced you in some way? It’s about an issue. SR:

[Laughs] You know, it’s funny, it may have. But I’ve always felt, even as kid, I felt myself as a socially conscious person. I grew up in a very liberal, progressive family and all that, but actually, when we started InterAct, I really didn’t have a political sensibility of theatre, and our first season kind of suggests that. It was really through meeting Tom and working on his plays that it became clear to me that that’s what I wanted to do. And then the challenge is to do things that also have human drama, where the human drama is central, and the political ideas, the world that they exist in are there to add that really vital layer for us, but they aren’t necessarily always the reason we’re doing it. The human drama should be the main reason.

BJB: Have other playwrights inspired you? SR:

Tom has certainly had a big influence on me. Edward Albee. I was going to say Tony Kushner, but it’s not really Tony Kushner, it’s Angels in America. Tony hasn’t written that many things, but I love Angels. A play that I directed here, Lebensraum by Israel Horovitz, had a huge impact on me both as a director and as a playwright. Jason Sherman, who is a Toronto-based playwright, Steven Dietz, and Lee Blessing – all playwrights we’ve produced a few times at InterAct. I would say those are the ones who come to mind, and there’re lots of others. Caryl Churchill, for sure. I mean, when I think back about the playwrights who I read early who got me excited: Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, a little bit of David Hare. Sometimes it’s actual plays more than writers.

BJB: When you’re starting your own writing process, how does that begin for you? SR:

Partly because I have a full-time job, I can’t just sit down and write everything. I probably have a library of about 15 or 20 ideas, most of which are dead, meaning I’m not likely to go back to them for whatever reason, but I wrote them down. But there’re always a few that won’t go away, that every time I come back to them, I go, “Wow, I really like that idea.” Some of them I’ve actually started, some of them I haven’t. But the way I write, those ideas gestate in my head, and if they keep nagging 79

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me, I know that they need to be written. And the longer they gestate without me writing, the more likely it is when I start writing that I’ll have something to write. I tend to just let it percolate in my head for a while, and then when I need to, I write it. I tend to write in spurts. Some days it’s there, some days it’s not. I usually start with a question. There’s usually some kind of question I’m trying to answer in the writing of the play. I don’t know where the play is going. I may think I know, but I don’t really. Somewhere in the middle of writing it I go, “Oh, my God, I just got an idea!” And it totally clicks everything into place, and all of a sudden I know exactly what it’s about. I can remember the moment with most of my plays when that happened. BJB: Do you think it comes from the idea more than the feeling about an idea? SR:

It’s usually the idea. But, as I said, it’s often a question. For instance, my first play, Men of Stone, was about Michelangelo creating his famous statue of Moses, and the statue comes to life, not in the character of what we imagine Moses to be, but in the character of his model (who’s his friend, a butcher). The question I was asking is, “What would happen if your creation takes on a life of its own but it’s not the life you want? It’s not the life you expected. It’s not the life you put your heart and soul into. What do you do?” So that’s what I started with, and what ended up was about other things, too. With Missing Link, a play about a couple who lose their only daughter to a plane crash, a la TWA Flight 800, the question was, “What do you believe in when the inexplicable happens, when you’re rock solid in who you are and what you believe in, what would knock you off that foundation and then what do you believe in after that?” That was what I started with and I had no idea where I was headed with that play. So that’s kind of how I start, and then characters and story come to mind. But that’s always a huge surprise once the play takes on a certain light, it tells me what to write. That’s the best thing when characters start telling me, “I want to talk some more! I want to say this! I want to say that! Here’s how I respond to this moment.” Then you know you’ve got something when your characters are talking to you.

BJB: Do you think there are recurrent themes or issues that continually come up for you? SR:

Yes, there are. There are three or four things that keep circulating. One of my strong interests is what people believe and why. I almost always have a character who seems stubborn or impenetrable in a way. They are unable to get past some way of thinking, which is usually a major impediment to some kind of deeper fulfillment or emotional catharsis. I tend to write plays in which big ideas and arguments are resolved with a very human emotional situation. In other words, the emotional wins out over the cognitive. The moment-to-moment human interaction becomes more important than the idea of that thing we’re fighting for. That seems to be an arc that happens a 80

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lot for me. Also, most of my plays, in one way or another, have some kind of – the rug gets pulled out or a big surprise happens, either early or late in the play, which I hope the audience can’t anticipate and plays into high drama. BJB: As you’re writing, what surprises you the most? Is it “the it moment” part of the play that you were speaking about before? SR:

I think the surprise is when the characters do start talking instead of me being the puppet master; when they start saying, “Hey, I get it. Stop telling me what to say.” They start telling me what they want to say and I just let them do it. Those are unbelievable moments. Doesn’t happen every play, but it happens as you get to know the people in your plays better and better. I think that’s most surprising. The other is when you’re in the middle of writing a play, you know of course, you think it works on some level, but it’s hard to understand how it works with actual people watching it. There’re good and bad surprises, obviously. There’re good ones where you feel like it works better than you could’ve possibly expected and have all kinds of unanticipated responses. And then there’re times when you thought for sure certain elements would work and they don’t at all, and those can be heartbreaking. But that’s why it’s so hard. I mean, I think it’s hard enough to come up with a good idea, to come up with a good story, to come up with some good characters and all that kind of thing, but to write a whole play that fundamentally works, that works whether it’s a brilliant performance or not … it’s very hard! [Laughs] All my plays have a little bit of mess in them. They’re not super-crafted to the point where they can’t not work, and I like that. I want a little bit of mess.

BJB: Are there things that you’re learning from writing that you may not have learned from being on the directing side or the running of the theatre side of things? SR:

My work with the National New Play Network, having the privilege of traveling around the country and visiting so many theatres that are similar to InterAct in doing new work, maybe comparable in budget size but in totally different communities and different resources and so forth, has been both eye-opening and very comforting in different ways to be exposed to all of those theatres and my colleagues and talk to them about it. And you know, after everything I’ve said, I have to acknowledge that even though I’ve tried to be my own worst critic, and I’ve tried to hold my own work up to the same standards I would hold up anybody else’s play to, in considering it for production, the truth is I can make a decision to produce my own play here, which most playwrights can’t at a professional theatre. I know that, and I take that very, very seriously, and I think that certainly of the four plays of mine that we’ve produced at InterAct, three of them did extremely well. The second one didn’t, though it did better than the other shows that season, but it didn’t do particularly well. I don’t feel 81

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like people think that my plays didn’t deserve to be produced, but I certainly would understand how a playwright who wished their play would get produced here saw my play get produced and makes that assumption. And I’m sensitive to that. I don’t think, however, it’s the first time in history that an artistic director has written plays, and it’s also not surprising that I’m writing plays that are in my own sensibility. So we have to accept that, but I’m very sensitive to that issue. I’m also a big proponent of playwrights producing their own work. My first production was actually at Theatre Catalyst, but I had a big hand in helping that project come to fruition. I didn’t actually choose the play, but I had to do more than just be a playwright, and I was willing to do that. BJB: Do you prefer to direct your own work? SR:

You know, my heart says, “Direct your own work because you know how to do it best and you know what you’re after and that you’re capable.” That’s what my heart says. My head says, “Come on, Seth. You know better than that. It’s good just to be the playwright.” I’ve had my first two plays at InterAct directed by Harriet Power, and she was also sort of the dramaturg. My first play was with Henry Gleitman, but I was more than just the playwright there because the actors sometimes consulted me on the sly. And then the last one was Black Gold which I directed here, and then I saw it directed by three other people. I had no problems directing Black Gold. I wrote it with the intent of directing it because it was very inspired by Lebensraum, which I directed several years ago, and I had a particularly good feel for this. I just knew what I wanted to do. The other two that Harriet directed, she really had a passion for and, I think, an understanding of. In the process leading up to production, I was extremely pleased with her role as dramaturg and her vision as director. The truth is, I do believe in someone else directing, but I think, as in other things where the relationship is so critical, this is perhaps the most. As the director of a new play, I believe your singular job, apart from just in general being a good director, is to try to bring to life the play that the playwright has written, but also to challenge the playwright as well. Sometimes playwrights don’t think about everything they’ve written onstage, so [the directors] help them see better what they’ve written, to clarify it, strengthen it, but ultimately do what the playwright is trying to do. I think that (and I say this across the board) directors can have a tendency to want to either overproduce or not trust some element of a play in production. In my case, it was around the whole question of characters being “likable,” which I’ve always found to be a problematic phrase. I don’t think we like Iago. He’s kind of a textbook villain. There’s nothing good about Iago, and yet we’re compelled to keeping watching. Why? Because we understand his motives and we find them compelling, even if they’re nefarious. I often write lead characters who have a major blind spot, who are impenetrable in a way that makes them “unlikable,” but I think if you understand why they are the way they are, and if I do my job to write that in, and the director does their job to show that, and the actor does their job to 82

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play that, I don’t mind that they come across as harsh or impenetrable, belligerent or whatever else it is. And I think that the trick is to trust in that and I write characters like that. So that’s been the struggle. I would recommend to other playwrights and to myself to not direct your own work. Someone who has really helped me feel that way is Lee Blessing. He’s very prolific and very accomplished, but Lee really trusts directors to interpret the play and knows that the director is going to do it in their own way and he accepts that. We produced a play of his called Whores, which is one of my favorites, and I went to see two productions of it before ours, and they were both remarkably different from my vision. And I called Lee up after [seeing] the second one and I said, “I was curious, ya know, I just want you to know our production’s going to be very different, I mean much darker, more abstract.” And he said, “Oh, that sounds great. That sounds like what I wrote.” I said, “Okay, ’cause I just saw the one up here and I just wondered what you thought about that.” And he said, “Oh, I thought that was fine. I thought they did a nice job.” But that’s Lee. He’s happy that they’re produced and as long as they don’t butcher it, butcher the words and dramatically screw up the meaning; he likes the fact that it can be interpreted different ways. And I actually felt that way about Black Gold. I felt that the quality of the productions weren’t equally good after InterAct’s, but the different visions were very good. I mean, I was happy with the fact that they wanted to do it very differently. BJB: I don’t know how you cannot think about directing when you’re writing your own work. SR:

Well, I believe it helps. I believe it’s a big advantage, and I don’t say it so much for myself. I don’t have the clarity to know. I know one of the writers I most admire, Steven Dietz, was an actor first and then a director and then a writer. One of things I really appreciate in Steven’s work, you can so tell he’s a director because he doesn’t do things onstage that make you go, “That doesn’t make any sense.” He actually writes something that makes sense theatrically. He writes something for an actor to go offstage and then come back in another costume or whatever, and he knows they need a certain amount of time to be off and writes it instead of saying “You figure it out” to the director, and I love that. I think I have that advantage in some ways. A lot of writers these days, I’m finding, are being encouraged to write whatever they want, without considering the world of the stage. In other words, “A stove flies in from sky, and then it starts raining, and then …” To some extent, if it’s written smartly and if it’s integral to the meaning of the drama, occasionally that can be really exciting. But a lot of times what I feel is it is lazy. A lot of these are plays that are never going to get done in the giant theatres that have unlimited resources but at medium-size and small theatres that really can’t do super-fancy technical things. They should know that and try to figure out the play based on that. Don’t compromise the vision, but try to think about it, because if you can’t figure out any way for this to happen, there’s a 83

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pretty good chance it’s going to be hard for the director to. Don’t write things that you have no way of figuring out unless they are absolutely essential to the play, and then, sure. Angels in America has an Angel coming down at the end from the sky, right? Boy, that’s pretty important. But he doesn’t have an Angel and a … BJB: A helicopter. SR:

Right. He doesn’t have ten things like that. He has one thing like that. So the director’s job is to figure out that one thing and that’s an essential thing. That’s fine, but you can’t write several different things that don’t make any sense onstage. The thing that gets written most these days that drives me crazy is, “The play is set in many locations but none of them needs to be realistic. A couple of pieces of furniture is all you need for each setting.” That sounds great except that there are 20 locations, so a couple of pieces of furniture for 20 locations is impossible. A bed, a scene that takes place on a bed. Most theatres don’t have enough space to put in a bed that comes on and off. So think about this. Does it need to be in a bedroom? Do you actually need the bed? Think about those kinds of things.

BJB: I should ask you, as we’re nearing this subject, what problems do you continually see with play submissions at InterAct? SR:

First of all, for us, the biggest problem is so many plays that aren’t in our mission. We have people send us things like, “This is a play about a family dealing with the death of the grandmother, and it’s socio-political because it’s social; there are people in it.” But I would say among the plays that are actually in our mission, I think there are a number of things we deal with. First of all, I think people often write things where they clearly have an agenda, a strong point of view, and I don’t mind a strong point of view if it’s really compelling or if there’s balance in the play, one of the two. But, usually, it’s not very compelling or it’s not balanced, meaning multiple points of view on something that are also thought out and given passion. One of the things I’ve always respected Tom Gibbons for is that when he writes his plays that deal with race relations, he always invests more, he tries to find more reasons to fight for the argument that he doesn’t believe. If you identify with X character, you write their argument, and then the Y character is there just to be the foil so that you can win your arguments. Tom invests in the Y character to make sure that it’s more balanced. So that’s something I respond to. One of the things that I find a lot is that either people have a real voice, a real gift for writing, they have an ear that is poetic or just an extraordinary gift for the actual written word, but they have nothing to say. Or they have a really good idea but they aren’t much of a writer. We’ve done some plays by writers who have the voice, which sort of sold us a little bit too much and then when we actually got to do the play, there wasn’t enough there. And there’re others where 84

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we loved the ideas and the potential of the story but when we worked with the writer, we couldn’t get the writing there. So, you know, those are the biggest frustrations. It’s hard to find people who have both, and those are the ones that stand out. BJB: Do you have advice for people who are going into a career in theatre? SR:

Yeah. You know, lately I’ve been talking to people privately about the fact that we are in a field, particularly right now because of the economy, where we already know there are way too many actors and writers out there, probably too many directors, too, but I think (a) directors are able to create their own work a little bit more, and (b) I think there’re fewer of them by a long shot than actors and writers. The bottom line is the economy of our industry, [which] is that even if you sort out all of the people who really aren’t qualified, who don’t have the talent, there’s still not enough work for all the others and there never will be. It’s going to get worse. I mean, it’s not like there’re going to be more and more new plays produced at a serious level. It’s a tough road. I don’t say this to be discouraging. I say this because if everybody thinks it’s the only thing they can do, that’s why they do it. I don’t think many people go into this as a dilettante. I think most people are serious, and they believe that if they don’t write or they don’t act, they will crumble. And I believe that. The problem is that that’s not enough. You have to have talent, you have to work hard, you have to go to see theatre a lot, you have to see new work. I am astounded, astounded by the fact that playwrights in Philadelphia (I don’t know about other places) do not come to see our work here! I don’t get it. If they want to grow as an artist, if they want to learn about what’s getting produced, if they want to be seen by the people who are actually making the decisions to do new plays, they should come see new work. They don’t. It’s astounding to me. They want you to produce their work, they want you to know who they are, they want you to include them in things, but they don’t want to do the simple job of finding out a little more about who we are, learning about what we respond to, or even just coming to be seen or not coming to be seen but to write and say, “I saw the show. I didn’t like it too much, but I’d be really interested in talking to you about why you chose that play because it was an eye-opener for me” or whatever. I’d happily engage that conversation. I’d be happy that they at least came to see the show. This amazes me. Anyway, you have to be your own worst critic. Go to see theatre. Develop relationships when you can. Don’t send plays to theatres that aren’t going to produce your plays.

BJB: What do you think of the Philadelphia theatre scene? SR:

It’s been booming for quite a while now. We have grown at quite a phenomenal pace for the past 20 years. When InterAct started there were less than five professional theatres in the region, and there’re now 20 or so that are Equity and another 50, 85

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60, 70 that are aspiring. There’s more new work than ever before, I think because of things like the Fringe Arts and PlayPenn, as well as some of the things InterAct’s done with PNPI and NNPN. There has been a growing feeling that this [Philadelphia] is a place where new work can thrive. And at the same time, I would say, generally speaking, the larger theatres aren’t producing that much new work. So that is one of the long-term questions, whether that is going to change, and I think probably not, because as times get harder economically, the bigger theatres in particular are going to make safer choices. It’s called evolution; it’s not a commentary. It means that the playwrights here and elsewhere have to stop shooting for the one big production and being disappointed when they don’t get it and instead try to get the mid-size or smaller theatres to do their work and ideally to get several to do their work and not only in Philadelphia. It’s certainly been a great renaissance here in the last 20 years. I feel like I’ve been a part of that and it’s been very special to me. I do think that we’re going through a tricky time right now, and there may be some casualties as far as theatres closing, because there aren’t enough resources to go around. I don’t believe that more theatres is always good. I believe that more quality theatres that are well-managed is always good, but there’re going to be some casualties, I think. BJB: Is this related to grants, funding, corporate giving? SR:

Partly related to funding, yes. Corporations haven’t been much of a factor for a long time; but it’s partly related to funding, it’s related to audience, it’s related to media coverage. There’s a diminishing pie with a growing demand from the theatres, and I just don’t think that we can sustain that forever. There’s going to have to be some give on that, but I think that the theatres that are going to survive are the ones that are well-managed, that have a strong footing in the community, that have a strong support, that have a clear mission. And then, of course, the really small theatres can always manage because they don’t have as much at stake. So we’ll see.

BJB: I want to ask you about the Philadelphia New Play Initiative. SR:

One of the reasons that I pulled together some colleagues to start this new play initiative was recognizing that we’re at a critical juncture here in Philadelphia. There have been great new things here like PlayPenn and the Fringe Arts and InterAct. And playwrights, especially younger playwrights, have been moving here, to set up their lives here, which is great. But I feel that if we aren’t careful to ensure growing opportunities and resources for those writers, they’ll leave and all this will go away. So, if we want Philadelphia to continue to thrive as a hub for new work, we need to do some ground work. We need to do some community building. We need to do some educating, some galvanizing of the community. And then we need to do some (for lack of a better word) lobbying to try to get more organizations to commit to 86

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producing new work. I don’t really mean just to go to the bigger theatres and try to get them to do it because I don’t really think that’s realistic, but I think there are a lot of theatres that are set up to be able to do more new work, especially the midsize and smaller theatres. If we can start building some relationships in getting those theatres to know some of the writers and vice versa, over time … I’ve always believed that every theatre that does any new work at all should have a resident playwright. It doesn’t have to be paid (though obviously it would be nice if it was), but Tom Gibbons would be the first person to tell you that over the 20 years that he’s been with us, he’s only made a small amount of money off of us. He wouldn’t trade it in for anything. And Michael Hollinger, the same thing. He’s made money in terms of royalties and probably a couple commissions from the Arden, but basically it’s not been a lot of money, it’s been the relationship that’s mattered. And I think in most of the theatres in town that at least sometimes do new work, had a resident playwright, even if it was just a year at a time; over the course of time, relationships would develop and there would be a lot more of them than there are right now. BJB: How do you envision the Philadelphia New Play Initiative? SR:

We’re looking at it as a five-year initiative with the goal of getting Philadelphia to be in a place where we can do some kind of new play festival, either annually or biannually, that really is something we’re confident in. This all came out of a new play festival in 2007, which was not completely unsuccessful, but which lacked any strong commitments going forward. Some of us felt that before we plow forward and try it again, we should take stock of where we are as a community and see what we can improve on. So we created a listserv. We’re trying to better inform the new play constituents in the region about what’s going on new play-wise; trying to get them to know more about each other, both playwrights knowing playwrights but also playwrights knowing theatres and theatres knowing playwrights. And that, I think, is going to involve a couple of years of events. I’ll give you an example of one we just did the other night. It was private because we wanted to test out an idea before every playwright in town clamored at the door. We did a pilot project that was based on the speed-dating model, and we had ten playwrights of varying experience and situations. And then we had ten theatre leaders, artistic directors, and a literary manager from People’s Light down to very small theatres. We had them sit around in a concentric circle and they would have five minutes to talk to each other. The theatre leaders would talk about their mission and their interest in new work and the kind of new work they’re looking for. Playwrights would talk about the kind of plays they write and maybe specific plays that might be of interest to a theatre and then they switched, and everybody got to meet everybody. Everybody found it very, very useful. Even Ed Shockley, who is far more knowledgeable than most playwrights, said, “You know, I now know that that theatre will never do my work. 87

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That’s good. I don’t have to waste my energy or my time or my money on that theatre. And meanwhile, I’ll know better that this other theatre is interested in my work, but their time frame’s different than I thought, so I need to get my work to them now. And that I have three ideas, and they’re interested in this one. I should probably put that one on the front burner.” So we had that kind of learning going on, and that’s the kind of thing we want to do. BJB: What kinds of plays continue to inspire you? SR:

The most important thing to me is I like to feel surprised by something. I feel so often when I go to play or especially a movie, I can tell you what’s going to happen before it does. Every once in a while, that’s okay. You know what’s going to happen and it’s the way it’s told that is so great, but I like to be surprised by something during my experience, to feel something or think something that I didn’t expect to. That’s the most important thing, and it doesn’t happen enough. I don’t understand the number of plays that are written about relationships; they’re saying the same things over and over and over again. I don’t get it. Ideas matter to me. Ideas matter a lot. And sometimes a play that isn’t as well written but has big ideas is more satisfying to me than a play that has great writing but it doesn’t have any ideas.

BJB: What would be your idea of a successful play? SR:

It would affect the mind and the heart, mostly. I think you should be thinking about something when you leave and, hopefully, feeling something that has stirred in you. I like plays that make me go out into the world and look at something a little bit differently, or a lot differently, but also make me feel something toward my fellow man or maybe someone in particular a little more strongly. I can admire beauty in playwriting, like a flowery speech of Shakespeare’s; no one does it better, of course. But ultimately, that’s not enough for me. I mean, that’s not what I want, while I understand that’s what a lot of people want. For me, I’ll take the meaning of King Lear over the beauty of Romeo and Juliet any day of the week.

Seth Rozin – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays A Passing Wind (musical) Black Gold Men of Stone Missing Link Reinventing Eden 88

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The Space Between Us The Three Christs of Manhattan Two Jews Walk into a War … Awards Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – Fellowships in Playwriting – 2 Philadelphia Inquirer “Philly” Award for Best Director – 6221 by Thomas Gibbons (1993) Barrymore Award for Outstanding Direction of a Play – Lebensraum by Israel Horovitz   (1999) Philadelphia Inquirer “Philly” Award for Best Director – Lebensraum by Israel Horovitz   (1999) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding Direction and Outstanding Overall Production of   a Play – It’s All True by Jason Sherman (2001) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play – Men of Stone (2001) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play – Missing Link (2002) Foundation for Jewish Culture New Play Commission (2002) Barrymore Nomination for Overall Production – Permanent Collection by Thomas Gibbons   (2004) The Smith Prize (2007) Philadelphia Weekly Best Director Award – The Elaborate Entrance of the Chad Diety   by Kristoffer Diaz (2010)

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Chapter 5 A Conversation with Louis Lippa

L

ouis Lippa received the Barrymore Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2004, but he’s far from retiring from playwriting. Beginning with his apprenticeship at the original Hedgerow Theatre, Lou has been a theatre professional for decades, which includes work as an actor, director, and playwright. For A House Remembered, which premiered at the Actors’ Playhouse in New York, he received an OBIE Award. Later, he furthered his career as a writer, receiving his M.F.A. in Playwriting from Temple University. As Playwrightin-Residence at People’s Light & Theatre Company since 1974, Lou’s work has been regularly produced in the Philadelphia area, throughout the country and internationally. His notable works produced at People’s Light include the critically acclaimed six-hour adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s novel, Sister Carrie; Sacco & Vanzetti: A Vaudeville, based on the real-life history of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; and the translation and adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. He recently worked on the adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which was produced at Hedgerow Theatre. In addition to working on a new translation and adaptation of Pirandello’s Henry IV, he’s writing a new original play. BJB: How did you get to Philadelphia? Were you born here? LL:

I was born in Rochester, New York, and I came with my family to Philadelphia during The Depression, the big one. I grew up in South Philadelphia among the Italians in what I like to call the Italian ghetto, where everybody kind of made a little village around Camac Street, and things were very rough. The details of life in South Philadelphia were very influential, I think, not so much in the specific sense that I write about Italians, but in the larger sense that I write about what people go through. Certainly my earlier plays were like that. My father, I must tell you, was a radical, way on the left in his politics. Since he was a shoemaker for a while, he led the shoemakers’ strikes against the injunctions, got his head busted, got six months in jail. One of my earliest memories is being carried by my mother in her arms and looking through what I now realize was a screen and seeing my father behind the screen. I grew up

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with a great deal of social consciousness, a realization of what we are in society in a political and economic sense. That was a big influence on my life. BJB: And you went to Temple University? LL:

I went into the Army for about a year just after World War II, and I got a G.I. Bill, which was a great help to me, and through the G.I. Bill, I went to Temple University. Before that, as a teenager, I had been doing a lot of writing – prose – on an old typewriter my father had. I tried to write stories for magazines and sometimes got close, but never got published. When I got into college, I was interested in writing, and they didn’t know where to put me, so they put me in journalism. I got friendly with a lot of students who were in the theatre department, and I became very interested in theatre as an actor.

BJB: After you graduated from Temple with your bachelor’s degree, what did you do? LL:

After I graduated from Temple, I auditioned at the original Hedgerow Theatre for Jasper Deeter and Rose Schulman, and they said, “Okay, you can be an apprentice” – not a member of the company, an apprentice. That’s where my formative years in terms of theatre awareness occurred. Here was an ensemble, a true repertory company of actors and scene designers, but actually no playwrights except for outside the company – Susan Glaspell, Theodore Dreiser, not a playwright, but he would give me adaptations of his novels, the same with the material of Sherwood Anderson. All of these famous, famous great American writers were in touch with the Hedgerow Theatre and, also, Wharton Esherick, the great wood sculptor, whom I got to know a little before he died. All of these people, in particular, Jasper Deeter and Rose Schulman, were very encouraging. So I grew up and learned my theatre from a repertory company. We would do one a week – an O’Neill, a Shaw, an O’Casey, a Pirandello, a Chekhov, and so on.

BJB: When were you at Hedgerow? LL:

I was at Hedgerow from 1951 to 1955, and I began to write plays during that time, without necessarily asking them to produce them. One of the plays that Jasper read that he liked was called The Uninvolved. He loved the idea that human beings should be involved in, if not the politics, the human condition. I have no idea where that play is now. [Laughs]

BJB: Was that your first play? LL:

It was one of the first that I wrote, not necessarily one of the first that was produced. I read a little article in the newspaper about some dancer in the Middle East who was 94

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murdered, and I tried to write something about that. I had Wharton Esherick and Rose and others look at it. At Hedgerow Theatre, my friend Don Gantry and I cleared out a space in the barn, and we called it Theatre in the Dirt. Jasper got a big kick out of that because that was just his cup of tea. For a couple of weeks we played around with my writing about this newspaper article. Finally, it came to the point where I wrote a one-act play called In the Light of Evening. Rose liked it, and I said, “Can we put it on and not charge anybody anything, just as kind of a workshop?” She thought it was a good idea. The result was that In the Light of Evening was my very first play actually produced on the stage. People heard about it and they came and they liked it, and I was shocked. Hedgerow eventually closed, I believe, in 1955 or 1956. I had been writing a play with my friend, Don, called A House Remembered. The original title was A House Remembered is Never Dark, much more poetic. However, in New York, they thought A House Remembered would be better. I managed to raise a few bucks to rent the closed Hedgerow Theatre. Don and I intended to put this play on. So we paid our rent, we opened the theatre, we put on the play, we received an excellent review, and people came. Out of that, we got somebody who had seen it put in some money and somebody else put in some money, and we had enough money maybe to go to New York with it. So, I moved to New York. BJB: When was that? LL:

That was 1956, something like that. And, in New York, when learning about the prices of renting a theatre, I thought the whole thing was prohibitive, impossible, but through a friend, I managed to get into a play, The Three Penny Opera, that was running at the Theatre de Lys in New York. I played one of the cops. All the great names – Jerry Orbach, Ed Asner, Jerry Stiller – were part of the cast. One of my interesting moments was with Lotte Lenya. We were both offstage ready to go on, and I, as the policeman, was going to bring her on, but I didn’t dare say a word to her. I mean, Lotte Lenya, my God! [Laughs] I did not say a single word to her, and she did not speak to me. But we went on. I was in it for about ten months. So, Don and I, managed to get some money together finally, and we put on A House Remembered, and the reviews, the first one was from The New York Times, Arthur Gelb, not so good; the next one was from the New York Post, Frances Herridge, which was terrific; and then the best of all was from The Village Voice. So I had two of the three major reviewers. Still, it was not really drawing because we did not have The New York Times. Without the Times, you don’t have it. That’s it. However, I had gotten to know Jose Quintero, the director on Broadway and at the original Circle in the Square at Sheridan Square, and he had come to see the play, and Jerry Tallmer of The Village Voice and Frances Herridge of the New York Post had come, and they were the committee which gave the OBIE Awards, and they gave me an OBIE Award. At the time, I didn’t realize whether that was important or not, and as a matter of fact, I wasn’t even sure if I was 95

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going to go to the Limelight, the coffee house, but I did. Geraldine Page gave me the award. It gave me some notoriety but not enough to live on. BJB: Where was this play done? LL:

The Actors’ Playhouse. That’s on Seventh Avenue, a short distance from Christopher Street. I think it’s still running. I needed money to live on, so Jose Quintero and Ted Mann at the Circle in the Square said to me, “Why don’t you work behind the concession and refreshment bar?” And that was fascinating because it was during the run of The Iceman Cometh with Jason Robards. Then I wrote another play called The Breaking Wall. The stage manager at Circle in the Square I knew liked it, and he managed to get some money together and produced it. In fact, one of the very small roles was with Olympia Dukakis. It received a good review from Brooks Atkinson, a fair review from Walter Kerr, and so it ran for a month or so. So that was the second Off-Broadway play. The third, produced by a fellow named Joe Beruh, who with Edgar Lansbury had produced Off-Broadway, liked my adaptation of Leonid Andeyev’s The Seven Who Were Hanged. I gave it the title, The Seven at Dawn. I got some flack about writing this kind of play about Russian rebels. By that time, I was getting a little disillusioned with Off-Broadway because I did not find any company of actors. I had been used to, at Hedgerow, working with a group, a company. [In New York] it was always a matter of an actor coming into a play and going his way. There was no unity, no ensemble, no repertory, none of that. And I was getting tired of it. The bottom line is I decided to leave New York and come back to the area, which I did.

BJB: Back to the Philadelphia area? LL:

Back to the Philadelphia area. And one of the first things that happened was I was asked to be artistic director of Cheltenham Playhouse. It didn’t pay much, but I accepted it. I also met my wonderful wife, who passed away a few years ago. I did six some years there, doing as many great plays as possible, Brecht and so on. That was as a director. I did write one play for the Cheltenham Playhouse. It was called The Guests Have Arrived, which got excellent reviews from The Bulletin.

BJB: Did you write other work during that time? LL:

I wrote The Line. Mostly, I was directing there. Eventually, I left the Cheltenham Playhouse. The board no longer supported the theatre. I left and I was given the job as a director at a place outside of Chicago, and I was there for about four years as a director. During that time, I don’t think I wrote very much at all. So then with my wife and two kids, I came back to the Philadelphia area. And one day I had read in the paper that a good friend of mine from the old Hedgerow days, Dick Keeler, was 96

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involved with a theatre called People’s Light & Theatre Company, and they were at a place called Strode’s Mill. I went out to see them on a Sunday and we talked and I met Danny Fruchter. He was interested in what I said about the theatre, and he invited me to direct a play. I think they’d only had about three productions, but that’s where I met Ken Marini and Tom Teti. Steve Novelli came later, and so did Alda Cortese. I directed a play for them; it was A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and that was very successful. So the next thing I know, the whole rest of my life, [Laughs] the next 20–30 years, was associated with People’s Light. So I went from there and began to write again. The first play I wrote for People’s Light was a one-act called Prisonbreak. Also for People’s Light, I did Delusions of a Government Witness, which was also accepted [for production] at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York. I was writing plays, but I was also directing. The Proprietor was commissioned in 1982; that’s about William Penn. Danny said to me, “Would you like to make some money?” I said, “Yes.” He said that the county or somewhere wanted to do something about the anniversary of William Penn, and they wanted to commission a play. I thought to myself, “What do I know about William Penn?” I did some research and was fascinated by him. It wasn’t until later that I realized I was probably writing as much about my father as William Penn. And then I wrote The Southgate Porter. The Welfare Lady, which has been one of my most successful plays, is a one-act, published by the Dramatic Publishing Company. I still get royalties from that. Then, The Stone House, which we re-titled The Loyalist, was done. Then came the biggie: I did a two-part adaptation of Sister Carrie, which was very successful. Tuesday, we did Act One. Wednesday, Act Two. Thursday, Act One. Friday, Act Two. But then, Saturday and Sunday, we did the whole bloody thing. With the dinner break, it ran close to about six hours. Huge cast. Songs from an Italian Neighborhood was a bunch of one-act plays for People’s Light. Sign of the Lizard was about the murder of Lorca. Have It Your Way! was the first Pirandello play that I translated and adapted. Then came The True Adventures of Pinocchio, and then The Dreaming of Aloysius in His Search for God and Six Characters in Search of an Author, the next Pirandello translation and adaptation, which won the Barrymore Award for Best Production of a Play. An American Tragedy, one of my favorites, was just recently done. I’m just finishing up, which may be the final Pirandello, Henry IV, which is a new version, translated and adapted. BJB: What has been your best or favorite playwriting experience? LL:

I would have to say Sister Carrie because a lot of challenges were thrown at me for that. But An American Tragedy is a story in itself. Penny Reed at Hedgerow said the University of Pennsylvania was sponsoring some kind of celebration of Wharton Esherick and Theodore Dreiser. Since Esherick and Dreiser had been associated with the original Hedgerow, Penny was asked if she would consider putting on a version of An American Tragedy, an adaptation of the novel by Theodore Dreiser, a version of 97

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the original which was done in German and then adapted by Erwin Piscator, a great German director, and whether or not we would consider doing it. Penny said, “What do you think?” I said, “Since I’ve done Sister Carrie, I know Dreiser’s work very well.” She said, “Let’s do it.” We were able to get a copy of it, and it was so dated. Number one, it was from the 1930s. Number two, it was hardly an adaptation of the novel. It was more of the leftist, socialist, communist propaganda, agitprop stuff. It was not Dreiser’s novel. The version that Jasper did we can’t seem to find, and that was translated by Louise Campbell, who was a member of the original Hedgerow Theatre. When we went into the first reading of An American Tragedy, I couldn’t bare it. I said to Penny, “If we do this, I can’t participate.” She said, “What are we going to do? We are committed to a date.” Releases had already gone out. I said, “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll take a scene from the novel. I’ll adapt it into what I think it should be.” I did that. She thought it was terrific. She said, “Let’s do the novel. You adapt it. I’ll work with you to edit it.” I said, “We only have three and a half weeks! We’ve got to adapt this into a play that we’re going to put on in three and a half weeks!” I was also acting in it as one of three narrators. Basically, I was getting up at like four o’clock in the morning, writing scenes, handing them to the actors and Penny. She would edit it and cut it down because I didn’t have time to do all that. And, believe it or not, after three and a half weeks, we opened! And that, I would say, was probably the most interesting experience as a playwright I’ve had. It was almost as if we were doing a film, like “Here’s the scene. You do it.” That was fascinating. I think I do well when I’m hit with a deadline. BJB: How have your plays progressed from the earlier ones to now? LL:

Obviously, a few were very personal to me. A House Remembered was a personal play about brothers. The Breaking Wall also had a theme which involved my sister. The Guests Have Arrived was a very social, political play because the guests are black who arrive at the [white] mayor’s house, which he did not anticipate. Of course, it becomes an absurdist comedy. The Line was a memory play. Delusions of a Government Witness was somewhat of a political play. The Welfare Lady was really a very personal play about The Depression, about how my mother had to deal with my father being in prison. My mother tried to be on welfare, and the lady told her, “You can’t have it.” The Stone House was also a very, very personal play. Songs from an Italian Neighborhood, obviously personal. Sign of the Lizard was a political play, as was Sacco & Vanzetti. But then there’s a turning point as I got more and more involved specifically with the Pirandello plays, but also my perspective as a playwright was changing. The change had to do with whether or not a play resonates, expands beyond the so-called ordinary and becomes extraordinary. It’s always been a mystery to me how the great Chekhov writes so simply and yet the plays resonate, unlike Shaw. Maybe it’s the relationship of the playwright to a theme, which says, “Okay, I understand what’s happening around me today, but I get a feeling that there’s something in a larger view.” 98

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BJB: You mean it includes the larger world? LL:

Yeah. Dreiser does this, but I find Dreiser ponderous at times, [Laughs] and yet I admire his work.

BJB: Which other writers have influenced you? LL:

It’s very hard. You can’t know; you can only speculate. The influence for me, if there is any, is O’Neill, and here’s another playwright who somehow managed with the ordinary to resonate. I mean, Anna Christie, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey. I mean, dysfunctional families are fine because they go back all the way to the Greeks! [Laughs] How more dysfunctional can you get than Oedipus marrying his own mother? The dysfunctional family theme has always been around since Adam and Eve. So, dysfunctional families are part of the fabric of human nature. The point is that O’Neill is a great influence, Chekhov definitely, and Pirandello. The funny thing about Pirandello is that I cannot stand some of the structure of his plays, but boy oh boy, can he write in what I call the Italian manner. By the Italian manner, I mean there is something immediate on the stage, something that potentially will explode, and yet at the same time, it has a nice, almost Galileo kind of logic to it. So that leads us to the Italian manner being a wonderful thing of drama – contradiction. If something goes one way, dramatically, it should always have about it the possibility of going the opposite way, that allows the audience to psychologically lean forward in the theatre, rather than back and accept. The potential of contradiction is a very dramatic insinuation in a play.

BJB: So, as you’re thinking of writing your next play, how does the inspiration come to you? LL:

The death of my wife. That’s the inspiration and a very, very, very difficult thing to write about. And yet, it’s never really about my wife that I’m writing about. I mean, if I write a play that concerns this man and this woman, and a marriage of so many years, and now one of them is gone, if I write a play about that, I’ll be writing a play about this man and this woman, not necessarily me. It’s a tough one to do. It’s not only tough in the sense that I don’t know the structure of it – I have some ideas – but also in the sense that it may be too close in time, and I cannot get distance and perspective, which I need, which is one of the reasons why I often write about people and subjects that are at a distance from me. The irony of writing about present events, popular present events, racism, feminism, sexuality, writing about those things in the immediate sense does not resonate because there’s no perspective. You cannot see it from a distance.

BJB: Because you’re in it. 99

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LL:

You cannot stand in the doorway and watch it; you’re in the room. And therefore my criticism of many plays that are written today, which have become unfortunately popular to write about, cause the audience to feel as though they should either feel guilty or they should totally be in agreement with how a racist or a feminist or a sexist point of view is taken. It doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t like it. That perspective is too ordinary for my tastes. I feel sometimes like I’ve seen that play before. Of course, I haven’t, but I get the feeling that it’s been done before. It’s not expanding for me. It’s sitting there because they want the audience to be able, without too much problem, to identify. It’s a kind of awareness of something going on here that’s more than what I’m seeing or what I’m hearing. In writing Pirandello, I sift through it for what may be in my case what I interpret as Pirandello’s intentions and then, of course, translating it. Translating is a kind of adaptation. You can’t, obviously, do it literally and expect actors to speak the literal translation. Almost all translations are literal. They don’t capture the essence of the moment, which is what I’d like to think I’m trying to do in creating a version of Henry IV or Six Characters, that is, to interpret the intentions of Pirandello in my own way of writing it. Brecht was a genius at adaptation. You come into a room, for instance, and you see the way it is. And when you adapt a play, it’s the same thing as changing the furniture, not the room, the furniture.

BJB: How did you become Playwright-in-Residence at People’s Light? LL:

I was put on a weekly stipend, which put me through many, many years of being able to write. That was something that I really admired and respected Danny Fruchter and Greg Rowe for. Danny was the Artistic Director and Greg was the Managing Director. My wife, Nancy, was actually an administrator there and worked closely with both gentlemen. She was there for 27 years. One of the things I miss about Nancy was her innate ability to understand and analyze dramatic structure. I could give her a play to read or even part of a play to read and present to her the possible problems in the matter, and she would just simplify and introduce possibilities for me on how to write a better play. She was very, very good at that. Of course, in adapting I have a sense of structure, but Nancy was especially capable of understanding a so-called original play, in which structure was something that had to be built.

BJB: What has it meant to you being Playwright-in-Residence at People’s Light and having an artistic home? LL:

People’s Light & Theatre Company, along with my earlier days at the original Hedgerow Theatre, was profoundly meaningful to my development as a theatre artist. Hedgerow Theatre prepared me; People’s Light matured me as a playwright. In both experiences, the most important contribution made to my life’s work was a deep love 100

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and respect for the artistic creativity of the stage. As a young apprentice at Hedgerow, I came into a daily awareness of plays by Shaw, Shakespeare, O’Neill, Pirandello, and Chekhov, and so many, many other theatre classics. Just as importantly, I developed a sense of theatre artists as an ensemble, which to this day I still regard as invaluable to a theatre’s meaningfulness. Later, at People’s Light, my earlier experience stood by me. People’s Light became the heart of my love of theatre and provided for me the continuity of development as an actor, director, and playwright. In particular, after some difficult financial times as a theatre artist in the early days of survival, People’s Light had become successful enough to secure me a living wage, and I was able to provide for myself and my family. These days I am still a Playwright-in-Residence, and my plays are produced with actors and a director whom I  have continued to respect. Lastly, after nearly 30 years at People’s Light, and recently having come full circle working again at Hedgerow Theatre, my life as a playwright has maintained a creative life force that constantly inspires me to continue writing. BJB: What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about writing for theatre through the years? LL:

There was a period of my writing while I was out in the Chicago area and I was directing for a very successful community theatre when I was trying to write and nothing would work. I thought of the phrase, “writer’s block,” and I realized what was happening to me was I was being critical of my own work. I was acting as a critic. I would write some lines, I’d look at them and criticize them. I’d go on and try to push it this way and push it that way. I do know that when I write, I arrive at a point in which I say, “Lou, you’re pushing. Stop.” There was a point there in Henry IV, that when reading the Italian and trying to make sense out of it and going to the dictionary and everything else, I couldn’t figure what the heck this guy was talking about. I had written something about it, but I thought, “There’s something missing in here. I’m not getting something.” I was going to throw the book away. It was driving me crazy because I couldn’t figure out what was the point of what Pirandello’s passage was, which is the way I translate. I translate by intentions, in what I interpret to be the intentions of the writer, and I could not figure out Pirandello’s intentions. So I reread something that was working and made sense, about what others thought of Henry IV, of the so-called mad man, and his personality suddenly emerged even more, who he was, not just a mad man, but a particular person. He was constantly criticizing the superficiality of those around him, the Italian aristocrats, and he would go mad at them. I thought, “Hmm …” Then, I went to the passage that was confusing me, and I looked at it carefully, and I realized because of that personality and the events, this particular passage made sense. I was able to translate it and adapt it now according to my new understanding. I guess what I’m saying is that in the course of writing, as well as in the so-called original as well as in adapting plays, you begin to sense a 101

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whole rather than a part, which is interesting because I’m teaching an acting class at Hedgerow, and the acting class I teach is fundamentally a matter of teaching what to interpret, not how to act, what to act. In other words, interpretive acting – looking at a script, looking at a play and finding the reason why you have a part in the play, a part meaning part of some larger whole. So then you ask yourself what happens if that part is taken out? What is missing? Then the actor might begin to find out his purpose in the play. Then he has a responsibility to fulfill a particular purpose. Granted, a director must also do this. The actor must keep searching, using music, poetry, anything in which to understand the character in terms of the whole play. So I’ve learned that a play is a whole thing of interacting parts and that you might begin a play a certain way and write and write and write, and then discover as you go along. Adapting is easier for me because it already has a structure. An original play is much more difficult to write, as the one I would love to start next, the one about myself, about this man and this woman. In writing, you may begin and then you go a certain distance, but then you are actually discovering and learning about the characters and the situation more than you thought you did when you first began when you had a plan, an outline. I’m not a great one at outlining. I wish I were because it’s excruciating to keep writing, and thinking, “You don’t know where you’re going.” And then you go back and begin to connect the dots. It’s a way of writing that’s painful. The plays I did that way were A House Remembered, Breaking Walls, The Guests Have Arrived, Prisonbreak, Delusions. When I first thought of Sacco & Vanzetti: A Vaudeville, I thought, I’ve got pieces now, and I can tell a story of these two guys and what they went through until their execution in acts. So that gave me a nice structure design. BJB: Throughout your years as a theatre professional, do you see changes in theatre here in Philadelphia or changes in the state of theatre in this country? LL:

I don’t know too much about theatre in the rest of the country. I can talk about Abbey Adams as an artistic director. She’s doing a fabulous job. She’s terrific. As a general statement, I would say that People’s Light epitomizes what a good regional theatre should be. The Walnut Street has a personality of its own and one can only say, “Bravo!” Within its limits, it’s brilliant. I was in Amadeus there. It was a challenge and it made a fortune. The Wilma has its own identity, too. The theatre scene here goes way, way back. And I was with it, at such places like the Pocket Playhouse on Manning Street. And it’s developed, thank God, through the persistence of Philadelphia artists, the persistence of Philadelphia playwrights and actors and directors, and through a terrible period of time when the reviewer of The Inquirer, William B. Collins, would murder everyone and almost destroyed the renaissance of Philadelphia theatre. He almost destroyed people’s motivation for continuing. We were struggling to make it, and this guy comes along and denounces it. The adjectives Collins used were devastating, but we persisted. 102

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BJB: What advice do you have for playwrights who are sending their work out now? LL:

Get an agent, [Laughs] but really, I have no way of knowing because the scene changes so often about the reception you’re going to get. There are never any guarantees. With that in mind, the obvious answer, if you’re that interested in having a reasonably good time in playwriting, just keep going.

Louis Lippa – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays A House Remembered An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser – Co-adaptation with Penelope Reed Delusions of a Government Witness Have It Your Way! by Luigi Pirandello (adaptation) Sacco & Vanzetti: A Vaudeville Sign of the Lizard Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (adaptation) Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (translation and adaptation) Songs from an Italian Neighborhood The Breaking Wall The Guests Have Arrived The Line The Love Life of Romeo Montague The Loyalist (aka The Stone House) The Persecution of Eugene Waterman The Proprietor The Seven at Dawn The Southgate Porter Two Masks Plays for Young Audiences Aloysius and the Ghost of Uncle Howard The Dreaming of Aloysius in His Search for God The Sorcerer’s Apprentice The True Adventures of Pinocchio One-Acts Prisonbreak The Mourning Show The Welfare Lady 103

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Awards Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – Fellowships in Playwriting – 3 OBIE Award – A House Remembered (1957) Charles Sergel National Drama Award – The Stone House (1986) Roger L. Stevens Award – Sign of the Lizard (1992) Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays – Sign of the Lizard (1994) Barrymore Award for Lifetime Achievement (2004)

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Chapter 6 A Conversation with Jules Tasca

J

ules Tasca has written over 130 produced and published plays, including The Balkan Women, winner of the Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play, produced at Bristol Riverside Theatre. His work has been seen across the country from Theatreworks in New York to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. In addition, his work has been produced across the globe in England, Ireland, Austria, Germany, South Africa, and Australia. His play, The Grand Christmas History of the Andy Landy Clan, was broadcast on 47 National Public Radio stations, and his libretto for C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is currently touring the country. The Mission, which had its premiere at New Theatre in Florida, received the Silver Palm Award for Best New Play from the South Florida Theatre League. A teacher of playwriting at Gwynedd-Mercy College, he has also taught at Arcadia University, Villanova University, Ursinus College, Penn State Abington, University of the Arts, and Oxford University in England through the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Jules discussed his work in the middle of his rehearsal schedule for his new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. BJB: Where were you born and raised? JT:

I was born in South Philadelphia. I attended the local schools. I did the usual things kids in Philadelphia did. We played stickball and football in the streets. We couldn’t afford a football, so we used a Daily News wrapped up in rubber bands. When I was around 12 years old all the kids went to The Dixon Settlement House after school. They offered all kinds of recreational programs for kids to keep us off the streets. The Dixon House did plays and I was fascinated, but in my 12-year-old mind, I was determined to be a chemist. When I got out of the Army – I served in the 341st Combat Engineers – I got a job as a lab technician. This was my dream; I was going to be working in a lab.

BJB: Was this in Philadelphia?

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JT:

Yes, Wilkening Manufacturing Company in Philadelphia. After six months I absolutely hated being in a lab. It was not for me. It was some childhood thing that I thought I should be a chemist.

BJB: So you went to Penn State? JT:

I went to Penn State after the Army and majored in clinical psychology. When I did my clinical field work in senior year, which involved actually interacting with freshman with serious psychological problems, I realized I couldn’t do that every day. I would leave the sessions depressed because of the contagion of emotion. So I took a master’s degree in theatre at Villanova University. Maybe I was “following my bliss” as the Guru Joseph Campbell would characterize – doing what your heart wants you to do. My minor at Penn State was drama, and I was always very interested in theatre. I realized that I found the place where I should’ve been all along. But I also found out what hundreds of thousands have discovered: you can’t make a steady income in theatre, so many of us, most of us, teach so that we might survive to write plays.

BJB: Did you write your first play at Penn State? JT:

Yes! A great teacher, Warren Smith, had the playwriting class, and admission was by permission of the instructor. You had to submit writing samples that were acceptable to him in order to get into his class. It’s not that way today. Now, you sign up for a playwriting class and you’re in, whether you have some writing talent or not. But, Warren Smith accepted me, and my first play was called Fole’ A Deux, which is a psychological term for somebody following another person who is irrational. The irrational person pulls the other person along on some bizarre adventure. It was first produced at the 5 O’Clock Theater. The director was from the directing class, and the actors were from the advanced acting classes. That was the only time I became physically ill that people were actually going to attend something I’d written. But I learned. If you’re going to do this, you can’t be a wimp. So that was my baptism by fire.

BJB: Do you remember your first produced play after college? JT:

The first produced play after school was a play called Tear Along the Dotted Line. The play was about two college kids in their first apartment. Dramatic Publishing published it in 1964.

BJB: What was your first professional production? JT:

I wrote a play for Phyllis Diller called Subject to Change. I got to know Phyllis because I had written jokes for her. She paid ten bucks a joke and I would send her pages. 108

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BJB: How did your connection to Phyllis Diller happen? JT:

At the time, I worked as a press representative in the summers for Lee Guber and Shelly Gross for their company, Music Fairs. I got to know her when she appeared at the [Valley Forge] Music Fair. I went there with jokes and she didn’t want to be bothered. Then, a week later, I get a call from Los Angeles, “Hey, I like some of these. I’ll buy them.” It was a thrill; I was just a kid. Then I sent her this play called Subject to Change. Phyllis Diller was perfect for this play about two sisters, one lazy and one who did everything around the house. When the active sister decided to get married and leave the other sister alone, the lazy sister did everything she could to thwart the marriage. We did the play in Chicago at a dinner theatre. It was a hit. The audience loved her. Subject to Change was published by Samuel French. That same year, my agent sent another play of mine, The Mind with the Dirty Man, to the Mark Taper Forum. Eddie Perone, who was one of the assistant producers on The Misfits, with Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, loved it and booked it at the Taper. Joe Flynn played the lead. Then Don Knotts did it in Chicago. The Mind with the Dirty Man went to Las Vegas with Marilyn Chambers playing the girl. It ran a year. It’s the longest running straight play in Las Vegas history. The Mind with the Dirty Man also ran in Atlantic City at Resorts International on the Boardwalk featuring Joey Bishop.

BJB: How did it get to Las Vegas? JT:

Audiences saw it in Los Angeles and Chicago, and they thought it would be a natural for Vegas. The play is a sitcom satire on censorship. Normally, it ran two hours, but Maynard Sloat, the director, cut it, with my permission, to 90 minutes for the casino. They didn’t want to keep people away from the slots for too long, as it was explained to me.

BJB: How did you get that agent? This was pretty early on in your career, right? JT:

Most events in showbiz are flukes. When I worked for the Music Fair, I became friends with Jay Colt and Jeremy Ritzer, who were casting directors. I showed them my work. They introduced me to Hayden Griffin. As a young child, Hayden was one of the “Our Gang” kids. Later, he was a dancer in New York. When he got older, he became an agent. Hayden knew everybody. I don’t know how he knew everybody, but he did. He could pick up a phone and call Chita Rivera, Darryl Hickman, Alexander Cohen, Joey Adams, Julie Harris, almost anybody. So Hayden was the one who launched whatever career I have.

BJB: What do you think has changed in the business to make it tougher now? 109

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JT:

Too many things. Regional theatres used to do cutting-edge stuff. Now, they have corporate sponsors. So the regional theatres are playing it safe because they can’t afford to offend anyone. Also, many theatres rely on subscription audiences that have to be catered to in some way. The subscription audience who wants to see another rendition of The Odd Couple is not the same audience that wants depth and insight and experimentation. In addition, some companies want a playwright from Europe or Canada, while many homegrown writers are ignored to the point that their plays aren’t even read.

BJB: What would you say has been your best theatrical experience? JT:

I would say I’ve had a lot of favorite experiences. They’re all different, but the best experience, most satisfying, would be The Balkan Women. Another fluke. I sent The Balkan Women everywhere, without even a postcard in response. Nothing. On a whim, I gave it to a friend, Jack Sirott. Jack is a lawyer, and he was on the Board of Directors at the Bristol Riverside Theatre at the time. Jack had done some pro bono work for Keith Baker, the director at the Bristol. Jack gave The Balkan Women to Baker. Baker read it because he owed Jack a favor. Baker decided to do a staged reading at the Bristol. The audience went wild, and the Bristol produced the play. If Jack hadn’t done a professional favor for Baker and hadn’t given him the script, there wouldn’t be any Balkan Women. They did The Balkan Women recently at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. Carmen Roman directed the play. Carmen has a recurring role as a judge on Law & Order. The press reviews were outstanding. The Balkan Women is a play that still holds its power with an audience.

BJB: What have you discovered along the way? JT:

I have so many insights that there wouldn’t be time to list them. But most recently, Drucie McDaniel, the director of Art Lover, said, “Sometimes in life we try to do things that we’re good at, but that’s not the best way to make a living.” When she said that, it resonated with me, and I said, “That’s an excellent piece of advice for any young person starting out in the arts.” Maybe you can paint or sculpt or sing, but maybe you can’t make a living doing that. I think everybody should have a way to earn his daily bread. In the arts, when you graduate with a B.F.A. or an M.F.A. there’s no ad in the paper calling you to work. You are in for a life of scuffling. Art is a scuffling business. Judging the artist’s life by the opening at the gallery or the theatre is not realistic. It’s not like that every day. I’ve also discovered an age bias. Nobody wants to hear that Shaw wrote plays into his eighties. Many theatres are looking for that fresh, new, angry voice when there are myriad old angry voices shouting in the wilderness.

BJB: Do you have recurring themes in your work? 110

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JT:

I’ve worked many different themes. I’ve written about people, their problems, worries, issues. The themes change. But one theme has preoccupied me for more than a decade now and that is the effect of religion on human behavior; it’s endlessly fascinating to me. As an example, I wrote a play titled The Jew of Bologna. It’s based on an historical event. It deals with a Jewish family, who hired a Catholic servant in Bologna in the 19th century. Their youngest child contracted a bad cough, and the servant noticed it getting worse. Fearing the baby would die, the Catholic serving girl baptized the boy so the child’s soul would not go into Limbo (the place reserved for un-baptized souls – a Catholic belief of that time) but would go straight to Heaven. By and by, the Holy Inquisition, as it was called, found out about the boy. The Inquisition concluded that the boy was a Catholic. The Inquisition had police officers remove the young boy from his Jewish parents. The boy’s Jewish parents spent the rest of their lives trying to regain their son. By the time the boy was 18 years old, he was completely brainwashed. He rejected his family and his heritage and became a priest. It’s a heartbreaking story. The play was immediately scooped up and published by Samuel French.

BJB: Maybe the clash of religions also shows up in The Balkan Women? JT:

Yes. That’s what I mean when I say that the effect of religion, any religion, on the human psyche is a constant interest of mine. In 2010, we did a reading of a play that I wrote, about Goya, called The Immorality of Thought. It’s a play about Francisco Goya and the Duchess of Alba. Goya was a brilliant artist, but he was a rustic, a provincial. This Duchess brought Goya out of his ethnic Catholicism, his intellectual center. She gave him books by Rousseau and Montaigne. She educated him to a wider world, so to speak. Goya’s work changed. The play is also about his intellectual liberation through falling in love with this aristocrat. At the end of the reading, we got a standing ovation.

BJB: Who are the playwrights who have influenced you? JT:

Every play I’ve ever admired has in some way influenced me. All the great writers have to influence a person: Miller, Williams, Odets, Albee. I like anyone who can make language soar and sear and not let me down for hours. The classics are also important to me: The Greeks, the Elizabethans, Ibsen, Strindberg, Lorca, Brecht, Shaw. Even novelists can stir one’s imagination: John Updike, Philip Roth, John Fowles, people of that caliber.

BJB: The language in The Balkan Women is so poetic. JT:

I think the theatre is about language and how you can work magic with words. Shakespeare had no sets. He set the scenes with poetry. When I say poetic, I don’t mean flowery. Television dialog has to be colloquial and everyday language. I don’t go 111

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to the theatre to hear sitcom dialog or Law & Order speak. When I teach playwriting, I tell them, “Look, you’re writing television dialog.” Writing for television is perfectly all right, but when we’re talking about theatre in the 21st century, it’s evolving – it should be anyway – into something richer. Tennessee Williams did not write television dialog in his great works. BJB: What do you see as the biggest challenge for your playwriting students? JT:

The biggest problem is that they grew up watching television, and they’ve seen more television than they’ve seen plays. So they need to hang out at theatres. They need to read today’s plays and the classics. They need to be able to spring back from failure and rejection in order to survive in this business.

BJB: Do you have any advice for young writers? JT:

I think they should take any job in the theatre after school is finished, even if they’re handing out programs. In London, Martin Esslin said in a talkback, “Buy a space. Open your own damned theatre. Do your own plays. Stop sending them to decay in a theatre office.” I think he’s right. Even though I didn’t do that, I realize Esslin hit it right on the head. Find your own Burbage and build your own Globe.

BJB: What are the things that inspire you to continue to write? JT:

The world is impure, corrupt, broken, and so we need to keep scolding ourselves to do better. While at the same time, the world is mysterious, fascinating, and beautiful, so we need to keep reminding ourselves to marvel at the wonder. At the end of my antiwar play, The Balkan Women, the last line is said directly to the audience: “Stop. Just stop.” Writers, artists, actors must keep the pressure on.

Jules Tasca – Credits and Awards Jules Tasca has written over 130 plays. His most notable works include the following: Full-Length Plays A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (adaptation) American Gothic Art Lover Commedia Americana Dementia Presidentia 112

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Goya Judah’s Daughter Sleep in Chains Subject to Change Tear Along the Dotted Line The Balkan Women The Mind with the Dirty Man The Mission Short Plays Beginnings Devil Dead Day Old Goat Song Opened Mail – A Collection of One-Acts Outrageous! Paulie’s Pen Pal The Amazing Einstein The Beautiful Princess Sasha The Birth of Theater The Grand Christmas History of the Andy Landy Clan The Jew of Bologna The Man with the Mother on his Arm The Spelling of Coynes Theatre Trip Musicals Narnia – The Musical (Based on C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe) Television The Hal Linden TV Special – CBS (Joe Layton and Kip Walton, 1979) Radio La Llorona – NPR Maria – NPR The Grand Christmas History of the Andy Landy Clan – NPR Book (Novel) The Sicilian Love Story (PublishAmerica, 2003) Awards Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – Fellowship in Playwriting – 1 113

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New York’s Performing Arts Repertory Theater Playwriting Contest, Winner – The Amazing   Einstein (1983) Thespie Best New Play Award – Theatre Trip (1989) L.A. Drama Critics Award – Old Goat Song (1993) Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play – The Balkan Women (1998) Dorothy Silver International Playwriting Award – Judah’s Daughter (1999) Writers Room of Bucks County Screenwriting Contest, Winner – Pot Luck (2002) Lehan Playwriting Award – The Sex Life of a Priest (2003) Theatre of South Florida’s Silver Palm Award for Outstanding New Work – The Mission   (2008)

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Chapter 7 A Conversation with Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon

T

he achievements of Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, particularly as a playwright and poet, have been recognized in academic and literary circles, as well as in the theatre community. She is the recipient of a Pew Fellowship and has seen 17 of her plays professionally produced. With her Ph.D. in Anthropology and her M.F.A. in Playwriting, she infuses her work with a strong sense of history yet reflects a dramatic and poetic soul. In the setting of the urban landscape, she addresses serious issues of concern like drug addiction, abortion, violence, poverty, and suicide. Her recent play, SHOT!, premiered at Temple University, where she is an assistant professor in the Theater Department and associate professor of Urban Theater and Community Engagement. SHOT! was part of The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and won the Distinguished Achievement Award for Project Co-Conception, Playwriting, and Performance. The play has since been produced at theatres across the country. Not only does her work resonate within the inner city, it echoes the struggles of all of us trying to find our way in a chaotic world. BJB:

Were you born and raised in Philadelphia?

KW-W: Yes. I was born and raised in West Philadelphia. We lived at 646 North May Street, in what they call “the bottom” now, and then when I was six, we moved to Wynnefield … 53rd and Berks. I always tell the kids when I do workshops in the schools that I am a product of the Philadelphia Public School system – Gompers Elementary, Beeber Junior High, and then the Philadelphia High School for Girls. BJB:

Can you point to any early influences that led you to writing and theatre?

KW-W: My mother, Lillian C. Hawes, has always been my biggest inspiration as a writer and a performer. Mommy wrote Christian readings and gave recitations at church for programs and conventions. Mommy was also a product of the segregated South. She grew up in Dade County, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the 1920s and 1930s at a time when students had to recite bodies of literature (the Declaration of Independence,

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the Gettysburg Address, Claude McKay, and the like) in order to get promoted from one grade to the next each year; so as a grown woman, Mommy knew so many recitations, speeches, poems, ballads, and she’d recite them around the house while she cooked or sewed or cleaned … to keep them in her head, I guess, as a form of relaxation. I loved hearing her read poetry. There is nothing like waking up on Sunday mornings to the smell of bacon and grits, tiptoe downstairs to surprise her while she cooked both breakfast and dinner at the same time (so that dinner would be ready when we came home from church later that day), and hear her doing “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson at the kitchen sink: “And God stepped out on space, and he looked around and said, ‘I’m lonely,’ I’ll make me a world. And as far as God could see, darkness covered everything, blacker than a hundred midnights down in a cypress swamp …” You talk about imprinting on your psyche … Wow. And when she performed in church, people would be mesmerized. I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be that … to do that. I started writing poetry when I was about eight years old – corny stuff at first but then later, more political and religious. As I grew up, writing poetry became my way of dealing. It became my solace because in the 1960s and the 1970s, kids didn’t play with “geeks” and so I stayed in my room a lot and read all the time and wrote poetry. I guess about nine or ten or eleven, I started performing in church, as well. In college, at Howard University, I joined the Debate and Forensics team and became smitten with duet and monologue and the intricacies of character. I was only on Howard’s intercollegiate team for a year, my senior year in college, but it was a blast. It was the closest thing I’d ever gotten to theatre. I won a few trophies, and a few months later I eloped with a guy I’d only seen three times before and ended up living in Texas. Because of that experience on the Debate and Forensics team, one of my first jobs in Houston was with Thomas Meloncon’s Kuumba Theatre. It was there in Texas that I began directing plays, acting, and eventually, writing for the stage. BJB:

Do you remember the first play you saw?

KW-W: No. I don’t. We were always going to children’s theatre and plays at church when I was little. I saw For Colored Girls when it came to D.C. when I was at Howard in the 1970s. But no, I don’t remember my very first play. BJB:

Do you remember the first play you wrote?

KW-W: Yes. I started off writing one piece about homosexuality, but then had to put it down to get another one out of my head about abortion in the black community called The Shit Stinks. That was my first play. BJB:

What were the circumstances? 118

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KW-W: Remember, this was 1980. It wasn’t long after Roe versus Wade. I was doing research for a play about homosexuality in the black community interviewing black gay men in the Montrose Section of Houston when an informant said something to me that made me stop and think about black women and all young women I had known at Howard who had had an abortion. It bothered me so bad that I put what I was doing down and wrote the first draft of a play about abortion. Then later I went back and finished my research and wrote a play called Conversations with a Homosexual. Both pieces were comedy-dramas on some level, but the latter was more of a domestic drama. BJB:

How does your passion for writing poetry influence your work as a playwright?

KW-W: Well that’s the thing about it. I started writing plays because my poetry just kept getting longer and longer. I had all of this stuff that I needed to say, and I needed to/wanted to explore multiple points of view, and theatre allowed me to do that. My first love and primary means of communication will always be poetry, but playwriting allowed me an opportunity to craft worlds with multiple voices. BJB:

Can you tell me about your degrees and colleges attended?

KW-W: I have always loved to learn. Not that I have to be a know-it-all, but I hate the idea that somebody might know something that I don’t … something that I’ve never run across, so I read all the time and I think there’s at least one or two degrees that I want. Already, though, I have had the opportunity for a lot of formal education: Ph.D. in Anthropology, Temple University, Summer 2002; M.A. in Anthropology, Temple University, April 2001; M.F.A. in Playwriting, Temple University, May 1996; Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies, Temple University, 1996; B.A. in Journalism, Howard University, May 1980; and Philadelphia High School for Girls, cum laude, 1976. But if you’re open to learning, you learn stuff every day. My students teach me a bunch and keep me current. My children have provided me a constant source of a growing body of knowledge. I also learn a great deal with every relationship I’ve ever had. Everywhere I go, every country I visit, every state we travel to – I learn so much. I think that’s what keeps us young. BJB:

Have there been writers who have inspired you?

KW-W: James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou. BJB:

Playwrights? 119

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KW-W: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Sonia Sanchez, Charles Fuller, Ntozake Shange, P.J. Gibson, August Wilson … BJB:

How has living in Philadelphia influenced your writing?

KW-W: I went to grad school with Ed Shockley, Clay Goss, Vicki Solot, Dennis Moritz, Michael Friel, and others. Charles Fuller has come to see my work. When they were alive, Toni Cade Bambara and Kristin Hunter Lattany encouraged me. Sonia Sanchez let me T.A. for her. Kariamu Welsh and I continue to hatch up ways to collaborate on projects together. Molefi Asante wrote the foreword to my first academic text. Robert Hedley has been my mentor for nearly 20 years. His wife, Harriet Power, believed in my master’s thesis so much, she produced it. I am surrounded by history, art, and culture; writers, actors, and directors that I admire and respect. Al Simpkins at Bushfire [Theatre of Performing Arts] produced all of my early work. Do you know how valuable it is to a young writer to have a “home” – a theatre that is committed to do your work and help you grow? Unfortunately, “homes” are few and far between, particularly if you don’t tell the story that everyone has become used to hearing. But with mentors, like some of the people I’ve mentioned and the so, so many more I can’t put here because of space, I keep at it. But a writer in Philadelphia is never want for something to write about. There is too much going on here … too many questions that need to be answered. BJB:

Is it a struggle for you finding the time to write? How do you balance life and writing?

KW-W: Absolutely! Virginia Woolf wrote we need time and a room of our own. But, too often, many of us are living our lives, raising families, working, grading papers, so that our creative work – except for those things that are on deadline – are often pigeon-holed into holidays and summers. BJB:

Can you say what compels you to write?

KW-W: Fear, hurt, pain, anguish, frustration. When a topic wakes me out of my sleep and the characters demand that I write them, I carve out all of the time I need to get it out of my head and onto the paper, so that I won’t lose them or they retreat from me. It’s frustrating how long new projects take now because I just “don’t have the time.” But then, like I said, the characters or ideas will “ride me” to use Zora Neale Hurston’s expression, and you get up in the middle of the night, lose sleep, postpone something else, and write. I am compelled to write when I can’t do anything other than write because I need to breathe. 120

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BJB:

What kinds of ideas/passions inspire you to write now?

KW-W: Everything! I am fascinated with the prospect of rescuing our heroes and “sheroes” from forgotten history. I am intrigued by stories that are central to any community’s field of experience. I love Black culture, Black history, Black people, and I want to write them all as they are and not just as stereotypes or ready replications of assumptions. BJB:

Do you write for a specific audience?

KW-W: In my head I write for my community; in my heart, I write for humanity. BJB:

Is there a hard part of writing for you? An easy part?

KW-W: Once I hear the character and know where the play begins, the piece begins to write itself. There are times when I know what I want to write but don’t necessarily know what form the piece needs to take. And then it just kind of sits in my head – sometimes days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years – until it hits me (usually in my sleep), and then I know where the play begins and the rest is easy. BJB:

What has been your best theatrical experience so far?

KW-W: With each piece, I learn a great deal. There are moments I’ll never forget: when Maceba Affairs took my play, A Woman’s Choice, to Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills for a month in the late 1980s; being picketed by the National Association of Planned Parenthood when my piece, The Girl Who Chose Abortion, played at the Warner Theatre in D.C.; or doing poetry, opening for that same play at the Majestic Theatre in Detroit in front of 5,000 people … but, I think I’m most proud of Survival Strategies, about a mother’s struggle to get her daughter off crack that was inspired by a true story about an incident in West Philly in the 1980s. That play won me the Pew [Fellowship in the Arts] in 2000. The second piece I’m quite proud of is SHOT! Requiem for a Bullet, a piece I did in collaboration with Eugene Martin and Doug Wager based on research about an impoverished community in North Philadelphia called Fairhill. SHOT! premiered at Temple University in 2009 and then went on to the University of Indiana in Pennsylvania in January 2010, the Kennedy Center in April 2010, and the University of Akron in 2011. BJB:

What do you think is your most artistically successful play?

KW-W: SHOT! would be the most artistically successful play. Remounted for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, it won Distinguished Honors for CoConception, Playwriting, Acting, and Directing. 121

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BJB:

What kind of discoveries have you made along the way in terms of the art or business of playwriting?

KW-W: Coupling “art” and “business” seems almost paradoxical. I have discovered that there are two kinds of playwrights – those who are produced and encouraged and given a “home” to take risks and try new things; then there are those who are not necessarily encouraged nor produced by the so-called mainstream arts centers for whatever reason. It is interesting to see how those decisions are made and who gets to make those decisions. This new crop of writers who don’t wait to be “anointed” by the mainstream theatres downtown but who put their own pieces up and mount them themselves – these young writers intrigue me. We create art because we love it and we find ways to make “doing the art” work. I am not one of the “anointed,” so I don’t have the Holy Grail. All I know is that I am committed to keep writing … to keep working on my craft, and I choose to believe that if I do, my audiences will find me. BJB:

How do you think there can be more opportunities for women who write plays?

KW-W: Resurrecting the Women’s Theatre Festival would be a start. Finding donors to offer fellowships for theatres to produce the work of women and minorities would be an incentive to local theatres to be more inclusive, but the funding climate these days makes that kind of social philanthropy difficult. Black playwrights were produced in record numbers in the 1960s because strategies needed to be put in place to quell the riots in our communities across the country. Women writers enjoyed a little of that philanthropy in the 1970s and early 1980s. These days the squeaky wheel analogy suggests that very little happens without a catalyst. BJB:

If you could change anything about the business of theatre, what would it be?

KW-W: Art changes lives. It has been proven again and again. If we can’t get Philadelphia theatres to support local artists – writers, directors, actors, and designers – and be more inclusive in the stories that they tell, what chance do we have as a nation to grow our economy, buy and support locally grown businesses and products … put Americans back to work? These can’t just be campaign slogans or macrocosmic ideals. Diversity, inclusivity, supporting and employing the plethora of voices around us has to start right here, at home, with everything we do, including the arts. BJB:

Do you see a lot of theatre in Philadelphia? 122

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KW-W: Yes. Nearly every week, either I’m taking a group of students or I’m simply going on my own to support the arts. BJB:

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned as a playwright?

KW-W: To keep writing! BJB:

What’s your best, most honest advice to other writers who are sending work out?

KW-W: Develop thick skin. Write from your heart. Write the kinds of plays that you like to see. Listen to criticism. Take what you find useful. Discard anything that you don’t. Just keep writing. Practice your craft. Go to theatre often. Study your craft. Edit and re-read your work again and again. If after eight drafts, a scene makes you laugh, it will make someone else laugh. If another moment makes you cry, someone in your audience will cry, too. Be brave. Don’t replicate the same old stereotypes. Write from your heart. BJB:

What’s the most important thing for people to know about you as a writer?

KW-W: When it is all said and done, I hope someone will say that Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon kept trying. BJB:

What does being a writer/playwright mean to you?

KW-W: Of course, I’ve written lots of poetry to answer this question, but when I am teaching playwriting, I tell my students that writing plays must be the closest thing we can do to know what it must feel like to be God. The blank page is the firmament and with the first line that we type or write or sketch, a world begins to take shape. When you think about it that way, then clearly the world needs to be layered, detailed, and defined. A one-dimensional world is merely a picture or cartoon, while a complex layered world has depth and breadth. As playwrights, likewise, we “people” these worlds, we need to do so with characters that are full and rich and complicated. I seldom write just for the hell of it. I like plays to have a purpose – that want to show me something or take me somewhere or teach me something. And I guess I write work that hopes to do that, as well. I think all theatre should educate as much as it entertains. Michael Parenti calls it “edutainment,” and I guess that’s what I try to do in my work. I don’t believe in “art for art’s sake.” If it has no purpose, then what the hell? I rather subscribe to the African concept of “art for life’s sake.” Art has to be functional – record, document, resuscitate, motivate, inspire. I write plays that “say something” or at least I try to. You don’t always have to agree with what the play says, but you damn 123

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well should be able to identify it. You know, I keep saying it and I guess it sounds corny on some level, but I write because I have to. Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays A Chained Foot Stumbling on a New World A Woman’s Choice Awake Brown Ices: Chocolate Drops By What Price: Unity Dog Days: The Killing of Octavious Catto From Brillo Pads to Feminine Pads: Raw Abrasives Gumbo Just Wait One Constitutional Minute La Baker: The Life and Times of Josephine Baker Nappy Truths Reunion SHOT! Requiem for a Bullet Slaughterhouse (The Shit Stinks) Survival Strategies: A Tale of Faith The Girl Who Chose Abortion We The People: The Real Ones Short Plays Common Folk Nappy Truth Night Orchids-Black Thai: For Black Women Who Served in Nam They Never Told Me There’d Be Days Like This Awards City of Philadelphia Citation – For Work in the Community as a Playwright (1989) Theatre Association of Pennsylvania – Fellowship in Playwriting (1990) Pew Exchange Residency Grant (1993–1994) Future Faculty Fellowship in Playwriting – Temple University (1993–1996) Scholars Fellowship – American Antiquarian Society – Visiting Researcher (1995–1996) Pew Exchange Residency Grant (1996) Ramona Broomer Award for Creativity – Temple University (1999) Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2000)

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Independence Grant – Theatre Communications Group National Organization Conference   (2001) Arts Initiative Grant – Temple University (2003–2004) Merit Award for Teaching, Scholarship, and University Service – Temple University   (2007–2008) Seed Grant – Temple University – Collaboration with Eugene Martin (2008–2009) Distinguished Achievement for Project Co-Conception, Playwriting, and Performance at   The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival – SHOT! (2010) Merit Award for Exceptional Performance (2011)

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Chapter 8 A Conversation with Ed Shockley

A

s the writer of more than 70 plays and winner of a Pew Fellowship, Ed Shockley is a major creative force in Philadelphia. Productions of his plays, Bobos, with musical collaborator James McBride, and Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues, broke box office records and won national awards. His leadership skills are evident in his work as a teaching artist at schools, universities, and theatrical organizations in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York. He has worked with writers in the Philadelphia Young Playwrights program and led the Philadelphia Dramatists Center as president for over ten years. He founded a publishing company, YouthPLAYS.com, and founded his own production company, Mosaic Theater Productions. His thoughts on art-making and theatre are an inspiration to many, including this writer. One of my favorite quotes from Ed, when dealing with the business of theatre, is, “No is just the first answer.” BJB: Were you born in Philadelphia?

ES:

Yes, I was born in South Philadelphia.

BJB: Did you go to school here? ES:

I went to elementary and middle school here. I went to G.W. Childs Elementary School, which is almost exclusively black, in South Philadelphia, and actually I was valedictorian, and I got a chance to go to Masterman, which was like the magnet school then. Back then it was an elementary and a middle school. It’s a high school now. Masterman, at the time, was the only school that was visited by a recruiter for St. Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire, for a program called A Better Chance (ABC), which takes urban kids and sends them to really super rich schools. So I ended up going to St. Paul’s for high school.

BJB: Had you thought about writing at that time?

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ES:

In fifth grade I wrote an assignment for an after-school program. They gave us a series of essays to write, and one of the topics was “Why I Hate My Teacher.” So I wrote a truthful essay as a fifth grader. When I went back to my classroom to get my coat, my teacher was there, and she snatched the paper out of my hand, she read it, she burst into tears, and dragged me down to the principal’s office. The principal wasn’t there (he would’ve acted more responsibly), but the vice principal suspended me for writing the essay. Luckily, the next day my mom came to the school and read them the riot act: “How dare you suspend my son for doing an assignment in school!” So everything was good; they expunged my record, but that taught me the power of words. Then in the sixth grade, I had a black teacher who was a black nationalist, and kids were fighting because one kid called another kid black (we were Negroes back then), and my teacher let a guy come into our classroom who talked to us about how in TV and in movies black hats were worn by the bad guys in Westerns and had made us hate our own skin. I didn’t realize that when I was watching a TV show that I was being shaped. And that really unsettled me that someone I didn’t see had made me do things. (I wasn’t the one fighting, but I could’ve been.) So I became determined to master words. Writing really became my mission then, and I discovered playwriting shortly after that. I had seen in less than a year two instances where words just transformed the world. It made this teacher do this ballistic thing, and then made people attack each other, just responding to words, these invisible words I didn’t see. So words became a magical thing for me and still are. As I researched more, I found that every religion in the world begins with something like “In the beginning, there was the word …” It wasn’t something new. I discovered what people have known since the beginning of time, that words are the greatest creation of humankind.

BJB: When did you write your first play? ES:

I wrote my first play when I was in high school. I started writing short stories and novels when I was in middle school. What led me to theatre was … I was a teenage kid full of testosterone, and my novels were very much like sexual exploit kinds of things, and I would read them to the class when the teacher was out. So that process of reading each chapter to a classroom of kids introduced me to theatre. In eleventh grade, I started my first play. There was a play competition between the different houses. This was a boarding school, and we all lived there. Each house would mount a play. My house won with Flowers for the Trashman, and I was in the play. So I discovered theatre from the acting side. Then I decided I wanted to write my own play, so I started a piece then and continued writing plays from then on. Playwriting brought all the elements of art together. I like to compose music, I like acting, I like singing, I like painting, and I found theatre brought it all together for me.

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ES:

I wanted to be where theatre was, so as a basketball player, I got to pick my schools. I went to New York and played basketball for a while and got a booster; they give you someone to make you happy as a basketball player. Since they knew I was interested in theatre, my booster’s brother was a Broadway producer, and I got to go backstage and meet the actors and watch openings, and it was a real great indoctrination into theatre. I saw Geoffrey Holder do the backer’s audition for Timbuktu, and just watching that stuff early gave me a quick indoctrination into theatre.

BJB: How did you get back to Philadelphia? ES:

My mom was always here, my family was here, so I always tried to visit. I lived in New York for more than a decade, maybe 15 years, but I would always come back to visit. In the summer, there was a theatre called Theatre Center Philadelphia on South Street – Albert Benzwie. When I came back during summers to visit, they had a Black Theatre Festival, and I could mount shows there. I visited a bunch of theatres in Philadelphia, and Albert was the only one who was welcoming. Other theatres would talk; Albert gave me the keys to his theatre. So I kept returning each summer. I didn’t move back until I got married about 20 years later. My wife was a dancer with a company called Urban Bush Women (she was a founding member and danced with them quite a number of years), and she was tired of New York, which surprised me, and she wanted to leave New York and move to Philadelphia. So I moved back to do graduate school at Temple [University] because I needed a graduate degree for teaching. I was approaching 40 when I returned to school. And also I moved back just to afford to buy a house and better living. It was a career-suicide choice, but socially and personally it was a good choice. When I came back, I had already started my career with a hit show called Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues in New York, so I was already known when I came back to Philadelphia.

BJB: Tell me about Bessie Smith in New York. ES:

That was my first legitimate hit show. It opened for a week and ran forever and set box office records in several theatres.

BJB: What was the process of getting it produced? ES:

I was desperate to break into theatre. I was living in a condemned building in Harlem, so I didn’t have any money. I was volunteering in various theatres with really great people like Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington and Sam Jackson. I was volunteering as an usher, and I wanted these people to know me as a writer rather than somebody who was running around. There’s a company called Frank Silvera’s Writers’ Workshop, started by Morgan Freeman and Garland Lee Thompson, and I was a regular volunteer 131

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there. And there was another theatre called the Remy that had no money to commission a play, so I volunteered to write their plays for them. They wanted a play for children’s theatre about Bessie Smith, so I wrote a really short play so I could have an adult play performed along with it. I thought the major play of the evening was going to be this play called The Gypsy Wagon. Then the theatre went bankrupt before the show opened. But, Garland Thompson at Frank Silvera’s Workshop had seen the notice for the play in the paper because this was a week before opening that the theatre went bankrupt. And he had gotten his Equity card in Edward Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith, so he was very interested in a play about Bessie Smith and he changed the title of the play. Originally, it was called Little Miss Dreamer because it was a children’s play. The character happened to be Bessie Smith that I was writing about, but it was a 20-ishyear-old girl who had her first northern performance. It’s early in Bessie Smith’s life, then it flashes back to her younger years, so really it’s a children’s play. Then he changed the title to Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues, so he could let the audience know it was about Bessie Smith. It opened just for a week, and then it took off and started my career that way. This is all while I was living in a condemned building with no telephone and stealing electricity from the hallway. BJB: When you came back to Philadelphia, what was the first play you had produced here? ES:

I think the first show I did was Bessie in Albert’s theatre.

BJB: Have you been inspired by seeing the work of other playwrights? ES:

I was inspired more by reading. I’m a writer, so when I’m seeing it onstage, I’m seeing someone else’s art. I’m seeing directors and actors, which I think gets in the way of my understanding the writing. I was inspired a lot more by reading. But at Silvera’s, I was lucky in that they did two readings a week, and I was there every week. I got to see early drafts of Charlie Fuller’s plays, Ntozake Shange’s plays, Laurence Holder’s plays. Hollywood hadn’t opened yet when I was there. This was before the big boom, so all these people were very accessible. I got to watch some of the best actors in America in early drafts of some of the best playwrights in America and also some of the worst playwrights, too, [Laughs] because I had to be there every week. I’ve always been at workshops like when I was at the Philadelphia Dramatists Center, where I was the one unlocking the door, so I had to be there whether it was a good playwright or a bad playwright. I would watch every single reading, and that would accumulate to thousands and thousands of readings, and that’s why I think I see better than most of my peers. And that’s the secret to writing. A not well-known writer, Robert Maurice Riley, wrote a play called Fixed that George Faison directed. It’s the most famous piece he’s done. He’s really a poet, but early on Robert Maurice 132

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Riley took me under his wing when I was acting in a piece by Ntozake Shange, From Okra to Greens, after Colored Girls. I happened to be in the company [of Okra] and he was directing it, and we bonded. I was like 21/22. He taught me the business and looked at all my early writing and introduced me to people, so he’s probably been the biggest individual influence. Richard Wesley, who wrote The Mighty Gents, also did the same thing because he was at Silvera’s at the same time when I was there. He was only a few years older than me, so we kind of bonded. He talked a lot about his writing and business. Phillip Hayes Dean used to eat lunch at my station when I was a CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act] worker at American Place Theatre. Every day he would come for an hour and eat his lunch and pontificate about theatre, and we started talking about writing. We talked a lot about Edward Albee because he was in writing workshops with him. So there was a mix, a wide swath of writers in different cities that influenced me. BJB: You also studied at Temple University, right? ES:

This was late in my career. My career was really already established before I came here [to Philadelphia]. I was really teaching illegally. I did three years of undergraduate, and then I left to start my career. The plan was, I was supposed to “try” the world and come back, but I was doing so much theatre, I wasn’t going to class. My career got me teaching, but you’re really supposed to have a higher degree to teach. So I came to Philadelphia to do the graduate program at Temple, and Temple gave me a full scholarship.

BJB: How do you find your inspiration to write? ES:

I’m very mechanical. In terms of inspiration, I consciously try to routinely reinvent how I approach it. If it’s a craft, I want to master the craft. I actually got this from James Earl Jones. He lectured once when I was an undergraduate. I asked him how he was able to do King Lear, Claudius in Hamlet, and The Great White Hope all in the same year. He said that he tried to rediscover the craft of acting with each new role, and that to me was profound. So I try consciously to rediscover how I approach it. For example, I had a period where I approached a series of plays from set, making an interesting environment first and see who fills the environment. My favorite approach to writing is theme. I like to have a theme first, then figure out a vehicle that allows me to explore that theme. But, again, I don’t want to impose a pattern on work. I don’t want to bore the audience or myself, so I need to find different ways. The newest piece I’m working on is an epic poem. It’s a 70-page poem, and it’ll probably be performed by a single actor kind of like the way Patrick Stewart does A Christmas Carol. So the way I approach that is completely different than the way I did Slave Narratives, which is an historical documentary, real words woven into a piece, or like 133

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Bobos, which is sung through opera and each series of the piece has a different voice. What I do, though, is do experiments first, short experiments. In my early plays, I wrecked a lot of good ideas. If I wanted to write about a teenager, I just wrote the play. I didn’t have the skills to write the plays I wanted to write, so I’d complete the play. I’d have this 80-page play, which isn’t working, then it’s hard to deconstruct it and make it work, so I’d end up throwing it away. So what I started doing is writing short plays first, so I could experiment. If I needed to know about writing women characters better, then I’d end up writing four short plays with all women casts. And then after I’ve done the exercises with short plays, then I feel confident to write the opus work, and repeat the process again and again. Now, at this point in life, I do less of experimental writing because basically I’m writing the opus pieces based on 30 years of experiments preceding it. But I’m not closed to finding experiment again, to develop something that I’m missing, some skill or accent. BJB: How was your experience writing Slave Narratives? ES:

In some ways, it’s been one of the most successful plays of my career because it just ran for four years; it’s been received phenomenally well, people are in tears; but creatively it’s one of the least satisfying because it’s along the lines of what Anna Deavere Smith does. It’s not living people’s interviews, but I went through various libraries and went through transcriptions, and took either their words or wrote monologues inspired by their words to create the play. So, creatively, it’s writing by the numbers, as far as I’m concerned. It’s something that any writer could do who has the patience simply to wade through these volumes of historical documents. So the experience was very easy creatively. The only challenge I had writing it was everything sounded the same. All the parts, when I read it, made sense, but when I started speaking the lines, I said, “Oh, this is redundant.” A word was repeated five times, and it made mental tricks in my head because I thought, “Where am I in the monologue now?” So, being inside it, I thought, “Wait a minute. The actor can’t say this.” I had to deal with the change, with the cut, whatever. That process led to a new genre for me.

BJB: What do you feel is your most successful play? ES:

This came up after a performance of Slave Narratives. The question is I have to figure how I’m measuring success. If I’m measuring financially, it’s got to be Bessie or Bobos because Bessie set five box office records. Bobos set one. Bobos was at a higher ticket theatre, as well as Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which ran for 99 performances in a large theatre. Bessie ran for a full two years. Creatively, Bobos would be the example. It took probably 13 years to write, but the problem is that Bobos is sung through opera, and the hardest work was James [McBride] composing the music. Writing rhymed work isn’t difficult once you’ve conceived the plot. I had James compose the 134

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music first. It’s like doing haiku. The rules make it easy to find the language. It took 13  years conceiving the structure, figuring how to actually tell the story so that it made sense. In terms of my idea of writing, probably this piece I’ve just completed, The Woodcarver’s Band is probably the best piece of writing I’ve done because when you think of a 70-page epic poem, everything is painted with words; it’s probably the most difficult thing I could’ve done. And also, thematically, it’s about our lives as artists, so the theme is close to my heart. It’s about this guy who makes these little figurines that come alive when he’s alone in the shop, and so he wants to spend all his time making the figurines, but he makes his living carving banisters and steeples. We all have this tug as artists, that the things that feed our soul rarely feed our bodies. On several levels the difficulty of writing it – a completely novel structure, I used no model for writing it, and just the quality of language in it – it’s probably my best work. I wrote a book, Notes from a Practicing Writer [2007], and one thing I talk about is this story about a little kid. I was with Robert Riley, my mentor, and he had asked a little kid about his paintings. He asked him which one was the best one, and he pointed to the one he was working on, which is how I actually feel. BJB: Do you think you have themes that continually come up in your work? ES:

Unfortunately, absolutely yes. I keep trying to fight it, and I’ll write pieces, but then when I finish the piece … I’m just doing a rough estimate, but out of my 70 plays, 50 of them are about what my friend called “pyrrhic victories.” They’re about characters who can either have a victory in their soul or a victory in the world, but they can’t have both. If a victory is a victory in the world, then you get the dollar but you’re unhappy. If the victory is a victory of the soul, then it makes you feel good but you’re broke. I don’t start off to write that theme often, but when I analyze the plays afterwards, five, six, seven, eight years later, I discover that theme again and again, so much so that now in current plays, I’m constantly now trying not to write that theme. The structures and the plots are so different, but when you boil it down and actually analyze it over and over again – because my life is about that – how do you define victory? Do you go write for a TV show and make gobs of money and get breakthrough fame? Or do you write what your soul sings? One of my best pieces creatively is a play called Mountain. It’s an antiwar play. I picked a war that people feel should have been fought, the American War for Independence. Then I picked a battle, King’s Mountain, which was next to the last battle in the war. And there were like two British people in the whole battle. It was like Americans fighting Americans. It was just absurd, a Hatfield–McCoy thing, which was just horribly bloody. That piece had 47 actors in it. It was performed brilliantly. Dr. Scott Miller directed it at Spirit Square Theatre, which is like Lincoln Center. We had members of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra onstage in costume with period instruments, so all this was an amazing creative success. There’s a pyrrhic victory. 135

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BJB: This was in North Carolina? ES:

The play was commissioned by the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte. I basically lived there for five or six years. I was commuting from here [in Philadelphia] down to Charlotte. At the height of it, I had three plays running at once. That’s one of my career highlights when I had the financial and the creative meshed together. All three plays I did there were really aggressive, groundbreaking pieces that were received very well, which is exciting.

BJB: Do you write for a particular audience? ES:

I have an audience in mind when I write, and I market my plays based on the audience. Black theatres are dominated by churches, kind of a Baptist church thing, so there is certain language they won’t tolerate; there’re themes they won’t think about. For children’s theatre, I have rules. I have this company, YouthPLAYS.com and very few of my own plays are represented by my own company because I don’t often write for young actors. I write for young audiences. Because I want to challenge actors to do the most difficult things possible, most young actors can’t possibly be successful as performers in my pieces. I have some pieces where the leads are youth, but I usually surround them with adults. There are youth leads, but they’re surrounded by a whole company of adult seasoned performers who carry them along. I adapted Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and several leads, about six, were youth, but they were also supported by a large, solid contingent of adults, and the youth that we picked had to be exceptional. So I do think of audience based on each play.

BJB: Tell me more about your company, YouthPLAYS. ES:

Jon Dorf and I founded it with a third partner, Matt Buchanan. Matt and Jon write almost exclusively for young actors. We started it to simply push our plays, but it grew into representing more than 100 plays now, and we’ll probably have 200 plays by the end of the year. The goal is to have 500 to 1,000 plays in the next four years. It’s growing phenomenally. We grew from having one play being picked up every two months to now every day or so someone mounts a play by one of our authors. The authors are doing great, but we take such a nominal percentage (these aren’t long runs) often in schools, so the author is making a royalty of $80/$200, but YouthPLAYS is only getting $20 or $40 for this. Meanwhile, the author has zero expense, while we have like $500 national ads. So we’re still in the red despite our getting like 3,000 hits a month. But the trend is moving up so quickly that we expect to be able to pay money to authors and also be able to pay our expenses as well. It’s getting to a volume of authors that when someone comes to YouthPLAYS, they’re assured that they can find a play that suits their needs. It’s exciting to send royalty checks to all these authors. 136

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BJB: Are you currently writing plays for young audiences? ES:

I composed a series of new plays, which I just completed now, which matches the rules of this genre – expandable, large cast, lots of roles for young ladies. There’re a series of things I’m discovering, which has been a learning experience. The odd thing is I don’t particularly like the genre, now that I’ve worked with it – I find it ties my hands in ways I don’t want them tied. Language is one of things I’m most interested in, and language is difficult for that world. So, when there’s a lot of words and tongue twisters, again that makes people not want to do those plays, and that’s what I’m interested in – elaborate, live, rich, vibrant, unique metaphors. The big things I discovered in this genre is that people want expandable casts so that they can have every kid in their theatre company or class have a role, and ideally they want to have flexible gender because they don’t know how many girls or guys they’ll have. Those are two of the biggest things. A lot of my plays for youth audiences have been historical pieces, and I really thought that was going to be a real appeal. But it seems like they’re interested in going to see Arden Theatre mount the show about Betsy Ross; they’re not interested in doing the show about Betsy Ross. I spent like a year writing The Boston Massacre. I’m really proud of the piece, but it hasn’t premiered yet, and it’s a really interesting, unique piece. For one, there’re too many guys. Also, things like violence. I’ve done excerpts of this with teachers and students in the classroom, and teachers and the kids love it, but loving it there versus taking it to your principal and saying, “I want to do this play where six people get shot …” So it’s a learning experience.

BJB: Do you find that there’re enough opportunities in Philadelphia for playwrights to get work produced? ES:

I think of mounting shows in Philadelphia as a way of completing the creative process – getting reviews so that will give it some legs, being in rehearsal to revise things. But Bobos did more than 150 percent above projected box office and closed in two weeks. I can’t possibly do better than that. I set the box office record at the theatre. How can you possibly close a show that set the box office record? But, after that, they were done with us, and that was a revelation for me. I can’t blame theatres, though. That’s why I started Mosaic Theater Productions. Why am I going to a producer where all he has is a Rolodex and calls some people up and gets money, and then he gets the largest share of my work? He makes a bigger salary than me. There’s a better way. We need to hire them. We should get the lion’s share, even with publications. That’s how PDC [Philadelphia Dramatists Center] came about. We should renegotiate the relationship of the artists with the industry of theatre. Writers need to take charge of the industry since we create the soap. Ninety-five percent of the income from Slave Narratives goes to Mosaic, to the artists who founded the company, or to any actors we hire, so there’s no middle man cutting anything out. 137

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BJB: Are you the artistic director? ES:

Yes.

BJB: How do you fund the productions? ES:

So far, it’s been performance contracts and occasional grants, but it’s easier to get some investors together and show how we will return a profit. It’s all a tax write-off. If the show opens and does well, you’re going to make ten times what you’d make with it sitting in the bank a thousand times faster, so it’s not a bad investment. The largest show we’ve done is a six-actor show. We did the late Joy Rose’s show, Forces of Darkness, about the Rosenbergs. It was her last show. She was alive when we started the production, and she actually died before the show opened. It was by far the best work of her life, and her family saw it. We did a really good production. I was really pleased with it. We did it here at the CEC [Community Education Center]. It was the last show of American Concert Theatre. That was the largest piece we did, and that’s because she had just gotten a grant from the Leeway Foundation to produce the show.

BJB: What is the most important thing you’ve learned as a playwright? ES:

Two things. What makes you a writer is not how well you write, it’s how well you see. I’m constantly training myself to see my plays better and see other people’s plays better. And the other thing is that there was this guy at Columbia University’s Film School when I was an undergraduate there, and he said, “Theatre implodes; film explodes.” What he meant was that film is two-dimensional; it’s flat. So the audience’s attention is quickly diverted. So, if you show a building front and you stay there for 15  seconds, we’re off for popcorn or something because nothing happens. But if there’s a live building, we’re looking at all kinds of things. It’s changing now as technology enters the theatre. There’re holograms, laser lights, rear screen projections, whatever. Suddenly the line between theatre and cinema is blurring. Probably 3-D will enter theatre soon, and then the line will really blur. Then suddenly, theatre could explode, but still, probably film will always explode better.

BJB: How has teaching helped you as a playwright? ES:

When you try to articulate something, you understand it better. When I try to articulate to someone else, I have to be clear. I see better as I try to explain something. There’s a guy named Neil Postman, kind of a contemporary philosopher, and he described, “Making sense at the point of utterance.” Often we don’t know what we think until we say it. So teaching does that for me. Teaching also allows me to stay in touch with 138

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generations that I’m not part of anymore, so I hear the language, the vernacular, the slang, so that’s good for writing characters that reflect the contemporary world. But having kids helps, too. I’ve been a father now for the past 23 years. My kids are ten years apart, so I’ve had a small child in my life for the past 23 years, which has actually created quite a few career challenges. I don’t see much theatre, and friends think I’m neglecting their shows, but many of the theatre artists in Philadelphia are childless, so they don’t understand what it’s like to have your kid come home, have homework five days a week, and then try to give up a Saturday to see a play. It doesn’t work. So I’ll go months and months and months without sitting in a theatre at 8 o’clock at night. Now my youngest can be home by himself, I might be able to go back and see adult theatre again. I know every Muppet Movie, every Rug Rat, whatever. Teaching also gives you some kind of control of your finances. There are two paths an artist can take. If you get a real career job, then you write in your spare time. The other is you get a meaningless, mindless job that takes no mental energy and you spend all your time creating. The high road, the low road. With the low road, you create more work. That’s why I’ve written 72 plays. I’ve lived the low road my whole life. The first hit show I had, I quit my last nine-to-five job and never worked one since. The disadvantage is that obviously you’re on a financial tightrope. Teaching allows you to have some influence over that. The bad part is that many artists end up becoming teachers who write, rather than writers who teach. I know, without a doubt, that the greatest contribution I have to make is as a writer. Many other people could still be meaningful in the lives of those kids as teachers, but those same people could not write my plays. If I don’t write those plays, it’ll never happen. There’s a line from Erasmus, “No one appreciates a talent that is concealed.” That’s one of the mottos I live by. I have to get everything inside of me out into the world. And that’s the race we’re in. It doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you get the work out there. There’re lots of paths. BJB: What was the process of writing your book, Notes from a Practicing Writer? ES:

Actually, through PDC. When I was first running PDC, I was disappointed by how many writers really had no foundation in playwriting. Most hadn’t been to universities. It’s not a requirement to go to a university, but you need some sort of training. They had just decided to be a playwright and had done no research. I had to be there for all these readings. If you have Michael Hollinger – great. But then you’d have Joe Schmo who didn’t even know how to put it on the page. So we started the First Draft newsletter as an information arm, and I started writing articles about play craft, and we were giving this away free to members. We did that for six or seven years. Then PDC stopped doing that, but there were all these articles I had written. So I pulled them together with other articles and that became the book. It’s actually going to Kindle next. 139

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BJB: If you were to give advice to playwrights who are in the trenches, sending work out to theatres, what would you say? ES:

Write first. Then analyze what your goals are clearly. A lot of writers just do things. If I want to be rich, for example, then I need to send work to Broadway producers or write for TV shows. Do I need to have a career as a playwright? Or am I content seeing my plays onstage for audiences and I also like being an engineer? It’s not hard getting plays produced; it’s hard making a living as a playwright. I wish I didn’t feel I needed to make a living as a playwright. Then I could do quite a few other things. I could coach basketball, teach martial arts. So, once you analyze what you really want, then it’s easy to make a map of how to get there. Then it’s trial and error from there. I find that most authors, actors, whatever, haven’t clearly figured out what they want. And then the rarest few figure out why they want it. What do I want? Why do I want it? How do I get there?

BJB: It’s really wonderful that throughout your life and career, you have this great enthusiasm that hasn’t changed. It’s even stronger now than when I first met you. ES:

If we were brain surgeons and knew we could cut into someone’s head and take out a tumor and save someone’s life, how could you not be excited about it? And we have that ability. I’m lucky enough to have had moments where someone said something to me like they were close to suicide and then changed their mind when they saw my play. I know, without a doubt, that’s what we’re doing. We’re speaking the right word to the right ear at the right time. So, knowing that, how can you not be excited about it? We get to do what we dreamed about as kids. So few Americans have the courage to pursue that, which disappoints me. Life is so short. How can you not pursue what you want to do? And so we’re doing our lifelong dream, and we know that our dream has this amazing impact. That’s why we can’t do anything trivial. You can’t do anything trivial because that means it’s time taken away from something which could’ve saved someone’s life or stopped someone from beating their wife, whatever. That’s what our writing is doing.

BJB: You’ve won quite a few awards. How have the awards impacted your life? ES:

Garland Thompson said a few years ago, “If you believe when people say good things about you, you’ve got to believe when people say bad things about you.” I don’t much care about all that stuff except for they are tools to the goal of writing. The Pew has opened some doors. I may go to some universities to give lectures, maybe have access to some university theatres, and that would be money to feed my family. So I’m interested in that stuff on that level. It validates me. Early on in my career, people would constantly say, “Why are you doing this? You need to get a job.” It’s impossible 140

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for people to say those things when you’ve won national awards. They [the awards] are tools to allow me to create, especially [to gain] access to better directors, better actors, and larger theatres. That’s really what it’s all for. There’s never been a year when I made a lot of money. Luckily, I live simply. BJB: Any last piece of advice? ES:

I would just encourage everybody to follow their dreams. That’s the only way to be happy.

Ed Shockley – Credits and Awards Ed Shockley has written over 70 plays. His most notable works include the following: Full-Length Plays A Nite in the Life of Bessie Smith (a.k.a. Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues) Bobos – Co-written with James McBride Mountain Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor (adaptation) Slave Narratives Tentshow The Boston Massacre The Stalking Horse The Woodcarver’s Band Short Plays Merlin & Vivien The Liars Contest The Milli Vanilli Orchestra Film Stone Mansion (Short) – Showtime, PBS (Jan Johnson Goldberger, 2004) Books Notes from a Practicing Writer (Hopewell Publications, 2007) Awards Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – Fellowships in Playwriting – 2 Audelco Award – Best Musical Production (1981) 141

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American Minority Playwright Festival (1985) Reader’s Digest/Lila Wallace Foundation Production Fellowship (1994) Stephen Sondheim Award for Outstanding Contribution to American Musical Theatre –   Bobos (1995) Richard Rodgers Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters – Bobos (1996) Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2008)

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Chapter 9 A Conversation with Larry Loebell

A

s a lifetime resident of Philadelphia, Larry Loebell has his roots planted firmly in the heart of the City as well as in the theatre community. Although his creative work began with writing, directing, and producing in film and television, he has transitioned successfully into theatre. He worked for eight years as literary manager and dramaturg at InterAct Theatre Company, and he has also worked as a dramaturg at PlayPenn in Philadelphia and Seven Devils Playwrights Conference in Idaho. His work as a  playwright can be seen every day during school hours in Living News at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where performances are viewed by hundreds of visitors annually. I spoke to Larry at the University of the Arts where he currently teaches. BJB: You were born in Philadelphia? LL:

I was born in Philadelphia. I have lived here all my life, really within a couple of miles of where I was born, with the exception of the time I was in graduate school. I was in Colorado for three and a half years.

BJB: And your degrees? LL:

My B.A. is in English, my M.A. is in English/Creative Writing, and my M.F.A. is in Film and Television, and I will start out by telling you I have never taken a theatre course in my life, other than Shakespeare courses in various English departments. All my theatre education has come sitting in the dark watching plays. My parents, starting around age five, took me to theatre, not just children’s theatre – although they took me to children’s theatre and I have vivid memories of that – but to see plays in all of the venues in Philadelphia, what were then commercial venues: the Forrest and Shubert downtown, Playhouse in the Park, the Camden County Playhouse, Valley Forge Music Fair, and also to New York. We had family in New York, and my parents were theatre lovers, and so I went to theatre, which meant Broadway in those days before there was Off-Broadway and Off-Off, starting from when I was very young.

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But my biggest childhood memories of going to theatres are seeing Broadway plays in tryouts here, or returning as road tours to Philadelphia. I have vivid memories of having seen major plays and musicals at a fairly young age. BJB: Was there one particular play that inspired you more than the others? LL:

I was a sort of difficult kid in high school, a classic underachiever. I sometimes cut school and went to New York to hear music or to see plays. I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in NYC at 16 or 17. I read about it in the Village Voice and I wanted to see it, so I got on the bus and went up, to a matinee probably. And I sat in the theatre when that play ended, and I thought to myself, “This is what I want to do.” By “this,” I didn’t know that I meant playwriting. It took me a long time to come to playwriting. But I knew the moment that play ended that I wanted to be a writer, even though I had no real idea what that entailed. I had no idea how you did that, I didn’t know what a career as a writer meant, but I knew absolutely, as clearly as I had ever known anything, that that’s what I wanted to do.

BJB: Who are some other playwrights who have influenced you? LL:

Influence is such a funny thing because so much of it is invisible. What would I point to in my plays to prove that, say, someone like Lanford Wilson or Naomi Wallace or Sam Shepard influenced me? It’s easier to see the influence of Kushner or Blessing or Odets, Miller, or Williams. What’s harder to show in any quantifiable way is how little pieces of influence happen, the turn of a phrase, the attitude of a character, the compression of time in a scene or an act. I’ve seen plays that were not particularly memorable in any other way, but suggested to me a new way to think about something or approach something. The list of plays and playwrights that exerted that kind of influence could be the whole interview! I have also been influenced by all the plays I have dramaturged because I have studied them more closely than plays I simply see once in the theatre. I learn things every time I dramaturg a new play. I’ve also taken a few workshops and master classes, including one from Bill Kelley, the guy who wrote Witness, and one a few years ago from Amy Freed at the Wilma. She had a direct influence on me because my most commercially successful short play came out of that workshop. You were in that workshop, too, right?

BJB: Yes, I was. LL:

I found her really inspiring. I’m not sure I could point to anything specific. It was simply the way she thought about and talked about plays. But, in fact, probably the biggest influence on my writing is not a playwright. During my M.A., one of my teachers was a poet named Richard Hugo. The compression of poetry isn’t usually thought to have 146

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much relevance to the speech style of playwriting, but in Hugo’s poems every line has the vitality of heightened speech. His poems, specifically his diction, continue to be a very important influence on me. I guess I would say that if Stoppard’s influence was telling me what I wanted to be, Hugo’s influence was showing me how to do it. The problem was that it just took me forever to realize where to apply those influences. I wrote poems and short stories and screenplays before I woke up to playwriting. I was in my early forties when I wrote my first play. Why I didn’t have my “ah-ha” moment before that I don’t know, but I didn’t. Writing plays didn’t make sense to me until the moment when it did. BJB: And how did that happen? LL:

I have a friend, Louis Greenstein, with whom I have worked periodically. We wrote an episode for the first season of Rugrats in 1991. Sometime before that, in the mid1980s I think, Lou had a play produced at the Theater Center of Philadelphia. The play was called In the Wee Hours, and it was about a brother and sister who were at war over the objects their parents left when they died. It was one of Greg Wood’s first stage appearances in Philadelphia, by the way. Watching Lou’s play I remember thinking, “I write like that,” meaning that my short stories were largely dialog. It was just a short leap to the question “Why am I not writing in that form?” Still, it took me a few years to actually do it.

BJB: How did you get the job of being literary manager and dramaturg at InterAct? LL:

I had been doing film and television for nearly 20 years, and I had done all kinds of media work. I co-directed one feature film and produced another. I did lots of commercial work, lots of corporate work. I did some broadcast documentaries. At a certain point, I decided that I was going to stop doing film and television. I just stopped being interested in the world of film or TV production, and I stopped feeling like it had the kind of creative goody in it that I was craving. At that point, I had been writing plays for several years, so I just walked away from the film and television career. The previous four years I had been producing a public affairs television show, and when the contract expired, I didn’t go after getting it renewed, and I disbanded my company. In September of 1998, I went to Seth Rozin with an offer. I said I would work for him for free for a year as literary manager to learn the ropes with the proviso that, if I did a good job, at the end of the year he would find me a salary and keep me on. You have to understand, at that point I didn’t have any experience in literary management specifically, though I had managed a company for many years. I didn’t have any experience with dramaturgy either, other than having seen a lifetime’s worth of theatre, though I had years of writing experience in several genres and forms. I also had accumulated a pretty thick stack of acceptance 147

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and rejection letters from editors and literary managers along the way. If I knew anything, I knew how to write a letter. But I also thought I knew how to read a play, and how to talk about plays well enough to be of service to InterAct. I knew as a writer how I wanted to be talked to about my own work – the kinds of questions I wanted to have asked of me, the kind of commentary I thought would be helpful. Part of my motivation for finding work inside a theatre company was to more fully understand how new plays made their way from page to stage because I wanted to learn how to be more successful promoting my own work to artistic directors. InterAct, at that point, was among the most consistent new play producing theatres in the city. InterAct probably couldn’t have afforded to hire me in 1998, but they were about to begin a period of significant growth, and in 2000 Seth made good on his commitment. I was never full-time. For most of the time I worked there, I was half or three-quarters time, and so I did some other things to cobble together a living – teaching and other writing. But InterAct became my artistic home in those years simply because Seth said “yes.” BJB: Did you know Seth before this? LL:

Nope. I had heard him speak at a PDC (Philadelphia Dramatists Center) event. I was really impressed with him. I knew InterAct’s work. I had seen the revival of 6221, and I think I had seen a couple other things at that point, and I knew a little bit about who they were, and what their mission was, but I didn’t know Seth personally. I tell the story of going to work for him, and I think it’s pretty amazing. People just aren’t open that way most of the time. To his eternal credit, I think that he could’ve said “no,” could’ve blown me off, could’ve said, “Come in one day a week and do some filing and I’ll see.” But his faith was immediate and total, and it’s pretty remarkable.

BJB: You mentioned you started writing plays in 1991. Do you remember writing your first play? LL:

Yeah, the first play I wrote that I was willing to show anyone also had a Lou Greenstein connection. Lou told me that Deborah Baer Mozes, who is the artistic director of Theatre Ariel, was putting together a festival of ten-minute plays that had Jewish themes. The play I was writing was about a guy who takes a trip on a small tourist boat up into Glacier Bay in Alaska in response to a mid-life crisis. He plans to get off to hike and camp on the glacier, and conceives of his little excursion as a test. He also wants to talk to God about his life, in private. The play is called Prayers. On the boat, he strikes up a conversation with a guy who gives him what amounts to Talmudic advice that has an impact on how the story plays out. So I sent it to Deborah and she accepted it, and it got rewritten in the rehearsal process, and it ran in that festival and after that I started to send it to other places. I think the Philadelphia production was 148

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in early 1992, and then right after that there was a New York production at Love Creek Festival, which it won, so it moved on to the Samuel French Short Play Festival. BJB: As you’re writing now, how do you find inspiration? LL:

The last several plays of mine have had significant foreign locations, and so I do think something happens when I travel. I enter a world that’s new and imaginatively provocative. When I start a play, I tend to want to write about something specific, though it’s not always something that ends up being apparent in the play. In House, Divided, for instance, which is a play about Israel, I was really writing about my extended family, and that is pretty apparent in the play. But in the current play, Shanghai Kaddish, I’m aware I’m really writing about my own father, even though the father in the play is essentially absent. The play is completely non-autobiographical. There’s no one in the play who represents me, no one in the play specifically represents my father – but in some way I am exploring ideas about fatherhood and absence. In the play, it’s physical absence. In my life, my father was absent in other ways, though his father was physically absent. Shanghai Kaddish is set largely in China because traveling there I discovered things I thought fit with what I was trying to do. Also, this time, I wanted to write a full-length comedy, something I had never done before; so I spent a year listening to, reading about, and watching comedy. I wanted the play to have as many forms of comedy in it as it could. Are these things connected to inspiration? I guess so. It’s hard to really answer the question. My first full-length play, The Dostoyevsky Man, resembles Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in its form. It’s based on Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. I wanted to write a play based on a classical source, and Stoppard’s play was more than in the back of my mind. Several plays I have written since then have been focused on the relatively familiar world in and around Philadelphia. Girl Science is set on the Schuylkill River and is about the municipal water system. I’ve written a play that’s set in Fairmount Park about birding and 19th century drinking fountains, Memorial Day. Another one is based largely on my own experience of being a student in the late 1960s, The Ballad of John Wesley Reed. It’s not about me, but it’s about my college and graduate school experiences. So those three plays are really very local. But others come from other sources. I went to Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 1999. Vieques was the place that was the bombing practice range for the United States military for 60 years. I fell in love with Vieques, the people, the natural beauty, and the locale. And that’s in contrast to this horrible, polluted, destroyed landscape where the bombing ranges are. I wrote a play that uses Shakespeare’s Tempest as the background and is about the antimilitary protests on Vieques, La Tempestad. My next play after that, House, Divided, is set partly in Israel, and my current play is set in China. I was in China a year and a half ago. So, in the last three plays, I’ve taken that notion of my local world and gone to places and gotten immersed. Those places were part of my inspiration. 149

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BJB: That’s interesting because I was going to ask you if you feel that living in Philadelphia influences the kind of plays you write. LL:

Absolutely. I feel very connected here. As a kid my parents pushed me out the door into the city. I was a public transportation kid, and I never had much fear of the city. I went every place. In high school I went places that middle-class kids of my era didn’t always go. Because I was a student at Central High School, which drew students from all over, I had friends from everywhere in the city. So I got to know it. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, I worked on two major historical film projects, one about Eastern State Penitentiary and one about the city water system. Working on those projects just amplified my love of the city. I learned a great deal about the 19th century history of Philadelphia, which was vibrant. I do think that being a Philadelphian is different from being a New Yorker or being a Los Angelino or a Chicagoan. I do think history and locale influence us in specific ways. But also, it’s easy to live here. It’s relatively easy to connect to the arts scene here, and the artistic community is relatively open and transparent, as opposed to some other places I’ve experienced. So I guess I would say that being connected to this community feeds me, and I feel like my work feeds back into it.

BJB: Could you talk about the play that you’ve written for the National Constitution Center? LL:

Nora Quinn, who is the theatre productions person at the NCC, started talking – it’s almost five years ago now – about doing a play aimed at high school students, which would ask the question, “What does the Constitution mean to you as an individual?” Or “Where are you in the Constitution?” There was some feeling at that time that as terrific as the Constitution Center was displaying the intellectual framework and impact of the Constitution, the museum wasn’t fully reaching its largest audience, high school kids. Not that it wasn’t interesting to them, but it wasn’t speaking to them in a way that felt personal. I was hired to write a theatre piece in which we tried to make an emotional connection between the Constitution and this audience. The result, which is now in its fourth year of performance, is a very balanced look at the most contentious Constitutional issues, and it’s based on the Living Newspaper style plays of the WPA [Work Projects Administration] era. This means certain things stylistically, and also that we update the piece several times a year, or as an issue gets hot. Gun control got hot over the last two years, and immigration has gotten hot then cooled off and now is hot again, and so we’ve had immigration sections in and out of the show. Freedom of speech is always hot for high school kids, and pretty contentious. As these big issues become part of our national conversation, they go into the show. It’s about half an hour long and it is performed by three actors and is directed by David Bradley, who was formerly the associate artistic director 150

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at People’s Light. It’s performed four times a day during the school year, every week day. We’ve gotten tremendous response to it, and I pride myself in the playwriting. It’s got its moments when it is pushing the museum’s agenda of getting kids to look at the Constitution’s importance, but the majority of the play, the dramatic part of the play, is taken up by five three-to-five-minute scenes that are grounded in very specific personal conflicts. They are not about propagandizing anybody about anything. The Constitution Center has been very clear that’s what they want. They don’t want to be telling kids what to think. BJB: You’re probably reaching a large audience there. LL:

Oh, yeah! I’m sure more people have seen my Constitution Center show than have seen any of my regular plays. And I actually have a second thing at the Constitution Center. I don’t know if you’ve been in the room that has all the statues of the signers. You can get an iPod from the Constitution Center and each one of the signers will speak a monologue to you about the moment of signing the Constitution. They run about a minute and a half each, and I wrote the monologues for all the signers and three dissenters. So, yeah, working for the NCC has been very satisfying.

BJB: How was your experience when La Tempestad ran in New York? LL:

It was an amazing experience for a lot of reasons. The way the play got to Resonance Ensemble, the people who produced it, was that Kittson O’Neill, who at the time I was writing La Tempestad was literary manager at New Jersey Rep, passed it to them. Kittson and I were in Dallas at a National New Play Network conference, and she asked me what I was working on. I told her I had just finished the first draft of a play loosely based on The Tempest about the bombing of Vieques. She asked me to send it to her because she knew someone who might be interested in a play based on a Shakespeare play. I was really hesitant because I thought it wasn’t ready, but she convinced me, and eventually she got it to Eric Parness, who is the artistic director of Resonance Ensemble. Resonance Ensemble’s mission, as Kittson knew, was to do a play from the classical canon and a play that was based on and resonant to the original. Eric read La Tempestad and three weeks later I had a contract. Resonance Ensemble developed the play over the course of a year in a series of workshops and readings, and ultimately produced it at the storied Ohio Theatre in Soho with a great cast. We got a positive New York Times review and we found our audience. The reviews had some quibbles, which I didn’t necessarily think were wrong, but then they essentially re-reviewed it in their “last chance” column and left out all the quibbles. We also got an ecstatic review from NewYorkTheatre.com. We had a great run, and then it was published in an anthology called Playing with Canons: Explosive New Works from Great Literature by America’s Indie Playwrights [New York Theatre 151

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Experience, 2006]. I guess that means I’m an indie playwright, a category that suits me fine. BJB: Since you’ve been in theatre, have you seen changes in the business or how theatres are choosing plays? LL:

Theatres have missions and they have tastes, and, ultimately, playwrights can feel disgruntled about people not doing their plays, but plays either connect with artistic directors and get done or they don’t. Literary managers, quite frankly, have only a modest influence, despite the fact that I think they do the yeoman’s work of reading and sorting for the season. When it gets down to it, the ten plays that a literary manager puts forward as his or her season suggestions have to reflect in some way an understanding of what the artistic director is going to want, what the theatre needs to survive, what the community is interested in seeing. But ultimately, selections are pretty subjective. A play has to connect with the artistic director, or it’s not going to get done. Or there has to be a popular consensus about the play and audience demand for it. And so I guess I’m saying that my basic feeling is that the way plays get selected for a season at most theatres has not changed much over the years I have been writing. The theatre world is contracting because of economics right now, and everybody is running a little bit scared, and I think there’s probably going to be some theatres that fail, and there’s probably going to be some playwrights who throw up their hands and walk away. But I don’t think things are that much different. That said, right now, until people kind of breathe out – and everybody is sort of drawing in their breath in apprehension – I think there’s a narrowing of the range of what is being considered. What happened to me with House, Divided is a case in point. House, Divided was InterAct’s second alltime top-grossing first-run play. We got great reviews, including in the national press, but nobody has picked the play up. Now, it’s very hard to get a second production no matter what the economic conditions are; that’s just a fact. But this is a play that has a track record and I think occupies a unique niche. Unfortunately, it got sent out at exactly the point when the economy was collapsing, and I think it did not get considered in part because there were all kinds of fears about how to recoup production costs of a largish and rather serious play, a political play at that, and a play that might piss off some segments of the Jewish audiences. These are issues that make it harder in this specific moment for a theatre to choose it. But realistically, I don’t think it would ever have been an easy play to sell. It’s six actors, which is large for many places. Someone, a literary manager, actually said to me, “It’s too big to be small and too small to be big.” What I hear in that is: it can’t be our big play because our big play has to be grander, more epic. It can’t be our small play because it’s six people. The point is I try not to take these things personally. This is the moment we’re in and I can hate it, but I don’t think I can change it, and it’s not what I want to spend my time doing anyway. The play that I’ve recently written is partly as a response to this. Of course, my problem is that the 152

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comedy that I wrote won’t be any easier to sell than my dramas. It’s a five-person show, which is big, and the three main characters are Asian, which in most places poses a casting challenge. We probably couldn’t do it in Philadelphia without importing actors from elsewhere. We really don’t have a deep enough Asian acting community; we’d have to bring people down from New York. But I wrote the play I wanted to write. I wanted to learn how to write comedy. I think I’ve done a fairly good job of learning it; whether I’ve done a fairly good job of writing it remains to be seen. BJB: Have you had discoveries along the way related to writing or theatre or yourself as you’re working on your plays? LL:

I know I tell this story at my peril, because it makes my process sound more mysterious and quirky than I want to admit, but here it is. I basically write two days a week. I don’t teach until late in the day on Tuesday and I don’t teach at all Friday, so those are my writing days. I tend to write long days on those two days. When I start working, I get into a kind of zone with my characters and I let them talk to me. When I stop at the end of the day, I usually don’t remember clearly what I’ve written. I really have to go back and read what I’ve done. I tell people that, and it sounds fishy, but I think it has to do with the particular kind of concentration it takes to hear a scene play out in my head. Remembering what the scene is about engages different intellectual faculties, and so I have to read the scene to recapture it. I didn’t learn this. I discovered that this was what was going on, but I have come to rely on actually being able to get into that zone. I know if it’s not happening an hour or so into my writing day, it’s probably not going to happen, and I generally stop. It either happens or it doesn’t, but it happens very regularly.

BJB: Do you think you consciously will it to happen or do you sort of slip into it? LL:

I slip into it. I usually read everything up to the point where I am about to start working. That suggests I always write in order which isn’t exactly true, but is true enough. When I start to write, I try to hear my characters’ voices. I am kind of performing them in my head. When I feel that they are speaking in some sense naturally, I can move forward. This is something that happens in the writing process more than in the rewriting process. As far as rewriting goes, another thing I’ve discovered about myself is that I have the discipline to rewrite, which I’ve got to tell you, when I was younger, I didn’t exactly have. Now I can sit down, and once I have a draft of a play, I can spend an eight-hour day on it, no sweat. I’ve worked on plays in developmental conferences like Seven Devils where I’ve had the experience of actors and directors and a dramaturg talk about my play or do scene work for eight hours, after which I find myself spending the next eight hours working on revisions and new pages for the next day. I’ve discovered that I’m a disciplined person. That’s not something I set out to learn; it’s something I discovered. 153

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BJB: Are there parts of writing that are easy for you? Difficult? LL:

Writing is easier than rewriting. I don’t really mean this, but in some ways once I’ve written the first draft, in some way I have fulfilled my need. I’ve got my characters. I’ve got my story. What more do I need to do? Fortunately, good sense or a dramaturgical smack upside the head from a good reader or dramaturg usually snaps me out of any resistance I might have to rewriting. But I do tend to write with more joy than I rewrite. It’s the fun part, the discovery part. I find rewriting a much slower, much more arduous process, and I like it much less. But I recognize that it’s an unavoidable piece of the work and so I do it. I tend to like rewriting best when I rewrite a whole scene and I can kind of get into my zone again, as opposed to when I’m consciously trying to figure out what is structurally problematic about a scene. It’s just less fun. And I suppose while I’m on the fun–not fun thing, I don’t love the submitting and business part of being a writer. It’s the mechanical labor, and I slog through it. Michael Hollinger said to me one time, “I just send plays off and I forget about them. I don’t even know where I send them, and then after a while I’ll get back a letter.” This was at an earlier point in his career, before lots of people were doing his work. I just couldn’t believe it, but that’s sort of what I’m doing now. Oh, here’s an opportunity. I write my cover letter and off it goes, and then six months later, I get a letter back saying, “We hate this play.” Or sometimes, “We love this play.” I’m surprised! How did they even get the play? Oh, yeah! Now I remember! It’s just the necessary stuff.

BJB: Before you were talking about places being topics in your plays. Do you think you have recurring themes in your plays? LL:

To some extent I think all of my plays are about the relationship of the past to the present. To some extent I think all of my plays are about how insignificant events have big reverberations later. Characters in all my plays seek to find their place in the world. La Tempestad is certainly about that. Shanghai Kaddish, which I just finished, is clearly about that.

BJB: Are you using your dramaturgical skills for theatres in Philadelphia now? LL:

I dramaturged at PlayPenn from 2005 through 2009. I’ve been out at Seven Devils in Idaho several times; I was a playwright there and I’ve been back eight times to dramaturg. I’m also their literary manager. I occasionally get asked for dramaturgical consultations by local playwrights. But these days I’m spending much more time teaching and writing than I am doing dramaturgy.

BJB: Do you think you have a philosophy of life that carries you through? 154

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LL:

I’m a pretty upbeat guy, and I have a lot of energy and enthusiasm. I’m pretty positive. I also think in some ways I’m probably pretty narrow. The things that I love and that I do well are pretty much the same things that I have loved and have been doing for most of my adult life. I’ve been writing, I’ve been teaching, I’ve done some media stuff. I’m not somebody who is hugely adventurous, except, I hope, on the page. I don’t know if I have a philosophy of life. I try to keep my cynicism about things that are easy to be cynical about at bay as much as I can. For my students, I try to be the kind of teacher I would have wanted for myself at their stage of artistic exploration. But I’m kind of an enthusiast when it comes to my students. I often find myself feeling a little bit like I’m cheerleading, possibly because I know how hard it is to keep your faith in an artistic endeavor before you have any public success at it. Does any of this constitute a philosophy of life?

BJB: Your play House, Divided received a Barrymore nomination. Was that meaningful for you? LL:

Yes, I think it said something about the way this community saw that play, and I felt honored to have been nominated because of that. I was interviewed by The Inquirer for Living News, and the first thing the reporter said to me was she had seen House, Divided, and she knew the play was Barrymore-nominated, and she also mentioned that in the article. I sometimes feel that Philadelphia apologizes for things that it does very well, but over the years the Barrymores have unapologetically celebrated our theatre scene, and new plays in particular. It’s pretty good to be recognized in the company of other local playwrights who have been nominated – Tom Gibbons, Seth Rozin, Bruce Graham, and Michael Hollinger.

BJB: What do you think about theatre in Philadelphia? LL:

I have very positive feelings about theatre in Philadelphia, and I’ve seen lots of stellar work here, though I continue to feel that a greater number of emerging local playwrights and directors should see their work on local stages. I worry we may be coming up to a crisis in this city, and I think the crisis is this: we have several older institutions on the landscape that are struggling to connect with audiences. I think there is evidence that some are struggling to grow their audiences and that younger theatregoers are wary of the established companies, and so I think some of them are destined for trouble. In some cases, the artistic leadership has been in place for decades. In some cases, there is a real aversion to change, an expectation that what has worked to bring in audiences in the past will always work. The artistic leaders of those companies came up in a time when theatre-going was habitual for many people, but it isn’t for the generation that is coming-of-age now. I simply worry that as a community we are not doing the greatest job figuring out how to keep our theatre scene truly vital. 155

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I was an engaged theatregoer long before I was a playwright. I want to be an engaged theatregoer after I stop being a playwright. I want the scene here to stay vital and strong. There are some great young companies emerging now. But I’m not convinced that the funding community or the major players in the critical community really understand that those emerging theatres are the future and need to be supported in their artistic efforts now at the beginning of their institutional lives and not only later when they become established. I worry that, sometimes, the fact that a scene like this one needs to renew itself gets lost in the belief that certain institutions always need to be supported and cannot be allowed to fail. Sure, our long-established theatres do reliably good work, sometime even great work. I just want to see the edgier places move up the ladder because they are the future. They’re the places that generate the excitement and connect to new audiences. The same way that, 20 to 30 years ago, the Wilma, InterAct, and the Arden brought my generation in by bringing new work to Philadelphia. And that is going to take some shifts in thinking and behavior. BJB: What are the things that continue to inspire you? LL:

I teach aspiring theatre and film artists, and I see them go out and struggle to start careers, and watch them develop their skills and gumption in the real world. If you teach aspiring artists and you aren’t inspired by them, you’re probably in the wrong line of work because it is damn hard to get started. So I’m continually inspired by my students. I love teaching, and that’s one reason why. I also get to work professionally with people who I think are exceptional – Becky Wright, Seth, Whit MacLaughlin, the artistic director of New Paradise Laboratories. And I’ve dramaturged new plays for people like Sam Hunter, Shelia Callaghan, Tom Coash, Michael Hollinger, Mary Fengar Gail, and lots of others, from whom I’ve learned a great deal. And then I go to theatre and I see people do things onstage that astound me and move me. I saw Fela in New York, a play with music that I think has some problems, but forget about that! It was a totally joyous experience to be in the theatre. Kevin Mambo who played the title character was tremendous! I was blown away by everything about his work – his range, his control, his power. So the experience of going to theatre has not really changed very much for me from when I was a kid who was blown away watching John Wood in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead on a day out of school. I am still awed by it. I saw The Coast of Utopia a couple of years ago at Lincoln Center, and aside from the fact that the plays were my kind of theatre writing, everything about the design and production dazzled me, lifted me. I still have that response here pretty regularly, too. I thought Becky Shaw at the Wilma was beautifully produced. I’m teaching a seminar about women playwrights, and my class saw Other Hands at Luna. Charlotte Northeast was in it, and I think Charlotte is mesmerizing. She is surprising in everything she does. I’d love to write something for her. I wrote Shanghai Kaddish with specific actors in mind – Miriam White, Bi Ngo, Seth Reichgott, and Justin Jain. I have their voices in 156

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my head; they’re the people I imagine saying my lines because I have seen their work onstage and it inspired me. I’ve been lucky enough to have them all participate in the development of the play, and I would love them to be its first cast. BJB: What advice would you have for other playwrights? LL:

Writing, maybe all artistic endeavors, seems really specific when it comes to individual practice. I can talk about things that have helped me keep going – like that I always try to have some technical problem I am trying to solve in addition to getting the story and characters right, but I’m not sure the way I write or the tricks I use have any relevance to what other people do. Writing Shanghai Kaddish, I had the goal of learning to write comedy. In La Tempestad, I wanted to write a play that formally riffs on Shakespeare’s Tempest. I appropriated his characters, language, and diction. As far as other kinds of advice, I don’t think there is any road map anymore about how to get work accepted and produced. So my advice is try everything. Send stuff out. Make alliances with theatres and directors and actors and designers. Go see everything and talk to anyone involved with the company you can buttonhole in the lobby after the show. Make friends in the theatre world. Push yourself out of your comfort zone. Do a lot of rewriting. Listen to your trusted dramaturgs and directors. Experiment. Change things. Isn’t this the same advice everyone gives?

BJB: How do you overcome obstacles to getting produced? LL:

Tenacity works, in my experience. Keep writing, keep sending stuff out, keep learning, stay in the scene, and eventually something happens. Or if it doesn’t, take matters into you own hands and put your play up. Make an end run around the gatekeepers and the naysayers. See what the marketplace says. There’s no shame in self-producing. Just do it. Do a show in the Fringe. Rent a space. It’s not that hard. I made a feature film from one of my plays, The Dostoyevsky Man, which premiered in the Philly Fringe in 2011. It’s a monologue piece starring Seth Reichgott, and I shot it on my iPhone. It showed in the Fringe and then had its commercial premiere at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute a few months later and drew good audiences in both venues. Because the costs to make it were very low, we actually made a little bit of money. It worked so well I am going to do another one, Portrait Master. But the main thing is to keep writing and revising, submitting and moving forward. There’s really no magic. Another opportunity some playwrights ignore is college theatre. I’ve had two plays produced by colleges, one as a world premiere, and they were very satisfying experiences artistically. Having an agent helps, but not as much or in exactly the way most people think. There’s a lot of competition out there. The work has to be good. I know lots of literary managers and artistic directors from my years as a literary manager and dramaturg, and I know lots of playwrights and the stories are all the same. Unless you are a name-brand 157

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playwright, you have to simply keep plugging. I’ve been very lucky, but it is luck that came to some extent because I simply kept at it. And, of course, making relationships with theatres is a big part of it. My play in progress, Wham Bam, will be developed by Brat Productions and directed by Lee Etzold, who I know from the work I did as a dramaturg with New Paradise Laboratories. When I had the draft of a play that I thought was right for her, I called Lee and asked her to read it. She got on board and is going to direct a workshop. That’s how things start. Larry Loebell – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays Girl Science House, Divided La Tempestad Memorial Day Pride of the Lion Shanghai Kaddish The Ballad of John Wesley Reed The Dostoyevsky Man Wham Bam Short Plays (partial list) Angie and Arnie Sanguine But Who’s Counting Edward and Ellie Supine Just Before the War Between the Plates Prayers The Lion Eats His Lunch The Portrait Master, a Radio Play Museum Theatre Living News – National Constitution Center Signers Monologues – National Constitution Center Thomas Paine’s Crisis – National Thomas Paine Society Film and Television Documentaries The Intricate Cell – American Cancer Society (1985) Fathers Talk – Barr Films (1986) Introduction for Volunteers – Philadelphia AIDS Task Force Education Committee (1986) Let the Doors Be of Iron – Hal Kirn Films, WHYY (1987) 158

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Making a Difference – American Cancer Society (1987) Brand New Day – New Jersey Educational Association (1992) Television Rugrats – “Incident in Aisle Seven” – Klasky-Csupo/Nickelodeon (Howard E. Baker, Dan Thompson, and Paul Germain, 1992) Awards Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – Fellowships in Playwriting – 4 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Special Opportunity Grants – 2 Cine Golden Eagle Award – The Intricate Cell (1986) Cine Golden Eagle Award – Let the Doors Be of Iron (1987) Daytime Emmy Award – Rugrats episode, “Incident in Aisle Seven” (1992) Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – Fellowship in Filmmaking (1992) Pennsylvania Playwriting Contest Winner – Memorial Day (1998) Eileen Heckart Drama for Seniors Competition Winner – Memorial Day (2003) Alfred Sloan Foundation/Ensemble Studio Theater Rewrite Commission – Girl Science   (2006) National Foundation for Jewish Culture Commissioning Grant – House, Divided (2006) Barrymore Nomination for Best New Play – House, Divided (2008)

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Chapter 10 A Conversation with Arden Kass

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rden Kass has been actively writing plays for over 20 years, having first found her love of the script through a Shakespeare seminar in college. She has also written poetry, essays, features, art criticism, TV scripts, screenplays, and advertising/marketing materials in every medium. Her one-person shows and multimedia performance pieces have been produced in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and elsewhere. For TV’s A&E Biography, she wrote documentaries on Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, and Pete Townshend. In 2013, Appetite, her full-length play, which was developed through PlayPenn, had a staged presentation at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. And, as a current member of BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, she is writing the book and lyrics for an original new project. I spoke with Arden in her office in Philadelphia, where she writes in a room of her own. BJB: Tell me about where you were born and where you grew up. AK: I was born in Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, and I grew up in Forest Hills Gardens, which is exactly seven miles from Bloomingdale’s over the Queensboro Bridge. BJB: And you went to Cornell, right? AK: Yes. I got an English degree there, but at the time they didn’t have an official Comparative Literature major, nor did they have Creative Writing, so we kind of crafted a major for me that was mostly comparative literature and a lot of poetry writing. I got to write poetry and talk about it with Archie Ammons. BJB: So you were already interested in writing at that time? AK: I’ve always been interested in writing. BJB: Where did that come from?

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AK: I really haven’t got a clue because everybody in my family talks a lot but nobody wrote. BJB: Did you write plays before college? AK: No. When I was growing up, I wrote stories. I always wrote poems. I obviously wrote essays in college. The plays didn’t happen until much later. Coming out of college, I wrote just about everything. I wrote public relations stuff, I worked for ad agencies, I wrote commercials, I wrote videos, I wrote a lot of journalism, I wrote for the City Paper. I started doing these two-minute commentaries for WXPN. They were sort of two- to three-minute rants that were on Michaela Majoun’s Morning Drive show. In advertising the part I liked best, I realized, was writing scripts for commercials for TV and video commercials. BJB: That was in Philadelphia? AK: Yeah, I was the broadcast director at Wanamaker’s. BJB: How did you get to Philadelphia from New York? AK: I had lived in Washington, D.C. for a while, and because I had left my job in an art gallery, I ended up working in the retail advertising agency at Hecht’s department store, where a very nice older man took me under his wing and taught me how to do advertising, both writing and paste-up. Back then, you pasted everything up. I wrote all kinds of ads and public relations stuff. I was also writing about art for the New Art Examiner, and I was thinking of going back to school as an art critic. Then I was sent to cover something with Grace Glueck of The New York Times, who told me she had worked in retail advertising for a while, too. And then she told me I’d have to go to graduate school if I wanted to write art criticism, and my heart kind of sank because I couldn’t figure out how I was going to afford to do that. After that, I went back to New York City. I worked for Macy’s; I wrote their Christmas catalog. I wrote Neiman Marcus’s Christmas catalog, and I was still writing for the New Art Examiner and writing poetry. And every month I was unable to pay my rent, and then a guy I had worked with in D.C. ended up here in Philly and said, “Maybe you’d like to come down here and work for Wanamaker’s.” And I said, “Absolutely not. I have no desire to go to Philadelphia.” My father said, “I think you better develop a desire to go to Philadelphia if they’re going to pay you.” So I said to them, “Am I going to be able to do broadcast stuff if I come to Philly?” And they said, “There’s a chance.” So basically I ended up down here by chance, and learned in the course of doing all of that, that what I really liked was writing scripts and working with the actors. I liked the way the thing came together and became complete and whole, and came to life once there 164

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were other people involved. I was jotting scripts down in the taxi on the way to Sigma Sound Studio. I’d write the commercials that were going on the air that day, and I’d get there and fix it while they were recording it, basically. I was always writing and directing during that job, and I really enjoyed it. From there, it’s gotten to be kind of an old story – one of those things that when people ask you how did you get into doing this, you always give the same answer, and it’s really true. While I was working in advertising, Vicki Solot, who [created] the First Person Festival, said to me, “You want to go take this class called Playwriting for Professionals?” I said, “Yeah, I guess.” So I took the class taught by Bob Hedley, and it was unbelievably fascinating – the way he spoke, it was just mesmerizing. I had no idea what he was talking about, and I just fell madly in love with the whole subject. I asked if I could be in his graduate class [at Temple University], and he told me, “Absolutely no,” because I was not prepared to be. He said I should study with someone else for a while, and he recommended Michael Hollinger, who was very young and teaching at the Arden Theatre, right where the Lantern Theater is now. I took Michael’s class a couple of times, and after a while, Bob said, “Yes, you can be in my graduate program now.” I was probably two years in [the graduate program], and I don’t remember if I already had a baby then or I was about to have another baby, but it was just nuts. I was trying to do that and work, and I was still writing freelance advertising. I was loving it, but then I got pregnant a second time, and in the time that it took for me to have the baby and come out into the world again and be ready to start, they cancelled the M.F.A. Playwriting program because of funding and administrative problems. I called Bob, “Guess what? I’m ready to come back.” And he said, “Too bad. There’s no more program.” They’ve since started it up again, and I’ve talked with them about maybe going back, but I don’t know. It’s really hard to fit it in now. It would’ve been very helpful, and Bob wanted me to do it because he wanted me to be able to teach so that I’d have a way to support myself. BJB: You have two children? AK: I have two children, and they simply don’t understand it when I’m sitting there writing away and talking to myself. They walk up to me and start a conversation, and I look at them, “Who are you? And why are you here?” We have fights like “Don’t you know that when you see the computer screen lit up that …!” BJB: What has been your best playwriting experience so far? AK: One of my favorite experiences was the collaboration I was doing working with a composer, Rob Redei, who has since moved away from here, and a choreographer, Beth Buck. Jan Silverman from Temple University directed some of this work. We were doing dance–theatre collaborative kind of pieces, and working in a group that way was enormously challenging. They call it “devised work” now. One of them I was 165

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working on was right after September 11th. That was really a powerful experience theatrically. It really made you get out of your depth and out of your writer’s chair and try different things, and that was very good. We put one up at the Fringe, we did one in New York at Dixon Place, and we did a third piece outside in this magical garden near Hawk Mountain. This woman was curator of an outdoor arts festival, and we did a site-specific piece in her garden full of artwork, and that was very cool. BJB: Do you see a lot of theatre in Philadelphia? AK: I see a lot of really good work here, and I think one of things that I really enjoy about Philadelphia theatre is its lack of pretense. A lot of the productions [in Philadelphia] tend to be a lot less self-conscious than in New York, for example. I remember seeing Suzan-Lori Parks’ production of In the Blood out at People’s Light, and it was so astonishing. And then two days later, I ended up in New York seeing the other play she wrote during that time, which was sort of made up of outtakes of In the Blood, and I have to say the production here was far superior, vastly superior, which is great. The other one [in New York] even had a big-name actor in it. I see a lot of great work here, and sometimes I see something here that I know couldn’t be better anywhere else. BJB: I think it’s interesting that you’ve done documentaries for A&E. How did that come about? AK: Somebody I knew was subcontracted to produce them, and called me and said, “Do you want to try this?” And I have to be honest, the experience of doing those documentaries was one of the best work experiences in terms of paid work. I spent a lot of time in London. I went to Las Vegas, La Jolla. I interviewed people like Roger Daltrey. That was a fun job. BJB: How is your play Dreamland coming along? AK: The reading [at Theatre Exile] went well. More people came than I thought would have, even in the snow, and their questions were very good. I have the sense that they liked the play because they asked questions about the characters and the characters’ motivations and what happened to the characters after the play. I wrote the first draft in probably 2003 or 2004, and I stuck it in the drawer for several years. BJB: Can you say what it’s about? AK: It’s about a home health-care aide, Bunny, in upstate New York, who falls in love with Alberta Hunter’s music when one of her elderly patients, Samuel, plays it for her in his room. Bunny, who’s been sort of a wannabe R&B and pop singer attracted to black 166

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music, Motown mostly, decides she’s going to do everything it takes to turn herself into a black blues singer. It’s tough because she’s 30-some odd years old and white and Irish Catholic and blonde, and has no idea about the blues or where it came from and what that music means, and yet she kind of thinks she does. So it’s kind of a learning curve for everybody involved. It turns out that Samuel has a sister, his younger sister, Sarah, and she’s 75, and they used to have a band way back when in Chicago, and some heinous things happened in their lives that made them put all those dreams away. So, when Bunny gets involved, they have to reclaim this part of their life again. Sarah’s been playing in a church and not playing the blues at all, and Samuel insists he’s not a musician even though he’s got a clarinet under his bed and his only valued possession is this one Alberta Hunter record. BJB: I’ve noticed that music comes up in a lot of your work. AK: I seem to be obsessed with it. I’ve always been incredibly moved by music. I played guitar early on. I had a great teacher. Paul Simon’s younger brother, Eddie, taught me guitar. But I didn’t have a real good support system for becoming a good musician. My parents made fun of me, and I think they thought they were being funny, but they were really breaking my heart. It keeps coming up in everything I do, so now I’m at BMI at the Music Theatre Workshop. BJB: What are you doing there? AK: I’m learning to write the books for musicals. Actually, Seth [Rozin] suggested that I go and figure that out because I kept writing music into pieces and getting more and more interested. BJB: How was your PlayPenn experience with the reading of Appetite? AK: PlayPenn was fantastic. First of all, it was hugely gratifying to be selected based on the caliber of the play I wrote, and the company of the other writers was tremendous, and the way they treated us was fantastic. I loved the respect that they brought to the process, and I adored the people I worked with. Ed Sobel was my director, and Becky Wright was the dramaturg. I couldn’t have been paired with better people. The whole experience really made me feel as though my work was being taken very seriously, and I appreciated that. BJB: How were you able to get a reading of your play, Appetite, in London? AK: Well, going back, a film producer I know had introduced me to a British actress named Miriam Margolyes, who is an insanely brilliant, remarkable actress. She did a 167

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reading of it in New York and really liked it. She read the grandmother, Malka. Then I had another reading in New York with Tovah Feldshuh playing the lead character, Hana, with a bunch of other really accomplished, wonderful women actors. After the reading was over in New York, I said to Tovah, “What’s next do you think?” And she said that it needs a big workshop and a public reading, and I thought, “Gosh, how am I going to get that?” And she said, “You’re going to have to put it together. You’re going to have to get a grant or something.” So, after that reading, an audience member called me and said, “I loved your play and what would be the next step for it?” And I said, “Well, Tovah Feldshuh says it needs a workshop and reading.” So she and her husband said, “Well, we’d like to offer you seed money for that.” And that was pretty great. So then we had to decide where to do the reading. Now, the thing is, my play has 12 characters, ten of whom are female, and none of whom get naked, or look like Nicole Kidman when they do. So I was trying to figure out who would be interested in a play that is a drama, that is very female-experience oriented, that talks about World War II, and that’s kind of entertaining but not entertainment. It also has songs in it that I wrote. Then it occurred to me that the place I had seen the most wonderful renditions of plays with strong female leads playing difficult roles with lots of language was in England. So first we went back to Miriam and [said] let’s see if we could do it in England. As it turned out, the same film producer who introduced me to her had a friend who had been at RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]. And through that man, we met a director, and it turned out to be one of the most remarkable experiences because I adored him. His name is Andrew Visnevski, and he teaches the master’s course in Performance at RADA and has had a huge career of developing new work. Andrew came here to Philadelphia for a week, and we hired super great Philadelphia actors to workshop the play here. The space was donated to us by a very generous patron, Victor Keen. Then we went over [to London], and rehearsed it with a really stellar cast including Miriam, Tamsin Greig, who is in Episodes, Jason Isaacs, Oona Chaplin, and Jemma Redgrave. My son nearly fainted because it was the cast of Doctor Who standing there to greet him! It was incredible to be in London at RADA, such a historic place. It was an industry presentation, and we got a lot of positive interest. There’s still a producer [in England], who is pushing the play. He’s trying to find a way to make it commercial. And there’s a theatre up in Canada reading it. And someone else is talking about making a movie out of it. Some of the people who were in that reading are considering attaching to it. Also, Appetite is a semifinalist at the O’Neill [Theater Center] right now. BJB: Let’s go back to your work with BMI. You’re working on a musical? AK: I was so drained coming back from London after Appetite, I thought I’m never going to get a big idea, again, and then I came up with this musical, O, Lou. I’ve got the first act written. I’ll be looking for a composer. It’s a very lighthearted 168

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musical about women’s underwear and a man who dedicates his life to designing it and builds up a huge business only to run smack into women’s liberation in the 1960s when people were burning their bras. So I’m working on that and that’s really fun. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t figure out why this material appealed to me so much. And this is why it is so weird to be a writer. It took me several weeks to recall that my great-grandmother was a corsetiere in The Bronx, who created prosthetics for women, and her sons went on to have a lingerie business. And my first job in retail advertising was writing ladies’ foundations ad copy. I think that will have a much easier time finding an audience than Appetite. I wish I were more strategic in what I do. BJB: What do you mean by “strategic”? You mean in terms of cast size? AK: Yeah, and subject matter. People keep saying, “Just write a comedy about a family dealing with a dilemma with five actors and a unit set! And I go off and spend two years writing a large-cast musical about push-up bras! BJB: Except that’s unique! And your other theatre projects? AK: I am making a kind of collaborative group docudrama piece about the chronic underfunding of Pennsylvania’s public school system – something in the vein of The Laramie Project or Let Me Down Easy, Anna Deavere Smith’s work, where you’re taking a variety of points of view about an issue, and you’re humanizing and dramatizing the issue by setting it on actors and turning it into a theatrical experience. I think that part of what’s going on with the breakdown is that people are viewing [funding the schools] as an intellectual, political, and conceptual notion, as opposed to an ethical, moral, and human problem that’s going to affect all of our quality of life, not just those of us who happen to have a son or a daughter in a public school. Working on this piece is extremely exciting. BJB: And you have collaborators? AK: Ed Sobel and Seth Bauer. And there’s an organization [Public Citizens for Children & Youth] that’s serving as our fiscal sponsor. They’re an advocacy organization, and they’re going to be looking for the money we need to put this together so that people can’t ignore it, to make it meaningful, to use theatre in a very purposeful way, to cross a lot of boundaries. This is called School Play [scheduled for production at the National Constitution Center]. I just can’t write a play about a son who can’t get along with his father when the whole world is falling apart! My son had to learn Spanish from Rosetta Stone last year. He didn’t have a Spanish teacher, just a pair of headphones and a monitor. Doing this piece is a different kind of creativity, but I think it’s going 169

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to be super powerful. You know, some of those collaborative pieces I did earlier on with the dance–theatre ensemble was some of the most powerful [work] I ever did because of that electricity that happens when you have a bunch of different voices in a room, but you’re all going toward the same place. We yelled at each other a lot, but it was really good yelling, productive yelling. BJB: Are you working on any other collaborative pieces? AK: I’ve been writing screenplays and TV scripts with a writing partner, Mark Gallini. I recently finished something about William Carlos Williams, which is also not the most commercial topic. We have an idea for a miniseries about his life – The Doctor Stories. We have the rights to his autobiography. So I’ve written an hour-long episode. And then we have two hour-long dramatic series ideas, and we have several screenplays, separately and together. I’m in a very busy interlude here. Still, it’s amazing to me that I can do this much [work] and get such nice responses from people and still not find a way to support myself by my writing. I don’t think it has anything to do with what I write or how I write it. BJB: It seems more and more it’s about marketing and PR. AK: I think in Philadelphia, it’s really hard to do it. It’s such a small market that if you didn’t do a good job of getting onto people’s radar early on or being politic or whatever it is, there aren’t that many more places to go. BJB: What do you think about the opportunities in Philadelphia? AK: I think there’s more and less in the sense that I think there’s the opportunity to know a lot of people and periodically participate in something that’s going on like when they had the New Plays Festival and Theatre Exile did Philly Originals. They included me with Bruce [Graham] and Michael [Hollinger], and that was great. That was a great opportunity, and it made me really happy, and sometimes I do get included in things, but I haven’t had a full-length play produced here. I can’t imagine that there’s nothing I’ve written that would be of any interest to anyone, so I don’t quite know. I’m trying to get to know some other theatre companies now, some of the smaller ones, and hopefully I’ll find some points of connection. But I’m not the world’s best marketer of my own work. And for ten to twelve years, I was sort of a hit-or-miss presence on the scene because I had kids at home. They can have all the benefits and parties in the world they want, but I wasn’t going to them. I wasn’t really available to hang out and do the things you’re supposed to do when you’re building a career. BJB: When thinking about theatre and writing and life, what kinds of things have been discoveries or realizations for you? 170

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AK: One thing I’ve really been dealing with, and Michael [Hollinger] and Bruce [Graham] would probably say it’s a good time that I did, is that talent really does not necessarily predict a great career as a playwright. You have to be so much savvier than you think you’re going to have to be. You think it’s going to be this world where you leave behind the kind of left-brain thinking that you do in worlds like advertising and editing, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve been spending the last year or two trying to figure out how I am going to make this worthwhile, because what’s the point of a play that lies in a drawer for ten years at a time? I’m not the poster child for the person who’s got their business life together as far as being a playwright goes. All things being equal, if you do a better job of connecting with people and explaining your work and making your work seem valuable to them, you seem to reap better rewards if you’re a little more strategic. Now it is not strategic to write a 12-character play about the Holocaust in an economic recession and spend two years doing that when you have not figured out a source of income, either during or afterwards. But I couldn’t not write this play. It was driving me crazy, keeping me up at night for months, and then I was very lucky because I got this grant from a private foundation that enabled me to write the play. That was a fantastic opportunity. However, there were no provisions for what happens when that’s over. So you come out of an experience like that and you’re kind of blinking in that morning sunshine and saying, “Now what? There’s nobody waiting here to produce it.” I don’t have a relationship with a theatre here that’s going to immediately grab it. And it’s really difficult to know about the caliber of your work if it doesn’t get a good production someplace. You get a reading somewhere and people run up to you and say how much they enjoyed it and how powerful they found it, and you go on that premise until you go out there and start trying to sell the thing, and for many of the reasons described in Outrageous Fortune [by Todd London with Ben Pesner and Zannie Giraud Voss, 2009] and other reasons, which can be from where you took it to what those people are looking for, to the economic times we’re in, you don’t have that reward of a production. BJB: And I think that’s how people get better at writing, too, having their work produced and seeing productions over time and learning from each experience. AK: The more productions you have, the more opportunities you have to work with the actors, work with the director, and be in the audience night after night, you become a much better craftsperson. The reason you need the continued productions is because what you hear the first and the second night and the fourth night begins to add up to a picture. BJB: Have you been reading any of the discussions about gender bias in terms of plays being produced? 171

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AK: I think there are a couple of biases at work. I have to be honest. I think one of them is age, and that’s throughout the industry, but it seems like the men keep working somehow. I would take workshops in New York, and I was very aware that in the time that I had been away from the scene – when I was writing, but I was home with the kids more – I started noticing that suddenly everybody seemed to have an M.F.A. Everybody seemed to have gone to one of four or five schools, and everybody seemed to know everybody else in the room, and it felt for several years as though there was sort a system going on. I felt like I sounded like I was complaining, mentioning that I had noticed a kind of a shift in the way things were working. And then this book, Outrageous Fortune, sort of publicly acknowledged all the things I had been feeling when I was going to things and watching what plays were getting done. BJB: What do you think about the business of playwriting? AK: I believe there’s a lot of good work being done, but I believe a lot of it is done for the wrong reasons. I believe a lot of it is done to fulfill a variety of agendas. Everybody’s trying to survive, theatres included, and a lot of work seems to get done because it’s “of the moment,” it fits the zeitgeist, and it achieves the goal of looking savvy and being hooked up with the right playwright and dealing with the right subject matter. I went to hear a reading of Michael’s [Hollinger] barbershop quartet play, and I thanked him for not being cynical in it. I thanked him. BJB: Who are your favorite playwrights? AK: They can be wicked witty, but I like to feel moved about something. I like the play to be about something. That doesn’t mean it has to be all top heavy and intellectual. It’s just that there’s something I like to leave the theatre with. Let’s look at the bookshelf. I love Tony Kushner. I love Suzan-Lori Parks. I love Lisa D’Amour’s writing. I like Tracy Letts a lot. And Lucy Thurber. I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen Belber’s plays – he’s a great writer. And Lynn Nottage. BJB: How do you feel about your work now? AK: Right now, I’m writing some of the best work I’ve written. I have fantastic projects I’m working on. I really feel like what hit me the most about Outrageous Fortune was about the numbers of playwrights, who, at what should be the peak (and I don’t think I’m there) of their career, just say, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t stick it out anymore,” and walk away. It’s a decision. You really have to think, “Can I afford to do this?” And so I’m trying. I feel like the response is gratifying enough from people so that I should continue, but I just have to do it in some form that works better. 172

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BJB: Do you feel like it’s a struggle finding time to write? AK: The answer is yes. I really have trouble finding time because it’s not the number of hours for me as much as the continuity, and when I have this split focus constantly, I just feel like I’m being bedeviled. BJB: Is there an easy part of writing for you? AK: Yeah, imagining it is much easier than writing it! [Laughs] That’s the part I find really easy! [Laughs] In fact, I imagined three plays today! BJB: [Laughs] Great! AK: But I definitely find writing dialog a lot easier than constructing a tight plot. Even if I know the story, I have trouble constructing a tight plot. BJB: How do you think we can improve opportunities for women who write plays? AK: How about we get someone to pick their kids up from school? [Laughs] Never mind. Now I’m being serious. This is true. When I was trying to come back to playwriting after I had little kids, I thought, do I want to keep doing this, writing plays? I tried to look for women role models. I tried. I researched it. I could not really find very many women at all anywhere in the playwriting world, anywhere older than me, younger than me – very, very slim pickin’s especially for women with a couple of kids and a family. Forget about it. My career had just started, and I felt like the sister from another planet showing up with a kid under my arm, or saying, “No, I can’t go to rehearsal at night, or no, I can’t go to that benefit because I have to be up for that six o’clock feeding.” It was really hard. Most of the women writers I came across had stuck their head in the oven or killed themselves in some other way, and that’s the damn truth. I was going through a really tough phase. I was trying to figure out how I was going to do this. It seemed almost impossible to get this thing, peace of mind, the whole Virginia Woolf thing. I didn’t have a room of my own. I did this big research thing, and then I went back to my husband and said, “The reason there are no role models is because they stuck their heads in the oven when they took a look around at their situation.” I don’t know why it is so difficult. Is it more difficult for women than for men? I don’t know, but I do know that there is a certain expectation, especially if you have a family. And what kind of a person would you be if you bring a family into the world and then you neglect them, right? And how do you define what’s neglect versus what’s being a conscientious parent? I guess it’s all in your head, but this thing about making limits is so very hard for me as a woman. For me to say what I’m doing is more important than what you need is the thing I can almost never say. And so much 173

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of my life is about trying to ensure that nobody suffers as a result of this drive I have to be in this world, which is so demanding; it could conceivably take me out every night of the week and for weeks and months. So the whole time my kids were growing up, even to this point, I’ve barely submitted things to any place outside of here. I didn’t apply for any residency, I didn’t apply for the Jerome things or Minneapolis. I didn’t apply for three-week residencies at universities or writers colonies, all these things people do to build a community for themselves, and to build this scaffolding for their career. I couldn’t do any of it because it didn’t seem right to me to set up a family and say, okay, now I’m a mom, and then go do that. Yet you couldn’t do it just by submitting things over the transom. That didn’t work, either, so that’s kind of one of the ways in which I explain the fact that lots of people I knew are at different levels of achievement and have produced much more work in the time that we’ve all been at it. I just don’t know when I was supposed to do it. I learned to type and nurse at the same time, and it was not easy. You need two hands for typing. Your kid notices when you move your arms. I got my first PCA grant right after my daughter was born in 1994, and I got the grant in 1995, and you had to use it right away. So it’s crazy. I’m just always juggling a whole lot. I just said to my friend that I was going to apply for an extension in life. I need about 150 years extra, and then I’ll be able to complete all the projects that I have outlined in the notebooks next to my bed. BJB: Any thoughts for young women who want to write plays? AK: I think if this is the kind of world that we’re in that being out there and networking is the way to get your work done, then you really have to overcome any kind of shyness or self-effacing-ness, and get out there and do the schmoozing and face time that other people are doing and be really smart about it. I hardly ever think it has anything to do with the quality of the work. There certainly is enough crappy work being written by male playwrights and getting produced; more crappy work is getting done proportionately. It has less to do with the quality; it has to do with the kind of entitlement one does or doesn’t feel, and the way one deports oneself out there in the world. Maybe women aren’t as aggressive as men or as comfortable speaking about themselves. I often have a really hard time. For someone who has advertised everything in the world for everyone else, I have a really hard time talking about my own work. But I’m definitely getting better. BJB: What are the things that still inspire you to write plays? AK: Other great plays that I see that take my breath away, make me cry, keep me up at night; actors who I work with, whose depth of understanding is greater than even mine about a particular character; then you really know you’re onto something; then you know you have this human connection where you’re making something bigger. The reward 174

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for me has been – I’ve never been rewarded in any measurable financial way to speak of, I’ve never profited from a play, so to speak, not that I have an aversion to it – but the reward has been to sit in a room with people and feel them paying attention and hear them gasp or laugh or cry in the right places, and then come up to you afterwards and say how moving they found it or powerful or funny or whatever it was – that touching people with stories that way seems to be the crack for me, the drug I go back to. BJB: What do you think of the current state of theatre? AK: It’s a very different thing to be in a room and watch Cherry Jones turn in a 75-minute performance that you’ll never forget as long as you live, and you might very well forget it if you didn’t see an actor of that caliber do the play, and so I think that having to pare everything down to where theatre is no longer astonishing and remarkable takes away the theatricality, that is, the theatre of it. I mean, theatre was originally a cathartic experience. Theatre should be powerful, emotional, moving. If you have talky plays with not that much going on and two people on stage chatting, I don’t understand why I should sacrifice to go there and be part of that experience, unless it’s going to show me something that’s going to change my life and be unforgettable, which isn’t to say that I doubt the power of one or two actors on the stage to elicit gasps. I’ve been in lots of situations like that. Stones in His Pockets was one of the most fabulous theatrical experiences. I saw it in London with two crackerjack, brilliant, amazing actors, and if it had been any less than that, then it would have been less than that. So that’s a consideration, too, in this push to keep whittling down the plays. BJB: About writing, any final thoughts? AK: You just have to do it and not get in your own way. And you have to believe while you’re doing it that it’s worthwhile because that’s what makes all the difference. You can’t be second guessing and wondering what you’re going to do with it, and wondering why you’re doing it. You have to be so lost and let yourself get so lost that you don’t even realize you’re the last person in the building and everybody’s turned the lights off and gone. Arden Kass – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays Appetite Dreamland Fog 175

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Knowing Bliss Mektoub (Force of Nature) Monsters I Have Eaten and Other Tales School Play – Co-written with P. Seth Bauer Short Plays Feeding Frenzy Guts Kick Me Serial Monogamy Sole Searching Vapors (collection) Musicals Jason the Bunyip Slayer O, Lou The Good Girl Documentaries For Biography on A&E Network –   “Eric Clapton: Just the Messenger” (Henry Nevison, 2004)   “Led Zeppelin: A Rare Alchemy” (Grant Slawson, 2004)   “Pete Townshend: Can’t Explain” (Henry Nevison, 2004) Awards Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – Fellowships in Playwriting – 2 Leeway Foundation Grant (2000, 2001) MultiStages Theatre New Works Contest, First Prize (2006) Chameleon Theatre Circle New Play Festival, First Prize (2007) Humana Festival of Short Plays, Finalist (2012) O’Neill Theater Conference, Semifinalist (2014)

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Chapter 11 A Conversation with William di Canzio

W

illiam di Canzio has impressive credentials. With an M.F.A. from Yale School of Drama, a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and a B.A. cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, he has taught playwriting and literature at such prestigious schools as Smith College, Yale University, and most recently at Haverford College. He has participated three times as a resident at the O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference and has had work commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville. His politically charged and historical plays have won awards from the Beverly Hills Theatre Guild and the Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation and residencies from the Camargo Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. Bill chose the quiet calm of the Great Room at the lovely Daylesford Abbey for our conversation. BJB: Were you born and raised in Philadelphia? WdC: I was born in Philadelphia in what was then called the Women’s Hospital, now Hahnemann Hospital. At the time my parents lived in West Philadelphia, and just a few months after I was born they moved to Drexel Hill, and that’s where I was raised. BJB: What was it like growing up in Drexel Hill? WdC: I went to the parochial elementary school, St. Bernadette, where I think at that time, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, there were typically 40–50 kids in a classroom. Unlike some Catholic grade school kids, I was really very fortunate that I did not have the Sister Mary Ignatius experience. [Laughs] And I credit that all to having been taught by the good Sisters of Notre Dame, originally a French Order. They were terrific at teaching grammar, arithmetic, language, certainly with a lot of grace and downright elegance. I think now about how those women themselves were being exploited by the hierarchy as free labor, but my memory of that school was that the education was just fine, but I was a pretty bookish kid. I didn’t have any trouble.

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BJB: So you read a lot as a young person? WdC: Yes. BJB: And you went to St. Joseph’s Prep School? WdC: I did. I probably got the exact same education as Molière; he went to a Jesuit high school in Paris. [Laughs] I don’t think they had changed the curriculum since the 17th century. Lots of Latin and Greek. BJB: And the University of Pennsylvania was next? WdC: Yes – not happy there. I wasn’t ready for the scale of the university or the loneliness. On the other hand, some of the classes were just great. I also acted a little. BJB: Did you have a playwriting class there? WdC: No, I didn’t. I didn’t start writing plays till I was 28. I took fiction writing; got into a class with Philip Roth, and he gave me excellent guidance. I remember submitting two pieces at the same time. One I was proud of because it was “literary.” The other piece I didn’t think much of, really a monologue, a narrative spoken by a young woman, based on my best friend’s older sister. When we were 18, she was 26, always seemed glamorous and sexy. She’d been a wild teenager, had run away and gotten married, had three kids, was divorced, and was dating this absolutely creepy guy – a Mafioso I was sure. Anyway, one day they got into a fight; she tried to run him over with his own Monte Carlo. I wrote the story in the first person as Joanne behind the wheel putting her foot on the gas. Roth told me bluntly that the one I was so proud of was worthless but the monologue was good. BJB: So that was really your first play? WdC: Maybe so. I guess I was doing what playwrights do, speaking in the first person as somebody who was not me. That was probably the best nugget of professional advice I’ve ever gotten from a teacher. It’s my hope as a teacher to do something comparable for my own students. BJB: Did that experience encourage you to go to Yale for playwriting? WdC: No. After college, I didn’t know how to go about being a writer. I knew I had to get a job. I wrote advertising, moved to New York, got a job at Dance Magazine – mostly answering the phone – but eventually I got a byline. I worked in New York for a year, taking classes at The New School, absolutely burning myself out. 180

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BJB: From writing? WdC: I’d get up at five o’clock in the morning and write for three hours before I went to the office. It did not occur to me that if you get up at five o’clock in the morning, it means you can’t go to bed at 1:30, which is what you do when you’re 22. I had a oneroom apartment and a mattress on the floor, and before I went to sleep at night, I’d set up the espresso maker on the stove, so all I had to do was roll out of bed onto the floor, reach up, turn the burner, and sit there till it perked. A few months of that will wear down even a 22-year-old. Meantime, I’d been admitted to the graduate English program at Johns Hopkins. So I took my coffeemaker to Baltimore. BJB: When did you get your first teaching job? WdC: I got my first teaching job at Smith College. Great students. Still, I was a 27-year-old single gay man at a women’s school. I got into the habit, because Northampton was so quiet, of leaving the TV on in my apartment, especially if I was there in the middle of the day eating lunch. Certain soap operas were a fad with the students then. Often students would invite teachers to dinner, and it seemed everybody could laugh about the soaps. I also happened to see a game show called The $20,000 Pyramid one day, and Dick Cavett was playing, and I watched it and thought, “I could do that.” I sent a postcard to ABC in New York. “Come on in and audition,” they said. And I did. I played and won the money. BJB: That’s a great story! WdC: It was the summer; I’d finished my dissertation, my first year teaching, and so now, I thought, I can write what I want. The new semester would start in eight weeks, not enough time to write a novel. “I know, I’ll write a play – they’re short!” Three years later, I was still working on that same play. But I tried to write a play, something went click, and I realized a play was what I’d been trying to write all along. That first one ended up at the O’Neill. BJB: How was your experience at the O’Neill Center? WdC: My first two plays were done there, and the first time was just terrific. Edith Oliver was my dramaturg. I had not even heard the script read aloud. They did the first cold reading sitting around the table with an accomplished cast of professional actors. She said to me, “Sweetie, you’re in a funk. What’s wrong?” I said, “It didn’t sound anything like the way I heard it in my head.” She laughed and said with her deep smoker’s voice, “Can anybody be that young?” Still, it was an excellent experience. I was back there two years later with my second play. By then I was at Yale and painfully aware of how much I didn’t know. It was a necessary shattering of naïveté. Not a great time. 181

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BJB: So you were at Yale when you were at the O’Neill? WdC: Yes. Oscar Brownstein, then head of playwriting at Yale School of Drama, had seen the first play at the O’Neill and encouraged me to apply. BJB: Did you come back to Philadelphia after Yale? WdC: No. I stayed on at the university, teaching in the English department. It was a struggle to teach part-time, make enough money to get by, and continue to write, but not unusual for writers. I did that for four years. Then I was offered the post of Dean of Trumbull College, one of the 12 residential colleges at Yale. The deans were expected to teach and to carry on their own academic or creative work, which in my case meant that there was a time for writing built into the job. I held that office for nine years. Then I moved to Los Angeles to see if I could get work in TV. I was only there for a year when both my parents got very sick at the same time. I moved back to Philadelphia to help with their care. BJB: Then did you stay in Philadelphia? WdC: Yes. Haverford College hired me to teach. More importantly, I met Jim Anderson, my spouse of eight years now. And along the way I’ve made some good friends in theatre and the other arts in the area. I met Ben Lloyd in 2000. I had seen him with Frank X in The Rhinoceros in the Studio space at the Walnut. They were terrific. I introduced myself; they were in the first reading of Hindustan at Haverford College. BJB: I want to ask you about the historical, political context of most of your plays. Where does that come from? WdC: Where does that come from? Hmm … I write about what moves me. BJB: Were you ever in the service? WdC: No. When I was eligible for the draft, the lottery had already been initiated. I was number 337 or something. Now I’m writing about Bayard Rustin, such a radical pacifist that he was willing to spend three years in prison for his beliefs. Rustin was a Quaker; Haverford College, a Quaker school. It was a good place to be during the Bush years. I think of theatre as being antiwar in nature. Epic versus dramatic writing. Homer, the epic, celebrates the warrior; yet Aeschylus, the playwright, chooses to take the point of view of those who don’t fight but are made to suffer from war. Still, in The Oresteia, Clytemnestra does in one day what the Trojan armies could not do in ten years. She kills her husband Agamemnon. BJB: So the classics have had an impact on you? 182

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WdC: Those Jesuits. I read Medea in Greek at 16. Sorry for bragging, but it’s amazing that our teachers could get that kind of work from us as teenagers. BJB: And history seems important to you? WdC: History seems to trigger certain “ah-ha” moments. I channel-surfed onto a documentary about the Nehru family one night just when the voice-over said, “And Nehru had a long-standing love affair with Edwina Mountbatten.” And I thought, “What? What? They’d been trying to get rid of the English for 300 years.” That’s where Hindustan came from. Dickie [Mountbatten] knew about the affair; he was Nehru’s friend. Then there’s Dooley, which premiered in May 2011. That “ah-ha” moment was when I found out this Catholic humanitarian icon in the 1950s had been forced to resign from the U.S. Navy because he was gay. It’s a fairly big show, cast of eight, music, masks, movement, but Diversionary [Theatre in San Diego] lavished their resources on it. It was a beautiful production. BJB: How did this production come about? Did you randomly send it out or did you have a connection already? WdC: No connection. I’d sent them sample pages; they asked for the script and decided to produce it. But not exactly random; the theatre produces LGBT plays. BJB: Where do you get your inspiration to keep writing? WdC: It’s desire to write, mostly, and some encouragement. As for ideas … they come from where they come from. As I mentioned, the current project is about Bayard Rustin, one of the leaders of the civil rights movement, who grew up in West Chester [Pennsylvania]. He was one of the architects of the March on Washington in August 1963, advisor to [Martin Luther] King. He was also an openly gay man and a practitioner of nonviolence. Rustin had been imprisoned during World War II for not complying with the military draft; he was also one of the first Freedom Riders, a hero. BJB: What’s the latest on Rustin & The March? WdC: Ben Lloyd directed scenes from it at the National Constitution Center on August 13, 2013, as part of their celebration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. We’re hoping to mount it in Philadelphia next year. BJB: Do you think about the number of characters in your plays because of budget concerns? WdC: Oh, yes. Paula Vogel, an exceptional teacher, advises her students to consider how few characters it will take to present a particular story. The fewer the better. I think that’s 183

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good advice, not just for practical reasons but for aesthetic reasons. Still if the play requires a larger cast, I don’t believe you should be afraid to write it. I realized with The Iranians, for instance, about the 1953 coup in Tehran, that the story needs nine actors to be dramatized. BJB: Do you have favorite playwrights or are there playwrights who have influenced you? WdC: Yes. I wrote Dooley, for example, after I had seen Angels in America. I like David Lindsay-Abaire’s writing. I think Kimberly Akimbo is brilliant. I admire certain plays by Jez Butterworth, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Martin McDonagh, Adrienne Kennedy. I could go on listing old plays and new ones. The worthwhile literature is inexhaustible, it seems, because it keeps growing. Significantly, many of my best students recently have been women. BJB: Tell me about some of your plays. WdC: Some are “heart” plays; some are “head” plays. Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier is very much a heart play. The Iranians, more of a head play. I guess the trick is to get head and heart working together, intellect and emotion. I’ve also got a mischievous streak, a love of music and masks and cross-dressing – Church & State is a play that’s lots of fun theatrically. BJB: Do you think living in Philadelphia has impacted your writing? WdC: Teaching at Haverford [College] made me more conscious of the Quaker influence in Philadelphia, which brought me closer to Bayard Rustin. Church & State is set in a homeless shelter in North Philadelphia. I’m thinking about an adaptation of Antigone set in West Philly. The heroine is a middle school girl, African American, whose brother and cousin have both been shot to death on the street. Lots of heartbreak in Philadelphia. In terms of history, you could say the City [of Philadelphia] was as important to the Enlightenment as Florence was to the Renaissance, and yet it’s the poorest of the country’s ten largest cities. Gandhi says poverty is the worst form of violence. BJB: What do you think about the whole process of submitting work to theatres? WdC: It’s disheartening. If you can raise some money, produce your own work. That’s what we did with Johnny. BJB: Do you have other writing projects? WdC: Currently, I’m working on a novel. It’s called Alec, based on E.M. Forster’s Maurice. 184

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BJB: Do you have advice for emerging playwrights or for playwrights who are struggling to get their work done? WdC: Find a director to work with. Make friends. You write the script at your desk, but it takes a community effort with other artists to make it a play. William di Canzio – Credits and Awards Full-length Plays Church & State City of Mirrors C-Section Dooley Hindustan Hroswitha Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier Last Night Home Open Heart Our Lady of Paris Rustin & The March The Iranians: Mosaddeq Overthrown One-Act Plays Exchange Las Madres Splendora Awards Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – Fellowships in Playwriting – 2 Eugene O’Neill Theater Center Residency – C-Section (1981) Eugene O’Neill Theater Center Residency – Open Heart (1983) Yale School of Drama – The Eugene O’Neill Scholarship in Playwriting (1984) The Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France) – Residence in Playwriting – Dooley (1999) Eugene O’Neill Theater Center Residency – Hindustan (2002) Pew Fellowships in the Arts, Finalist (2008) Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation Playwriting Competition, First Place – Dooley (2009) Julie Harris Playwright Award – Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier (2009) The MacDowell Colony, Thornton Wilder Fellowship – Residency in Theatre Arts (2009) The MacDowell Colony – Residency in Theatre Arts (2011)

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Chapter 12 A Conversation with Nicholas Wardigo

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icholas Wardigo captured the attention of the theatrical community in 2004 when he was awarded the $50,000 Pew Fellowships in the Arts. Since that time, he has continued to delight audiences with his imaginative and unique voice. In 2009 he received a nomination for the F. Otto Haas Award for Emerging Artist, and in the summer of 2010 his play, Hum, was selected for development at the nationally renowned PlayPenn Conference. His plays, with relatable characters in challenging situations, often inspire audiences to contemplate life and existence in a new way. Beginning in college as a writer of short stories, he has grown to be passionate about his current work as a playwright. BJB: Where were you born and raised? NW: I was born in Frackville, Pennsylvania, about a hundred miles north of here, coal region. My grandfather worked in the mines. My dad was the first one in my family to go to college. BJB: And you went to college? NW: Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. BJB: So you went to college from Frackville before you moved here to Philadelphia? NW: Yeah. BJB: What did you study in college? NW: I was a double major in Creative Writing and Professional Writing, both in the English Department, not in the Theatre Department, which is an important distinction. BJB: Was it during that time you wrote your first play?

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NW: It was! There was a company on campus called Scotch and Soda. They’re for nondrama majors. At that time, they were written, produced, directed, performed by non-drama majors. They actually have credit for doing the very first production ever of Pippin in the late ’50s/early ’60s. At that time I was a big short story writer, and they were looking for one-act plays, and I knew somebody who did the lights for them. So I tried converting a couple of my short stories into plays, and they did two of them! Then I wrote my first full-length for them, but they didn’t take it. BJB: Did you have a playwriting class there? NW: No, but I had a lot of classes in short story writing, poetry, professional writing – things like writing articles and technical writing. I actually have a theory I’ve been developing over the past couple of years that playwrights come from two different sources: they either come from an English department or they come from a Theatre department. You can tell the difference in the play because people from the English department focus on plot and less on character, and people from the Theatre department focus more on character and less on plot. I think it’s because the English Department, the Writing Program there, really drilled in structure, structure, structure and plot, and where the climax happens and the denouement happens and all that technical work. So, since then, I’ve been really trying to focus on character development because I always felt it was my weak point, and I know if I’m writing something long enough, it will automatically fall into a plot. If you put a gun to my head and told me to write a story or a play that doesn’t have an arc, I’m not sure I could do it. It’s something that a lot of playwrights could use more of, in my opinion. BJB: How did you get from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia? NW: I had an uncle who lived here. I wanted to get into writing of some kind. At the time I graduated, I didn’t know that I was a playwright, although I had written a play, but I was also still writing short stories. I’d written a novel. I’d tried getting into comic books. I just really enjoyed writing of all kinds … [also] poetry. But about short story writing – I kept all my rejections slips. I used to tack them to my wall, and I would submit to all the literary rags – Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Glimmer Train, all those. I promised myself I would take them all down when I published my first short story. That never happened, so I had to take them down because I ran out of wall space. I stopped counting at 80. Then I just got success as a playwright and then went in that direction. BJB: When you arrived in Philadelphia, did you stay on the playwriting track? NW: I hadn’t really sold a play yet. I had those two things, tiny things, I shouldn’t say tiny – one [play] was actually an hour long, but they were done when I was in college. But, no, 190

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when I moved to Philly, I was still writing short stories. [Then] I discovered The Brick Playhouse, so I went there for the readings; that was in 1995. Even when I was writing plays for those guys, I was still writing the novels, not so much poetry at that point, but short stories definitely. I had a couple one-acts produced through The Brick. They did the first production of one of my full-length plays, but that wasn’t until 2004. BJB: That was Editorial Decisions? NW: It was. And I think, until that moment, I didn’t know I was a playwright, for sure. It was originally read at InterAct in the Showcase of New Plays in 2001, and even then it took three years before it got picked up by The Brick. A lot of people read it and just kind of walked away from it, but there weren’t quite as many tiny theatres out there as there are today. BJB: Did the experience of having Editorial Decisions produced encourage you to keep writing plays? NW: Oh, of course. Nothing breeds success like success. BJB: So after Editorial Decisions, your next play was …? NW: The Biggest Box of Crayons and that was at Philadelphia Theatre Workshop. BJB: What was your experience like there? NW: Great. I’ve never had a really bad experience with any of my productions, at least not with any of the people or any of the directors. I mean, I have problems with myself because I go a little bit crazy every time I have a production or at least an opening night. I short myself out sometimes. The worst is the week right before opening because I try not to do any rewrites. As a rule of thumb, I stop ten days before opening night unless somebody directly asks me to rework a line. I don’t want to make the actors crazy. I don’t care about me. That’s an important distinction. One of my mantras is I care about the production, not the play. I’ll rewrite lines to accommodate what the actors are giving me. I like to have a certain amount of collaboration when working on a play. And frankly, sometimes the actors come up with something better than what I had in mind, or they gravitate towards certain aspects of a character, and I’ll boost that and tone down some other aspects. Going back to what I was saying before, it’s good that I have a strong sense of plot because I can rewrite characters knowing that I can get the plot back on track. BJB: Are there playwrights who have influenced you? 191

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NW: I can remember the first time I read Glengarry Glen Ross very distinctly. I thought I was making some headway as a playwright, and I read that thing, and it was like “Holy crap! There’s a whole world out there that I really need to learn about!” One of my influences, actually, which is a surprise to some people, is Neil Simon. I love the hell out of Neil Simon. He didn’t always write brilliant plays, but he always wrote very well-constructed plays. Reading one of those things is like looking at a watch, just the way the gears fit and the springs and his sense of comedic timing and everything else. I know he’s not always purely artistic. He can get formulaic, he can get commercial, to be sure, but you really can’t fault his structure. BJB: When working on your own plays, where do you get your inspiration and ideas? Is it from other writers? From books? Current events? From situations in your own life? NW: I don’t know. It’s all of the above. It’s none of the above. I don’t suffer from writer’s block. I suffer from the opposite. Right now, I probably have about eight ideas for plays in my notebook. Whenever I’m working on a play, I’m thinking about my next play. Every once in a while I’ll just stop everything, and I’ll go through those ideas, and I’ll think about each one. Sometimes I’ll combine them. Sometimes I’ll alter them or shuffle them. The problem is editing the ideas, not getting them. BJB: Do you feel you have time to write, or do you feel it’s a crunch all the time trying to find the space to write in your day? NW: I’ve never felt crunched. Well, right now I’m kind of jumping from temp job to temp job, so my next job, for instance, doesn’t start for another two weeks, so I’m getting time to write some stuff now, but even then, no. I write during my lunch hour. I write in my head while I’m driving to the job or on the train, wherever I am. At some of the crappier jobs I’ve had I’ve certainly been known to steal time. I forget who it was – it might have been Hemingway – it was a novelist from the 1920s or the 1930s, who said they had a job as a security guard, and they would write in a drawer. They had a notebook in the drawer and would write in it, and when somebody came up, they would just shut the drawer. BJB: Do you think living in Philadelphia has impacted your writing? NW: It’s hard to say. I’ve written plays that are set in Philadelphia, but material-wise, I don’t think I’ve gotten anything from Philly. Although, having said that, now I’m thinking of Concrete Dinosaur, where I did write about the Main Line. So that’s not completely true. What I was going to say, though, was living in Philly has given me access to other plays. I’ve been chasing ideas about playwriting, and this year I decided to keep 192

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track of all the plays that I saw. Also for tax reasons, I write off my ticket purchases. I saw at least 25–26 plays between September and August, and almost none of them at the big theatres, [most in] the 99-seat or less theatres, and you can’t help but be influenced by that. You can’t help getting more ideas. I mean, writers through the centuries have done this. Virgil would be nothing without Homer. BJB: What comes easiest to you while you’re writing? NW: Talking about Concrete Dinosaur, I don’t think I sat down and said, “I’m going to write a play about the Main Line.” I think I had some ideas for characters, who happened to be older Main Line women. I’m not even sure I necessarily wanted to set it in the Main Line originally. I was writing these women and how they were talking, and I remember the first thing I wrote was about threatening the neighbor’s dog. A lot of my plays start by writing snippets of dialog. I don’t normally flesh out characters first. I’ll have two sort of rough ideas for characters, and I’ll have those characters talk to each other on the page. As I’m writing, the voices will change, and then suddenly I say, “Oh, clearly this is a plot about threatening the neighbor’s dog or whatever.” I just started working and working on it, and suddenly I had ideas of “Oh, I need to set this in the Main Line.” I write very organically. I try to mostly because I’m not worried about plot. I’m more worried about the dialog sounding natural. BJB: Is there a best part of writing for you? NW: The best part of writing is actually sitting here, like in a coffee shop, with a notebook, with my coffee. I may go to the comic book store. I’ll have a stack of comics ready to go, take little breaks. I’ll sit here for at least three hours every week and more if I’m hot. BJB: You mean “hot” in terms of writing a lot? NW: [Laughs] Right, right, when the writing’s going well. There’s something very … it’s not comforting exactly … but there’s something very right and correct about just me, the pen, and the page, and my hot cup of coffee in a coffee shop watching other people with good light. BJB: It’s all conducive to the writing spirit for you? NW: Yeah, yeah. Now having said all that, I just had this conversation maybe four different ways with my latest director, David O’Connor at PlayPenn. He directed Hum. He said, “Try and have fun with it!” And I don’t have fun when I write. I kept telling him if I want to have fun, I’ll go and see Ironman, again! I mean, that’s fun! Going to see a movie is fun! Going to see plays is fun! But, definitely, the hardest part is being in 193

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rehearsals and making the damn thing work. That scene that goes so well on the page now suddenly just doesn’t make sense when it’s coming out of actors’ mouths, and if you have very smart, very talented actors, they have a very annoying habit of actually telling you what’s wrong and pointing out your shortcomings, which you need. It gets particularly bad when their point suddenly undermines the entire plot. You realize, “Oh, my God! This thing is flawed from the outset! How can I fix that?” It’s a nasty process. It’s a nasty piece of business. Most people do it badly. BJB: How long have you been writing plays? NW: Since 1995. BJB: What have you learned from the process of writing? NW: I can tell you about a “bingo” moment I had, and I actually talked about this a little in Bruce Graham’s book [The Collaborative Playwright, with Michele Volansky, 2007]. I took a class with Jeffrey Sweet, and I remember I had written two full-lengths, and I don’t know how many one-acts before I took that class, including the one I wrote in college. I think it was the first week, and he said something like: “Theatre isn’t literature. Don’t try to write flowery prose. Don’t try to say anything. Just write what the damn characters are saying.” It really was like rainbows and unicorns and all that stuff, and suddenly I did that, and that’s when Editorial Decisions happened. I tried to have people talk to each other. I wasn’t trying to say anything as the author. And, again, I think that’s from my training as a short story writer, and I don’t think theatre is that. BJB: Do you notice any themes in your plays that come up accidentally or subconsciously? NW: God, I hope not. Actually, I’m a little worried about that. For years I was enjoying Edward Albee. Without knowing anything about the man, I was enjoying his plays. Then, I think after reading the fifth or sixth one, I started realizing these recurring themes of babies and children that may or may not exist. Then years later, I read an interview with him where he talked about how he was adopted and how he never knew his biological parents, and the rich people who did adopt him he didn’t get along with. He was estranged from his mother for decades. So now I’m really worried that 20 years from now some grad student is going to look at all my plays, string them all together, and think, “Oh, clearly, he hates his mother.” It really does concern me. BJB: I want to ask you about your PlayPenn experience with Hum. It was great hearing your play read. 194

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NW: I was really happy with it, but … It’s a horrible thing to put yourself through, but you’re serving the play. This was a more abstract piece of theatre than I normally write. I was being experimental. I was really kind of pushing myself in a lot of ways. So, consequently, it scared the hell out of me. I think the first day of rehearsal I showed up with something like 15 pages of rewrites, and it didn’t get much better after that. I was always bringing in new pages. But then there was a playwrights’ dinner, and I should add they had all these different events, but this was not something they organized. This was one of the playwrights actually who said, “Hey, let’s all get together for dinner, just the six of us and talk.” And we talked, and I realized we were all having the exact same experience. We are all there to work. This is our job. This is our career. It’s okay for people who come and see the show to have fun, but I’m not going to have fun until this thing is over. And that goes for when I have a play up, too. I used to think and hope and pray and dream that the tension would go away on opening night, but it doesn’t. After opening night, you suddenly see that there’re reviewers in the theatre. Now you’re on pins and needles for five days or whatever until it hits the paper. Then maybe that’s done, and you’re fine but you’re not. You’re not good until maybe two weeks after the last show. Now, I’m okay. It’s just a horrible thing to do to yourself, and I’m not exactly sure why I do it. BJB: Yes, why do you do it? NW: I don’t know, but I’ve always done it. I’ve been writing since I was six or seven years old. When I went to visit my Grandmom every Saturday, she would pull out a big manual typewriter, and I’d poke out these little stories. Also where I started drinking coffee. BJB: Coffee at age six? NW: She was Ukrainian. It was mostly milk. I painted my name on the coffee cup with nail polish because she told me all writers drink coffee. I actually discovered this maybe ten years ago when I was trying not to drink six cups of coffee a day and cut back to three. It doesn’t even have to be coffee. I could have water in there, but I need to have that action while I’m writing. [Laughs] It could be potato chips, carrot sticks, at least for me, but I have to have that action going. BJB: I understand! [Laughs] Do you remember the first play you saw as a young person? NW: I didn’t grow up in a theatre family. There were high school productions. I went to see those. I do remember Harvey. I remembered the Jimmy Stewart movie. That’s how I recognized it. In freshman year at college I saw The Crucible. Carnegie Mellon has a kick-ass drama department, and they gave away tickets to the incoming freshman, 195

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so I went and really, really enjoyed it. I’m not sure I’d seen a professional production before I was 18. I’ve never thought about it before. It would never occur to me to write a play. I went there to write short stories. BJB: Do you still write short stories? NW: I don’t. BJB: Do you still have your novel? NW: It’s in a drawer somewhere. It’s funny you should say that. I’m actually working on a novel now, but here’s the thing. The novel that’s in my drawer is a literary piece. It’s meant to be artistic. What I’m doing now actually is a crappy fantasy novel, but I’m not doing it professionally. I’m doing it as a hobby, just because, and I’m enjoying the hell out of it. I’m feeling none of the pressure that I normally do when I’m playwriting. I understand there’s a market for crappy fantasy novels, and I’ll certainly try to sell it, but it’s really just a way for me to relax. It’s funny, I haven’t written prose for probably ten years, and I find this thing is very dialog-heavy, which is fun and different. BJB: Do you think seeing The Crucible had an impact on you? NW: I doubt it. At least at that point, my influences were novel writers. I actually read a lot of science fiction. I was a big fan of Dostoyevsky. Any genre of fiction is very plotheavy. A lot of the tropes are set. You have laser guns, you have spaceships, you have robots, you have monsters. So it really is about plot – any Western, romance – and how that unfolds. BJB: It sounds like you’ve always been a big reader. NW: Sure. One of the stories my Mom is always fond of saying is when I discovered the town library – I think I was eight or nine years old, and I came home with The Iliad and The Odyssey. I was interested in monsters. I was interested in Cyclops. BJB: How do you feel about the business of playwriting or about how plays are selected for production? NW: It took me a while to figure out how that works. In some ways I think it’s not businesslike enough. I worked for nine years at a company writing proposals in the marketing department. I didn’t touch anything that was worth less than half a million dollars. So I understand pressure. I understand deadlines. I understand what you need to do to make a buck. The company’s probably worth $50 million, maybe 196

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a little bit more, but there’s a sense that “Yeah, you should be enjoying yourself. Yeah, you should be friendly.” All those things are true, but at the end of the day, you’re all there in this building to make a buck. I get the impression that’s not the case with theatre, and it annoys me. Occasionally, the small theatres do something interesting. I did work for one of the major theatres in town for some time. I was a grant writer, so I understand things like the median age of the theatregoer, which turns out to be 55 to 60. It was like the vast majority had a household income of $100,000 or more, and it suddenly occurred to me, I’m not the target audience for this theatre by a lot – my age, my income, all of it. I am not this theatre’s target. I’m not necessarily saying the show selection needs to change so much, but how they approach it definitely should. At some point, you have to treat it like a business. All with the exception of the Walnut Street Theatre. When they put on Annie, boy, do they know what they’re doing to get people to come in. I guess what I’m saying is if someone wants to do Caryl Churchill and still fill the seats, I think it can be done. I think other theatres need to look at something like the Walnut’s marketing machine and emulate it, or do something like it to fill the seats. This is nine years of marketing talking. I wasn’t successful as a playwright until I applied my marketing theory to my own writing. It’s not about mailing scripts to theatres. I have never gotten a production by mailing anything to anybody. What it is about is buying drinks for literary managers and figuring out what they’re looking for, maybe talking a little about what I’m writing about, and seeing if there’s a match or not, and then getting someone to ask you for a script. It’s not about cold sending. I’ve seen the slush piles. BJB: Are you writing smaller cast shows because of economic concerns? NW: That’s part of it, to be sure, but also because it’s easier. It’s more interesting. You can do a lot more, character-wise, with a three-character play than with a nine-character play. You just can. Also, I still think of myself as a young playwright. There was a play I saw years ago I think at The Brick, and it was about painting, and it was about a man teaching a younger woman about painting, and she kept painting horses, but the horses kept being obscured by bushes and rocks and things, and he criticized her because she couldn’t draw. He said, “The reason you’re obscuring the horse is because you can’t actually draw the horse.” If you can’t handle a three-character play, I don’t think you can handle a nine-character play. If you can’t flesh out a character to the point where two people talking to each other onstage is mesmerizing, you’re going to be completely lost in a larger cast play. I think you have to write short plays before you write bigger plays, too, because a short play is a microcosm, and I think it’s an important teaching tool to teach yourself. BJB: Do you have thoughts for playwrights who may be just beginning? 197

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NW: I think if you can give it up, you should. In the first place, the vast majority of playwrights are awful. They’re really, really awful. Years ago, Seth Rozin did this thing where he invited a bunch of playwrights at different career levels, and we all talked about playwriting in Philly. He mentioned there were like 120 playwrights in Philadelphia, and someone said, “Really?” And what he said was that the survey [showed that’s how many] people self-identified as playwrights, not necessarily someone who’s had a production or any readings or really any talent, just somebody who says, “I’m a playwright,” and, therefore, most of them are pretty lousy. So I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re a lousy playwright and you really don’t have an interest in de-lousing yourself – quit, knock it off! And if you’re somebody who really has any self-respect or really wants to not make yourself crazy or borderline suicidal, also probably not the profession for you. So I guess the people who are left are the people who have a modicum of talent and are insane. As I’m getting older now, I’ve been thinking about this more and more. There’s something pathological, something incorrect in how I’m wired that makes me want to show these to people and then try and put it onstage, where actors can slap me around and then the audience can slap me around and then critics can slap me around, and I can feel like shooting myself in the head for weeks and weeks and weeks until the show’s over, and then I crawl into a little ball in my bed, and then a couple weeks later I’m up and on my feet and I’m okay. And, alright! Let’s do that again! Like, what the hell is that? BJB: Yes, what is that? Do you think it’s about sharing something? NW: No, because I don’t necessarily really like people. [Laughs] I’m still working it out. The closest I can come to it really is like a doctor. I don’t mean to think that what I do is as important as what a doctor does, but if you say to a doctor, “Do you love what you do,” they’re likely to say, “Yes.” “Oh, so you have fun being a doctor?” “Well, no. I love it, but I don’t do this for fun. I’m doing this because I’m good at it, because I can help people and because this is what I do. I am a doctor.” So it’s something like that. I don’t know if that’s good advice for anybody, let alone a playwright. BJB: How do you see your future as a playwright? Do you think you’ll stay in Philadelphia? NW: Yeah, for the foreseeable future. My wife has a terrific job here that she actually loves after years of having many jobs that she hated or didn’t pay well. It took some additional education. God bless her. It took a while to get there. She’s a web designer and a good one. To be honest, this is a great city to be in as a playwright ’cause it ain’t New York. You can’t throw a dead cat without hitting a playwright in New York. But at the same time, it ain’t Frackville, Pennsylvania, either, where there was one theatre within a 30-mile radius. I’ve certainly seen a huge outcropping of small theatres 198

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[in Philadelphia] that do some really interesting stuff. There’s Walking Fish, Azuka, Simpatico, Flashpoint, Plays & Players, Brat. I wish The Brick was still around. BJB: I know. Wasn’t that a great experience? NW: Fantastic. BJB: The more I think about it, the more I’m amazed that we all sort of came together there – new playwrights, new directors, new actors, and plays were produced, and people lined up, people couldn’t get in, the houses were packed. NW: It was a 60-seat theatre, to be fair. It definitely had like an underground, kind of happening, kind of cool, a lot of drinks afterwards, a lot of camaraderie. [But] people didn’t have an eye to the future. In a lot of ways, that’s what made me different than a lot of the others. I don’t mean to sound arrogant. I was doing what I was doing, and I was trying to figure out how do I get this into the Arden. Then I realized, “Well, I can’t. I got to hit these stepping stones between here and the Arden.” And maybe someday, I will. I had these conversations with Bill McKinlay, and he agreed with me. His vision was for The Brick to be a training ground for playwrights to do their thing and then move on. As popular as the ITS [Independent Theatre one-act plays] were, if you wanted to be a professional playwright, you couldn’t be at The Brick forever. They weren’t a production house; they were a training ground. I was there for ten years, but I was still submitting to the other theatres. For as much as I loved the readings, for instance, I wished there were more artistic directors from other theatres showing up for them, and I would try and get people there. I mean, with PlayPenn, all the shows sold out. In the seats, too, were a lot of artistic directors, and that’s what The Brick needed to be, and it just never got there, but as a training ground, it was unbelievable. BJB: The Pew Fellowship must have been a significant milestone in your career. What has that meant to you? NW: Huge, huge. I quit my job at the time. Nine years at the same company. It was a job I didn’t hate but didn’t love. It provided me the opportunity to quit and to work full time on my writing, and I wrote two and a half plays in a year. At that point, I was doing about a play every two years, and I’ve been writing about a play or two a year since then even with other work and all that. It really kind of ignited a lot of stuff in my head. I’ve gotten different work habits. It’s also a certain amount of exposure. I was able to talk to Bruce Graham and Tom Gibbons and get more information from them. BJB: And the F. Otto Haas Award nomination? 199

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NW: In some ways, that was a bigger deal because more people stopped me to talk to me about that, and I think it’s because the Pew is for all arts and the Haas is strictly for theatre. BJB: What do think about the Barrymore Awards? NW: I love them as an opportunity to meet the players and promote your work in a polite, social kind of way because, as I’ve mentioned before, plays aren’t picked by mailing them in. They just aren’t. So, for instance, there are a couple of people who are in the audience that I know when I go to the Barrymores because I’ve gone since 1997. I did write them one year, actually. I know they – artistic directors, literary managers, whatever – are at least going to say hello to me. When I first started going to the Barrymores, I used to make of a list of people I wanted to meet. Again, this is from my marketing background working in a white-collar kind of job. I knew that if I could meet at least one person on that list, it was worth the $60 ticket to get in there plus the tux. If I could meet two people, I was doing very well. I did that year after year after year until people started knowing me. It’s every little bit that helps. So, maybe someone will say, “Hey, maybe I should read a Nick Wardigo script.” That’s how it’s done, and it’s slow and tedious, and it’s glacial in its timing, but that’s how it’s done. Nicholas Wardigo – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays Concrete Dinosaur Editorial Decisions Exit, Corpse Hum Snowglobe The Biggest Box of Crayons The Do’s and Don’ts of Time Travel Short Plays Burning Bush The Tribe of Ishmael Awards Pennsylvania Council on the Arts – Fellowship in Playwriting – 1 Roger Cornish Award at The Brick Playhouse (2003) Pew Fellowships in the Arts (2004) Barrymore Nomination for the F. Otto Haas Award for Emerging Theatre Artist (2009) 200

Chapter 13 A Conversation with Alex Dremann

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ince returning to Philadelphia with his Master’s of Professional Writing degree from the University of Southern California, Alex Dremann has been a prolific writer of plays, especially short plays. Of his over 150 plays, most are one-acts. His ten-minute play, On the Porch One Crisp Spring Morning, has been nationally recognized with a production at the 2009 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville. And his creative energy is not only focused on his own work but also includes the support of other theatre artists. He started Secret Room Theatre as a collective organization to encourage new collaborative work. In addition, productions of his plays at Philadelphia Theatre Workshop, as well as across the country, have put Alex on the theatrical map. BJB: Where were you born and where did you grow up? AD: I was born in West Chester, and I grew up outside of Phoenixville, so local to Philly. BJB: And you went to college? AD: I went to multiple colleges, but undergraduate at University of Delaware for Accounting, and then I started graduate school at Drexel for Publications Management but didn’t graduate, then University of Pennsylvania for Computer Science but didn’t graduate, and, then U.S.C. for Playwriting and did graduate. BJB: When did you write your first play? AD: Probably 1991. BJB: Was this before you went to California? AD: Yes.

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BJB: What inspired you to write that first play? AD: I was writing fiction for a long, long, long time. BJB: Short stories? AD: Yeah, and a novel when I was in tenth grade. And then in 1991, I decided I wanted to write a screenplay, and I took a screenwriting class at the University of Pennsylvania, Continuing Ed., ten weeks with Marc Lapadula. I was writing a screenplay called The Coincidental Hygienist, and I gave him Act One, and Act One was 120 pages. I had these long scenes. There was one in particular I remember; it was a 15-page scene that took place on a balcony, and they were just talking. And Marc was like, “Alex, Alex …” He liked it, which was really good, but he told me about The Brick Playhouse, and that’s how I got involved in The Brick. So the first real play I wrote was Tea, and that had to be in 1991. That was the first time I wrote a full-length and got it done. BJB: Are you pursuing screenwriting or are you focused on playwriting? AD: I’m focused on playwriting. I took a screenwriting class at U.S.C., and I wrote a screenplay called Dirt. I ended up turning that back into a play, also. BJB: What compelled you to go to U.S.C.? AD: I knew I wanted to go to grad school for playwriting, so I applied to five or six different schools. I got into U.S.C. and San Francisco State. I figured U.S.C. was better ’cause it’s closer to Hollywood and all that stuff. So I think I made the right choice. BJB: Did you like the program there? AD: There were great things about it, no question. I got four productions while I was there. And you’re sort of part of the process and you get to read plays so much, which I really hadn’t done at The Brick. In that sense, it was really good. It wasn’t the perfect program, but it was definitely good. I met a lot of great people there that actually I’m still friends with. BJB: And … you came back. AD: I did. Yes. Part of me wishes I hadn’t ’cause there were a lot of great things going on when I was there. I was getting a lot of productions, and in L.A. it’s much easier to get reviewed. I had a bunch of reviews in the L.A. Weekly and in Backstage West. That was very cool. That was all going well, but I missed the East Coast. I missed my family. 204

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My brothers were having children, and I wanted to be around for that. I missed snow and thunder. I feel like I’m an East Coast person in general. The original idea was that I was going to move to New York … and it didn’t work out. It was very expensive. I ended up getting an apartment here [in the Philadelphia area]. I thought I’d live in Chestnut Hill for a year, and then it was 9/11, and then it was the Gulf War, and suddenly it’s 2010. I ended up not going to New York. And you know, Philadelphia is a surprisingly good theatre scene. I think it actually changed during the six years I was in L.A. I think it sort of exploded because I don’t think there was much of anything going on in 1991 except The Brick for new playwrights. Then the Fringe happened while I was in L.A. So, by the time I got back, that was going strong, and the little theatre companies like the Wilma were not big yet, but now I think we’re in sort of a golden era with Philadelphia theatre. There’s theatre everywhere … although, there’s no Brick. There were problems with The Brick, certainly, but the idea of The Brick doesn’t exist anymore. You know, [when] a kid graduated from college, a playwright like you and I, the first place he’d go was to The Brick. That’s why Marc Lapadula told me to go there. Now there’s no centralized place, but there are far more opportunities. There are over 100 little theatre companies, and there’re always new ones. And it’s another 23-year-old, who just graduated from some college somewhere and they’re starting a theatre company. BJB: Tell me about Secret Room Theatre. AD: I’m one of those little theatre companies! [Laughs] I had done SKITSoid before that at the Fringe. It was Elle McComsey and I. There were four shows. The first one was fantastic. The second one was excellent. The third one was okay, and by the fourth one, it sort of fizzled. That was 2004 and 2005. So then I did pretty much nothing, producing-wise until 2007. When I started Secret Room, 13 Lemonade Avenue was the first one that we did. I had a pile of these monologues, and they really didn’t go into a full-length play. I didn’t really want to send them to actors and have them use them as audition pieces ’cause some were a little too long. So they were sitting there doing nothing, and I liked a lot of them. So I put them together, and I made an hour show. We had ten actors and they did these 13 monologues. I had John D’Alonzo helping me; he did a lot of the work. But, SKITSoid was a partnership, and with 13 Lemonade Avenue, I was the producer. It was really scary because I didn’t know what I was doing, and I think I did a pretty bad job. [Laughs] But in the end, it turned out so good. I’ll never forget, I was in a panic because you send these actors out; most directors had two, so it was six directors and ten actors; and they went off and rehearsed, and I didn’t hear anything, and I wasn’t good about checking in. That’s something that I sort of learned. It was dress rehearsal, the day before opening night, when I saw it all put together. It serendipitously all sort of worked. There were some really phenomenal actors. The directors I knew; the 205

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actors, I didn’t. It was Karen DiLossi, Bill Felty, John D’Alonzo, me (I did two), and Allison Heishman directing. BJB: Are you interested in directing? AD: Maybe if it was my stuff, but that’s totally vain. I don’t really have a big interest in directing at all, but sometimes I watch my stuff and I think, “I would’ve directed that totally differently.” BJB: It seems that you’ve been getting produced pretty regularly since you’ve been back from California. Tell me about Actors Theatre of Louisville. You submitted a tenminute play? AD: Yes, and that takes a year. I sent in the play in 2007, they called me in 2008, and then they put it on in 2009. I was on that list for a finalist, and I was very happy, but I assumed that nothing would happen. Then they called me and said, “This is the biggest reward per word in the American theatre.” I mean, they pay for your trip down there, they pay for the hotel, they pay for your food, they pay you for the performance, and they pay you to publish it. It was a good vacation! It was just fun because it’s a 1,000-seat theatre and it was full. I remember walking in there. There was a dress rehearsal, and I walked into this huge theatre and they were setting my play up. They built sets and they were flying them in. It takes place on a porch, so there were these ferns coming down, and they put up wicker lawn chairs. There were literally 20 people on headsets running around. BJB: Have you had any more productions of that play? AD: There’s one in Florida and one in Ohio, and now that it’s published, it’s been done five or six more times now. Just the other day, I got emails from graduate students somewhere saying, “We’re going to produce your play and I wanted to talk to you.” So that’s really cool. They published it twice, once in the Humana book [Humana Festival 2009: The Complete Plays, 2010], and they published in the Great Short Comedies book [Great Short Comedies: Volume 4, 2010]. I get an email [from Playscripts] every time someone buys it, and 98 percent of the buyers are high schools. Maybe I should be writing for high schools? BJB: Do you write for any particular age? AD: Probably twenties and thirties. I still feel younger [than my age], so I seem to write younger, although I’m writing a play now and the lead is 39. He’s the oldest main character I’ve ever written. I have this one-act play and it’s the most produced. It’s 206

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four people all in their twenties: two girls, two guys. And I think that’s why it gets produced because it’s so easy to cast. BJB: What is it that compels you to write? AD: I feel different than a lot of other writers because they’re like, “I have something to say, I have a mission I want to accomplish or an agenda that I want to portray to the world.” I really don’t have any of that. It’s more like, “I want to write fun plays that I would want to go see.” There’s an audience for everything. You’ve just got to know what you want to do. So I guess that’s what compels me to write. BJB: Do you enjoy the process of writing? AD: I do, but it’s gotten different over the years. It’s a little less enjoyable now because I think about it more. That’s harder in a sense. In the last two to three years I’ve been in a transition. The tricks I used to do don’t work. My concentration is smaller. The thing I’ve been doing lately is, and it really works, there’s a little coffee shop in Doylestown that I drive up to, and that’s 40 minutes away. If I go to the coffee shop in Chestnut Hill, it’s like “I’m tired. I just want to go home.” But, if I go to Doylestown, it’s 40 minutes, and I can’t just turn around and go home. For some reason, the first time I went I was hugely productive, so I’ve been going almost every week for the past three months. I’m relearning what to do. The biggest problem was that I was self-employed for 12 years, and in 2003, I got a real job, so that was the beginning of the change. I switched jobs in 2007, and the new job is much harder than the old job. Before when I was self-employed I could do what I wanted. It used to be I would get up in the morning, take an hour to write, and then I would work. I could make my own schedule. I could write when I was inspired. It was awesome. Now I just don’t have that option. BJB: Is there an easy part of writing and a hard part of writing for you? AD: That changes from play to play, but in general I’d say dialog is easier and character is easier. Plot is harder. But there have been a couple plays I’ve written where it started with the plot, so it was really easy. Usually, when I start a new play, it’s like a line of dialog or something funny somebody says or like one minuscule situation and then it goes from there. There’s one play I wrote called Split Pea Pod, and that’s the only one where the idea was totally formed when I started. I wrote a one-page treatment of it that was in a fairly concise and well-organized three-act structure. I sat down and wrote three pages a day, and in 30 days I had a full-length, and I didn’t rewrite it. I don’t think it’s my best play, but I think it’s the best structured and was by far the easiest to write. Now, this last one that I wrote was by far the hardest – The Sleep 207

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Detective. It was part of the PlayShops Festival. There were public readings, and you rewrite in the middle. It was pretty much torture but really fun at the same time. It was so much work, it was so hard, and I made the mistake of thinking I was actually going to write the play during those five weeks, which is sort of the idea, but I had a full-time job. By the time I left work at 5:30 p.m., all I wanted to do was sleep. So I had to go home and write. You get accepted a year before it starts, so I had a year to write, and I think I had about 200 pages. They were all little scenes that didn’t go together. In the first two rehearsals, in six hours of reading, we read the 200 pages. It just stressed me out to no end. It would have been a thousand times easier had I had a set structure and could go in and play with this character and see what would happen and then expand. That, to me, is the key. So, with the new one, I’m trying. I spend half the time writing dialog and half the time working on the structure. So Doylestown and my new method seem to be working now. BJB: Are there playwrights who have inspired you? AD: Early on, Neil Simon I loved just because [his plays are] well-structured, and it’s light and funny. It’s kind of like the stuff I like to write. Tom Stoppard is one. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead had a huge impact. I loved that. I saw the movie with Gary Oldman, and I was like “My God, this is fantastic!” Noël Coward. I’ve read everything. It’s all about the lightness and air. I call it air. It percolates. Present day, at Humana, I met Peter Sinn Nachtrieb. He wrote boom and Hunter Gatherers, and he’s been produced all over. I just find him amazing. There’s something about him that’s just so frothy and percolating, and yet there’s so much going on. BJB: How do you feel about the business part of playwriting? AD: It’s a lot of work, first of all. And I am a database analyst in real life, so I frequently get hung up on the technical side of it, like I’ve got to have a database that’s just right, and it’s got to be so organized. I spend too much time doing that. Over the past few years it’s gotten much easier because now you can just submit PDFs and that significantly affects the number that I send out. BJB: Are you sending your work out to theatres all over the country? AD: One-acts, mostly, but just today I sent out Split Pea Pod, a full-length. I’m thinking about Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, who had boom done at like 20 theatres within three months. The trick is to follow the good playwright and see where he’s produced. It’s hard to get a full-length produced; even harder to get an evening of shorts. BJB: How many short plays have you written? 208

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AD: Probably over a hundred. There’s a whole bunch I started and haven’t finished. BJB: Do you feel you’ve learned things along the way as a writer? AD: Yeah, structure-wise. Maybe it’s my Achilles’ heel, because I think I’ve learned what good structure is and how to structure, but it also makes it harder because then if it’s not working and not good structure, then I get frustrated faster. In the past before I figured it out, I would’ve been, “Just write it and see what happens!” One thing I’ve definitely learned is not to take it so seriously. It’s your baby and to see it massacred onstage is really painful. And now I’m like, “Whatever. Maybe I’ll get to do this again.” It’s so easy to fall into that trap to think it’s the end and it’ll never happen again. BJB: Do you see yourself staying here in Philadelphia to continue your playwriting career? AD: Oh, yeah. Obviously, it depends upon my “real” job. Without getting into that, I’d really like to have a different job. If that takes me somewhere else, then I’d have to go, but otherwise, I don’t see any real reason to leave. Philly’s got a great theatre community and my family’s still here. Now I’ve been here for ten years, and I’m more settled. The only place that would possibly be easier would be L.A. For many years I went back to L.A. three or four times a year, from 2000 to maybe 2007. Then in the past two or three years, I’ve only been once a year. It’s really tough to get out there. I was there in June 2010, and I don’t have any plans to go there in the future right now. BJB: Do you have any advice for people who may be interested in playwriting? AD: I know it and don’t follow it all the time. The rule is always read, no matter what; write as much as you can; if you can’t write, then rewrite; if you can’t rewrite, submit a play; if you can’t submit a play, gather the submissions because that’s half the battle. If you don’t do that, you’re wasting your time. The reading is the most important. I used to read so much. It stimulates your brain and you think differently and you’re in a different story. You should never not have a book on your bedside table. It’s so easy to say, “I’m just gonna watch Mad Men on TV and not read. Lately, it takes me months to read a book because I read two pages and fall asleep. It’s all about focus. BJB: Do you think living in Philadelphia has influenced your writing, or do you think you’d write the same kind of plays if you were living in California? AD: I’d have to say yes because I did that. I went through a sort of darker period in L.A., interestingly enough. Everything I write isn’t frothy, frothy, frothy. I wrote some monologues that were dark, which I tend to do less now. I’m back to my froth. 209

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BJB: Are you interested in teaching at all? AD: No, because I have horrible, horrible stage fright. It’s maybe partly why I write in a way because I’m so nervous about speaking in public. I’m in complete control when I’m writing a play because I say what I want to say, and I can time it the way I want to time it. To a certain degree, all writing is like that. You can say what you want to say and you get to say it the way you want to say it. But in regular life, you don’t have control. You can mess up what you say or misquote somebody by accident or completely forget the train of conversation. BJB: Do you ever find your writing is based on a real event in your own life and you change it in your play to have a different outcome? AD: Mildly, but almost everything I write has nothing to do with my real life. Almost nothing I’ve written is autobiographical. I mostly try to be as completely opposite as possible. I’m sure autobiographical stuff comes through, though. BJB: Do you see themes in your writing? AD: I don’t know why, but the theme of doubling is there frequently, like identical twins. It may be like two characters that start on the same path. They go through their change, and then they end up opposite again. I don’t know why that is or what it means. Like in Split Pea Pod, there’s a guy who splits in half, so literally two actors are playing the two halves of him. BJB: Was your best playwriting experience at Humana Fest? AD: As a whole, yes. But The :nv:s:ble Play at Philadelphia Theatre Workshop was really good. Some fantastic acting, and it’s close to what I wanted. A couple of shorts. There’s one [play] Rapscallion Theatre Collective did in New York called Four Dry Tongues. We also did it in “4Play.” That was one of the best I’ve ever seen. The cast was fantastic. The direction was crisp and smart. The best part was that it was an evening of short plays. There were nine. So there were like eight short plays, and some were tough to sit through, and then mine came on and it exploded onstage. The whole audience was like, “Oh, my God!” That was easily one of my best experiences. And it won Best of Show for that production. BJB: Do you think you’ll be writing more full-length plays? More shorts? Or both? AD: Both. I want to write more full-lengths. I feel like I may repeat myself in the shorts. In a full-length, you can really explore. There’s five or six full-lengths that I know I want to write. 210

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BJB: How do you overcome obstacles to getting produced? AD: It’s all about volume, I think. If you flood it, and you get three, it’s like, “I did really well.” If you send out six and you get three, it’s fantastic! But that’s not going to happen. If you send out 20 and get three, that’s great. BJB: At any given time, how many pieces of work do you have out there? AD: Probably right now about 20 at the most. Even though sometimes the chances are tiny, it’s like … maybe. The possibility is always fun. That’s why I submit to Louisville every year because it may happen! BJB: Do you plan to continue to write plays? AD: Yes. I don’t see myself going back to novels. I have a minor interest in screenplays. I remember in that first screenplay class, the world was opened. I’m going to have them driving a car! I’m going to have them jump off a building! In that sense, it’s so freeing, but it’s also like, “Oh, my God! What am I going to do?” When you’re writing a play, you’ve got to stay in the room.

Alex Dremann – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays Demon Pigs Squealing at the Moon Dirt Henchpeople Organ Heaven Postcoital Variations Simply Hamlet Split Pea Pod Tea The Coincidental Hygienist The :nv:s:ble Play [The Invisible Play] The Sleep Detective Collections 13 Lemonade Avenue Bipolar by Thursday Scream in My Breasts 211

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One-Acts (10 Minutes and Over) A Statement of Fact Avocado Cannibals Gone Bad Damn Spot Dead Wong Emma of Sandusky Four Dry Tongues Hypothermia Man in Peril Meat Meta-Meta On the Porch One Crisp Spring Morning Prey Sally Sock Soul Soup The Cheever Tapes The Narcoleptic Pillow Fight The Peach The Superlative Game The Red Play Third First Person Three Sweaters Wanton Wonton Wet Paper Bag Ye of the Chickpea-Sized Bladder Shorts (Under 10 Minutes) Over 80+ including Allison Bear Skin Rug Burns Downstairs at Quantico Existential Angst George and the Evil Bastard Round Peg She Licks His Face in the End Slap Happy The Cranks

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Monologues Over 20+ including Dillweed Elvis at Stuckey’s Girl with the Butterfly Bracelet Awards Roger Cornish Award at The Brick Playhouse – Split Pea Pod (2006)

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Chapter 14 A Conversation with Katharine Clark Gray

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atharine Clark Gray has worked as an actor, scenic designer, assistant director, and mural artist, among other occupations. However, after receiving the Pew Fellowship in 2008, she is firmly established as a playwright. Her work has been seen in Philadelphia with Brat Productions, for which she received a Barrymore Award for collaboration for Three Chord Fiction, with Philadelphia Theatre Workshop, Secret Room Theatre, and Luna Theatre Company. Additionally, her plays have been produced in New York at various venues, including the New York International Fringe Festival, Manhattan Theatre Source, The Drilling Company, and others. She is co-founder of A Chip & A Chair Films, LLC, where she served as line producer and art director for the feature If You Could Say It in Words. Most recently, she was a participant in the Lark’s Playwrights’ Week. BJB: Where were you born and raised? KCG: I was born and raised in Syracuse. I lived in the same area my whole life. My parents are both university professors. My father was managing director and producing director of Syracuse Stage, so I grew up in the theatre. My mother is a drama professor. My dad chaired the department for a while, so I sort of knew what the deal was in terms of the fact that you could make a living in theatre. We had actors at our house every Thanksgiving. There were some very famous people who came through. Aaron Sorkin came from there. He was a student of my mom’s. It was a fortunate way to grow up. BJB: Well, this explains a lot! KCG: I wound up reading a lot more plays than books when I was a kid. It’s not like my tastes were particularly highbrow or advanced necessarily. I found pockets of things that I liked, and I would read them over and over again. But what that did was it really let me understand structure intrinsically without having to study it externally.

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More practically, I knew how to format things, like I knew the breakdown, character, dialog, stage directions. That was how I read things, so that part came very naturally to me. I didn’t actually ever get any formal playwriting training. I trained as an actor. I graduated with a B.F.A. in acting from Ithaca College. I’ve taken a couple of master classes since then, but I didn’t do a graduate degree. BJB: Are you thinking about a graduate degree? KCG: It’s funny, but I applied and got in to the Michener Fellowship at U.T. Austin the same year I found out I was going to have a child. My daughter was due about the same week the classes were about to start. I talked to the head of the program, Suzan Zeder, who’s so warm and encouraging, and she’s like, “Whatever you want to try to do, alright.” We discussed whether or not my husband would be able to quit everything he’s doing, come down there and be like a stay-at-home dad and live off a meager but doable stipend. I finally decided that it was ridiculous. I knew I was going to have to fly from here with a zero day-old baby down to Texas. Bottom line is that I did not go, and then after that, my husband wound up getting a very fulfilling and enriching creative director job in New York, so now I’m probably not going unless something happens that I could do something nearby. The job my husband has now allows me to do some work for his company, which means I’ve got a screenplay in development, and all these things that grad school is supposed to send you to are sort of happening, so it seems kind of silly to drop out and go to Texas, as much as I wanted to for a while. BJB: After college, did you go to New York? KCG: Yes, straight away. BJB: How was living in New York for you? KCG: I always say what a lot of people say, which is that it took me six months to call New York City “home.” Until then, it was really hard. It’s a hard city, but once the six months went by, it was home. BJB: Were you pursuing acting work there? KCG: I was pursuing acting, although I was writing, as well. I had my first professional production as a playwright when I was 20 and still in school because I won this contest at the Kitchen Theatre in Ithaca, which is a lovely theatre and has really taken off since then. Rachel Lampert was the artistic director, and she was newly the artistic director when I was there. They had this contest, Ithaca Great Playwrights Contest, and anybody could apply. Because I was 20, and because I didn’t know how hard it 218

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is for those sorts of things to happen, I was just like, “Well, of course!” I don’t think I realized how lucky I was to have that at that time. BJB: Did you write your first play when you were in college, or did you write plays before that? KCG: In high school I mostly wrote poetry. I was a very old 17. I did write one play when I was about 15. I read somewhere where David Mamet said you write your first play and you put it in a drawer and you forget about it, so I don’t really count that one. It’s like 40 minutes of these homeless people who lived under a tree or something, and I took it very seriously. Even then, it was very dark. I don’t remember what it was called, but I put it away. BJB: Do you remember the inspiration for your first play? KCG: Yes, I do. My inspiration was completely an exercise. I wound up giving myself a bake-off without realizing what it was, only not with the 48-hour thing. I didn’t know what a bake-off was, but I did take three ingredients and made a play, and they were seemingly random. Like I remember being on this bus ride, and I wanted to write a play, and I sort of didn’t have any ideas, so I just filled a page full of completely random things, many of which were things I saw like, “Oh, dried soups,” so I put in “soup.” I had my page of random stuff, so I’m going to circle every seventh word, and then I’m going to circle every third word of the seven. I was trying to get as random as possible, while still being in my own brain. I wound up with “soup,” “big butt,” and something else. Then I wound up writing a play. I think I kind of instinctively knew what I would then be told for a decade, which is that I think too much. Acting teachers love to tell you that you think too much, and so in order to get to the subconscious place where all the interesting stuff lives, I really have to trick myself. Sometimes I don’t really get any good ideas until I am totally sleep deprived, and again, at this sort of advanced age when you’re supposed to have your technique in a box and ready, I’m still trying to get to more practical and healthier ways to get to that place without like staying up for a week banging my head against the wall. BJB: So, after living in New York for …? KCG: … six years … BJB: … you came here to Philadelphia? KCG: My husband and I have a film company, A Chip & and A Chair Films, and we were shooting our first feature. We had shot half of it in New York, but it took place in 219

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Philadelphia. So we were getting ready to come down, and we were going to do like six months here and do pre-production and just settle in here because we figured that we could rent a house, and it would be cheaper and easier. And November of 2005, my day job in New York wound up ending, and his day job wound up ending, and he called me up one day and said, “Hey, do you want to move?” I was like, “Yeah, okay.” Then the MTA went on strike around Christmas that year, and it was like, “See ya later!” We came here to do the movie, and once it was done, by that time we had bought a house and we had dogs. BJB: Has it been an easy transition into the Philadelphia theatre community? KCG: Long. Sort of surprisingly long because it’s a very close-knit community, so you get in a little bit and you’re kind of in, but it took me a while mostly because that first year I was working my ass off on this movie. The one thing I did do was I got a job with Amaryllis Theatre as their marketing associate, so that was great. They’re very friendly – Mimi [Kenney Smith] and Josette [Todaro]. I started working with them, and that got me in a little bit. But that first year, I didn’t really investigate much. It really wasn’t until my dear friend, Michael Alltop, had just taken over for Brat Productions as the artistic director, when he moved to Philadelphia in 2007 after I’d been here a year. That’s really what got me in. He asked me to be part of this huge collaboration, Three  Chord Fiction, which wound up getting a Barrymore. What a wonderful project that was to work on! It was like 25 musicians and theatre people – playwrights, actors – and it wound up being such a great group. That was my in, how I met everybody, through that one project. BJB: You’ve done a lot here in a short amount of time. KCG: It’s weird. It doesn’t feel like it sometimes. I was just talking to somebody yesterday about this, about how it feels very easy to forget one’s own resume. It sort of feels like you haven’t done anything because if you’re not doing something right now, you sort of forget what comes behind you. BJB: What are the subjects that compel you to write now? KCG: I’ve always been fascinated with people’s jobs. That’s been a real touchstone for me always. I sort of get sick of either relationship plays where you didn’t really need any prior knowledge of other things or relationship plays where it’s like, “Oh, well, he’s a dentist and she’s an accountant,” but you never hear about their jobs, and their jobs don’t really influence their characters. I really got fascinated with why people take the jobs that they do and what those jobs do to them. It’s probably because I’ve had a million random day jobs. I’ve experienced a lot of worlds for like three months at 220

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a time. So, having touched a lot of worlds, but not really sunk into a lot of worlds, I feel like writing a play about a certain world is a way for me to sink in without having to go in and be a miner. People’s professions and the way they influence who they are and how who they are influences their profession – big deal for me. The other touchstone comes up incidentally. I mean, I don’t set out to do this, but eventually in every play someone is going through a particularly dark place. My characters don’t always behave very well. BJB: I should tell you I saw 516. KCG: That’s not even the worst example. I like exploring people behaving selfishly and badly, and getting inside because the world is full of people behaving selfishly and badly. We often behave selfishly and badly. If you’re going to the theatre to sort of discover something about yourself, like make discoveries maybe about the way you’re living your life, you’re touching a place that you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about. I guess the place I always want to investigate is what makes us behave badly and is there forgiveness on the other side of that. That part of the concept is sort of newer for me. I think when I was younger I was okay with people just behaving like shits. How shitty can we behave before we say “stop” or somebody says “stop”? I think since then the sort of humanity that’s crept into my work later on is about whether or not you can overcome that, whether or not people can be forgiven, whether or not people deserve forgiveness, whether the appropriate thing is at some point to say, “You’re going to wander around in the desert with your eyes poked out. That’s how it is.” BJB: Does your play, Timber Land, that was in the Lark’s Playwrights’ Week, have these same ideas? KCG: Sure. Timber Land is about activists. It’s funny because when I was there, my director midway through the week showed me this article, “So there’re these people on Wall Street protesting.” It had just started that week, and it was crazy. Nobody there knew that it was going to brew into this thing. I just noticed that there were some people protesting on Wall Street, and I was working all week, so I couldn’t go down and see, but that synchronicity was entirely accidental. BJB: What’s the play about? KCG: It’s really about activists who think they’re doing a lot, but they’re not. It’s about an insider community of so-called progressives. At the beginning of the play, they’re very much in the world where they’re preaching to the choir because that’s where they’re comfortable. So I introduce an element in the form of somebody who’s come in. There’s a couple in their seventies, and they’re the patriarch and matriarch of 221

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this community. They’re retired activists who were there during the civil rights movement, so they experienced something very real, but they sort of retreated and fled back to this community and created a safe haven for progressives where everybody kind of agrees with each other. They never really realize that the big point is that they didn’t do anything new. They didn’t reach anybody. It touches on all those things. First of all, the profession aspect. Looking at activism as a profession, I was really trying to get inside that. And, of course, everybody [in the play] has done bad things. The play is really about the community learning how to reach out as opposed to just like staying inside, but it’s also secondarily about the guy who comes there seeking the truth and redemption for himself through this community and how they help each other discover the truth of who they are and sort of move past it. BJB: Are you still involved with InterAct? KCG: Yeah. BJB: Did your experience there help you with this play? KCG: It did. Timber Land was very much helped by the Playwrights Forum because when Becky Wright was running [the group], I brought it in in a very nascent, early stage. I’d written the bulk of it in like two weeks – not even. Really, I wrote it because I’d submitted a scene that I’d had kicking around for a few years and sent it to PlayPenn when he [Paul Meshejian] was taking ten-page submissions. I got an acceptance letter saying, “Oh, hey we’d like the full script.” And I was like, “I don’t have a full script.” So I wrote it really fast in time for the deadline. I think I drove the script to Paul Meshejian’s house. It was very rough. I brought it to the Playwrights Forum, and we talked all together, and then I brought in a second draft. Becky wanted to direct a table read of it, and we had a great discussion after that. Then that sent me to the next round of rewrites. I had a staged reading elsewhere after that [at NYC’s Reverie Productions], but this was very much developed in its early stages by bringing it to the Playwrights Forum, as did Jackie Goldfinger’s play. Same cycle. BJB: And then you were both in the Lark’s Playwrights’ Week together? KCG: Yeah, it was great. BJB: What kind of discoveries have you made along the way with your writing? KCG: Part of it is that I have to trick myself into the subconscious because I can spend a lot of time crafting a good conversation. Dialog is the easiest part of it, but it takes me a 222

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few drafts to really get at the meat of what I’m talking about. That’s kind of the only way I can really do it. Probably my worst habit is to think that it’s done before it’s done because I want it to be done. I think that’s the point at which a lot of people say the work’s done. I can be very difficult occasionally because if we’re at that specific stage where my work isn’t done but I want it to be done, then I make very good arguments for why it should be done. I am trying my best to surround myself with people who can be honest with me and can say, “I really still think this isn’t working,” and try to challenge me into a better play. I’ve discovered that the best thing I can do is to not write things entirely in order because my tendency is to spend a lot of time on the first act tinkering. It’s better for me if I write scenes that come later in the play. I never used to work like that at all. I used to write straight through like, “This is Act One, Scene One. This is Act One, Scene Two,” and keep going like that. That was the only way I knew how to do it. But what happens then is my first act will be a little stiff for a long time. My second act will be written in a rush and will become very unglued. I teach sometimes and what I tell my students, especially the college age ones who can actually handle this is, “Write some scenes throughout so that you have touchstones to come back to.” The more I push myself to do that, the better off I am. It feels good to know that you at least know where you’re winding up as you’re putting ten full scenes in – that you have a forward-driving motion to get to those scenes. Even if you change where you’re actually going or even if you fill in those things later and some don’t fit, it’s fine. It’s really just a more sophisticated way of still tricking myself out of thinking too much. BJB: Are you teaching now? KCG: I’m about to start my second year as an instructor for The Wilma Theater. We go into Bartram High School in Southwest Philly. Last year was my first year. It was so much fun. Our first job is to acclimate them to the play they will be seeing. Last year it was Macbeth, so we spent several weeks getting them used to the characters and the basic story. This year [2011] we’re doing it for Our Class. We’re going to read parts and get them used to the names because the names are Polish. Then after that we wind up transitioning into getting them to write their own stuff. So that’s been lovely. I’m also teamed up with Mike Dees for the second year. BJB: Has living in Philadelphia influenced your writing? KCG: It’s a different pace, for sure. It certainly influenced me in that when I got the Pew, I was able to quit my other job so I could sit and write at home. I could get really softbrained about it in a way I had trouble doing in New York. It was really an effort to get to that soft-brain stage in New York because you always have to do stuff. So that’s been really good for my process. 223

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BJB: Were you surprised about receiving the Pew Fellowship? KCG: I had no expectation that I was going to get that. None at all. Here’s the crazy part. They called me up to ask if I had accepted because they sent a letter out to the wrong address. They were like, “Everyone else has said ‘yes.’ I don’t know why you wouldn’t say ‘yes.’” They called me up on my home phone, which nobody ever used, and I didn’t even always answer. At the time I had an office in my basement, and I happened to pick up. It’s hard to think back to a time when I had a greater surprise with no warning at all. And the application – I stayed up the night before [it was due] to do it because at the time I was working for Brat as a scenic artist. They were doing A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, which I was assistant directing, [also]. So I was there at the theatre painting backdrops and clouds on wood, and Michael [Alltop] said, “You know, you really should submit to the Pew.” I’d heard of the Pew Foundation, but I didn’t know that this Fellowship existed. I barely qualified for the residency. If I’d moved here two weeks later, I wouldn’t have qualified. What it really did more than anything else was it helped me transition to being just a playwright because at the time I was one of those slash/slash/slash/slash people. I was acting, assistant directing. I was working for the Mural Arts Program a lot, and I was at the point where I was just like, “I’m a freelance artist.” I think that everyone just needs confirmation periodically that they should be on a certain path. If you’re an actor and you’re auditioning for 20 years and you don’t get anything major, something should tell you that you either need to change something, or you’re not meant to be an actor. I was a pretty good actor, but in terms of my acting ability and the geniuses of the field, there was no comparison. I feel like I’m a very good writer, and sometimes you need a reminder of that. So really it just allowed me to say, “I am a playwright,” and I needed that focus at the time. BJB: Has the Pew Fellowship made an impact on your career? KCG: Yes, I’m sure. I also think I was so new to the idea that I was just going to be a playwright that I may not have done all that I could have in terms of capitalizing on it, in terms of trying to solicit agents. You know, your agent finds you when it’s time, and so I guess in retrospect, I’m glad that I didn’t bust my ass trying to do that, that I used that time to make work and get productions. That’s really what I focused on. I used that time to write and to submit for things because I just never had time to submit for things before. I spent two years submitting to a lot and that sent me to the next couple of productions and that sent me to the next level of people that I knew. I never would have done that if I was doing murals 30 hours a week. I wouldn’t have had the time. BJB: What do you think of theatre in Philadelphia? 224

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KCG: It’s gutsy. The community is so supportive. I hear Chicago is like that in terms of a supportive community. In New York, I have not experienced it as much. I had certain friends who were very supportive, but there are so many showcases, so it became a lot of work to see other people’s showcases. Here I was surprised to find that people like to go to see each other’s shows. It almost feels collegiate. When I was in college, of course, you saw all the other plays and you were excited to see all the other plays, and all your friends were in all the other plays, and it feels a little like that – like everybody in one big drama department together. I think I was a little frustrated at one point. I sort of expected to come in, and having been in New York, which is a very tough place, and I did work with people who have gone on to very important things, so I was fairly well-connected. I thought that coming here would be like, “Oh, well, she was in New York.” Not like that. You have to pay your dues here like you have to pay your dues everywhere. And I think that’s fair, but it took me a while to sort of realize that. I mean, I’ve been in showcases that were bigger than the entire production budget [of some professional shows here], so obviously I thought I should go right to the top of the list, but I didn’t realize how strong the bond was between actors and companies and people in the community here, and that it takes some effort to become one of them. And to do that, you have to do it with a certain level of humility. Now that I’m here and know everybody, I feel a little bit on the outside again just because the last few things I’ve done have been very New York-focused. You only have so many hours in the day to do this, and especially since I have a 13-monthold now, which cuts into the I-get-to-see-everything time. So my efforts have mainly been to the productions that are going on in New York, so I have not gotten to see everything that I’m supposed to see here. I think it’s refreshing to see people go into theatre with the best of intentions. I feel like that happens a lot here because shows are not done here to transfer. Occasionally, they do, but that’s not the point. Here people do a show – maybe with a micro-budget – and that’s the end of it. When you do that, you’re doing it for the right reasons, and that’s been really nice. BJB: What has been your best experience in theatre so far? KCG: I think I’m still seeking the “It was glorious from start to finish” experience. I think we all kind of are. I know that the writing of User 927 was a pretty great experience, even though at the time, there were times when, again, [I was] banging my head against the wall. And there were many discussions. That’s probably the script I’ve written the fastest. I wrote the bulk of it in eight months, and then I was tweaking and changing some stuff for a year beyond that. It felt like that was the way it was supposed to work where it was an idea that was brought to me by Michael Alltop. It really was a nice collaborative experience, but at the end of the day, I felt a lot of ownership over that script. I will also say that working on [my first] screenplay, structurally and processwise, has been the best that I’ve had so far just in terms of like growing up and doing 225

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things the way I should be doing them. I actually owe a lot of that to my husband because I report directly to him. The producer came to me with a very loose concept. It had to do with the location and the kinds of kids he wanted, and that was really it. I wrote the early scenes when I was a new mom, so I would get up at like four and I would be in the nursery. Some of my best scenes of that script I wrote almost asleep, so I really got into a very emotional place very quickly. Then we had a workshop of it that my husband helped run. The producer financed the workshop. The process of creating this has been the best so far. BJB: Do you have any thoughts for emerging writers who are sending work out? KCG: I mean, I still consider myself one of those writers. I haven’t made it. We’re all still collectively making it. I think that the idea of making it is one of the biggest disservices you can do to yourself because you wind up sabotaging your own work, but also your own drive because you’ve gotten to a certain level and you haven’t “made it.” I did that to myself for a long time, not so badly that I would stop submitting things, but every time I got to the next level. It’s married to this crippling defeatism. When I got the Lark thing, when I was particularly sleep-deprived trying to get to the next rewrite, I was trying to do the rewrite, driving myself crazy, driving my family crazy. I spent several hours telling my husband about how this was such a farce, about how you get there, and everybody else has “made it,” and I don’t belong there. It’s stuff that many, many people tell themselves, but I feel like it comes after I’ve actually gotten something else. I spend a moment telling myself, “Well, I should’ve gotten farther. Why am I getting so excited because I just got this one production when I should be so much farther than I am?” A lot of my career has been spent trying to get on my own back about how I’m not farther than I am. I think I did this with the idea that if I did that to myself, if I try to horsewhip myself, that it would make me work more, that it would make me submit more. But I think that’s a horrible way to go about it, horrible because you’ll wind up not submitting to things you should be submitting to. There’s a lot of fear wrapped up in rejection, of course, and the more you tell yourself “I should be farther along in my career,” the more you’re giving yourself excuses not to try. You wind up telling yourself you shouldn’t submit to these free things or these small things or these little theatres because you should be past this by now, so you don’t submit to those. It comes down to you not sending stuff out. I feel like my best successes come when I allow myself to be just where I am for a minute to remind myself that from the outside, it doesn’t look like it feels on the inside. From the inside, it feels very messy. On the outside, it looks like there’s an actual narrative and a path. If you look at other playwrights and it looks like they made it from A to B, I guarantee you, they don’t feel like that. They feel like they hopped from thing to thing. They were raiding the refrigerator at two in the morning going, “What am I doing?” Everybody experiences that, and you just need to remember that you need to 226

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be okay with the idea it may be a while before you get the next success. You just have to be okay with where you are because you certainly can’t turn back the clock and do things differently. And the longer you spend horsewhipping yourself into telling yourself you should be farther along, the harder it’s going to be just to put one foot in front of the other and get there. So that’s it. It’s the thing I need to tell myself every day because I need it. BJB: You’re involved in so many projects and you have a new baby to take care of. How do you balance all these things in your life? KCG: I’m a Libra, and I seek balance all the time. I know that daycare helps! She’s in her first week. I’m just enjoying that right now because she reached a point where she just needed attention from me a lot. So I’m very grateful to the fact that – it’s expensive – but just having those days now is something I’m excited about exploring because I’d really reached a point where I was not in balance. The last few months have not been in balance at all. I think it’s about knowing myself well enough to know I need balance – that if I’ve been doing something for a long time, I need to shake it up and do something else. Katharine Clark Gray – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays 516 (five sixteen) Francis Bacon The B Side The Beef Timber Land Two Front Teeth User 927 Short Plays (Partial List) Mizz Ginny Tate: or, Amarillo Cops are Invading My Neighborhood Nebraska Red Light Riot Standard Served Cold The Joyce The Sad Tail of Veronica Deal Three Chord Fiction (Collaboration with Brat Productions) Wired Shut 227

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Musicals The Pestilence is Coming (Book and Story) The Wind in the Willows (Additional Lyrics) Awards Kitchen Theatre’s First Annual Ithaca Playwrights Competition Winner – Francis Bacon (1998) Barrymore Award – Ted & Stevie Wolf Award for New Approaches to Collaboration – Three Chord Fiction (2007) Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2008) Reverie Productions’ Next Generation Playwriting Competition Winner – User 927 (2009)

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Chapter 15 A Conversation with Jacqueline Goldfinger

J

ackie Goldfinger arrived in Philadelphia in 2008 and has since served as literary manager at Philadelphia Theatre Company where she founded a national new play festival, PTC@ Play; has had readings of her work at InterAct Theatre Company, Passage Theatre, Theatre Exile, White Pines, and Flashpoint Theatre Company; and had a play in development at PlayPenn and Lark’s Playwrights’ Week. She’s had productions at Flashpoint, Gas & Electric Arts, and Azuka Theatre, where she is now officially Playwright-in-Residence. She has also been nominated for the Weissberger Award, nominated for several Barrymore Awards, and won the Barrymore’s Independence Foundation Award for Outstanding New Play in 2012. Along with Michael Hollinger and Quinn Eli, she started The Foundry, and recently became the new Director of Education at PlayPenn. Having spent her early years in the South where most of her plays are set, she has been inspired by the Southern Gothic tradition of writers like Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty. With her focus on good storytelling and her passion for writing, she has added an exciting new energy to the Philadelphia theatre community. BJB: It says in your bio that you’re from Tallahassee, Florida. Were you born and raised there?

JG:

I was. I was born and raised in Tallahassee, Florida, when it was a little more rural. Now it’s built up. We actually didn’t have a professional theatre in that region at all. If you wanted to see professional theatre, you went to Atlanta or went the opposite direction to Alabama Shakespeare Festival. I grew up in the community theatre movement, which was fantastic. I loved it.

BJB: When did you get that first feeling of connection to theatre? JG:

I was in elementary school. A traveling troupe of community theatre actors was bringing a play to school cafeterias. There was a guy with a big dark mustache and a black cape, and a girl with blonde hair was being taken away. Looking back on it,

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it’s funny and ridiculous and all those things you would see in a Christopher Guest movie, but I’d heard storytellers all my life, and I was fascinated by the idea that you could actually get up and act out the stories. Unfortunately, I was in a school system that didn’t have a drama program, in middle or elementary school, and I went to a big public county high school. We had a teacher named Miss Pelham, who was an English teacher, but she thought that kids in our area needed exposure to theatre and the arts, and so she – I think she did it on her break period – started a drama class. I’m indebted to her because she sacrificed a lot of time and energy just because she really believed in theatre. BJB: Were you thinking about acting or writing then? JG:

I did act in a couple of plays. I was horrible. I couldn’t remember my lines. So, initially, because that was what was offered, that’s what I did, but I actually came to really like being backstage. I really liked just hanging out with the theatre people and talking about plays. When we got an official drama teacher who was trained as a drama teacher, she signed us up to be part of a statewide competition. That’s when I started writing plays because one of the categories of the competition was playwriting. And I loved writing. I was on the school newspaper from the time I was in middle school. I always wrote stories and poems, so I decided to try writing a play. At first I was very intimidated because most of the plays that we had read were by Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare. And I thought, “I’m never going to write like these people. I don’t have that poetic soul, whatever that is.” But then I started reading the work of playwrights like Sam Shepard and Arthur Miller. And especially with Sam Shepard I was like, “Okay. I know these people.” Not that I could ever write as well as Sam Shepard, but at least there was a connection for me because crazy rural people were doing weird shit and speaking in more naturalistic language. I got it. I realized that there was space in theatre for how I liked to play with language.

BJB: Do you remember the first play you wrote? JG:

The first play I wrote in high school was called On the Park Bench Beside Me. It was about a homeless woman who sat down next to a girl on a bench while she was waiting for a bus. The girl at first is a little reticent to talk to her but then kind of gets pulled into her world, and then we are whirled back into the homeless woman’s memory, and you see all the things that got her to this point. It was very much a tragedy based on the Greek plays that we’d been studying.

BJB: You’ve said that you identify with the Southern Gothic tradition. Was there anything in particular that drew you to that tradition? 232

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JG:

I think it was because I grew up not really reading plays until high school, but I was an avid reader, and I was in the rural South. So I read a lot of Southern Gothic work. Kate Chopin really resonated with me; [so did] the stories of Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty. I always thought about how wonderful and visual they are. When I started studying theatre, I was really wondering why more of them weren’t adapted to the stage because Southern Gothic is such a visual and visceral rip-your-guts-out style. As I began understanding the craft of playwriting, I started to understand that a lot of Southern Gothic is in people’s heads; it is internal narrative. That’s problematic. I started to see why these pieces hadn’t been staged and then wondered if I could write something that was in that style that was able to be staged that wasn’t entirely a voice-over inside people’s heads. It was an interesting challenge.

BJB: What was your first play that was in the Southern Gothic tradition? JG:

The first one, which no one will ever see because it’s not very good, was called The Burning Season. In Florida, before hurricane season, they do controlled burning. There are a lot of lightning strikes during storms, and fire is a huge problem in north Florida. The play was about a husband and wife who lived on the edge of one of these controlled burns, and the husband had gone to jail for something the wife had done, and then came back and found out she was sleeping with someone else. Then she was living with her mother and her father’s ghost came back. It was bizarre but fun. Totally bizarre. And what happens is they try and have a baby. They lose the baby. The husband kind of loses his mind because he’s lost everything that in jail he’d been holding onto for hope. He’s one of the forest rangers who works on the controlled burn, and he resets the burn line so that it will actually burn down his house in the night. He leaves and takes the dead baby, and his wife is burned alive. So, very dramatic. It was a wonderful exercise, and it actually had a couple of readings.

BJB: Did you write this play in college? JG:

This was after college. I did write in college, but I wrote more straight Southern dramas, more in the Beth Henley mode. Once I kind of got a feel about how to write Southern dramas in college, I started to ask myself, how do you take this to a Southern Gothic level?

BJB: How did you like your M.F.A. program at U.S.C.? JG:

Loved it! I actually went to their film school. I got an M.F.A. in Screen and Television Writing. After I got my B.A. at Agnes Scott College, I’d gone back home, did some internships at theatres, but those only last a season, and I just couldn’t find a way to 233

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make a living from playwriting, which we all know doesn’t happen, unfortunately. I had a friend who was in L.A. and he’s like, “You should study film and television writing at U.S.C. because one-hour series are really one-act plays.” At that time, there was a lot of exciting television going on. There was The Sopranos and Six Feet Under and West Wing and Homicide. Television was really happening. It was before the whole reality boom, which is still scripted, a lot of it, but it’s not the kind of scripting I want to do. Once I was in L.A., I had another friend … [Laughs] Basically, my advice is to have friends who are awesome and much smarter and better connected than you! That’s my suggestion to young writers. [Laughs] I had a friend who was working at Center Theatre Group. They had the New Works Now Festival. When the festival was over at CTG, I was looking around for where I could go and do more work in theatre, and there were some openings in San Diego at La Jolla Playhouse. So I moved in with my boyfriend [now husband], who lived in San Diego, and [I] worked at LJP. I was the artistic assistant, which was really cool because it meant I got to sit in on the rehearsals for new works and watch very accomplished artists work. Then my husband finished a post-doc program at U.C.S.D., and he got a job on faculty here at Temple [University]. So we moved here and we didn’t know anyone. BJB: When did you move to Philadelphia? JG:

That was in 2008. It’s been a wild and woolly few years!

BJB: Then you got the job at Philadelphia Theatre Company? JG:

Yeah, I actually sent my resume around, and luckily, the Philadelphia theatre community is so warm and welcoming that even though I didn’t find a job immediately, I met wonderful people. Terry Nolen at the Arden hired me to do some dramaturgy contract work, and then I’d met with PTC. Warren Hoffman, who was the literary manager at the time, was nice enough to just meet with me and have coffee and tell me about the city. He got a job with another organization, and so he called me and said, “I really enjoyed our coffee. Do you want to come in and talk to the artistic director, Sara Garonzik, about my job?” And I was like, “Yeah!” Sara and I hit it off, which was great.

BJB: How valuable do you feel your M.F.A. is in getting work? JG:

I did work a little bit on some TV programs right when I graduated. My M.F.A. was useful there in a very direct way. But it also has been useful in my playwriting. Like most young playwrights I meet, I was really good with language. I could have people talk and talk and talk till they’re blue in the face. Now those conversations didn’t go anywhere and didn’t necessarily build to something dramatic, but they were really 234

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lovely little conversations. However, film and TV is story-based. Especially for TV, you have to build such strong, complex characters because they have to connect with audiences for years, season after season. So, having U.S.C. beat into me the craft of storytelling, dramatic arcs, how to create complex characters that feel very full and have many places to go, that was the best thing for me. BJB: People respond to good storytelling. JG:

I think so. One of the things I’m excited about, because I’m also interested in audience engagement and audience building, is that sometimes it’s easier for an audience member who hasn’t seen or rarely sees theatre to come in and see a play that’s storybased. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be other types of theatre. I think there should be many, many other types, and I like going to see other types. I learn from them, but one of the things I’m excited about is when I have people who bring friends and family to my plays who are not theatre people – they get excited by theatre, and they come and ask what other shows to see in town.

BJB: When you were working at Philadelphia Theatre Company as literary manager, what did you learn in terms of the state of theatre or about what playwrights are writing about? JG:

I feel like the floodgates have opened, which is really, really exciting. I feel like there are more different types of stories being told than ever before – diversity in terms of stories about different ethnicities and races but also in terms of different genders and gender identity, male, female, transgender, homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual; stories about economics and class systems in different communities. And stories being told in a variety of ways, linear, nonlinear, etc. I don’t know if it’s because of the younger writers coming into the field now or just because in America we are reexamining our identity in general, but there does seem to be a kind of re-examination of who we are as a people. I was at the Lark’s Playwrights’ Week, and one of the coolest things about being a part of that festival was that all of us were looking at American identity through very different lens.

BJB: What do you think about theatre in Philadelphia? JG:

In Philadelphia, audiences seem to like plays to be about something, to explore some big idea, which I really like. Even in comedies, I like plays to have some weight, to have something there you can really chew on. I feel like it’s easy to be glib and hip, but what’s really hard is getting into the guts of something and bringing the audience into the guts of something with you. I don’t necessarily mean didactic plays where you’re preaching at the audience but plays that just ask some questions that many times 235

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aren’t even resolved in the play; they’re left for the audience to decide. Philly seems to really take to those. BJB: What discoveries have you made along the way about your own work in terms of the art or business of playwriting? JG:

In terms of the art of playwriting, I tend to have spurts, where I’ll have a lot of ideas, and I’ll write them down in a notebook. Then I’ll have six or eight weeks where I have to write every day. So, whether it’s after I come home from teaching at night or whether it’s getting up early in the morning and doing it, I feel in those spurts, I write large amounts of new work. And from those spurts of creative energy, I take years to develop them into what you might actually see onstage. So writing the first initial draft a lot of the time is very quick, and then the development is where I need time.

BJB: Is there an easy part of writing for you? A hard part? JG:

I can write dialog forever, so sometimes the hardest part for me is figuring out the story. Once I have the story, a lot of times the dialog will click into place because it’s like a river. Once you have the story, it’ll push you along. And rewriting can be hard just because it’s sometimes really hard to let go of things you love, but you need to do it.

BJB: What has it meant to you to be Playwright-in-Residence at Azuka? JG:

Working with Azuka to develop and produce my Southern Gothic Trilogy has been a phenomenal experience. I don’t write hip-uptown-Abercrombie-and-Fitch characters who live in small boxes. I write characters who dare to live life, even when they don’t have much to live for, and you can see the legacy of their vast potholed journeys in how they move through the world. Azuka has perfected the art of imperfect people, embracing characters and stories so flawed that an audience might hate them. Southern Gothic is all about imperfection, its ugliness and its beauty, so it’s a perfect fit with Azuka.

BJB: What has been your best developmental process so far? JG:

My best developmental process was PlayPenn, which was revolutionary for me in terms of developing Slip/Shot. One of the things I’m interested in is writing plays that I think of as “bridge” plays. I go to a lot of theatre in Philadelphia and in New York. I also go to Baltimore and D.C. occasionally. I used to live on the West Coast, and when I go out there to visit friends, I always see something. I feel like we have all these college students, 20-somethings interested in theatre, and then we have all 236

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of these people in their fifties and sixties and retirees, but we don’t have a whole lot in the middle. We seem to lose them in their late twenties, thirties. I don’t know if it’s because they have families and kids and they can’t afford it, or they don’t have the time, but I feel like we lose people. One of my objectives when I’m writing is to write the play so that people of different generations all have an access point into the play. I think we need those, that kind of play that bridges the gap between a play that only a 20-something might see to a play that only a 50-year-old might want to see. I think really great plays appeal to a variety of audiences in different ways. PlayPenn is perfect for developing these types of plays because their audience is incredibly diverse. BJB: Do you write for a specific audience? JG:

Early on, I write for an audience of me, and occasionally for my husband, because that’s the only way I can engage with the piece. After I’m a draft or two into the process, that’s the point where dramaturgs, directors, actors, and designers all play a really important role, not just their traditional roles of “I am going to read your lines” or “I am going to design your set,” but like, “Okay, you’re 50 and you’re going through something like this, so does this character’s voice sound real to you? Does it sound authentic? Does it sound true? Is there anything that trips you up?” I rely a lot on the creative team I work with. We really talk about how they connect with the characters and the story. I don’t write it for them, but they are influential in how the play is crafted, after I get over my narcissistic the-entire-world-revolves-around-me stage of the process. When the play’s done, it’s really about finding the right company to produce my work that has an audience or is willing to find an audience that will connect with the work.

BJB: Have you seen or experienced any gender bias in theatre? JG:

I think that there’s still gender bias in society, so there will be in theatre. However, I think that one of the biggest challenges we have is that many theatres rely on shows that have been successful in the past and they know are likely to sell tickets. In the past, the playwrights who have had the most success overall are male. Therefore, by needing those shows financially to bring in larger audiences, the male playwright’s work is more likely to be programed. In addition, I think there’s a false idea among audience members that plays by and about white men are “universal” and plays by and about anyone else are somehow specialty plays, that unless they are part of that play’s specific ethnic or gender group, you can’t connect with it. I think that we need to expand the idea of what a universal story is.

BJB: Do you see recurrent themes in your work? 237

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JG:

I’m always interested in tradition and nostalgia and how they alter people’s perceptions and how different generations view the same event. I’ve returned to both of those ideas a few times. Also, the idea of coming-of-age being a lifelong happening and not just once in your twenties’ experience, especially now that people are living longer.

BJB: Do you think living in Philadelphia will change your writing? JG:

Probably because no matter where you move, your writing will change a little bit, but Philadelphia is really a pretty Southern city in certain ways. There’s a lot of emphasis on legacy here. There’s a lot of emphasis on community continuity.

BJB: Like old families and traditions? JG:

Old families. The Union League. I mean the South definitely has those organizations like that. And I can go out on almost any day of the week and get really great Southern food! Finding a city that has a Southern feel where my husband and I can both work is fantastic.

BJB: Do you think you’ll be staying in Philadelphia? JG:

Yes, not only do we love the city and love the people, but we are not moving our stuff one more time. We’ve just acquired too much crap. We’re done. Whether or not they want us, they’re stuck with us.

BJB: Any advice to fellow writers out there? JG:

Take the long view. I get so focused on getting one short-term project that I lose all perspective, but it really is a marathon. You never know when you’re going to write your best play. I mean, some say that Williams thought Orpheus Descending was going to be his best play, and I love Tennessee Williams, but it’s not one of his best plays. When The Glass Menagerie premiered, people said, “Oh, this is so melodramatic. No one is ever going to want to see this again.” So you never know. Just focus on the long view, focus on doing the best work you can, and connect with people who share your vision and can help you execute it fully.

Jacqueline Goldfinger – Credits and Awards Full-Length Plays A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (adaptation) Enter Bogart: The Most Spectacular Misfit Adventure in the History of High School Crime 238

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Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel (adaptation) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (adaptation) Raw Stitch (A Collection of 12 Monologues) Skin & Bone Slip/Shot The Burning Season The Ghost’s Bargain by Charles Dickens (adaptation) The Oath the terrible girls Trish Tinkler Gets Saved Short Plays Blood Oranges Deception of Eve His Last Fight Yiddishkeit Awards Ohio Independent Film Festival Screenplay Competition Winner – River Street (2005) Playwrights Theatre’s National Play for the 21st Century Competition Winner – The Burning Season (2007) L. Arnold Weissberger Award Nomination – Slip/Shot (2010) Outstanding Young Alumna Award Winner, Agnes Scott College (2010) Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play – the terrible girls (2011) Barrymore Nomination for the F. Otto Haas Award for Emerging Theatre Artist (2012) Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play – Slip/Shot (2012) Barrymore Award for The Brown Martin Philadelphia Award – to Flashpoint Theatre Company for Slip/Shot (2012)

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Conclusion People respond to good storytelling. There’s something about gathering in the dark, focusing on the light in front of us and listening to a story. As we become involved in the characters and their circumstances, we reflect on our own deepest hopes and fears. Sometimes the experience is reassuring, sometimes it’s provoking. As it illuminates our struggles and celebrates our triumphs, it helps us understand who we are and who we can become. And there’s something about this shared experience that makes us feel connected to each other, to the world and all of humanity. These playwrights, with strong and unique voices, have captured something special as they connect to audiences in Philadelphia, across the country and beyond. They have infused their work with their own sensibilities built on imagination and determination, and taken us on new and exciting journeys. They have transported us and transformed us. They have surprised us with laughter and driven us to tears. They have thrown us into the furniture and comforted our wounded hearts. They have taken us to the past, propelled us to the future, and brought us home. And we need them. But most of all, these playwrights must be celebrated, not only for their talent and achievement, but for their courage – tackling the empty page, filling it with life, sending it off into the world … and beginning again. And they do all this knowing there is no guarantee, only a hope that someone will connect to their vision and move it forward toward production. While emerging technologies evolve, offering bold, new ways to view the world, it’s the playwright’s challenge to continue to explore the complexities of life and the human condition. As I conclude this book with even deeper affection for these men and women who devote themselves to their plays, I’m aware of the theatre artists who are moving to Philadelphia from other regions for better opportunities. Hopefully, this book will provide information into a part of our theatrical history and offer some insight for those who follow. The art of creating original stories to be performed onstage continues to be a promise of unexpected possibilities – in Philadelphia and everywhere else.

Bibliography di Canzio, William. Personal interview. September 5, 2010. . Email interview. March 28, 2014. Dremann, Alex. Personal interview. October 17, 2010. Gibbons, Thomas. Personal interview. September 26, 2009. . Email interview. March 10, 2014. Goldfinger, Jacqueline. Personal interview. October 6, 2011. . Email interview. March 16, 2014. Graham, Bruce. Personal interview. May 15, 2009. Gray, Katharine Clark. Personal interview. October 7, 2011. Hollinger, Michael. Personal interview. March 18, 2009. . Personal interview. April 1, 2009. . Email interview. May 4, 2014. Kass, Arden. Personal interview. April 13, 2010. . Personal interview. March 18, 2014. Lippa, Louis. Personal interview. July 2, 2011. Loebell, Larry. Personal interview. March 18, 2010. . Email interview. March 11, 2014. Rozin, Seth. Personal interview. July 8, 2009. . Email interview. February 26, 2014. Shockley, Ed. Personal interview. April 21, 2011. Tasca, Jules. Personal interview. September 29, 2011. Wardigo, Nicholas. Personal interview. August 19, 2010. Williams-Witherspoon, Kimmika. Email interview. November 21, 2011.

Suggested Reading Ball, William. (1984). A Sense of Direction: Some Observations on the Art of Directing. New York: Drama Book Publishers. Cameron, Julia. (2002). The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam. Catron, Louis E. (2001). The Elements of Playwriting. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Downs, William Missouri and Russin, Robin U. (2004). Naked Playwriting: The Art, The Craft, and The Life Laid Bare. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. Garrison, Gary. (2005). The New Improved Playwright’s Survival Guide: Keeping the Drama in Your Work and Out of Your Life. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Graham, Bruce and Volansky, Michele. (2007). The Collaborative Playwright: Practical Advice for Getting Your Play Written. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Hagen, Uta. (2008). Respect for Acting. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons. Lamott, Anne. (1994). Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor. London, Todd, with Ben Pesner, and Zannie Giraud Voss. (2009). Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play. New York: Theatre Development Fund. Rebeck, Theresa. (2006). Free Fire Zone: A Playwright’s Adventures on the Creative Battlefields of Film, TV, and Theater. Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus. Seger, Linda. (1990). Creating Unforgettable Characters. New York: Henry Holt. Shockley, Ed. (2007). Notes from a Practicing Writer: The Craft, Career, and Aesthetic of Playwriting. Titusville, NJ: Hopewell.

Photo Credits The photos in this book are reprinted with the kind permission of the following: Bruce Graham photo by Kim Carson; Michael Hollinger photo by Arden Theatre Company; Thomas Gibbons photo by Amy Fenton-Shine; Nicholas Wardigo photo by Heather Gillespie; Alex Dremann photo by Mark S. Gardner; Katharine Clark Gray photo by Jen Hughes; and Jacqueline Goldfinger photo by Plate 3 Photography. All uncredited photographs are courtesy of the playwrights.

About the Author B.J. Burton is a playwright and adjunct professor, who teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania. Her plays include Lobelia Lodge, For the Record, Hunting Season, Room for Love, Pizza Again, and The Dangers of Lightning. Honors include two Fellowships in Playwriting from Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, winner of the Pennsylvania Playwriting Award, and a finalist for the Heideman Award. Her screenplays have been recognized by the Nicholl Fellowships, New Century Writers Awards, Set in Philadelphia Screenwriting Competition, FirstGlance Film Fest, and other competitions. In addition to her plays, her short stories, poetry, and nonfiction have been published as well. She received her B.A. in Theatre from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and continued with postgraduate work at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, U.C.L.A. Extension Writers’ Program, and Villanova University’s Graduate Theatre Department. She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing – Playwriting at Rosemont College. Memberships include AEA, SAG-AFTRA, and The Dramatists Guild.

Philadelphia is one of America’s most interesting and innovative cities for theatre. This book paints a picture of the city’s burgeoning scene through interviews with some of Philadelphia’s most influential and successful playwrights. Featuring interviews with Bruce Graham, Michael Hollinger, Thomas Gibbons, Seth Rozin, Louis Lippa, Jules Tasca, Kimmika WilliamsWitherspoon, Ed Shockley, Larry Loebell, Arden Kass, William di Canzio, Nicholas Wardigo, Alex Dremann, Katharine Clark Gray, and Jacqueline Goldfinger, the book will be a source of inspiration for playwrights in Philadelphia and beyond. B. J. Burton is a playwright whose work has been produced in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and New York. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Rosemont College. “The Philadelphia playwrights whose passions, methods and influences we experience so vividly in these interviews will inspire all playwrights, but particularly those who feel a deep connection to place. This is an absolutely compelling read for anyone interested in how plays are made and the ways in which a community can contribute to that making.” – Abigail Adams, Artistic Director and CEO, People’s Light “What a joy to hear real, working Philadelphia playwrights talking so passionately about their craft. This book is an homage to a rich theatre community and a rare peek into their storytelling process…stories that are fierce and funny, heartbreaking and heart-stopping, psychologically complex and straightforward as a punch in the gut…just like their city.” – Joe Canuso, Founding Artistic Director, Theatre Exile “B.J. Burton has given us a foundational look into three generations of playwrights whose work can be seen as building blocks for a theatre community that has only recently found its own identity. The Philadelphia Connection is thoughtful, insightful, and illuminating in helping us understand the particular character of Philadelphia’s growing contribution to the American theatre.” – Paul Meshejian, Artistic Director, PlayPenn

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