A: In genre terms, Buzz is a mix of tragedy, comedy—even slapstick comedy—and also surrealism and horror. I’ve sometimes said the play is about global warming or environmental decay. And it is. But you could more accurately say that it’s about the disjunction between private domestic life, on the one hand, and great public and universal issues, on other hand: issues like climate change, capitalism, and, well, death. Which may make the play sound much heavier than it is. It’s a comedy throughout, even when it’s other things. The characters spend a lot of time swatting at flies, which may represent the themes I’ve mentioned or, at other times, may not signify much of anything.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: The main project is what I’m somewhat embarrassed to call a political treatise. I’ve also got a novel on the back burner.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: No one story comes to mind. But I grew up outside of a small town in western Colorado: no movie theater, certainly no theater theater, no record store, no internet as yet. So culture as such seemed to consist largely of the books on my parents’ shelves and my own books. Plus my mother and father both studied literature in college and referred to it with a kind of offhand reverence that must have encouraged me to take the written word seriously. I never saw plays as a kid, which may be why it struck me as such a revelation, later on, to see what actors can do with words that are already pretty good on the page.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: I wish plays were cheaper and—partly as a result of that—more abundant. Other media (books, film, recorded music, et cetera) are cheap enough that people feel free to consume a lot of the stuff and to be adventurous in what they try and passionate in their judgments. Whereas when you go to the theater, too often you’re paying so much that you’re afraid to take a risk and instead go see some reliable old warhorse of a play. And then you may not even feel free to hate it when it sucks. After all, it set you back a lot of money. And that’s when people feel like it’s worth spending their money on theater tickets at all. By the way, this is one reason I favor bare-bones productions. If you want a sumptuous spectacle, go to the movies.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: I’d rather let people who see the play guess who they are. And I think if you see Buzz it’s not too hard to make a correct guess or two.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: I like theater that can only be theater, plays that are content to be plays and don’t seem to wish to be TV episodes or movies. I like it when theater embraces its relative poverty of technical means—in terms of scenery, costumes, furniture, number of characters, et cetera—instead of seeming to hanker after the luxuriance of TV and film. And one reason I like this is that I think plays can do a better job than any other medium of showing how people live inside symbols, half-formed ideas, and stereotyped situations—abstractions from reality, in other words—at the same time that they’re absolutely flesh-and-blood and real. Theater can be good, simultaneously, at both abstractness and tremendous concreteness. And I like when it recognizes this about itself.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: I’m just starting out myself. So I’m probably more in need of advice than I’m able to dispense it.
Q: Plugs, please:
A: Lots of people saw Will Eno’s Realistic Joneses. But I don’t know too many people who have seen or read his Middletown, which is just as brilliant and maybe even better: a twenty-first century version of Our Town at the same time that it’s completely its own thing.
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Hometown: Lafayette, Louisiana. Heart of Cajun Country.
Current Town: Willington, CT.
Q: Tell me about In The Bones.
A: In The Bones began as a one-act for Manhattan Theatre Works' "ReWorks: The Spanish Civil War," an evening of plays inspired by artwork from the Spanish Civil War era. I chose a poem by Miguel Hernandez, "Everything is filled with you." The ending, particularly -- "everything is filled with you, / with something I haven’t found, / but look for among your bones." -- triggered ideas about unexpected loss and the way we deal with it. So the one-act version looked at a family dealing with the suicide of a son (a veteran of the war in Afghanistan) and the unwelcome visit of the boyfriend he left behind.
The one-act evening happened, but the family of In The Bones wouldn't let me go. I was interested in how they might, over time, integrate this seismic loss into the fabric of their lives. So I expanded the play, moving each scene forward one year, charting the changes. And these other ideas came bubbling up -- the changing face of the South and its evolving relationship with gay rights, the real need for marriage equality in these socially stalled parts of the country, and our relationship with technology (The play contains several video interludes, filmed by the son who committed suicide, which serve as a kind of document of the life they all led before the suicide).
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: I'm working on two new plays right now. One is called The Bottom of the Sea, and it imagines Tennessee Williams, post-opening of the "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" film, holed up in a seedy New Orleans hotel room, furiously working on the film script for "The Fugitive Kind." Williams is upset about the removal of the homosexual themes in the "Cat" film and is creatively stalled. Anna Magniani, Meade Roberts (his collaborator on the "Fugitive Kind" script) and a beautiful young man named Arthur swirl around him as he works. The play looks at how closely identity and creativity are tied together, and at the necessity for representation in art -- not just for the audience, but for the artist as well.
And I'm working on a show called Cuddleman, which is about a company that trains people to be professional non-sexual cuddlers for those in need of physical reassurance. Although apparently there's now an app for that, so... we'll see what happens there.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: The standard answer here for me has always been Tony Kushner. I met his work at that formative moment when the lightbulb is going off, "Oh yeah, I know! I wanna be a playwright!" I was in that moment, and I encountered "Angels in America." Completely changed the way I saw plays and what was possible on stage. And it gave me -- a still-closeted gay boy in south Louisiana -- permission to own my identity as a gay man and permission to tell stories about it.
Lately, I'd have to say my theatrical heroes are the wonderful people who put on the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. I've been a playwright at the conference for the last two years, and it's been such a gift. The courage to tackle the full-length version of In The Bones came out of my first conference experience. It's an inspiring, challenging, warm and wonderful week in the Midwest. Everyone should go.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: I'm going to defer to Tennessee Williams here, since he's on my mind lately.
"The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel's."
That's the kind of theatre that excites me. No matter the package. You can find "lightning in a cloud" in a devised dance-theatre piece or in a really cracking production of Ibsen. That flash of life inside the artifice of theatre -- that's always what I'm hoping to find.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Don't wait around for some theatre to do your work. If no one's producing your play, produce it yourself. While we all love sitting at the computer and hashing out rewrite after rewrite, you don't really learn what it feels like to be a playwright until you're seeing your play in the rehearsal room and in front of an audience. So, make those opportunities. You learn so much. And while it may not be Steppenwoolf or Broadway or any of the other brass ring theatre opportunities, your play is being heard. Your play is being seen. There's value in that for you. There's value in that for your audience. So do it.
Q: Plugs, please:
A: In The Bones is being produced by the Astoria Performing Arts Center on November 6-22, 2014.
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Current Town: I live between Madrid, New Mexico & NYC
Q: Tell me about Sweet Sweet Spirit.
A: Sweet, Sweet Spirit is the name of a popular church hymn in the Southern evangelical tradition. The play is about a conservative family in West Texas that have to ask some really hard questions of themselves and each other after the father beats his gay son to near death. He's facing trial, has disgraced his respectable family, and has left them with the overwhelming task of figuring out who should raise the kid in his final teen years. It's about the complexities of faith, culture, family and community in a rapidly changing world.
Q: What else are you working on now?
A: My newest play The Guadalupe was part of the New Play Workshop at Chautauqua this summer under the direction of Ethan McSweeny, and we are continuing to work together on it now. It’s about a farming family on the border who get involved in the cartel wars. It’s a thriller, very plot-oriented and suspenseful. Ethan calls it a “blockbuster movie play,” which is a good way of describing it.
I’m also in the conceptual stages on a new play that will be set in my hometown of Artesia, New Mexico. Artesia is the one town in New Mexico that is housing Central American refugees. As you might imagine, it has sparked the same kind of populist outcry that is happening in other refugee towns across the country. This is in sharp contrast to how I remember my hometown thinking about Guatemalan children in the 1980s. Growing up, my parents and their church friends often spent their vacation and working-class dollars volunteering at an orphanage in the southern jungles of Guatemala. My Dad’s job was to build bunkhouses for children of the disappeared, while my mother served as a dental assistant by filling cavities and pulling teeth. When they would return from Guatemala, our house would fill up with all of the people who had gone on the trip, and with their children, who were coming to see the big slide show of their journey. This was very exciting for us kids. My Dad would click through all the slides, and the adults would tell stories about each of the children in the photos – how their parents died, what pictures they had drawn, what their dreams were, what candies they loved. The women would emote endlessly about which children they had fallen in love with and dreamed of adopting. At the end of the slide show, they’d begin planning how they could all find the money and time to return to Guatemala. When I put these memories against the reality of the public reactions in my town to the refugees, the relief is quite stark. Are the people who volunteered in Guatemala the same people now shouting for the refugees to be sent home? Are they a different segment of people? If they are the same people, what has changed in our culture to produce this dramatic shift? Or is it somehow different to care about war refugees in their own lands as opposed to on your own soil? If my father were still alive, I wouldn’t be surprised if we would have had a foster child in our home right now. And this is what the play will be about: a father who wants to foster one of these children against the backdrop of the family and community wrestling with the issues that play out daily in today’s political environment.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.
A: When I was a kid, I would often stay with my cousins on the various ranches that my Aunt Savannah and my Uncle Vernon managed. They always lived in the employees’ quarters, which were usually very simple houses that were a hundred or so miles from towns of any real size (real size meaning a few thousand people). And there was nothing more exciting for us kids than having Uncle Vernon choose you to throw on the back of his horse and ride out to take care of ranch business. So one day I was the lucky one he chose. We rode out to look for a herd of wild horses. When we found them, my Uncle Vernon said, “If these were our horses and you could have any one of them that you wanted, which horse would it be?" And so I pointed to this beautiful chestnut horse. He told me it was a Palamino. As we rode back to the ranch house, he started trying to convince me to sell him my new horse. He offered me a few bucks. Then twenty. Then fifty. The more he offered, the more certainly I refused his offer. When we got home, all my cousins were waiting on the porch and came running out to hear about our ride. Uncle Vernon told them them that I’d picked the most beautiful horse in the pack and that he was going to buy it off of me. He continued to up his offer: A hundred? Two hundred? My cousins eyes got bigger as I kept refusing. He said he had one final offer to make and he walked into the house. We all followed him through the living room and down the hallway until he stopped in front of a little linen closet. He opened it up up and reached onto the highest shelf and pulled out a towel that had been rolled up tight. He sat the towel down in the hallway and began to unroll it. A sock was inside. He opened the sock and pulled out a wad of hundred dollar bills. He laid them out one at a time on the floor until seven hundred dollars sat before us. I realize now that it was probably his life’s savings. He said, “I’ll give you $700 for that horse.” I said “No.” Then he picked me up and kissed me and said “That’s my girl.”
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: That it appealed to people outside of our major urban centers.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
Q: Horton Foote for his dedication to place and his belief in the goodness and potential of all people. Sam Shepard for his dedication to place and his belief in the opposite. Anna Deavere Smith for her ability to embrace it all. Lately, I really like the work of Samuel Hunter and Mando Alvarado. I love Rattlestick and LAByrinth and Intar. Beyond the theater, the storytellers who inspire me to write are Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Bowden, country and western singers, right wing nut jobs, left wing nut jobs, preachers, and populist maniacs.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: I like classically structured stories about people and families for whom the stakes are very high. Stories where life and death are at play. Where culture is so strong that taboos still exist and give characters conflicts to really wrestle with.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: Your foundation is your history, your ancestors, your place. Stand on this foundation, but listen to everyone. Crave criticism. A man on the street has as much to tell you about your play as the Columbia grad. Structure matters. Master it before you break it.
Q: Plugs, please:
A: Sweet, Sweet Spirit
Running October 10-25, 2014
14th Street Y Theater
Produced by Manhattan Theater Works & Goode Productions
Tickets & Info here
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a artist or as a person.
A: Here's an excerpt for psych evaluation of me at 7: Lane has an above average IQ but is not a genius. She is talkative and can carry on in-depth conversations with adults...she shows great empathy towards the characters in the story we've read, but prefers to make up her own stories about the characters... the stories she made up often came in song form... she is easily distracted, and expects rewards for "good" behavior.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: First off, I try to be a nice person. Ask Morgan Gould, she said I wasn't an asshole and she wouldn't interview me for her Asshole Blog. But I gotta say I hate this Kickstarter mentality we've all got. It's bullshit. It just feels like artists asking artists for handouts, and it devalues the work. I'm not saying all crowd-funding is all bad, but f&*k you if you think I'm gonna give you $15, for Facebook shout-out, and a hug.
The SEC is working on approving crowd-sourced investing which could be HUGE for the theater. I give you $15 because I believe in your show, and think you'll sell tickets and give me back my $15 and then some.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: All of my teachers: Dennis J. Reardon (who begged me not to be a playwright), Laura Maria Censabella, Christopher Shinn, Stephen Adly Guirgis, and Francine Volpe.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Anne motherf$%&ing Washburn. I mean holy shit.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
Hometown: I was born in Charleston, West Virginia. However, I grew up outside of Tampa, Florida. I pretty much think of my hometown as the town where my present home is, which is...
Current Town: ...Kennebunk, Maine
Q: Tell me about Many Mansions.
A: Many Mansions is the twilight of the gods, a miracle play, a sex farce, and the redemption of God with a teardrop. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Q: What else are you working on now? Where can I read your comic strips?
A: Most of the time, I'm working on my strips, "Pibgorn" and "9 Chickweed Lane." Because they are, by their nature, narrative rather than gag-a-day strips, they are as close to stage plays or screenplays as one can get with a pencil. I have written a screenplay for a story I created in Chickweed called "Edie Ernst, USO Singer - Allied Spy," which, despite the derring-do implicit in the title, is really a kind of epic love story. It is under option for screen realization. You can find both "Pibgorn" and "9 Chickweed Lane" at http://www.gocomics.com/pibgorn and http://www.gocomics.com/9chickweedlane. Chickweed also appears a innumerable newspapers here and abroad.
Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a artist or as a person.
A: I can't think of one, really. I've been drawing cartoons, obsessively, since I can remember. I suppose that would say all that can be said.
Q: If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?
A: I wish that it weren't a place where a standing ovation is no more significant than an occasion for some well-deserved stretching and scratching. If the occasion onstage is something that brings me to my feet, it would mean so much more if the rest of the audience weren't already there fumbling in their overcoat pockets for their train tickets and yawning.
Q: Who are or were your theatrical heroes?
A: Shakespeare for poetry, Shaw for argument, Terence Rattigan for empathy, Noel Coward for Noel Coward.
Q: What kind of theater excites you?
A: Telling a story absolutely wonderfully - not grinding an axe instead.
Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?
A: The trait that separates human beings from other animals is not the opposable thumb; it is that we tell stories -- in theater, cinema, newspaper comics, comic books, around water coolers. It is what we are as creatures. Look in any bible, at any prehistoric cave-wall painting, at any two people sitting on a front porch. Stories are related as soon as the human mouth opens, to give directions, to complain to a cop, to lie to an electorate. In writing a play, your opinions are not half so interesting as the story that leads the audience to be hushed and coughless while you're telling it. Learn how to tell it well. And don't congratulate yourself over your opposable thumb.
