I Interview Playwrights Part 30: Mac Rogers

Mac Rogers

Hometown: Greensboro, North Carolina

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Q: Tell me a little about your play Viral that's going up soon. Who is the artistic team. Have you all worked together before?

A: Viral is about three people - a sister, a brother, and the sister's boyfriend - who share both a shitty apartment and a strange fetish: they are sexually and emotionally obsessed with watching footage of people dying. They're very specific about it; they like quiet, nonviolent - ideally consensual - video of passage from life to death. They put out a vague website looking for someone suicidal who might be willing to kill themselves on camera for them, and one day, a mysterious woman named Meredith responds. The play follows the four days she lives with them up to the morning when they shoot the video, and explores how hard it is for strangers in close quarters not to start caring about each other. It's a play with a gruesome hook, but it's also a little sweet in a way. Viral is produced by Gideon Productions, the theater company I co-founded nearly a decade ago with Jordana Williams and Sean Williams. Gideon has either produced or co-produced most of my plays. Jordana, with whom I have worked as a director five times in the past, is at the helm. Three of the actors - Matthew Trumbull, Kent Meister, and Jonathan Pereira - are new to me (and razor-sharp, I might add). Becky Comtois, li'l sis of your former interviewee James, is playing a role I wrote specifically for her (as me and my fiance are kind of Becky-groupies). Amy Lynn Stewart is an actor Jordana and I knew in college, but have not seen in the years since until she showed up to audition. By remarkable coincidence, she last appeared in a play of mine fourteen years ago - also playing a character named Meredith. (I don't use that name in every play.)

Q: Besides as a playwright I know you as the star and titular character in James Comtois' Nervous Boy. What was that experience like?

A: The Adventures of Nervous-Boy was without question the coolest acting experience of my life. The script is this beautiful tone-poem to self-hatred and self-destruction, the Nosedive production team gave it an amazing look and soundscape, I got to work with wonderful actors, and I got to be on stage the whole time and play a dynamite arc while everyone else in the cast brought the set to me. To this day, every once in a while I miss playing Nervous-Boy. I actually haven't been able to act in a while, which is a bummer, but it's hard to complain when the writing's going nicely.

Q: How long have you been doing theater in New York? How did you start? What led you to become a playwright and start your own theater company?

A: I've been in New York about eleven years now. Like many people, I spent most of that first year in my apartment watching TV, but then a lot of the people I did plays with in college started moving here, and we sort of huddled together for theatrical warmth, doing shows various places downtown. Many of those people have left New York or theater or both, but they helped a scaredy-cat like me ease into it. My personal Great Leap Forward was when I got involved at Manhattantheatresource. There's a great core group there, and nearly everyone passes through there at some point, so I started meeting and working with a number of different groups through that hub. (Manhattantheatresource made Universal Robots happen, which was pretty key for me.) I've been a playwright since I was very young. I liked writing stories and I liked acting in children's theater plays, and the two sort of merged. Even as a little kid, I felt like I wasn't seeing the plays I dreamed of seeing, and figured no one would write them but me. Nowadays I see like two good plays a week, but there's still certain things I dream of that I know will only exist if I write them. So I do. I formed a theater company partly at Sean's more-or-less nonstop urging, but partly also because that's what I knew. I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is no conservatory by any means. But they did give us undergrads this black box in the basement and let us mostly do what we wanted there. It was completely DIY, and I grew to like it that way. DIY's way harder in NYC - it costs a lot more, for one thing, and you have to have a job too - but it comes more naturally to me than sending out scripts and waiting to see what happened.

Q: You were one of the first theater bloggers. When did you start? How has theater blogging changed since its inception?

A: At the beginning, it seemed like the whole world of theater blogging was Laura Axelrod, Isaac Butler, Dan Trujillo, and George Hunka - and all in New York. (That's probably not how it actually was, but how it seemed.) Laura moved on to other interests, George went sporadic, I went even more sporadic, and Dan stopped altogether (blogging, not writing), but Isaac has gone on to be one of the most prominent voices in what's now the theatrosphere, which stretches all over the world and which has diversified fascinatingly. Guys like Travis Bedard and DevilVet focus on process, Colin Mitchell and Alison Croggan review, you interview, Nick Keenan sometimes writes about relevant creative technologies, Scott Walters is pursuing an ongoing mission, Playgoer's more journalistic, and Leonard Jacobs looks to be running a one-stop shop. The hard part is that theater blogging is the weirdest and most contradictory genre of blogging there is. It's a publicly and internationally available exchange of ideas over events that can only be experienced locally. Isaac can host a debate on Watchmen on his blog, but not on the awesome and actually kind of important Dan Trujillo play he just directed, 'cause only local people can even see and experience the Trujillo play. We can't know what Travis or Alison or Don Hall would have thought. They could all read the script, maybe, but not share the event. It's hard to write in a mass media platform about a local, site-specific event. People are still figuring out how to share what they do. I hardly write anymore. I have a demanding day-job and errands to run every night, and then if I have any writing energy left, I horde it for playwriting. This makes me a little sad. I wish I blogged more. I liked it. I hated the fights, though, the flame-wars. I never have the stamina to stand up to some of the people who really enjoy them.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I really like stories I can sink my teeth into. I'm pretty basic: I want to meet a character, get to know them, and worry about them when they get into trouble. I like stories that don't rely on making the characters stupid, or poor communicators. It's an important truth that smart, articulate people - even artists! - get into all sorts of personal and political messes, and we need to look into that. I like plays that take characters for who they are and don't judge or aggrandize them. I like plays that find strange humor in shocking situations. I particularly like genre storytelling - horror, science fiction, fantasy, suspense, noir, mystery. I would like more writers to be telling these stories on the stage, using the tools of the stage. We need audiences to associate going to the theater with having the kind of good time they associate with other media, just translated into our unique terms and techniques. MOST IMPORTANT - I like plays with discipline. I like to feel the inexorable forward movement toward something. When I feel a play drift off course, it really bugs me.

Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A: Write the sort of plays you would actually set aside an evening to go see even if none of your friends were in them. Don't pretend to like things you don't like just because they seem cultured or deep or something. Be honest about what stories you enjoy, and write your own version, your way. Self-produce when you're young, as often as you can. You learn the deepest and most nuanced lessons from watching your plays fail in front of live audiences. Also, self-producing gets harder as you age. Work on plays in some other capacity - acting, desiging, crewing, something. Learn the physical realities. Fall in love with the basic tools of live theater - human bodies, light, language, maybe music and dance - so that you're writing for the live event, not putting TV shows on stage. Write short plays. You must do this. Learning to write short plays makes your longer plays so much better. Do those 24-hour/48-hour play exercises. Get involved in short-play events. There's no better way to learn discipline. Forge relationships with theater artists you trust and who trust you. Especially, ESPECIALLY directors. Dig in for the long haul. Seriously. Seriously, playwrights-just-starting-out. Don't be like, "I'm different." Dig in. Enjoy the stuff you get to do during the long haul.

Link for Mac's show: viraltheplay.com

I Interview Playwrights Part 29: Cusi Cram

Cusi Cram

Hometown: Manhattan

Current Town: Sixty blocks south of where I grew up. Big move.

 Q: Please tell me about your show Lifetime Burning that's going up at Primary Stages. What's it about? Who is the artistic team?

A: It's mostly about the odd phenomenon of the fake memoir that seems kinda epidemic at the moment. It's also about how we tell stories and what goes in to making them and how fact and fiction collide. And there are some warring sisters. And a handsome guy. And a very, very nice coffee table, which kind of the fifth character in the play. I dreamed of having the coffee table. And now I get to have it in my play. Magical. Pam Mackinnon is directing the play. She is a delight and very talented. And calm. She bikes a lot. I would like to be more calm. I might take up biking to aid in the calmness. The actors are: Jennifer Westfeldt, Christina Kirk, Raul Castillo, and Isabel, Keating. They are gloriously talented and as beautiful as the aforementioned coffee table. Chris Stone is the set designer. David Weiner is the lighting designer. Daniel Baker is the sound designer. Theresa Squire is the costume designer. I think the design is pretty amazing on this show. I wish I could live in the apartment in the play. And own all the ladies shoes. Also, There is a lot of cocktail drinking in the play. I've never written something where so much liquid is consumed. It requires a lot of measuring and monitoring. We have a crew of stage management ninjas. They astound me as much as the actors and designers and Pam.

Q: I first met you when I was interning at MCC and you were part of the playwrights coalition. I also know that you work with LAByrinth. How has development been for you with them and other theaters?

A: I think both LAB and MCC and also the Writers Group at Primary Stages have helped me grow as a writer in leaps and bounds. It was the good and supportive kind of development. I feel at one time or another all of those groups have forced me to write plays and have reading of my plays in front of people. And given me constructive feedback. I really need deadlines and people showing up in rooms to see my plays to help me write. I can't write without a deadline. So, I am grateful for that. LAByrinth has been real creative home for me in the last five years. I just adore the company of actors and the ethos of the company. It feels like a wonderful, unruly family. I am so inspired by the risks people take in the company as actors, writers, directors---how everyone is always stretching themselves and trying something new. I find that artistic exploration very moving and it continues to refuel me creatively. I hope I was nice to you when you were an intern. I feel very old because I can't remember meeting you there. I hope I am not blocking out a horrendous incident.

Q: No, you were very sweet. Were you a model at 13 or is that some other Cusi Cram that google turned up? If that was you, what was that like? If it wasn't you, what's it like to have someone with the same name out there who is/was a model?

A: Yes indeed that is me. I modeled and was on a One Life to Live in my teens. It was strange but paid for a chunk of Brown. So, I am grateful for its strangeness. I would not like it all if someone else had the same name as me. Sometimes, I feel like what I got is a wacky name.

Q: Do you write for the kid's show Arthur? How is that for a day job?

A: I do. It is a fabulous gig. And I am grateful for it every day. Well not every day but most. It's really fun now 'cause the show has been on for so long, the writers can write about whatever jazzes them. I did an adaptation of (kinda) of One Hundred Years of Solitude. That sort of thing. Another writer did a takeoff of King Lear and someone did a kids version of Waiting for Godot. It's also taught me a lot about story telling and how to do it in a more efficient way. I still feel very lucky that someone pays me to write.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I guess, I like to laugh and be moved. And be provoked---to have my mind bent out of shape a little. I want to be surprised too, not just by the plot but something beautiful and unexpected. I just saw Arianne Mnouchkine's company's latest piece: Les Ephemeres. That did all of those things for me. It was both absurd and moving. I think I strive for that in my work. It's a tricky business. I also like watching people's work evolve and take off. That happens a lot for in the context of LAByrinth. There are so many writers in the company that excite me and feel very vital, to name a few: Melissa Ross, Megan Mostyn Brown, David Anzuelo, Florencia Lozano, and Michael Puzzo (he has a play coming up--Lyric is Waiting that I am psyched to see) And I also am a big fan of Stephen Guirgis. I am sure I am forgetting some people. There are more. It's late and I have my first preview tomorrow. I also recently really liked Stunning by David Adjmi. I loved that it s straddled a lot of theatrical worlds. Shifts in tone excite me.

Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A: Write. A lot. Produce yourself, if no one will. Find like minded theaters souls and stick to them like glue. And write. Some more. Send things out in envelopes. Strange things come back when you least expect it.

A: Also, I would like to throw my hat in to the ring for the Seth Glewen fan club. He is also my agent. I wish an Oscar size Seth could live by my pencil cup on my desk.

Cusi's Show:http://www.primarystages.org/ http://www.primarystages.org/special-ticketing Primary Stages Interview

Food For Fish in Atlanta

Photos from some of the 7 previous productions here and here.

I Interview Playwrights Part 28: Michael Puzzo

Michael Puzzo

Hometown: Old Bridge, New Jersey

Current Town: East Village, NYC

Q: Tell me about this play you have going up.

A: It’s called Lyric is Waiting and we open at Irish Rep on July 30th. Of all my plays this is the one that has always been my not so secret favorite. Mostly because it is so mysteriously odd to me, that it even exists at all. Being a member of LAByrinth Theater Co. I have been lucky enough to be able to have all my plays presented up at our Summer Intensive. I have always found that the safety and support you get from the folks in LAB, gives me more artistic balls than I would ever be able to muster on my own. So about five years ago I decided to take a risk and try something that really scared me. Up until that point I had just written comedies. And just like all those hackneyed sad clown clichés I was always more interested in what I thought was the super serious subtext in my plays then making people laugh. I mean I still to this day can’t tell if Woody Allen’s Interiors sucks or not, but I sure as Hell understand it need to exist. So I set out to write about a very painful codependent relationship I had been in and tried to tell the story in a serious and true way that would not feel like pretentious bullshit. Dunno if I succeeded or not, but people seem to dig it………

Q: Now, you're not in this show, are you? I know you primarily as an actor. (you've been in three readings of two of my plays.) Have you been in your plays? When you're not in it do you wish you were and vice-versa?

A: No, I don’t act in my any of my plays. I mean I feel like there is plenty of me up there already I don’t need to be in the damn thing too. I learn so much about the play from just watching the actors. I would never trade that part of the experience for some bullshit chance for me to show the world how good I am at crying or playing a serial killer or whatever. I have always felt like becoming a playwright was a weirdly natural progression for me. I mean at some point even The Monkees started playing their own instruments and writing songs, right? But I will say, that as soon as I finish rehearsals for one of my plays I always immediately start jonesing to be on stage. With each play I have finished I feel like my acting improves and with each acting gig my writing gets bumped up a notch. But recently I have broken the No Puzzo in his own plays rule. I have been working on an autobiographical solo piece called Guaranteed Second Base that I perform myself. And I have found the writing and acting of it, is so so different than anything I have ever attempted before that I am really digging exploring the possibilities of it.

 Q: You and I have the same agent. Don't you love Seth?

A: I am in the processes of having a statue of Seth built in my backyard

Q: How did you get hooked up with LAByrinth Theater? How long have you been hanging around them?

A: I have been in LAByrinth for 12 years now but I have been loitering on the periphery since they began. In the early nineties my roommate was Elisabeth Canavan who I knew from Jersey. She joined LAB at the very beginning and so I would check out the plays and go to their epic parties. I am not ashamed to admit that the parties were what drew me to them at first. Cuz anyone who has ever hung with the LAB folks, know they can really throw down. So after I finished my two year acting program with Maggie Flanigan, Liz got me and audition for the LAB and I got in. I must point out, that LAB no longer holds auditions, and I have always secretly felt it was because they never wanted someone like me to get in under the wire again. A few summer intensives into my membership Stephen Guirgis suggested I might try writing a play or something and so I did, they put it on and that was that. So much like so many LAB actor/playwrights, I had a new hat!

Q: Tell me a childhood story that is either funny or sad that will explain who you are as a person and how you go through the world.

A: When I was a kid my Dad wanted to be a tough guy. So he was always encouraging me to get into fights play and play contact sports, neither of which I had even the remotest interest in and it drove my Dad bananas. I was forced to play almost everything, and sucked equally and profoundly at all of them. Then I discovered soccer and realized that I could at least fake it. Cuz let’s face it, if you keep running and running at some point you will at least bang into the ball. So I’m eleven and I’m on the second worst teams in the league. The team was filled with the kinda kids who would get their head stuck in the desk or who wore retainers that looked like medieval torture devices. . Jesus, I was the second best player on the team, that’s how bad we were. But what kept us outta last place was Mark Eckert, who was not only our best player, but maybe the best player in the whole league. Now Mark Eckert can best be described as a wiry little bully prick. He was one of those kids who always had a sun burn, and I don’t know why, but kids who always have a sun burn are always so fucking mean, mean, mean. And the target of his harassment was always me. And in a way I brought it on myself, see at that time my idol like every other geeky bookworm was The Amazing Spider-Man. So everything I owned celebrated this. Spider-Man pajamas, belt buckle, socks and of course the focus of Mark Eckert’s constant ridicule my 8,000 Spider-Man tee shirts. Which I wore in rotation to every single practice, despite the fact that this punk would inevitably call me Spider Fag. Which made no sense to me cause I didn’t wanna fuck Spider-Man, I wanted to be Spider-Man! Yet I continued to wear the shirts, until one day I decided to wear two. So I show up to practice rocking the jewel in my collection a classic John Romita, web spinning pose. And on schedule Mark hits me with a barrage of Gaylord, Gaywad and Queer-baits. And so I say “What you don’t like this shirt, well maybe you’ll like this one better!?“ and by this time all the retainered misfits have surrounded us, waiting to see what I’ll do. So I take off my shirt and underneath it I have on a plain white Hanes, that I have taken a red magic marker and written the words : I HATE MARK ECKERT! Now I am fully aware that this is neither clever or original. But it did have the desired effect cuz for the first time every asthmatic, lazy eyed kid became the laugher and not the laughee. And it was deafening, all the sunburn drained out Mark’s smug face. And he began to wail, Tears flying off his face like a lawn sprinkler. And then something amazing happened. He just up and ran away. And we never saw him ever again. Now I pinpoint that as the moment that I became me. Wits over fists. And admittedly it wasn’t all that witty, Like I had finally manned up on my own terms. But that was it. No more, henceforth I will always use my powers for good like a Samurai, like Spider-Man. Now of course the coach and my Father were not too happy, we lost our only good player and we immediately sucked. But I did not have to hit anybody….and hey now I was the number one player on the last place team….which was some sort of distinction, at least in Jersey.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: A couple of years ago I read this article about some indie music star (Sufjan Stevens, I think) and he was asked what kind of music he dug and he said “Friend Rock” meaning that he was into going out and listening to his buddies bands. And so, I guess I like whatever the friend rock equivalent for theater is. And not just because you usually can get comps or because you have to go see it anyway. I get such a visceral thrill from watching my friends practice their art that I just don’t get anywhere else. It always reminds me how fucking lucky I am to be able to get to do this, and so I get inspired. For example last night at the intensive I saw a new play by both Stephen Adly Guirgis and John Patrick Shanley and my first inclination was to go back to my room and write, write, write. I am also looking forward to Cusi Cram’s new play A Lifetime Burning, which is going up in a couple of days. I saw it last summer and it rocks. But my most important theatrical moment happened when I was just starting out. I will never forget seeing John Malkovitch in Burn This, back in 88’. It was a Monday night and I had money from my first real New York City acting job to burn. I went in, knowing nothing about the play or the actor and came out realizing that I knew nothing about the thing I wanted to do with my life. Thank God, Burn This was the only show available on that Monday, or I might be like a Game Show Host today.

Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A: Grab some actors and have what you have written read out loud as soon as you can. What good is writing a recipe if nobody ever bakes the cake? And do it in front of an audience if you can. It doesn’t matter if it’s your girlfriend and her Grandmother or three strangers in the back of a Kentucky Fried Chicken, but it needs to be somebody. Shanley told me once “the audience is a genius” and he’s right, they will tell you everything you need to know. Oh, take an acting class….a good one. You will be surprised how your feelings about actors change when you find out that as much work goes into crafting a character as does crafting a script.

 Link for Michael's show: http://kefproductions.com/current.html

Herbie in DC

Photos by Michael Paolantonio

I Interview Playwrights Part 27: Megan Mostyn-Brown

Megan Mostyn-Brown

Hometown: Shoreview, MN

Current Town: New York City

Q: What are you working on now? A: Rewrites, rewrites, rewrites. I have a play called Other People's Problems that I worked on at the 24/7 retreat. It had a reading in the city this past spring and I am currently doing rewrites on it as the director I've been working with and I want to do a week long workshop of the play in the fall. I also have a TV pilot I've been working on.

Q: I know you said you were heading to LA soon for a month or so to check out the TV/Film scene. How long have you been planning to do this? Do you think you might just start living there?

A: Oh sweet, sweet LA. Yeah, this past winter I was feeling the urge to really shake up my life so I'm taking the plunge, quitting my day job and heading west in the fall for three weeks to take meetings and try to sell my pilot. I have wanted to write for TV for awhile and have a tiny bit of experience as I developed and pitched a show at one of the cable networks a few years ago (it never got picked up). I'm not the biggest fan of LA, in part because I'm not really a palm tree and sunshine kinda gal and in part because I have driven once in the last twelve years. I wouldn't live in LA just to live there but I could learn to be a big fan of LA-LA land if I had a job doing what I love. I'm a little- well alotta freaked about my new plan but I figure sometimes it's good to take a chance. So cross your fingers kids that I get a writing job because momma doesn't have a plan B.

Q: Tell me about your day job and how you got into it.

 A: I have two day jobs. I nanny a few days a week and I also write copy for Elle Magazine's website. I started nannying because aside from writing my only other marketable skill is taking care of children. The job at Elle I got through a friend. I had written fashion copy for a now defunct website called Girlshop. After Girlshop closed a friend knew someone who was hiring at Elle. She read my stuff and hired me without ever meeting me. When she did finally meet me at a party a few months later she was a little in shock that I was the person who was writing quizzes like "Is your Hair In or Out" and ninety tips for spring. Although I don't look the part I secretly have a deep love of fashion and totally know how to describe the cut and fabric of a piece of clothing because my mom made all our clothes until I was twelve. It's a super silly job, but I do have to say it teaches you how to write quickly without being precious because the turnover for a piece is usually twenty-four hours. And really, who can be precious when writing about how to get "fall hair with flair"?

Q: How did you get hooked up with LAByrinth? Did you start as an actor with them or as a writer?

A: A friend saw "In Arabia We'd All Be Kings" and thought I would dig what they were doing. So I applied for an internship in 2001 and got it. I was still an actor at the time but my first day as an intern one of the company members, Sal Inzerillo, was in the office and asked me if I wrote. For some reason I lied and said yes. He told me to bring him ten pages by the next day and he would read them. Sal upon first meeting can seem a little intimidating (he is very tall) and I am a total overachiever who can't resist a challenge so I went home and wrote a monologue and brought it to him. He liked it and passed it on to Melissa Ross, another company member, and the two of them guided me into making it a play. It eventually made it's way to the LAB summer intensive and that's pretty much how I became a playwright. A few years later I became a member. LAB has pretty much been my "grad school" for playwriting since I've never actually been to school for it. It's weird though, to think about the fact that my whole career started because of a lie...but I guess you have to start somewhere.

Q: You and I have the same agent. Don't you love Seth?

A: I adore him. I also adore his suits.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: I like theater you can't shake after it's over. That could mean a play thats dialogue you keep quoting because it was super clever or funny or a play thats emotional life and characters hit you with such a ton of bricks you keep thinking about it for weeks after. If they have both, like Tracy Letts and Stephen Adly Guirgis's stuff, it's like the ultimate jackpot for me. I also get really excited about plays that break the mold of traditional play structure and take you on a wild ride like Sheila Callaghan's "That Pretty, Pretty".

Q: What advice do you have for playwrights just starting out?

A: Hmmmm...I guess my top three would be: 1. Don't be afraid to show your work. 2. Cultivate a group of 2-3 people who understand you as a writer and who you can trust to give you unbiased feedback about your work. 3. Be okay with the fact that sometimes you have to fall out of love with a play and put it in a drawer for a year before you can fix it.

Q: Any plugs you'd like to plug?

A: Go see Michael Puzzo's "Lyric is Waiting" and Cusi Cram's "A Lifetime Burning". I think they both open the first week of August. They are both funny, sad, wonderful, beautiful plays that I am so excited are getting productions.