Featured Post

1100 Playwright Interviews

1100 Playwright Interviews A Sean Abley Rob Ackerman E.E. Adams Johnna Adams Liz Duffy Adams Tony Adams David Adjmi Keith Josef Adkins Nicc...

Sep 12, 2009

I Interview Playwrights Part 53: Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

Hometown: Mill Valley, CA

Current Town: San Francisco CA.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about Boom? What's it about? Can you run me through the production history of where it was and where it will be next? And it will be published soon by DPS, right?

A: boom is a play about a craigslist casual encounter date between a gay biologist and a female journalism student in a suspiciously well-stocked subterranean apartment right before a comet hits the planet earth. It's a play about evolution, creation myths, difficulties with management and fate versus randomness. I also like to describe as my way of reconciling having been a Theater and Biology major when I was an undergrad. I first workshopped it at Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep in the summer of 2007 and it went on to have its world premiere at Ars Nova in 2008, with subsequent productions at Woolly Mammoth, Seattle Rep, and Cleveland Public Theatre last season. There are a bunch of productions of the show this season which I'm very thrilled about and yes it's getting published soon by DPS with a domtar turquoise cover I believe.

Q: What are you working on next?

A: I just finished a draft of a play called Bob, a commission for South Coast Rep. It's spanning an entire life from birth to death of a guy named Bob and his pursuit of greatness and his version of the American Dream. It's got about 30something speaking roles played by a cast of five and takes place all over America. I think this is me rebelling against all my plays that have taken place in a single location. It also has no cussing in it, which is sort of a big deal for me. I'm also continuing to work on my show TIC which premiered in the Bay Area last January at Encore Theatre. And I'm going to be working with the A.C.T. 2nd year MFA class to develop a new play this year. A play for twelve actors, woohew!

Q: What theaters or shows in SF would you suggest a visitor to your city check out?

A: Oh boy. I suggest a number of options (looking at the whole Bay Area here). http://www.theatrebayarea.org/ lists them all. ACT and Berkeley Rep are our biggest spots and worth a look, with Berkeley Rep having a nice streak of cranking out some contemporary hits. There are literally hundreds of smaller and medium size companies around as well doing ambitious and great work. I suggest seeing stuff at the Z Space Studio (http://www.zspace.org/), Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo (http://www.theintersection.org/), Encore Theatre (http://www.encoretheatrecompany.org/) , Marin Theatre Company (http://marintheatre.org), Aurora Theatre (http://www.auroratheatre.org/), Shotgun Players (http://www.shotgunplayers.org/), Crowded Fire (http://www.crowdedfire.org), Killing My Lobster (http://killingmylobster.com), Cutting Ball (http://www.cuttingball.com/), and many many many others. And while you're here, you have to eat lots of the amazing food.

Q: Tell me a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a person or as a writer.

A: In sixth grade I jokingly polled my friends in my class about which seventh grader they hated the most. It was all hilarious fun until some of the seventh graders caught wind and chased me across the campus until I had to hide in a classroom. Angry and upset when i got home, I found an old piece of plywood, got myself a hammer and drove in about a hundred nails into the plywood. After starting at the wood for a time, I thought of everyone's favorite Price is Right game, Plinko. I nailed some shards of wood on either side of the plywood, tipped it up, and created my own version of the game. Only mine was called "Kill The Seventh Grader." You would let go of a large marble at the top, it would head down, bouncing off the nails, and depending what "slot" it rolled through at the bottom you either missed, slapped, dismembered or killed the seventh grader. I played the game with my friends that summer at a birthday party. I think that says something about my humor and aesthetic, right?

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Aesthetically, I think I have very very broad taste. I guess theatre that engages me viscerally and surprises me is also the theater that excites me. I'm not a big fan of pretension but I don't mind being challenged. I think I prefer work that feels open to an audience, and not too insular. I like plays with open hearts but also enjoy the mean ones too. I definitely enjoy seeing plays born from the time we are living in. I like a rock and roll sensibility and/or playfulness and/or humor and/or imagination and/or plays that do the sneak attack and get me crying. I like investing in characters and story. I like being structurally bedazzled. I like simple or complex, so long as it feels honest. I do like plays with well thought out endings. I don't mind intermissions.

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

A: Get things on their feet. Have friends read your drafts out loud in your living room. Self produce when you're starting, but get some friends to help. Take acting classes. Design/Directing classes may be helpful too. Watch a lot of plays. Find actors and directors you like and trust and then trust them but stay in the room. Don't be afraid of cutting things. Rewrite lots of things. As important as sending your plays out is meeting the people you are sending your plays to. Do not put your eggs in one basket either by waiting for one particular theater to do your play or waiting for that one play to get produced. Keep working on the next thing. Write a lot and take comfort in knowing that the despair you feel sometimes while writing is universally felt.

Q: Any other plugs?

A: Hi Mom!

Sep 11, 2009

I Interview Playwrights Part 52: David Johnston

David Johnston

Hometown: Born in Lexington, KY. But I only lived there until I was a few weeks old. Then I became restless and moved to Richmond, Virginia.

Current Town: New York City

Q: Tell me about "Effie Jean," the play you have going up right now.

 A: I’ve always been a big fan of Charles Ludlam. And he wrote a children’s play called “The Enchanted Pig.” He mashed up a lot of Shakespeare’s King Lear with fairy tales and Hollywood B movies, and I’ve always thought it was hilarious. But it did make me think over the years. Just take some Chaucer or Homer or Boccaccio or Shakespeare, history, mythology – mix ‘em up – and come up with something new for kids. Rather than another goddamn adaptation of “Velveteen Rabbit.” So “Effie Jean in Tahiti” is a loose adaptation of Euripides’ “Iphigenia In Tauris” crossed with “Twelfth Night” – and Bugs Bunny, The Simpsons, Abbott and Costello, the Muppets and “Valley of the Dolls.” And songs.

Q: Based on your past work, of which I am a fan, I would not immediately think of you as someone who would write a play for children. How did this come about?

A: I get that a lot. But here’s the idea. I have great nieces and great nephews now and I realized at some point there was no show I’d ever written which would be suitable for them to see for twenty years. And this Ludlam/”Enchanted Pig” idea was always rattling around in the back of my head. I’d also done a lot of research for the adaptation of “Oresteia” a few years ago, and I loved the idea of kind of the magical happy flip side of the House of Atreus. At the core, the intersection of the Euripides Iphigenia and Twelfth Night is a magical reunion between siblings, siblings who thought the other was dead or gone forever. I did “Twelfth Night” a few times as an actor and that part always affected me. Like Scrooge’s second chance.

Q: Can you talk a little about Blue Coyote? You've worked with them a bunch. What should my readers know about them?

A: Your readers should know that Blue Coyote is composed of blood - thirsty zombies, and if your readers are talented playwrights, they should stay the hell away from my producers. I’m kidding. They’re not zombies. It’s hard for me to talk objectively about those guys. We’ve done about seven or eight projects together. They’ve produced my plays, written songs for them, directed them, acted in them, run out and bought toilet paper, made copies, moved the bench in a black out, walked the cast up the Bowery because there was no room to change at the Marquee, and bought me a round ‘cause I was broke. We’re good friends, they've taken care of me during one of the worst periods of my life, we fight, we make up, they do fantastic work, and I can’t really imagine where I would be if I had not met them.

Q: What are you working on next?

A: I was getting nowhere on some other projects a few months ago. So I said, screw it, I’ll be Suzan Lori Parks and just write a one-act every day. After about two weeks I realized every one act I’d written took place in Coney Island. So I guess that’s my next play.

 Q: Do you think Matt Freeman is a robot?

A: I know this is controversial, but I don’t think Matt Freeman is a robot. But I do believe he and I are genetically linked – brothers, actually. Matt Freeman is my genetic ‘younger’ brother – which is why I have a great need to torture him, lock him in closets, call him a queer, make him cry and tell him Mom and Dad didn’t really want him.

Q: Tell me a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a person or as a writer.

A: When I was a little kid, I told my mother I wanted to be a housewife. Then, later I told her I wanted to be an undertaker. Seriously. And Mom and Dad were great, I would come up with these things, and they would say, well let’s get some brochures and read up on it. This weird little kid, reading brochures from the local community college about mortuary science. I think I just had this idea that if I were an undertaker, I would wear pinstripe suits and have a grave expression and people would take me seriously. So I guess that explains who I am now - some sort of death-obsessed homosexual. But really I’m just gay and not particularly death-obsessed.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: The kind that doesn’t bore the crap out of me.

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

 A: Don’t sit around talking about writing. Write.

 Info for David's show here: http://www.bluecoyote.org/spotlight.htm

Sep 10, 2009

I Interview Playwrights Part 51: Dan Dietz

Dan Dietz

Hometown: Born in Long Beach, CA. Grew up in Marietta, GA. Came of age in Austin, TX. Austin's probably the place I really think of when I think of the word "hometown."

Current town: Tallahassee, FL. I'm teaching this year at Florida State.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Right now I'm working on a play called CLEMENTINE IN THE LOWER NINE. It's an adaptation of Aeschylus' AGAMEMNON, set in post-Katrina New Orleans. It's not a musical, but there's blues music and songs woven through the piece. I feel like the sheer size of the destruction that storm (and our response to it) wrought upon that town, not to mention the emotional upheaval, requires an equally big theatricality. Which is how the Greeks came into it for me. I had a fantastic reading of it at Geva Theatre earlier this summer, and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next with it.

Q: You're a playwriting professor at Florida State right now. What's that like? What plays do you have your students read?

 A: Being a playwriting professor at FSU has many fantastic things about it, foremost of which are the students. FSU Theatre majors are the most motivated, driven, and excited bunch I've ever encountered. There's no laziness, in their writing or in their relationship to their careers. The grad students are a slightly different kind of crowd, because it's a combination Screenwriting/Playwriting degree which is actually run through the Film School. Which means the grad students are more likely to have experience in screenwriting than playwriting. This can bring difficulties, but it's also great because they have so few preconceived notions of what theatre has to be. You're kind of working with a blank slate, and the impact that a powerful and fresh voice--Sarah Ruhl, Jordan Harrison--can have on them is immense.

 Q: Isn't Travis York the bomb?

A: Travis York is a powerful and fresh bomb. Seriously, he's a fantastic actor and my best drinking buddy.

Q: You're one of those UT Austin folks. What are the theaters in Austin that you love?

A: Yep, and UT Austin is one of the things Travis and I have in common. I absolutely love Salvage Vanguard Theater (which I was a part of for ten great years) and the Rude Mechs (whose work is constantly pushing me to make my own better, more innovative, more exciting). The Blue Theater puts on an incredible festival every year called FuseBox that theatre artists from across the country would do well to fly in and see every spring (unless for some reason they don't need their minds blown). Plus the community there is such that phenomenal, exciting work is always popping up in the least expected places.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

A: Anything that makes me care excites me. It can be straight up realism or something mindbendingly experimental, as long as it draws me in emotionally. I don't have a lot of patience for shallow commentary or mobius-strip, snake-eating-its-own-tail irony. More and more, I just want people to say something and mean it with every fiber. I think it's the bravest thing you can do.

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

 A: For playwrights just starting out, I'd say do everything you can to surround yourself with people as dedicated and determined as you are. Make that people who are even more dedicated and determined. And courageous. And talented. Find a community that wants to support your work, and support them in return with everything you've got. Don't be afraid to take a good hard look at your own work, even if your first instinct is that it sucks. And if after that good hard look you find even just one shining thing in the middle of a big mess, congratulate yourself--you've done well. Then get back to work.

Sep 9, 2009

on interviewing playwrights

Fifty is a lot of playwrights but if I think about it, I probably know five hundred or more. I know there are many I have not yet interviewed. I also know I might burn out or run out of questions before I get to one hundred. At the same time, I am constantly inspired by the playwright responses. There are a lot of amazing intelligent interesting people writing plays. And I feel distant from theater right now and this is my way of staying involved while I'm so far from NYC and unable to see many plays or write my own stuff. Anyway, I hope you've been enjoying them. Here's to 50 more!

Sep 5, 2009

I Interview Playwrights Part 50: Mark Schultz

Mark Schultz

Hometown: I was born in Pomona, CA but count Upland, CA more of my hometown. They’re both like 60 miles or so inland from LA.

Current Town: New York, NY

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Finishing up a couple commissions. Am really happy with them, too! One’s loosely based on the old dying god myth (particularly Baldur), and the other is about John Dee--astronomer, mathematician, advisor to Queen Elizabeth I and a frequent converser with angels via his “shewstone.” Lots of fun!

Q: You are the man who wrote one of my favorite plays of all time: Everything Will Be Different or A Brief History of Helen of Troy (available from Dramatists Play Service) But really, the plays I've seen of yours have always impressed me and I'm very sad I missed Gingerbread House at Rattlestick. Can you tell me a little bit about that play? Am I going to hate myself forever for missing it?

A: Thanks for the good word, Adam! Gingerbread House is concerned with what I think is a very American (and certainly very Bush administration) notion that we can do whatever we want with impunity because we’re good people and somehow deserve good things. We can justify anything--all it takes is slightly redefining our terms or adjusting our worldview. The main character in the play, Stacey, really wants to be a good mom, wants to love her kids, but she finds the going a bit difficult. Her husband helps her to define responsibility to her children out of her conception of what it means to love them--she can be a better mother if she just gives up motherhood. She agrees to get rid of her kids, to sell them off. But as her life begins to become ostensibly better, more and more luxurious, her children haunt her. And she begins to realize that living in the world without going mad with grief or guilt at the knowledge of her complicity with evil involves a high degree of story-telling and self-deception. But being honest with herself about what she’s done becomes less and less of an option just as lying to herself becomes more and more difficult. Ultimately, she’s forced into the position of having to lie in order to live while being painfully conscious of the flimsiness of the lie. The one consolation of that pain, though, is that it’s the last connection she has to her children. I hope there are some subtly Senecan things going on in the play. Seneca’s major pre-occupation in his work was with the question of justice--does it exist? If it does, is it possible to have a relationship with it? If it doesn’t exist, or if I can’t be in relationship with it, what does life mean? How do I go on in the face of the endless parade of atrocities life lays at my doorstop? And how do I go on in the knowledge that, as Heiner Mueller puts it, someone somewhere is being ripped apart so that I can dwell in my shit? Writing in Nero’s Rome as he did, Seneca’s vision of the world made a lot of sense to me, writing in Bush’s America. In that sense, the question in Gingerbread House is not, “Is selling your kids to what you suspect is a sweatshop-brothel in Albania a bad idea?” It’s taken for granted that it is a bad idea. The question is, “If you sell your kids to a sweatshop-brothel in Albania, if you sell out the future, will anyone really care? Will anyone call you to account?” The answer suggested in the play is: “No. Not really.” I don’t usually think of myself as much of a pessimist, but…the play’s a bit pessimistic. More than a bit, I guess. And while I’m not completely lacking in hope, I nonetheless find myself feeling that, while the administration has changed in Washington (for the better!), the political realities of what it means to be alive in this country, in this world, at this time remain brutal, Faustian and Spenglerian. What it comes down to, I think, is that for me, hope means something like the will to love through adversity without the expectation of comfort, succor, reciprocation or relief. Anyway--I was also really conscious when writing the play that I’m afraid I’ll be a bad parent. Very afraid. My partner and I would like to adopt one day. Erich (who honestly really is my better half) would be a great dad. Me I’m not so sure of. Are you going to hate yourself for missing it? Hrmm. I don’t want you to hate yourself! But I was really proud of the production--the cast, director, designers--everyone was great! I was and am very grateful to everyone.

Q: What do you look for in a director. (You've worked with lots of good ones including one of my favorites, Evan Cabnet.)

A: I LOVE Evan Cabnet. Love him. Love him love him love him. Everyone in the world should love Evan Cabnet. That’s a plain moral imperative. The rhythm of a play is very important to me--the music of it. Someone who understands how that rhythm works from line to line, scene to scene, how that rhythm informs structure, how that structure contributes to the articulation of a particular emotional gesture and how that gesture suggests or demands a sensual movement that in turn reflects back on the fundamental rhythms of the piece in really important. That understanding is key! A sense of economy is also nice--I tend to like things a bit stripped down, stark, simple. Less is always more, I think, when it comes to production elements. Simplicity is best. I think suggestion in design and staging feels more conspiratorial, more intimate, more lovely than stating something openly. I’m not really a fan of strict realism in that regard. One of the things that I’m least fond of onstage is working plumbing--you know what I mean? To me, there is nothing particularly theatrical about working plumbing. When I see a sink onstage, the first thing I think is: will it work? And until it does, the dramatic action of the play, to me, is always about whether or not the tap will work. A sense of humor is also important. And a sense of the absurdity of life. Also, I’m very very conscious that I’m not a director. Or rather, I’m very very conscious that I’m a really bad director. The last time I tried directing something, it was pretty unwatchable. Really. Gouge-your-eyes-out bad. And it was a long time ago, thank God. I’m really am awful at it. Directors I work with need to understand that I can’t direct my way out of the proverbial paper bag. I know what good directing looks like and where good directing can take a play, but I’m just not able to provide it. Which is to say that the director should take whatever I have to say regarding staging with a huge huge huge grain of salt. A mountain of it, preferably. Literally, I try not to write too too many stage directions in part because I don’t want to infect directors with too too many of my own poisonously bad ideas regarding staging. I guess what I’m really looking for is someone with whom I can share the play. That may sound touchy-feely, but I’m happiest when I can look at something I’ve written and I can feel that’s not all mine. That it no longer belongs to me alone. That it’s more than just mine. I’m very grateful that I’ve had a lot of good luck with directors.

Q: You're a bit of a religion scholar. If I wanted to catch up with you, what books would you recommend I read?

A: I’m a very very amateur religion student. But I love studying--mythologies, comparative religion, ritual--I love that stuff! There are a couple areas, though, that I often find myself looking into for various reasons: esoteric traditions and theodicy, the problem of evil. And there are a couple figures and topics lately that’ve loomed large in my…er…studies in these areas. Jakob Boehme is one of them--17th century Lutheran mystic. He was a cobbler who had a couple visions tried his best to write them down using alchemical language and symbolism. Great stuff! He had a big impact on lots of folks from Swedenborg to Blake to Hegel. His understanding of God is really quite dramatic and seems to suggest that all things arise out of a kind of struggle in God between movement / expression / expansion and stillness / silence / contraction. The pain of this struggle is nature, the world. The friction this struggle causes creates fire, life. The struggle of life finds rest in the light of the fire. Things take a turn for the worse, however, when creatures attempt to separate the light from the fire. There’s so much to get into with Boehme that I don’t think I could do him justice here --Six Theosophical Points with an introduction by Berdyaev is really good. Another is the sophiology “controversy” in Eastern Orthodox theology. I put controversy in quotes because whether or not it’s controversial just depends on who you talk to! Anyway, it comes down to whether or not it is possible to speculate regarding the substance of God. In Trinitarian Christianity, God is One Substance in Three Persons and while much has been written about the Persons, little attention has been paid to the Substance (according to the sophiologists). But how do you talk about something that your tradition teaches you is something it is impossible to talk about? Well, Sergei Bulgakov gives it a go by positing that the Substance of God is the non-personal but personalizing Sophia. John Milbank of the University of Nottingham wrote an interesting essay called “Sophiology and Theurgy: The New Theological Horizon” which is quite lovely, and Bulgakov’s most comprehensive work is Sophia, the Wisdom of God. Both Boehme and Bulgakov deal with the Sophia figure in interesting ways, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Bulgakov was a Boehme admirer--Boehme’s Eternal Nature and Sophia imagery find some lovely parallels in Bulgakov’s distinctions between the created and uncreated Sophia. Currently, though, I’ve just finished the First Book of Enoch following a brief flirtation with Margaret Barker’s work and am re-reading Rene Girard’s great Violence and the Sacred. I’d like to re-read Robert Thurman’s translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, too, and I really want to find something on the Druze and on the Ismaili in general. I know next to nothing about them! Also, I wouldn’t mind a good book on the history and development of the Sarum Use. My God, I’m such a geek.

Q: You were the guy who got MCC to start their Playwrights Coalition. Can you talk a little about the Coalition, how it started, what it does, etc?

A: I wasn’t the only guy! Before graduating from Columbia, I did one of my internships at MCC and became friends with Literary Manager Stephen Willems. (I love Stephen very much--he’s become not only a great friend, but a real mentor to me and a keen critic of my work.) After the internship, I was able to stick around for a bit as an interim Assistant Literary Manager. But I had to move on and get a day job. Before I did, though, Stephen and I were talking, and he mentioned that they’d tried developing some sort of support program for playwrights in the past at MCC, but that it never quite stuck. I thought it was a great idea, so we started trying to develop something that would stick. We called it the Coalition because I’m more than a bit of a socialist and the word suggests to me both solidarity and mutuality. This was in late 2000, early 2001. By the way, I LOVE the writers in the Coalition! I’m incredibly humbled, challenged and amazed to know and work with people of such staggering talent--folks like you(!), David Adjmi, Cusi Cram, Itamar Moses, Daniel Goldfarb, Blair Singer, Crystal Skillman, Annie Baker--all of whom you’ve interviewed here! (Speaking of your interviews, they’re really fantastic! It’s such an incredibly generous thing allowing us all to get to know these artists better--it’s great!) Anyway, what we try to do in the Coalition is provide resources, an ear, a home-base. We have three major programs: the first is a public reading series which takes place in the Fall and in the Spring; the second is a series of seasonal intensives--a few writers around a table, reading each others’ works-in-progress and giving feedback; and finally the roundtable reading, a private reading with actors which is available to our writers on request. The hope is that the Coalition will be there if needed during whatever part of the process a writer may find themselves, from initial scribblings, scenes and thoughts (intensives), to a first draft and re-writes (roundtables) to knowing how a play sounds in front of an audience (public reading). In the process of doing all this, we hope to build a network/community of writers committed to mutual support.

Q: What kind of theater excites you?

 A: I like theater that’s brutally honest. Really, truly brutally and/or viscerally honest. I really respond to plays that are unsentimental but emotionally gut-wrenching, that are not easily digestible, that grab me by the throat and won’t let go, that have a certain violence to them akin to Rothko’s definition of sensuality as “a lustful relationship to things that exist.” Plays that are conscious of the overwhelmingly dazzling and awful beauty of what it means to be alive and human. Plays that are not afraid to go to dark and “ugly” places.

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

A: In saying the following, I hope no one believes that I’ve somehow been able to implement all of this myself--these are more personal aspirations, stars and constellations I’ve found helpful to steer by when I can bring myself to look up and remember them! So here goes: --Be true to your experience of life and the world. Emerson says that believing what is true for ourselves is true for others is true genius--which is to say, in part, that our experience of what it is to be human is not separate from the whole of the human condition. We should be able to say, with Terence, “I am human, and consider nothing human foreign to me,” or with Tennessee Williams, “Nothing human disgusts me.” If we can be honest about who we are, how we desire, what we desire, then we will discover in ourselves so many points of connection to so many disparate aspects of what it is to be human that no matter what we write about, we will write truth, and we will write it fearlessly, unsentimentally, but compassionately. We will find in ourselves the capacity for every heaven and every hell, every act of beauty and horror of which it is possible to conceive. We will know what it is to wound and to be wounded. And we will find it impossible not to love the world and the people in it so much that we happily break, bleed and suffer for that love. -- I don’t think it’s healthy to begin writing a play with the expectation that it will be any good. What “good” means is often an external value, but the play has values of its own. You cannot judge whether or not it’s good until you know what those internal, intrinsic values are. Often, failure is the best teacher of what those values are or should be. Being afraid of failure is pointless. So fail often. (And, as Beckett says, “fail better.”) --Find at least one person who loves you enough to be devastatingly honest about your work, someone you can trust to encourage but not coddle you. --Do yourself an immense favor and read David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact. It’s as close to a guidebook to the creative process that I’ve ever seen. --Finally, you can’t do better than remember this from Lorca: “Life is no dream. Watch out! Watch out! Watch out!”