I Interview Playwrights Part 139: Amy Herzog

Amy Herzog

Hometown:  Highland Park, NJ

Current Town:  Park Slope

Q: Tell me about the play reading you have coming up at Soho Rep.

A: The play is called 4000 Miles. It’s about a young man who stays with his grandmother in Greenwich Village for a few weeks following a crisis. She’s an old communist, he’s a belated hippie, and they’re both dealing with grief and figuring out how to be roommates. It’s my second play about this character Vera, an old New York lefty based on my grandmother, Leepee. Leepee is funny, dry, sassy, and devastating at ninety-three. I try to do her justice. My director is Pirronne Yousefzadeh, and we’re on our way to a wonderful cast.

Q: What else are you up to?

A:  The other Vera play, After the Revolution, is going up this summer at Williamstown and next fall at Playwrights Horizons. The play is about three generations of leftists, inspired by my dad’s side of the family. It takes place in 1999, which was a time that for various reasons the American Left was being asked to do some self-examination, and it was a really tough time for my family. My grandfather had recently died after a long illness and some questions were popping up – quite publicly – about his past. I didn’t fully understand what was happening at the time, but I was aware of this pervasive sadness and disappointment that was partly about disagreements within the family but also about what had happened to the Left since my grandparents were young and sure that the revolution was on its way.

Carolyn Cantor is directing both productions.

In other news, I’m performing my solo show, Love Song in Two Voices, at the Emerging America Festival at the Huntington in May. Portia Krieger is directing and teaching me how to act. That one’s about my mom. Because fair is fair.

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

A:  Oh dear. I can tell just by reading that question that I will write something I regret is on the internet in ten years…

Well, what the hell, this was third grade and my class was doing a zoology unit. Our assistant teacher, Mr. Hogan, announced that we would create a play in which every student would play a different animal. But get this: there would be one human. A young woman decides to become a zoologist and the plot is born. Those of us with acting aspirations auditioned for Mrs. Lefelt, the English department chair. The sides were from a dramatic adaptation of Rumpelstilstkin, and as I remember it was a very emotional scene. We were whittled down to two – it was me versus Alexis for the lead. Alexis would later be Lucy to my Sally, Ms. Hannigan to my Annie, the Witch to my Little Red. Oh, Alexis, where are you now? I am delaying the painful revelation that Mrs. Lefelt ultimately chose Alexis to play the human. I was to be one of twenty-five representatives of the animal kingdom. I would have to make a costume out of construction paper and tell Alexis about the salient features of my species. This would not do. I approached Mr. Hogan and offered to write the play, and because it meant he didn’t have to or because I was obviously going to be a pain in the ass about it he agreed. In my rendering of the story we had outlined as a class, there was one important addition: the protagonist had a sister –the sensible, buttoned-up foil to Alexis’s impractical dreamer. I remember one of my lines, which I wrote for myself all in caps: “THIS TIME YOU’VE REALLY GONE OFF THE DEEP END!!!” If anyone resented my flagrant hijacking of the collaborative process, no one said anything to my face.

That is the story of my first play.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  I would just make it way way cheaper, that’s all.

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

A:  Be patient. Be happy for your friends and colleagues. Avoid reading theater news; read novels instead.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  I’m so excited for Annie Baker’s new play at the Rattlestick. It’s called The Aliens and it’s really wonderful. www.rattlestick.org

I Interview Playwrights Part 138: Stacey Luftig

Stacey Luftig

Hometown: Metuchen, NJ

Current Town: New York, NY

Q:  Tell me about your operetta that's being workshopped soon.

A:  Actually, it’s not a workshop—we're getting a full production in Portland, Oregon, with a 35-piece orchestra! Story of an Hour is based on a short story by 19th century writer Kate Chopin, who is probably best known for her novel The Awakening. I wrote the libretto and Michael Valenti composed the score.

I'm so happy Michael asked me to work on this project. His music is lush, and the story is both stark and subtle. Josephine must tell Louise, her sister, that Louise's husband has died in a train crash. When she hears this, Louise goes through a surprising emotional transformation—an awakening, really—that ends in a shocking way.

Chopin’s tale is just three pages long, so we expanded it by developing the relationship between the sisters. We also created a specific time and setting. That's because the operetta, while it stands alone, is also part of a three-act evening called A Christmas Trilogy, and each act takes place on Christmas eve, in the same mansion in Bath, England. Act I is an opera set in the 1700s, with a libretto adapted by Michael from a 17th-century play. Act II—our piece—is an operetta set in the 1800s. And Act III, set in the 1900s, is a musical comedy, with book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro, and music, of course, by Michael. So it's one set, four actors, three centuries, three styles of music theater.

Q:  How is writing a musical or opera different from writing a straight play as it relates to your working process?

A:  As a playwright, I'm completely in charge. Which is great…and kind of scary. But having a collaborator means having a co-creator, critic, and cheerleader right there with me during the dreamy, vulnerable parts of the process that as a playwright I have to face alone. Plus, it means I have someone else who’s as jazzed about the project as I am, someone to please, someone to argue with. All very useful.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I'm writing lyrics to an original musical set in Ghana. This time I have two collaborators—Jennie Redling is writing book, and Phillip Palmer is composing the music. Jennie lives nearby, but Phillip is now living in South Africa. So that means lots of MIDI files, PDFs, and Skype instead of sitting in front of a baby grand and turning the pages. The story is about a 16-year-old girl from a small village who wants to become a teacher, and it involves sexual slavery and AIDS. Which may sound a little depressing. Yet the show is actually high energy, filled with joy and humor, not to mention great music and a powerful story. I’m excited to be immersing myself in a culture and in rhythms so different from my own.

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

A:  My dad wrote for television and theater. He loved what he did. That alone was influential. When I was twelve, Dad was writing, directing, and producing a kids' program for NBC called The Everything Show. He asked my sister and me to read his scripts and tell him what we thought. (He paid us a dollar a week for the privilege, too.) He said to us, "My friends will tell me, 'Sure Don, great, it's great.' I count on my family to tell me the truth."

I took this responsibility very seriously. I saw my ideas and suggestions make their way to the show—my ideas, on TV! After that, I always assumed I'd end up living in New York, writing scripts. Recently, I had two scripts of my own produced for a kids’ TV show. I wish Dad could have seen them.

And when someone asks me to edit his or her script, I still see it as an honor.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Almost anything if it's done really well. One of my all-time favorite pieces is Love's Fowl, which is an opera for adults about Chicken Little, sung in Italian, with subtitles, and performed entirely with tiny puppets built on top of clothespins. It's hilarious, and oddly moving. I also love intense, spare productions of classics, like David Cromer's take on Our Town. Then again, big, bold, stylized theater with huge production values—like the opening sequence of The Lion King—well, that just sends me. Stop me now—I could go on and on.

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

A:  If you're not already an actor, take an acting class. See and read every kind of theater you can, even if you think it's not a style that interests you. Find a good playwriting teacher. Finally, allow yourself to write terrible first drafts. You can always fix them. And they may not be so terrible after all.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  Story of an Hour, music by Michael Valenti, premieres May 22 in Portland, Oregon: http://portlandchamberorchestra.org/wordpress/buy-tickets/american-feast.

Understood Betsy, a family musical, with music by Mary Feinsinger and additional music by Robert Elhai, opens July 9 in Columbia, Missouri.

I Interview Playwrights Part 137: Vincent Delaney

Vincent Delaney

Hometown: Minneapolis

Current Town: Seattle

Q:  You got a couple things coming up in New York this summer. Can you tell me about Ampersand and T or C?

A:  Both plays were spawned by relationship terror. Ampersand is a comedy about husbands and wives cloning each other. It’s a three hander, so a fun workout for actors, playing multiple versions of themselves.

The style is brutal farce, with more than a touch of Feydeau: fast pace, surprises, mistaken identity, lots of humiliation and quick exits.

I’d say the play asks two questions: how far will we go to be married? And if I sleep with your clone, is it really cheating?

T or C is stylistically at the opposite end of the spectrum, but is also based in terror. It’s about the parents of a school shooter, meeting up in the New Mexico desert a year after the crime. Sheridan wants to hide, his wife Jane tracks him down.

The third character is Soledad, a local teen who’s a gifted poker player, in every sense of the word. Her relationship with Sheridan ends up being wickedly undefined but also funny.

This play asks, can we ever really know our children? And if not, what does that make us?

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  Working on two more comedies. One is called Three Screams, about the people who keep inexplicably stealing Edvard Munch’s Scream. It’s about obsession, jealousy, and artists.

The other is about a playwright who fakes his own death in order to finally get produced, then works incognito as a stage hand on the production. He has to watch as everything gets rewritten, and he can’t step in. When the rewritten play is a big hit, I think he kills himself for real. Not sure about that ending yet.

Q:  If I came to Seattle tomorrow, what shows or companies would you suggest I check out?

A:  Most exciting theatre in Seattle is happening at Seattle Public Theatre and New Century Theatre Company. Two nimble, lean companies that are all about the actors and the text.

Q:  If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

A:  Take the money out of the equation. Regionals should do five times as many plays each season, run each one for two weeks maximum, and build a community to rival film and television. I have no idea how that could happen.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Danger and complexity. Characters that can’t be summed up. Scripts that point us in odd directions and make no effort to offer solutions. Breathless poetry that is never about itself, but keeps rushing forward. Small spaces where the seats feel like they’re part of the set.

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

A: Always assume the audience is smarter than you are. Leave a play for a month and come back to it. Have some really physical hobbies.

Q:  Plugs, please:

A:  In addition to NCTC and Seattle Public, I adore the Workhaus Collective in Minneapolis, the Virtual Theatre Project, and Florida Stage. These companies exist for plays and playwrights.

Exciting new directors: Hayley Finn, Makaela Pollock, Meredith McDonough.

Exciting established directors: Lou Tyrell, Rita Giomi, Joel Sass, Ben McGovern.

If you need a dramaturg: Liz Engelman, Sarah Slight, Polly Carl.

Smart actors who love new plays: Sally Wingert, Josh Foldy, MJ Siebert, Sarah Malkin.

I Interview Playwrights Part 136: Kathryn Walat

Kate Walat

Hometown: A small town in Massachusetts

Current Town: New York

Q:  Tell me about this opera of Paul's Case you're adapting.

A:  “Paul’s Case” is a short story by Willa Cather, about a high school boy in 1906 Pittsburgh, whose father pulls him out of school when he spends too much time hanging around the opera house, and makes him get a job at a financial office. One day Paul steals all the money, takes the night train to New York, and blows it all on a weekend at the Waldorf Astoria—and then jumps in front of a train. It’s a great story, perfect for opera. I’m co-writing the libretto with composer Gregory Spears, who is also a good friend, so it’s fun that the collaboration grew out of that friendship and it helps that we know each other’s work well. And opera is a very cool medium: more poetic and spare than playwriting, but with similar questions of characters development and dramatic structure.

Q:  What else are you working on?

A:  I’ve recently finished a first draft of a new play entitled GREEDY, set in New York during the heat of last summer, partly about the fall-out of the financial crisis. It deals with greed and desire and loss both in personal ways, for the four characters, but also in terms of our nation. One of the characters looks like Barak Obama; there’s also bits of Strindberg’s MISS JULIE mixed in. And there’s a band—I think—I haven’t exactly figured out how that fits in, but even before working on the opera, I’ve been very interested in music and how it works with non-musical theater. My previous play CREATION also deals with music, but more in terms of structure and rhythm and theme, rather than being written into the script or production.

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 young, maybe 5 or 6 (so young I barely remember it), my family and I were visiting a farm, and we were part of a group of people being shown around the dairy barn. The farmer giving the tour asked if anyone wanted to try milking a cow, and everyone was surprised when I immediately raised my hand—no one else in the group did—and I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, but I was like: of course I want to try this. I was so small that I wasn’t really being able to do it (you actually have to squeeze and pull pretty vigorously to get the milk to come), but my parents say that it was then that they knew I was going to be an adventurous child. I think as a writer, or with starting a new play, you don’t ever really know what you’re getting yourself into, but in a sort of primal way, you just want to do it.

Q:  What is the purpose of theater?

A:  I don’t know that it has to have a purpose. It’s art—it’s entertainment. I do like how theater is fantasy and reality at the same time; it can make people feel and think and connect with other people. For playwrights in particular, I think it’s also an intense way of sharing part of your self with an audience.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  Right now I’m excited about seeing plays that use theatricality and structure in interesting ways. That’s something that always jazzes me as I write too. And it also sets playwriting apart from, say, writing for television or film, where the medium has more prescribed forms. Something that has been fun about working on the opera is that I don’t really know what I’m doing, so I’m exploring new theatrical possibilities, seeing what you can do once you add music. But at core, I’m most interested in plays that I can connect to on an emotional level—usually through the characters. To me, it’s about people, both theater and making theater.

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

A:  Write a lot. See and read a lot of plays. And meet a lot of people, because it will feed you artistically, and so that you can collaborate with them. Also, listen to your instincts, in terms of your plays and your career; take the time to know yourself as an artist and person, and that will make the work better and getting there more interesting.

Coming Up Next

A reading of Incendiary

That's the one about the female fire chief/arsonist who falls in love with the detective investigating her fires.  In case you missed the readings at Ars Nova or South Coast Rep or LAByrinth or the workshop production at Juilliard.

April 5 at 7pm at Jimmy’s no 43

http://www.stu42.com/

A reading of My Base and Scurvy Heart

A brand new play about pirates I will hear for the first time that day.  I still have a great deal of this play to write.

April 15 at 4pm at 59E59

http://primarystages.org/readings

A production of Nerve in Philadelphia

April 8-May 2

http://www.azukatheatre.org/

Also have you seen my new rocking website?  www.adamszymkowicz.com

Have you bought your copy of Pretty Theft yet?

http://www.amazon.com/Pretty-Theft-Adam-Szymkowicz/dp/0573697213/ref=cm_lmf_tit_5

Have you seen my 135 and counting interviews with playwrights?

(below)

I Interview Playwrights Part 135: Paul Mullin

Paul Mullin

Hometown: Baltimore

Current Town: Seattle

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  I’m sort of half working on a play about consciousness. As soon as I say that I can hear someone saying, “But aren’t all plays about consciousness?” And the answer is, yes, they are; but this one would be literally about philosophical and scientific explorations of consciousness, which have sort of failed miserably over the last several decades. Or I should probably say, they failed brilliantly, since while they haven’t brought us any closer to explaining how consciousness works or even really what it is, they have succeeded in framing some mind-blowing questions. I want to find a way of dramatizing those questions and make an audience’s collective head spin the way mine has spun researching the subject.

Last year I finished a farce and it was the hardest thing I have ever written. So I’m not sure I really have the energy required to tackle a full-length play. That’s why I say I’m only half-writing it.

I am also currently involved in a community-wide effort to advance locally grown plays in Seattle and through that effort help bring the city to its rightful standing as a world class theatre town. I have begun a series of essays on the subject and am posting them at my blog called Just Wrought. (paulmullin.org)

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

A:  Well as the youngest of a moderately large Irish Catholic family I got to watch my brother and sisters play parts in the church musicals that I was too young to join. I loved it. I also remember as a kid that I felt a particular thrill when I used my toy type writer to bang out short scripts that I dreamed we would perform in our basement. Later I loved seeing my sisters play roles in their junior high school productions. I still believe my sister Margaret’s performance of Gollum in THE HOBBIT is the best portrayal of that character ever. My sister Mary was one of the dwarves and I remember playing with the wooden sword that I believe my brother made for her in my step dad’s woodshop. My whole family loved shows and show business, but compared to my siblings I joined the game late, since it wasn’t until the 10th grade that I first got on stage as Puck in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. Being on stage felt natural, powerful. I scored an acting scholarship to the University of Maryland, and within months of being there, I started working on my first full-length play, PHILOSOPHES, which my brother still maintains is my best. Maybe that’s because back then, I didn’t have a computer of my own, so whenever I had finished writing out a play longhand in some spiral bound notebook, I would catch a ride up to Baltimore county and spend an entire weekend at his apartment typing the play into his computer so I could then print out a proper script. He probably feels a strong ownership over the plays that were first typed on his computer.

Q:  On your blog you seem (as most every playwright I've ever met seems) unhappy with the role of the playwright in today's theater. If you could change one thing, what would it be?

A:  We need to rescue the role of playwright from that of supplicant. The very language around the process has grown poisonous. We are asked to “submit” our plays. We shouldn’t be submitting anything. We should be leading, not begging a relatively newly minted caste of artistic administrators whose job seems to be to watch what all the other artistic administrators are doing and hew as closely to that as possible. I would reverse the trend of placing artistic directors and directors at the top of the decision-making hierarchy and return playwrights to their rightful places as the premiere progenitors of plays.

Q:  What kind of theater excites you?

A:  I catch a huge thrill when I sense that the audience is galvanized by the ephemerality of the experience. When they experience not only the thrill of the performed story, but the understanding that what they are witnessing will never be witnessed in exactly the same way again. I love theatre that exploits this. Conversely, I am deeply bored by theatre that merely attempts to offer offer craft in place of heart, or stories better suited to a flat screen or the pages of a book. I love theatre where the audience gets that they are responsible finally for putting it together, where passivity is banished and replaced by engagement and community. So you could say my favorite kind of theatre is community theatre.

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

A:  Work hard. Expect no success on terms other than your own. Ever.

Do not expect to make a living but do it any way. What if William Carlos Williams had whined about having to be a doctor for forty years? Well, actually, he did on occasion whine about it, but we got many amazing poems from him anyway, and the fact that he brought over two thousand babies into the world isn’t anything to shake a stick at either. (So fuck that traitor Ezra Pound.)

Understand the tradition you have joined. Never cede your place in the hierarchy. Directors did not come into existence until the 19th Century. Artistic directors not until the 20th. Only actors outrank you in seniority in the tradition. So treat them with respect. In fact, act on stage as often as you can, but at least once in a while, whether you are comfortable doing it or not.

Q:  Any plugs?:

A:  If you have a theatre that has any technical chops, consider doing my farce, Gossamer Grudges, because farce will kick your theatre artist ass as like a spin class in a sauna.

Keep an eye peeled for the next edition of Seattle’s Living Newspaper: The New New News. The last one we did about the death of the print version of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer got lots of national attention, both locally and nationally (here’s a link to story about It’s Not in the P-I on NPR’s On The Media: http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2009/11/20/segments/144826.)

And lastly, know that Seattle’s exploding. We will lead theatre where it needs to go. This is not empty rhetoric. I eat empty rhetoric for breakfast. Really. Ask around. Anyone who knows me will tell you I actually do. It’s not very nutritious, but it’s fun, like Fruit Loops.